Mr Skeptic

Distillation won't eliminate all materials from water though. While many contaminants are solids with very high vaporization temperature and will be removed pretty much entirely via distillation (such as salt), some contaminants may remain. Organic contaminants for example can vaporize at about the same temperature as water and so would be hard to remove via distillation. In this case the purity can be improved by repeating the distillation, but only up to a point.

Just put your ant in a charged container in a particle accelerator.

My solution is for all of us to become rich and lazy (wealthy people tend to have less children).

Two ways to think about it. When you put an acid such as H2CO3 in the water it dissociates into H+ and its conjugate base HCO3-. H+ is a strong acid and HCO3- a weaker base, so the H+ counts for more. Another way to think about it is that when you put acid and base into water, they neutralize each other and can't much affect the [H+].

The pH only looks at the H+. It is pH = -log([H+]). Note also that H2CO3 is a weak acid.

How does that translate to order from chaos though? What is more ordered, an atmosphere of methane, ammonia, etc., or one that contains all those simple molecules and then some other molecules as well? What I see there is complexity from simplicity. I think "order" and "chaos" are a poor choice of words because in this situation they can be ambiguous.

Actually I don't know anyone who doesn't do this at least a little bit. The more honest ones by not mentioning things rather than active deceit. And it's essentially unavoidable -- your time is limited, so you focus on what you prefer. This works OK if others are taking up the other side of the debate, but if not we need someone to temporarily jump to the other side to play Devil's advocate. It's called confirmation bias, and as far as I know we all have it -- its inbuilt and instinctive -- but many of us fight it as best we can.

That's a chance of [math]1 - (\frac{5}{6})^{1,000,000} \approx 1 - 10^{-159}[/math], to be exact. It is the chance of not getting no 6's a million times in a row, and it is about 159 digits of 9's after the decimal. The shape of the universe has no effect on the time, nor was that what I was talking about for this model (infinite time into the future is kind of useless anyways due to entropy). No, I was talking about infinite space, like with the flat Euclidean space that you learned in school, endless in all directions. Which together with a constant matter density means infinite matter. Which means infinite chances to make life. Why does that matter? The past events in question are unknown, and we simply estimate which we believe is the most likely scenario. The past events happened for sure, but what happened? Our estimates of the probability of various scenarios having happened does change with new knowledge or understanding. The more ways for something to have happened the likelier it is to have happened and so the likelier we think that it did happen. This is why we consider evidence during a trial -- we're not trying to change the past but to determine what it was.

! Moderator Note Your post violates our rule against soap-boxing (Section 2, Rule 8). This is a discussion forum, not a lecture hall.

Let's play a game of conspiracy theory. Anyone else want to play? Here goes: The war still has too much popular support to be ended easily. Therefore, Obama gets someone to release the documents via Wikileaks, to remind people of the atrocities of war. Obviously, the names of informants have been changed to those of suspected terrorists, so that this saves the US the trouble of killing these people. </conspiracy> Anyhow, the point is we don't really know if the informants are actually at risk, even if there is enough information to implicate a specific person as an informant. In fact, editing at least some of the informants info to another person is probably a good choice rather than trying to eliminate every reference to the informant since there are so many and some may be missed.

A possible exception is space. Space could very well be infinite, and also infinite space can be much simpler than a finite space because the infinite space can be flat like the Cartesian coordinate system you learned in school. Now that I've learned about limits and calculus, whenever I see an infinite symbol in an equation I automatically replace it with the limit of x as x approaches infinity or a similar appropriate limit.

This only shows your ignorance about models of the universe. If you had read my earlier post #4 in this thread, you would know by now that it is the same model that is used to predict a finite universe, that predicts an infinite universe as well. The only difference is a variable in the very same equation -- and if you had followed the link, you would see that it is you who is choosing to disregard data to choose the finite universe. The current best estimate is a flat universe, which is infinite. And on top of that, there are other, independent, models of the universe that could result in the universe being infinite in other ways. These increase the chance of the universe being infinite still further.

I suggest you do this problem in two steps: first you find the ratio of water to make your desired temperature. Then use that ratio to find out how much water specifically to get the desired weight. For the first ratio I suggest adding 1 pound of the cooler water with n pounds of the warmer water, then solve for n.

Have you observed macroerosion? If you've never observed erosion digging even half a mile how can you believe it can dig all the way to 1 mile like in the Grand Canyon? Yes. Put a petri dish with 1 bacterium in it, wait a day or two. A significant portion of the non-living matter making up the petri dish will have become living matter. You can remove the original bacterium if you can find it.

Here's a more accurate description of the problem (yours didn't specify whether the hole was through the center nor what was 6 inches): A sphere has a cylindrical hole drilled right through its center. The hole is six inches long -- that is, from one point on one edge of the hole to the closest point on the other edge is a distance of six inches. What is the volume of the remaining part of the sphere outside the hole? It may sound like you don't have enough information to solve this puzzle, but you do.

Well with the GRE, what matters more than your raw grade is what percentile you were in. When I took my GRE I got a perfect score in Quantitative but it only put me in the 90%, whereas I got barely better than half the score in Verbal but that put me at about average. Rather than some meaningless numbers, the percentile tells you how many people you did better than (a comparison rather than a score). Anyhow, I know one thing that might make you not be a competitive applicant: if you have so much self-doubt that you don't even apply! You don't have to be the best in your class you know.

If life were found to be commonplace in the universe, the religious would say it is proof of God because how could so much life arise by chance, whereas the non-religious would simply think life had an even better chance of forming naturally than we currently believe. Unless someone can actually calculate the odds of life forming, there really wouldn't be a way to tell which is right, and so naturally both would claim it as evidence for their beliefs.

OK, I placed it in Computer Science since they have to deal with storing and transmitting information. http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/51133-what-is-information/

The question is, what is information? And how would you measure it? In my opinion, information is any data at all, and measured in bits (or a similar system). However, some data can be compressed. Because the same data can be reconstituted from a potentially smaller amount of data, it makes sense to count the smallest amount possible as the amount of information, with the compressibility factor a measure of the redundancy of the information. A subtype of information would be communication-information. Messages depend on the context of the situation, so what would be information to one person may be gibberish to another. Also, this gives another way to measure the information value of a message. For a message, the amount of information in the message itself is rather meaningless, and what people are interested in is what is new to them. Telling someone the sky is blue, for example, might not be considered information since they learn nothing new. Sending someone the entire contents of a website and sending them a link to it (if they have internet access) would be essentially equivalent. Politicians like to blather without saying anything definitive, so lots of words with very little information. I'm not sure how one might go about measuring this however, since to properly measure one would require the entire knowledge of the receiver as well as of the message. Also a closely related question, how can information be generated?

Using the very same laws of physics that we use to model a finite universe, we can likewise get an infinite universe. The only difference is a different matter density -- a higher matter density means that gravity will have a stronger influence. Both the finite and infinite universe have interesting properties that might make them attractive from a philosophical point of view. An alternative form of infinite universe is a cyclic universe, for example one that goes through infinite cycles of expansion and contraction -- this one is extra nice because then you don't have to describe how time starts or ends. Yet another way to get an infinite universe is the quantum multiverse nonsense. The shape of our universe and finite/infinite Cyclic universe Multiverse/Parallel universes Each of these three is a separate way in which the universe could be infinite. All three could be true, or none at all. The first one we may be able to measure definitively sometime soon. The second is a theory which could describe our universe (its still work in progress). The third can result from an interpretation of quantum mechanics, and so more or less outside the realm of science to say whether it is so or not (interpretations are like God, they are for "making sense" not "making predictions"). This particular option boils down to a matter of opinion. There are however other multiverse possibilities that would be within the realm of science, such as M-theory. My estimate of 50% was only for the first option only, the only one that we can meaningfully estimate at this time. The current best estimate is that the universe is flat (infinite), with a 2% margin for error. Of course the slightest deviation would result in either an open (infinite) universe or a closed (finite) universe. Another option that could also be is that the universe is finite but very very big (closed, but almost flat). For example the whole universe could have 10^41,000 times the volume of our observable universe.

There's pretty good odds of finding such coincidental relationships. To calculate exactly what odds there are you'd have to specify the degree of separation, and then make assumptions about the number of children per couple (or actual data from specific couples). Think of it this way: If everyone has on average 2 children per couple, after 30 generations that is 1 billion 30th generation people, plus another billion of their ancestors, who would be related via direct descent from this couple. Now consider that whenever there is a marriage, this connects the original couple (and their descendants) to a new family, which will likewise have lots of people related to them. For maybe 10 generations you'd have 1000 10th generation descendants at 2 children per couple, plus another 1000 ancestors. Each time there is a marriage you could join together two families with another 1000 or so relatives for the same reasons. So if you have 10 generations and 3 rounds of marriages that's 1 billion relatives again, so long as all marriages are to unrelated people (of course in 10 generations you get 10 rounds of marriages so that would really be 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 relatives if the marriages were only between unrelated people, which is impossible -- because, obviously, everyone is already related to everyone). Anyhow, you'd need an estimate of the relatedness of people who get married to get proper numbers, and it will start getting a little too complicated for my liking. But the short answer is, everyone is related to everyone and it's just a matter of what their degree of separation is.

Looks to me more like a 4th order polynomial.

A little. The ear's shape is to focus sound into the ear canal, and a bigger ear could focus more sound. In the old days they didn't have electronic hearing aids and they used ear trumpets (ear horns). However another large part is how sound is transferred to your cochlea and how sensitive your cochlea is. Oh, and earwax.

Still not enough info. The hole is through the center of the sphere, yes?

Black holes are the direct result of following our current theories of gravity to their logical conclusion. There were black holes proposed under Newtonian gravity as well as under General Relativity. Our theories of gravity have evidence for them, but that doesn't mean they won't break down in extreme cases. For example, the theories predict a singularity in the center of a black hole, but most scientists treat that as a breakdown of the theory. We've seen stuff that should be a black hole according to our theories, and acts like a black hole should according to our theories. Dark matter is an application of our theories of gravity. Either gravity does not work like we think it does at large scales, or there is dark matter. A lot of people are uneasy about dark matter -- we don't even know what it is. However, it is important to gather data about dark matter -- either it tells us where the dark matter is if it exists, or it conveniently stores data about where our theories of gravity are failing if dark matter doesn't really exist. Lots of people are attempting to find a way to directly detect dark matter, while others are trying to create some in the lab to identify which of several proposed particles dark matter is as well as proving its existence. Evolution we see happening. The process, though slow, is ongoing. This is more of a case of saying the Grand Canyon couldn't have formed by erosion because we never see erosion digging something a mile deep and 18 miles wide.