Mr Skeptic

Well at least you're thorough. If I recall correctly, several well-educated mathematicians had trouble believing it too.

I think its an exaggeration. However they did have some nasty maths 100 years ago. However if the first man you see on the streets were patient enough (has this changed?), then I'm sure it could be explained to him, even if it takes a year or ten...

Cars recharge their batteries immediately upon starting. He's talking about an electric motorbike. Honestly, I don't really know the answer to your question. I'd have to look it up myself.

What if you think about it from a trophic levels point of view? Whales eat krill/plankton, which puts them up near the base of the ocean food chain. Compare to tuna which eat fish. I think whale meat would be more ecologically sustainable, but of course we need to make sure we don't hunt them to extinction to do that.

I've found that the internet is usually a better source for answers, either via Google or Wikipedia. The point of a study guide is to study, which it is clear from your answers that you need to do. My suggestion is to find the key word in each sentence (might be the blank one), look it up on Wikipedia, and study it a bit. It will give you the answer and fulfill the purpose of a study guide. (This method won't work for some of them, eg for 15 you need to know about the Coriolis effect even though it is not mentioned in the problem) Good luck on your exams!

The simplified version is that you choose one of your two alleles for each gene. You should be able to figure this out, so at least take a guess. I'll ask some questions to help: For the homozygous genes, how many choices of allele are there? For the heterozygous genes, how many choices of allele are there? Note that the choice of one gene is not independent of the others due to the way recombination works, but that will just change the odds of any particular combination, not the number of possible combinations.

Vodka + fire = flaming corpse. That would disfigure them pretty good, though alcohol is not ideal since it has a low boiling point and will evaporate and cool the surface it is on, somewhat counteracting the whole being on fire thing.

Honestly, I don't think having so many potential candidates actually working at Fox would help at all with partisanship -- news corporations just love partisanship. There's still Mitt Romney, and I'm sure that some Republicans currently holding office might also consider running. Then again, I'll just vote for whoever I like because my vote won't count (NY for the Democratic candidate, which will probably be Obama).

Not really. The Republicans like Big Government just fine. They just make people think they are against Big Government by repeatedly conflating the Democrats with it, so that people think the Democrats like Big Government and ignore that the Republicans do to. The Republicans like the government to meddle in the private lives of the citizens, forbidding them from smoking pot, having abortions, and various other things based making others conform to their moral values, as well as military so they can meddle with other countries. These are extremely expensive undertakings, currently costing comparable to the Democrat's use of Big Government for social equality (compare the costs of the War on Drugs and War on Terror to the War on Poverty). The ones opposed to excessive government are called Libertarians, and are largely ignored.

A tautology will always be true, no matter what is true. A non-tautological claim of truth could be false if other things were true/false. The tautology will be of the form (A or not A) whereas the non-tautological claim of truth would be one or more sentences that cannot be reduced to (A or not A). It will be true if it is true but false if it is false. Saying a tautology is false would be a contradiction. Yup, tautologies are in fact rather meaningless. By virtue of necessarily being true, asserting it is true tells you nothing. But true is not the same as logically consistent. Being logically inconsistent does however make something necessarily false (a contradiction, or the negation of a tautology). For example, "If pineapples are prickly then pineapples grow on pine trees" is logically consistent but false. Yes. That's what I meant by them being trivially true.

Science can't tell us what "practical" means, that is just a word that we can define to mean anything we wish. But once given a certain definition and the relevant value judgments, science can certainly decide whether abortion is practical or not. In my opinion, abortion is not practical compared to birth control, and abortion is practical compared to raising an unwanted child. I know people disagree with both of those statements, since it really depends on how you are defining practical and on some value judgments.

It could very well be. If you were to use pandemic models to consider the spread of a political lie, it matters a lot what percentage of individuals is susceptible. Specifically, to be successful there needs to be on average more than 1 re-sending for every 1 recipient. Even a small change in demographics could be the difference between extinction and success. And liberals tend to be more educated and more internet-savvy so should be less susceptible to the lies. Even with plenty of crazies it would be harder to reach critical mass. That's why I chose the word FUD rather than just fear. FUD needs to be based on dubious or false information, for otherwise it would be valid criticism. Fear is a necessary component of being reasonable, and so accusing someone of a fear-based argument isn't really good criticism. So accusations of fear-based argumentation are a problem for those who use: 1) FUD -- Fear, Uncertainty, & Doubt based on dubious/false information 2) Negative Campaigning -- running on the platform that your opponent really really sucks, rather than on the good of your own platform Of these, the Republicans pretty much own option 1, but option 2 was pretty much enough to ensure a Democrat won in 2008. Negative campaigning makes the most sense to use when there are few candidates, since then it can be used to the most effect. Some degree of negative campaigning is useful and informative, but in the extreme it means no one knows your own platform which would make it a form of misdirection.

Do you want to also get the credit when one of your students decides to go around playing with smoke bombs? Especially if they go wrong? It is a chemical reaction though. How about the barking dog reaction? You'll need a fume hood or to do it outdoors. What is safe depends on where you do your experiment, is it a classroom, lab, outdoors?

Neon would do as an inert gas, but not any of the other properties I mentioned.

According to a recent Politico article, 4 of the Republican candidates for President who do not currently hold public office are employed by Fox News, with Mitt Romney being the exception. So the odds are fairly good we'll end up with a Fox News employee as president. So which of them would you prefer, or would you rather someone who isn't employed by Fox? Note that most of these candidates have an exclusivity agreement with Fox, preventing them from going on another TV network that would actually ask them tough questions. Fox has said that they will terminate their employment when they can't continue pretending to be undecided announce that they are running for president. For now, they are being paid to have airtime in a friendly environment.

Well sure, "fear" is part of life and very necessary in pretty much anything we do. For example I am afraid to cross the street without looking, and to be honest I'd think anyone who wasn't profoundly dumb. I think it is more a case of reasonable fears vs unreasonable fears. Fears that Obama is a secret muslim, socialist, wants death panels, illegal as president since not born in US, and what not, are unreasonable fears... and yet, they are a large part of the opposition to Obama, way way more than they deserve to be. So while an argument against crossing the street without looking is also based on fear, it is also based on reasonable facts and argument, so you could likewise say it was based on reason -- whether you call it fear or not. So yes, large contributions by people will necessarily change the laws that get passed -- even without corruption. Quite often without corruption, in fact, because these contributions are given to people who already agree with the donor, rather than an unreliable and illegal attempt to change their mind about something, and also because people do modify their behavior in response to gifts even if not intentionally. It is not just fear, it is also reason. As for the women in congress issue, it does seem like fearmongering... but at least it is based on facts. Of course talking about the reasonableness of fears is probably going to be largely opinion-based for the most part. I think that FUD is the more appropriate term than just fear, for what the Republicans and supporters are doing. Of course FUD is a very useful tool and certainly not unique to Republicans, although I do think they use more than do the Democrats.

Oh, I had meant in other places. --- We do however use abbreviations for multi-word phrases, eg eg, IMO, FYI, and a few others. These have the benefit of saving a lot more typing while at the same time being more familiar.

IMO the ban was an overreaction. So I too think lifting it early was the correct choice.

Your first source is contradicted multiple times by your second source. As for the claim about Olinto De Pretto publishing E=mc^2 first, he did... But not in any scholarly journals (according to wikipedia, for whatever that's worth). In fact, he got that equation because he didn't understand the basics of kinetic energy!

No. That is a social norm for instant communications. Those are limited by the speed at which people type, and typically only seen by a few people, and written in single or even half sentences, with the occasional multi-sentence spree. The forums are visible to the whole world, are also read by many people who haven't been exposed to the various abbreviations potentially years after the person who wrote it has left, so that any misunderstanding cannot be cleared up. Since these are not instant communication, they also tend to be longer and there is of course much more time to go through it and check for mistakes, as well as no need to speed things up. Basically, both are done the way they are because it is quicker that way. We do have a chat system, and I think that peoples there use the abbreviations much more than here on the forums, though I don't because I'm not trained to use them and so it would be slower for me to do so. It would be painfully slow both to write and to read, and people would hate you for it. What about when discussing illegal or dubious things, like the 1337 hax0r5 do? I think part of the reason for them was to avoid trouble with law enforcement, both because their words as such for a while couldn't be monitored and because it lets them know if the person they are talking to has had practice with that type of language.

No, if it is false it cannot be a tautology (they're always true by definition, so they if its false it automatically isn't one). What you offered fits the second category, assertion. Assertions can't be proven even though many people will claim they know it is true. Specifically, your example is false in the case that you are not the king of the world. A tautology is true in all cases. What you have is however an example of circular argument. To modify your example to be a tautology, try this one: If I am king of the world, then I am king of the world. or If as king of the world I say I am king of the world, then I am king of the world. Both these are always true regardless of the truth or falsity of anything.

That's what I said you were saying -- that they are irrelevant to things that have no explanation and things that are explained by invoking intelligent agents. Sure, in this thread: http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/51133-what-is-information/page__pid__567241__st__60#entry567241 First you claim functionality as a necessary component of information, then when I give an example of something nonfunctional that evolution can turn functional in a very short period of time, you claim the information was already there. So it seems functionality is only necessary when it is convenient for your argument. Certainly, but I'm not saying it is absolute proof that there is a materialistic explanation for the currently unexplained. Just noting that the consistent thing to do is expect a materialistic explanation given all explained examples have a materialistic explanation, and also given that the supernatural explanation is not really an explanation, not in the same sense as the first. Certainly we could make up materialistic stories to "explain" things in the same way as supernatural stories "explain" them, but that wouldn't help with predicting the things in question like a real scientific explanation would.

Not so much. There's good bacteria, and there's bad bacteria, and there's neutral bacteria which is also good bacteria because they don't leave room for bad bacteria. As for tooth decay, it is due to two problems: 1) bacteria that generate a sticky layer of plaque for other bacteria to stick to 2) anaerobic fermentation of mostly sugars (and starches in your mouth also become sugars), which produces a localized acidic spot which dissolves some of the calcium from the tooth. The tooth decay is countered because you have some calcium in the saliva to reverse this, and also with fluorine which is part of a mineral that does not dissolve as easily. I have heard suggestion of a bacteria-based solution to tooth decay, by replacing the plaque forming bacteria with something more benign. But other than tooth decay and pathogenic bacteria that would actually cause disease, there's no cause for concern. But having harmless bacteria there leaves less room for harmful bacteria.

I'd agree that alien pathogens are unlikely to be a problem. Pathogens tend to lose many of their vital genes because the host provides the needed chemicals, and so they are dependent upon as specific type of host. Also sometimes pathogens depend on specific proteins to be able to carry out the infection. However, regular dirt bacteria might do nasty things to the aliens. On the other hand, the immune system will attack pretty much anything that is not self.

Yes, though it would probably do better at a slightly higher pH... but the digestive track doesn't have the full range of pH, so its as close as you can get. But then the digestive track is optimized for absorbing, and it has a huge surface area to do it with so it doesn't have to be optimal. But in the stomach the non-polar form would be outnumbered by almost a billion to one which would be problematic.