Mr Skeptic

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/09/100922155120.htm

I'm pretty sure we've used gamma rays to study small things. Also, electrons are any wavelength you wish to accelerate them to, and they are much easier to accelerate.

Officially, peace talks. Unofficially, there are enough crazy people that they'd almost certainly get attacked, and of course governments would want first dibs if they could get away with it. Likewise, the aliens would probably officially wish peace talks, whatever their true motivations.

Revenge is but one path to forgiveness, and certainly not the shortest. Usually the vengeful person will (unconsciously) require slightly more harm than they received, so mutual revenge frequently leads to feuds. To avoid this trap you'd have to have someone else figure the proper amount of vengeance for you to take, and you have to forgive the rest. The saying "an eye for an eye" really was the basis of several laws, and was taken very literally.

http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=s111-3804 Here's the full text of the bill. Internet service providers will not be targeted, although if they run a DNS they have to take reasonable steps to prevent the domain name from resolving to the IP address. Therefore it would seem that using the IP address directly would sidestep this bill. Another effect is that the website itself is targeted rather than its owner, and so the owner need not be in the US to be sued.

What might be a more interesting effect is the fact that the earth is spinning and stays warm for a while, so that it re-radiates in a slightly different direction. But this effect would still be minuscule.

Yes, you can have a submerged meniscus. The principle is very similar (well the same really). For a regular meniscus, you compare the attraction of the liquid to the walls to the attraction of the liquid to itself. The meniscus can curve either upward or downward. If you have two liquids, you also need to consider the attraction of both liquids to the walls and the liquids to each other (presumably not very strong since they are immiscible) and to themselves. I think the liquid that would have a sharper meniscus in air would win (but it would be an upside down meniscus if that layer is on top). Don't quote me on that though.

The brownian ratchet would only work if the ratchet were cold, otherwise the ratchet itself would wiggle too.

Well, there's a slight difference between blocking websites they deem bad, and making it easier to file lawsuits against American websites that are breaking American law. The difference, of course, is that you can still go visit the websites hosted elsewhere, outside of US jurisdiction.

Right, you'd be better off attaching a turbine to the valve you are opening and closing via wave power, than any other part of your contraption. Incidentally, if your machine worked the way you seem to think it does, then you wouldn't need wave power to open and close a valve, since you could power it with your perpetual motion machine.

And what if one of those two people are crazy? If one person sees a man who is out to get him and another person next to him sees nothing, which one is right? What is the truth? Of course, just like saying God is the most evil thing in the world but also the most good, would be a contradiction. Of course, since you never said that that wouldn't be a problem for you. But if you want me to defend the above statement you made, then I shall ask you to defend the above statement I made. Seem fair? For what person? 2+2=5 for very large values of 2 (I have done this and verified it to be true). Also, there is no reason to have the value of 5 be IIIII rather than IIII. The only reason 2+2=4 is because of how we define 2, +, =, and 4. Define them differently and you get a different result.

Yes, hallucination was the wrong word, unless the guy somewhere claimed to have actually seen Jesus. Maybe he was being harsh (not holding back his opinion in deference to the man's beliefs), but I think forthright would be the better description. As for cruelty, the other man would have had to be lying about the strength of his beliefs if having them questioned agonized him.

In waves over a flat surface, the water doesn't really move much, moves in circles or up and down while the wave itself travels forward. But the shore slopes upwards making it too shallow for the wave, which constrains the wave and makes it crest. I think there's a little forward motion overall, but it is certainly not like a flow of water. Plenty of the wave is under the surface of the water. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_waves See the animations on that page.

Marat, iNow: If we are arguing the morality of God, do we not need to assume the accuracy of the Bible in describing him? Much like we can discuss the morality of Robin Hood, but need to assume the accuracy of the storybook in describing him? So either we are discussing something real with real data, or something imaginary with imaginary data, it doesn't really matter. What, how long does it take you to recall whether you've had pain medication?

Well for your first formula you aren't conserving units. What you want is to use the mass of copper precipitate to find the concentration of copper (grams Cu/L). Then compare that to the concentration of your copper halide.

What they give you is the concentration of the copper halide, and the weight of the copper in a given volume. So you can find the mass of your halide, which would give you a pretty good idea of the formula. You also should know the charges of the copper ion and halide ions.

For another example of unintelligent alien life: microbes hitching a ride on space rocks. Every so often, a meteor collides with earth hard enough to launch debris into space (this obviously occurs more often for smaller planets with no atmosphere). So, microbes could end up doing spaceflight without doing rocket science. Occasionally space debris gets launched out of the solar system by interactions with multiple large objects (slingshot effect). While it would be a cold, harsh, absurdly slow ride, were microbes to survive this they could colonize other systems -- all without intelligence. Obviously, such microbes couldn't care less about humans, because they aren't smart enough to care (incidentally, care being a human concept?).

Force is not energy. I'd imagine the force from sunlight and solar wind would cancel a tiny fraction of the gravitational force. In any case, over a billion years the above quoted 570 MegaNewtons force would accelerate earth by 3 meters per second. http://www.google.com/search?sclient=psy&hl=en&q=570+MN%2Fmass+of+the+earth&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=&pbx=1&cad=cbv#sclient=psy&hl=en&q=570+MN%2Fmass+of+the+earth+*+1+billion+years&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=&pbx=1&psj=1&fp=5a997d1e90bc09a

Nutrition... it may not be as wholesome as in the "good old days", but at least there's enough of it. Probably has nothing to do with the Bovine Growth Hormone we get in our milk nowadays.

Stop putting your fingers in your ears, and tell me what other possibility there is. If you're arguing against the laws of physics, you should at least try to make your case, other than that you don't like the laws of physics.

A convection current powered turbine? Yes, it would work, if by work you mean convert a tiny tiny tiny fraction of the energy it gathered into electricity.

Well, there's the gel that we have in our eyes, and the lens in our eyes (mostly collagen I think). There's also some (proposed?) cameras with flexible lenses to cut down on the huge assortment of lenses and mechanics in the camera.

Except that you can't make wormholes without exotic matter, and even then they would probably kill you, among other problems.

It is more of a subclass than an equivalence. All dogs are mammals, but mammals are not equivalent to dogs, nor are dogs equivalent to mammals.

Mass is only one of many forms energy can take. It can be photons, heat, kinetic energy, potential energy, electrical energy, etc. Do you think there is a difference between these? But they can convert one to the other, and only energy is conserved.