Mr Skeptic

I think so. It is repeatedly stated that the wages of sin is death, from Genesis to the epistles. It is stated that Jesus was crucified and was dead for 3 days, but I don't think it says anywhere that he went to hell. In any case, when hell is mentioned it is never a temporary thing. Anyhow, 3 days of hell is rather meaningless. If for my own sins I need to spend eternity in hell, then should not the punishment for the sins of all humanity be at least as bad?

Well you could try to estimate it, or you could just measure it when fitting a curve.

Looks to me as evidence that some people can't count on their fingers. [math]1 \neq 5[/math] Oh, Snap!

According to the Bible, Jesus died and paid the price for all the sins of all mankind. Therefore, the punishment for all the sins of all mankind is being dead for three days. There's no indication that dying for your own sins has to be a painful death, although I guess if it's for everyone's sins then crucifixion is the way to go -- or maybe that was to fulfill a prophesy, I can't remember. Still, it certainly can't be an eternity in hell, since that would be a harsher punishment than the punishment for the sins of all humanity. While I'm not perfect and so I guess can't die for other people's sins, I do plan to spend at least 3 days dead sometime in the future, and so I might as well die for my own sins rather than have Jesus stuck with the blame. How about you?

Worst case scenario is that everyone got the trajectory wrong and it actually hits us while we weren't expecting it so we didn't even try to stop it. Close to that, we might realize on time to do something, with just about the only something we could do being a nuke. However, I think that then we'd have to develop a launch vehicle which could take too long. However, if we have plenty of warning (the pass by in 2036 will allow better measurements of its trajectory after that, and it will come close again and potentially hit us years later), if we have plenty of warning all we need to do is give it a little nudge. The tiniest nudge multiplied by the distance it is traveling will be enough to deflect it. There's several ways to do this, which roughly are crashing it, pulling it via our own propulsion, using its own mass as propellant.

I think we need an ALL-CAPS-TO-bold converter.

Oh, it doesn't matter if they kept the money or not. They kept the title didn't they? (Obama gave away the prize money)

It's actually extremely simple. However, it is too expensive for practical use unless you really need it to work independently, which seems unlikely. Also it's probably going to be only 1-time use for said purposes. When I played as a kid I would ignite things at range with an old car battery, an electrical cord, and a thin wire from a window screen as a filament. This was really cheap and reusable, and allowed me to make things go boom from a safe distance. But that was in Paraguay; here in the land of the free I don't think it is allowed nor wise to do.

I wonder how common that it.

People can't be citizens of the US if they win the Nobel Peace Prize? Delicious!

How much is it worth it to a patient to have a doctor that can understand all kinds of chemical reactions? How much is it worth it to a patient if the doctor can convince them to get off their lazy ass and stop shoving semi-toxic crap down their throats?

All punishment is permanent. The years of your life wasted, the skills you lost/never learned, that awkward hole in your resume, the time away from your family (possibly including divorce), these things are part of how our chosen punishment works -- and while it may be possible to regrow lost limbs in the future, these things you won't get back. Sounds impossible.

I on the other hand, have looked in the proper place, albeit only for one god and only the one described by a Bible taken to be historically accurate. Under those circumstances, the God of the Bible doesn't exist.

Personally, I don't think odds of about 50% are all that low. Which makes us wonder, why then did you bring up this red herring in the first place?

4.1 and 4.2: yes, I'd steal medicine to save someone's life. It would be a different matter if this medication was really rare and taking it would deprive someone else of life. 4.3: Assuming the captain can swim, he ought to give the spot to the passenger. If whoever would stay would die (say sinking in the Arctic ocean), then it doesn't really matter who goes -- but the captain has just failed in his duties, even if the sinking wasn't directly his fault, and that might be reason enough for him to let the passenger have that spot.

It's only pretending if the words and actions differ. Yes, I would take Rush Limbaugh being the person people go to to leak important documents as very good evidence that he is trustworthy. But he isn't and they don't.

I've heard somewhere that knowing the laws of physics saves would-be inventors precious time and money.

Yes, that is one of the correct ways of doing it. Another way would be to do the same ratio thing for each pigment. Another would be to have found what percentage the first pigment was of the total pigments and divided by that: 3.5 g * (7+3+19+5) / 7, which would have been the most similar to the way you did it. Incidentally, the correct answer would be 17 g even without rounding. You just got a slight difference due to rounding of the fraction you did first.

If you want to see exactly what blind search is capable of, what you should do is take a genetic algorithm, and modify its fitness function to be constant. Do that (or just imagine it) and compare it to the same genetic algorithm with a particular fitness function. Compare the results, then come back and tell me about how effective blind search is. (And if you meant blind search while still checking for results, instead modify the genetic algorithm to not prefer the more fit over the less fit in the reproduction phase).

I'd have to say yes, and furthermore that this chance is roughly the same as the chance that the universe is infinite (we don't yet know). But even with an infinite universe, it would be silly to expect to actually find an example of life arising by pure chance in a single step, rather than one via a several step process that includes chance and non-chance components.

[hide]For the first, there's a 1 in 2 chance that both are boys. The first child is known to be a boy, and there is a 1 in 2 chance that the next will be a boy.[/hide] [hide]For the second, there's a 1 in 3 chance that both are boys. There are 4 possibilities for 2 children, each equally likely, but the possibility that both are girls is eliminated. Thus there remain 3 possibilities equally likely, and only 1 of them has both children as boys.[/hide] [hide]For the third, there's a 13 in 27 chance that both are boys. The trick is to be sure not to double-count the possibility of both boys being born on a Tuesday.[/hide]

I should think the bigger advantage of that design would be its far greater stability. This stability means that the vehicle's center of mass could be lifted up much higher, so that mines would be largely negated due to distance. However the extra width may make it useless.

Wait, I think that if you want to point out a 4 order of magnitude difference then you can't discount the 6 order of magnitude difference that I pointed out earlier -- humans have ~1000X the DNA and ~1000X the mutation rate as compared to bacteria. We've already tested this and found it false. The simplest example is the reversal of SNP mutations, where a random process creates a functional protein from a non-functional protein, and a non-random process favors the bacteria with the more functional protein. The outcome is that any form of selection, including artificial selection, reduces the amount of information, but does so in a non-random way. Thus by selectively reducing the information via the selection rules, it non-randomly changes the character of the information to more closely match the selection rules. Genetic engineering does have the most interesting mutator function though. Looks like a keeper

Yes, this is different than what relativity predicts. But it seems to me that if B and C are both 1 second in A's past, then the round trip for this would have to be 2 seconds rather than 3. Hm, how does your theory handle things moving at given fractions of the speed of light, as seen for example from red/blue shifts?