Mr Skeptic

Well, your grammar is horrible but that is up to you to fix, that would be the main point of making you writing a paper after all. Try to make it look less like you copy-pasted sentences from all over the place into one paragraph. And as for the bit about enzymes, sorry for confusing you. Most enzymes are denatured and deactivated when food is cooked, so it would be vaguely accurate to say they are destroyed, enough so that saying the opposite is even more wrong. I'm not aware of enzymes having any different nutritional value when cooked (they get disassembled at the molecular level during digestion, just like any other protein), though most of them won't act as enzymes anymore. Mostly I see the whole enzyme thing as rather irrelevant to the topic of nutrition. But at least most of the science parts of that paragraph are OK.

Yeah, the cops have a very high rate of criminality so we should do more to discourage that, and I hear athletes are physically fit and can run fast, so when we jail them we might need a few extra precautions so they don't escape.

Just remember that at some point, the mass used to get the energy becomes more significant than the mass expelled. Due to the nature of kinetic energy and momentum, you're better off throwing two particles half as fast as one particle twice as fast, which would take double the energy for the same momentum. How about this new guy:

Well, it is vaguely right. After cooking, the enzymes get denatured, which would destroy their enzymatic activity, but not really destroy them. Rather like disabling an opponent and destroying an opponent are both different, but both will make them irrelevant to a fight. A denatured enzyme would be like a generic protein, with all its original nutritional value but no enzymatic activity. As for the temperature cutoff, I heated an enzyme to 167 F for 15 mins, and it did not destroy nor denature the enzyme. Different proteins denature at different temperatures. I guess you could say that it was simplified to the point of being wrong, rather than just plain old being wrong.

My modification was just to reduce the effects of pundits being poorly known. Oh, good point. Just like what random people think are the answers to physics problems correlate well to what the actual answers are, or how people's estimate of how likely people are to die a certain way correlates to the actual percentages (eg "What is likelier to kill someone, a peanut or a terrorist?"). Sure, there's a correlation, but is asking random people really the best way to get reliable answers?

Nope, the enzymes are still there in cooked food -- they are however folded differently, so that they don't have any enzymatic activity. This is called denaturation.

Yeah, I've heard bad things about microwaving the non-microwave-safe plastics. Some of the plastics have nasty chemicals and you don't want that breaking down. My favorite dishes/bowls are the corningware ones, they're made of a very thin, white glass-ceramic, they don't scratch nor stain and are lightweight, and my mom has had them from since I can't remember. They're probably older than me

Well, another thing to consider is your soap/detergent, which might affect how thick or how large the bubbles are.

So I thought up an idea for a universe, that would have an infinite universe, at exactly the critical density (on average), but with some slight fluctuations resulting in inhomogeneity. Also, equal parts matter and antimatter at the start, with high density. So my idea is that the parts of this universe with equal parts matter and antimatter will annihilate and tend to cause expansion, whereas the parts where there is some slight separation of matter and antimatter won't expand so much. The part in between would expand since it would have both matter and antimatter, resulting in total isolation of the matter from its antimatter. The end result would be an infinite number of matter-dominated and antimatter-dominated pieces of universe (very rare though), which themselves would be finite and have slightly more than the critical density, separated by vast expanses of universe slightly below the critical density. My question is, does this contradict anything we know about the universe? I know it rejects the Cosmological Principle, but as far as I know that is just an assumption.

But is this actually a superconductor, or evidence that maybe there is one? Or, maybe a superconducting structure in equilibrium with non-superconducting ones so that they can't really be separated? Would be awesome to have superconductors that we can cool salt and ice though.

I think that A) Some of our text-only lists need fixing, specifically the second item using capital letters, and B) This smiley has to go.

We've not found a "proper" difference between antimatter and matter that would allow us to say which should be the one called "anti", other than that our universe is made of the one we decided to call matter. There's expected to be some sort of difference that would account for matter being dominant (parity violation), but if something somehow had simply separated matter and antimatter than maybe there is no parity violation

No. You need an economy to do pretty much anything, even if it is an isolated economy. Furthermore, were this society to have an isolated economy, they would have to dedicate a lot of their time to their economic affairs. Conversely, such a society would produce valuable knowledge, which if sold to others would mean that they can use that money instead of spending the time to make their own economy. However, various science-based societies have existed as part of regular society, and since Edison's "idea factory" some of these have also become such that they don't need external funding (due to the nature of the information they gain). I would quite like if we spent a lot more time and money on scientific pursuits rather than the various crap we do, but I guess not enough people agree with that.

OK, but you're being inconsistent again... If you are now interested in the information content and information entropy of specific systems, then why when I talk about photographic film are you talking of light-patterns that are not part of the film? Does the information content of the film increase when taking a picture or not? (My line of questioning about the information entropy of the film I will leave for later). I never changed the problem, just refused to change it into the problem you wanted. And yes, feel free to rank the strings instead of finding an absolute value. This is also not changing the problem, since I said so right from the start. Also, it is not a hypothetical example since the data there is real. If you like, you can also compare the same strings' ranks if the strings were generated by a random number generator of equal probability for everything. Not sure if that would be a hypothetical example or a real one -- probably hypothetical due to the length of the strings.

So, where does the Euclidian space (the one you learned in high school) end? Where does the number line end? These go on forever because they are "flat".

What's the fastest you figure a realistic rocket could go (must carry a human passenger)? And what basic design would it use? As for realistic, let's say that means it would cost less than 100 trillion including R&D through construction, over several years of course. And if the budget were only 1 trillion, how much slower would it be?

Of course not. I'd advocate for him to go to jail and wikileaks to replace him. I'd still applaud his previous work though, but I would not want him in charge of choosing what documents are safe or not to release anymore. And just to note, you said "proven beyond reasonable doubt" rather than "proven in court". Those are not necessarily the same thing, and unless there is evidence that is very unlikely and that I don't know about, there won't be enough evidence to prove "beyond reasonable doubt". Nothing more than one witness per crime, for two crimes, doesn't seem like "beyond reasonable doubt", whether a court says it is or not. What I'm saying is, there has to be some evidence.

Well, there's a few things to say. First of all, "cooking" is not some generic thing -- there are several types of effects due to cooking, and they depend on the temperatures reached, method of cooking, etc: 1) Chemical damage to fragile chemicals such as vitamins (not proteins or amino acids!) 2) Leaching, if you boil something in water you lose more nutrients than if you steam it, including minerals and other chemicals that would not be damaged by heat 4) Structural changes. Proteins are denatured (folded differently, no damage to the nutritional value but will deactivate enzyme), some structure of the food destroyed. These changes in general make for easier digestion, and probably why our digestive system is comparatively small. 5) Oxidation. Due to the damage incurred and higher temperatures, oxidation can occur more rapidly. Of course, the same occurs in a slice of apple left for a while. 6) Sterilization. Properly cooking food kills bacteria. 7) Charring -- burnt food may be slightly carcinogenic Note that some foods may not be eaten unprocessed, as they are poisonous like that. Cooking or other processing can reduce naturally occurring toxins, for example in the staple food cassava, and can increase the nutritional value of food by making it easier to digest. It is a tradeoff though, since it can damage some of the chemicals, especially the vitamins and antioxidants. Not all of the above are for cooking only, but some for processing of food, of which cooking is just one of many possibilities. Oh, and sorry to say but I'd consider your paper to belongs to pseudoscience, it's got more errors than I care to list. I guess you can't really change that though, if you're just adding a paragraph. The difference between science and pseudoscience not just in terminology used, but in the use of the scientific method or not. For example, a controlled study with a group and a control group differing by just one variable, is the hallmark for a scientific study (though not all studies can be done like that).

Well, polls don't show they have it, they show people in the poll demographic think they have it. I'd be rather interested in a poll that compared both whether people agree with the pundits and whether they think they have a positive or negative impact. I suspect that would agree very closely, especially for the choice of positive impact. I'll go on a limb and guess that there would be more disparity in "disagree with" and "negative impact" in one political alignment than the other. And now, slight modification of the data: Positive Impact/Negative Impact: Jon Stewart 154% Bill O'Reilly 153% Sean Hannity 140% Glenn Beck 119% RachelMaddow 100% Ed Schultz 100% Keith Olbermann 92% Rush Limbaugh 69% Positive impact/(Positive impact + Negative impact): Jon Stewart 34% -> 61% Bill O'Reilly 49% -> 60% Sean Hannity 35% -> 58% Glenn Beck 38% -> 54% RachelMaddow 18% -> 50% Ed Schultz 11% -> 50% Keith Olbermann 23% -> 48% Rush Limbaugh 36% -> 41% Negative Impact/(Positive impact + Negative impact): Rush Limbaugh 52% -> 59% Keith Olbermann 25% -> 52% RachelMaddow 18% -> 50% Ed Schultz 11% -> 50% Glenn Beck 32% -> 46% Sean Hannity 25% -> 42% Bill O'Reilly 32% -> 40% Jon Stewart 22% -> 39% Note that it seems that not everyone voted in one of the three categories; there's percentage points missing. For these last two categories, I divided as in the category heading, disregarding the "never heard of" data. You're right, Stewart is barely at the top in positive/negative. I think the reasons for such a bias would be different: a mostly unknown person is probably likelier to be known by his fans. Certainly, 100% of the people who watch their show have heard of them, but watching their show correlates with agreement or other positive ratings (if only importance of what they say). Good catch.

Well, looks like about 85% of the people got the answer wrong (at least if they live in on of 43 states in the US, and not in one of the 7 where it would be rape). I only got it half-right myself, I thought it should be illegal but apparently in most of the US it's legal. http://lawprofessors...and_court_.html http://goliath.ecnex...hdrawal-of.html Anyhow, this shows the dangers of using polls in place of reading the law and case law.

Well there's two separate issues here: 1) 20 kg is not 20 N (although I guess what they're showing is 20 kg * 9.81 m/s^2, so see #2). 2) If the appropriate mass were added such that it would weigh 20 N, then the tension on the rope would be less than 20 N due to the acceleration (compare to, if a dog tugs on the leash and you follow the tension on the leash is not as much as if you stay still). 3) And then you have to consider that adding that new mass changes the mass of the system. But I'd have to calculate to be able to say which of these has the greatest effect.

Hm, but sailing ships still have significant energy costs. There's the energy and material costs of manufacturing the ships, and repairing/maintaining them, and feeding the crew. These costs are common to all ships, of course, but you have to consider that if the sailing ships are slower, you need more ships to carry the same cargo, so you have to build more ships and maintain more ships. And the crew has to eat too, and while the energy in the food itself is nothing compared to ship fuel, there's quite a bit of energy costs associated with actually making the food and delivering it. Longer trips with more crew means more food eaten while transporting ships. Overall it would probably be lower energy costs than for fueled ships, but it won't be free. And now for some reason I have an image of a giant cargo ship using kiteboarding to increase its sail size.

No, I don't think that but that is not what you are suggesting. You are not suggesting improving clean energy tech, you are suggesting making it cheaper than dirtier tech. As I showed in the case of normal pollution, more pollution means cheaper, period. Yours is a good idea, but I question its possibility (in the near future). Sure, eventually oil and coal run low, and their price raises and eventually they will definitely be more expensive than clean tech. Because it does not identify the problem. There are two separate, linked problems. Treating both together is nice, but it also excludes the possibility of treating them separately. Hence, more restrictive. I gave examples of solutions your idea would exclude. Also, I note you have not made mention of reliability. This is a problem for many clean power techs, and could exclude them for a long time from being the dominant tech, even if they are cheaper at the per watt level.

Well, you'd have to get rid of the secret ballot instead, with your method. I still think that we're better off changing our voting system from the two-party-and-inconsequential-thirty-party system.

Fighting extradition is perfectly legal, and also perfectly moral given the circumstances, so in no way is evidence of holding themselves above the law. I don't see how it is possible that he'd be found guilty of rape without some sort of evidence, or his admission, so what is more dubious here is not the fighting extradition but the insistence of holding a (possibly illegal or unfair) trial. Just to be clear about this: if a woman from Sweden claims you raped her, with no evidence other than her testimony, and the judge threw out the case, would you go to Sweden to stand trial to show how innocent you are? Little bias here? Fact is, there's a reason we have rules to protect people from illegal prosecution, why we require arrest warrants to be based on evidence, etc -- otherwise there could be no justice, someone could just keep having you arrested without cause, finding you innocent, and repeating.