Mr Skeptic

Multicellularity evolved multiple times independently. This is not entirely from scratch, since even unicellular life has adaptations to multicellular living both with self and other species as in colonies or biofilms. Prokaryotes such as myxobacteria are also multicellular.

The way it works is that if you label 10 questions 90% then 9 of them should be true and 1 false. For the ones you label 80%, 8 should be true and 2 false, etc. Any deviation from that lowers your score. If you happen to know all the answers the test fails (giving you 100% if you rated the answers at 100% and 0%), whereas if you know nothing and put 50% for each the test also fails (in this case it will probably give you 100% since they usually have an equal number of true and false questions -- but otherwise a lower score). Rather than testing for knowledge this test is about how well you judge the extent of your own knowledge.

I can't say I care much for God's holier-than-thou attitude either.

That would kind of work, but the astronaut themselves would be weightless with their suit yanking them around. Artificial gravity is not hard to do -- simply use centrifugal force. For example attach two modules with a wire and then spin it. Artificial gravity for the weight and cost of a wire.

No... He (and Shannon) specifically said "messages". Changing this context changes the meaning. I do. The same data might or might not be meaningful, depending on context. Since no one can consider all the context, the prudent choice is to either treat the data as information or ignore it. Compression is the ability of the instruction set to reproduce the original stream, whereas Shannon's message information is most definitely not. Shannon can accept lossy compression that cannot reproduce the original stream, so long as the same meaning is understood. My words are digitally encoded (when written) and also functional. OK, I set as my example lottery numbers. These are pure information (according to Shannon and my own compressibility definitions), yet they were originally randomly generated.

I disproved your claim that the probability of life forming by chance is 10^-41,000. The method I used was to demonstrate that were the universe to be infinite then the probability of life would be 1. In no way is this speculation -- it is absolute certainty.

Photons are the quantum of electromagnetic waves (and also contain a quanta of energy). For visible light you could look at a rainbow, or the equivalent made by a prism. For radio waves, tune your radio to a certain station (wavelength). This is necessary for them to be theoretically allowed (as a solution to Maxwell's equations). The proof that they are so, is that Maxwell's equations work.

It is unknown whether the universe is finite or infinite. The observable universe is finite, constrained by the speed of light and the expansion. If the universe is finite it will have some closed shape, like the 2D surface of a sphere has no start or end.

As TonyMcC said, we've long had machines that can travel faster than the wind, and they're called sailboats. In the case of sailboats its as simple as traveling at an angle from the wind and having enough sail. The same could be done on land, but if you have a wind turbine as your sail you can also use gears.

I think there would be unnoticeably more ions at the bottom, since the density would be greater (both the density of the ions+water and the water itself due to compression). Just how tall a container are you proposing?

You equating an infinite universe with an infinite earth population. If intelligent life arises anywhere in the universe there will be intelligent life in that part of the universe, no matter how small the odds might be. If you limit yourself to earth and an event on earth then pretend you can apply odds occurring so far away as to be causally disconnected from earth as relevant, people will laugh at you. Is this an honest mistake on your part, or did you think I wouldn't notice? Sure. So for example with the case of matching DNA, if a lawyer argued about the chance of this DNA belonging to someone else and the guy had a twin I would argue that the low probability of the DNA matching someone else is irrelevant if they cannot show that the greater probability (that it was the twin's DNA) was not in fact the case. The court will choose the more likely alternative as the odds, not the least likely alternative like you are suggesting. Given the odds of 10^-41,000 and the odds of the universe being infinite, which do you think a court would choose? You had 4 posts correcting your mistake and you posted 2 more persisting in the mistake. Then you admitted your mistake and changed your first mistake to a second mistake (energy density now), followed by about 3 more posts addressing that and by you defending that. So since a bottle of water at 21 C has a higher energy density than air at 25 C, and there is a temperature gradient, then heat flows from the water to the air until they have equal energy density, right? Everyone is wrong once in a while. Trying to argue that you were at least kindof right can get you deeper in that hole though. Plenty of natural processes too can produce the same effect as a refrigerator. But I got the impression that by molecular entropy you meant something significantly different than regular entropy, as if thermal energy wasn't a major part of molecular entropy. Some people try to agree with themselves. Look at your words "on earth". I agree that the probability that the earth is infinite is zero, however that is quite irrelevant to the probability of the universe being infinite and life starting on some planet in the universe. Please do also note that I never accepted odds of 10^-41,000 happening on earth, rather that such odds of life would guarantee life if the universe is infinite but that I would never expect to see it (because to be able to see it it would have to be within the finite observable universe). OK. Why don't you then?

I don't think that drinking seawater is unhealthy so much as it will dehydrate you. There would really be no reason to drink seawater unless you were dying of thirst and can't stand it (and want to die of thirst faster). Dehydration and dying of thirst are both unhealthy. Oh, and I guess that sort of sodium and such a rapid change could mess with your blood pressure.

That is a very nice find! At first I thought it might be some cheesy nonsense, but this looks like the real deal. I think everyone here at SFN should take that test. The beauty of this test is that it is a test of yourself and not so much about external factors. My score was 79.

The basic concept is that many people are thoroughly irresponsible and unable to make their own decisions, particularly when it comes to getting cash now. I don't really think a little extra money would help this sort of people. I think the entire demand for kidneys could be met by people willing to part with theirs for under a thousand dollars, and within a year any benefit from that money will be gone. Two kidneys are better than one, but not by much. No kidneys of course is horrible. I think that the proper thing to do is for the government to place a minimum price at which organs may be sold. This will both prevent poor people from being exploited too much (at least they will get good compensation), and also allows to be more selective to get kidneys from healthier people (so they are less likely to suffer and also for the good of the recipient). This could probably be paid for from the money that would otherwise have gone to constant dialysis.

Wait, no. My main point is that your calculation of probability of life forming (lets say per unit of our observable universe), is meaningless since there is a possibility that the universe is infinite. Hence my entire focus on the possibility that the universe is infinite. Unless you can demonstrate that the probability that the universe is infinite is less than 10^-41,000, your claim that the chance of life starting by chance alone is anywhere close to that number is clearly false. Basically, I proved you wrong despite your use of a red herring. As I said, yummy fish dinner. It is you who is demanding that the universe has to be finite. I'm just saying that it might be infinite, and gave conclusive evidence that it might be infinite. You have been completely unable to prove your claim that the probability of the universe being infinite is less than 10^-41,000, and simply dismiss such an impressive task as the other side speculating. That's just precious. You have no less than four members disagreeing with you plus you seem to have done a search to try to confirm and you still persist in having things backwards?!? Now I don't want to make this into an Ad Populum argument, but there is a reason that people make this sort of argument: the majority is in fact quite frequently right. In any case, I suggest you pay particular attention to the last of the quotes I shared that disagree with you. It is interesting but not really a surprise. Denying evolution while being fairly well educated does require being able and willing to deny the undeniable, it is just a particularly interesting example of such. I know about diffusion of both heat and molecules. Perhaps I misunderstood your use of molecular entropy. A refrigerator can reduce the molecular entropy of its contents, yes? Perhaps, but I know an expert who claims to have worked with compressible gasses (as if there were any other kind ) for 20 years who disagrees with you. All I'm saying is that even such small odds fail to make any meaningful argument unless you can prove the universe is finite, which you haven't. None however contradict what I said. Of course the observable universe is finite, I even said so myself. Which makes this a strawman. Your argument rests entirely on the unsupported assumption that the universe is finite. The if's don't help your argument any since I don't accept your claim that the universe is finite.

What you seem to be suggesting is called Determinism. It is generally accepted that this view is false due to quantum mechanics containing true randomness. In any case, to predict the universe you would have to model the entire universe, and you can't do that with a computer contained within the universe since your computer would have to model itself.

I've found wikipedia to be an excellent resource. They have well-written articles, which are particularly well-written in the hard sciences. They also have links to external sources, either as reference or as additional education resources. I would suggest you study astronomy rather than astrology.

The government can't say it's OK to release any of the classified documents, as you say. I suppose it could declassify the less dangerous ones if it really wanted to, but that would probably be a process that would take too long to do. What it could however do, is specify which of the documents would endanger an individual were they to be released, and ask nicely that those in particular not be released. Or, it could say don't release any to force Assange to do his best at checking, delaying his release and then trying to blame him when he inevitably misses something, so they can decry leakers as unethical. As you say, it is a position attributed to Assange. However it is doubtful that he himself holds that opinion. For example, I doubt he would be willing to release the schematics for our most advanced airplanes.

In other news, it seems that morphine might increase the growth of cancer cells, but it can also reduce the growth of tumors by preventing angiogenesis (new blood vessel formation). This is even more important because morphine is used to treat pain that can result from cancer.

Perhaps you may want to read this: THE EVOLUTION OF THE KNEE JOINT

Don't atheists also know how to band together and kill people who disagree with them? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_atheism

Similar to how many of us have lost the ability to synthesize vitamin C. In the right conditions we get all we need from the diet and so have no need to make our own. Having no need to make our own, there is no mechanism to provide selective pressure to preserve these metabolic pathways.

Well, for one thing heat usually flows from areas of high entropy to areas of low entropy. Also it seems you took the term "molecular entropy" and invented your own definition that is convenient for your argument but doesn't really appear in any real physics. But you did pretty good considering your kind never was good with thermodynamics. Of course this is where you will mention how wrong I am or ignore me completely, rather than trying to show you were right by referencing a source. Yes, speaking of red herrings, the whole thread is based off a red herring (everyone agrees that the odds of life forming by chance alone are ridiculous). However I decided to take that red herring and make myself a delicious fish dinner. The crux of my argument is that there is a significant chance that the universe is infinite. As I demonstrated, an infinite universe negates any tininess of probability of life forming. Therefore, the probability of life forming by chance alone is the greater of the chance of the universe being infinite and the chance of life forming by entirely chance alone given a finite universe. So far, cypress focuses on the unimaginably smaller and completely irrelevant probability of life forming entirely by chance alone. Yes, and I cited a source to support my claim (unlike you, who have just kept claiming some kind of magical non-existent unreferenced observation contradicts an infinite universe). Remember, if you are claiming that the probability of life arising by chance alone is 10^-41,000, then you are also claiming the probability that the universe is infinite is also less than 10^-41,000. I never claimed that the universe is infinite -- I claimed that it could be and if it was then your odds of life forming are 1 and the probability per unit whatever is meaningless. Beyond that I also cited a source that puts the universe as probably being flat.

The only way to economically improve public transport is to have many people use it. The public transport in Paraguay, for example, beats any I have seen here. There's buses showing up every 5 min to 1 hr or so depending on the path its taking. You can get within a few blocks of anywhere by taking the buses. In fact I think that a lot of poor countries beat the US in terms of public transport.