billiards

No. Wave function collapse doesn't care what the observer believes.

Funny. How can one seriously put these (paraphrased) contradictory sentences together??? 1) Carbon emissions don't warm up the planet. The whole theory will be disproved -- 10 or 11 years -- max. The planet's actually cooling down and we're heading for a disastrous new phase of glaciation. 2) It's gonna be so bad, we're gonna have to increase carbon emission to stop the planet from cooling down.

Another despicable and deplorable move planned by Israel: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/01/israeli-settlement-west-bank-gvaot-condemned

I asked you if you would blame deaths of Israeli citizens on the Israeli terrorists if the boot were on the other foot. Maybe you didn't read that far down the paragraph. But you certainly didn't give me a straight answer. You used the "imagination game" to reveal your inner fear of muslims. In your mind you clearly do not doubt that a free and powerful Palestinian state would lead to an Arab war waged "to commit genocide and kill every Jew in the area". You challenged me to "doubt for one minute", and that is what I did. I doubted. Groups like Hamas would not thrive in a prosperous Palestine. Extremist views tend to come to the fore under extreme situations (i.e. Hamas are kept in business by Israeli oppression). If Palestine were a free state, then I very much doubt that they would wage a war "to commit genocide and kill every Jew in the area". I strongly doubt your premise for backing Israeli action.

OK, so we get to the root of the problem here. (Israel's actions are justified because) you unquestionably believe that if the boot were on the other foot then Hamas would do much, much worse. That is a very lame rationale. In a sense it is irrelevant what Hamas would/would not do. That is because if the boot were on the other foot, Palestine would not be governed by a militant group like Hamas. If you are in the position of power (Israel) -- you have the ability to escalate/de-escalate the situation. Israel could lift their siege of Gaza, and that would undoubtedly ease the tensions. They could actively try to work towards peace. Instead Israel have escalated the situation to an abominable level. One should not buy into the school-yard defense of "ifs, buts / he started it".

This is very backwards. You seem to be saying "terrorists are bad because they kill people in a public manner". I think a more straight forward premise would simply be "killing people is bad". Secretly killing people is just as bad as publicly killing people. Also labeling a group as "terrorists" is basically PR. It's a label that can be conveniently applied. Then uncritical minds magically switch off. "It's ok that we're bombing Gaza, we're killing terrorists." Uncritical minds would also buy into the notion that it is Hamas who are killing Palestinians by using them as "human shields". This is to have BS force fed down your throat and to regurgitate it. Rather than actually think, it can be easiest to repeat the phrases pumped out by the Israeli PR machine. It is comforting if you can remove all elements of responsibility for your actions, it removes the feelings of guilt. I find the whole idea that the situation in Gaza is comparable to Israelis marching Palestinian citizens to the border so as to line them up as a human shield frankly offensive. In a sense though it does highlight the military disparity. If you resort to this ridiculous notion to excuse Israeli action, it just goes to show how ridiculous Israeli action really is. If you want to play the imagination game. Imagine it were Hamas who had the military might backed by the west. Israel were an oppressed nation with factions of armed rebels or "terrorists" who fired rockets (the most sophisticated warfare they are capable of) and demanded freedom. Now Hamas could carry out pinpoint attacks with minimal fear that the Israeli rockets would actually cause any harm. They destroyed 10s of thousands of homes, Israel's power supply (by "accident"), their water and sewage treatment. They even bombed the UN schools that the entrapped refugees were sheltering in. They killed thousands of civilians. Would you then blame those deaths on the Israeli terrorists?

I remember there was a story about a diamond that had a crystal of ringwoodite in it. Geochemical analysis found quite a high percentage of water volatile component in the crystal. The inference being that there is a lot of water inside the Earth. However, I recommend caution. Chances are there is a lot of water in the earth's mantle, however, the amount is very poorly constrained. The evidence from diamond inclusions is potentially highly biased. What if diamonds formation is favoured in places where water content is high? Then by analysing diamonds we would form the impression that there is a lot of water in the mantle. This is what is known as a sampling bias. To know for sure how much water there is, we should look to as many strands of evidence as possible, and we should always consider the potential biases in the data.

Nit picking

Rocks are simply too weak to support a cavity, unless it is a cavity very near the surface. As is the iron alloy which is under tremendous heat and pressure at the centre of the earth. Gravity may be exactly zero at the centre of the earth, but pressure and temperature are not. Under these conditions (earth) materials deform visco-plastically. Any hypothetical void would be infiltrated fluidly.

To be fair, we can only theorise about what it is we see in the data. I'm saying that as a seismologist. Having said that, faults are particularly easy to see on good seismic data as they cut the stratigraphy often with dramatic effect. Further, countless "theorized" faults have been verified by subsequent drilling. As has already been pointed out, many faults are obvious from their surface expression. Things get a lot murkier when we look at the deep earth, to be fair to the OP.

Yes you/I/most people would do something. I personally would call the police. Perhaps in extreme situation, I might even shoot him (but I don't have a gun). However, I would not take out the water, power, homes, schools, hospitals and innocent lives of all his friends, family, and distant acquaintances. Anyway, the analogy fails on several levels to capture the complexity of the situation, as John has already pointed out.

You have absolutely no idea what I do/do not know. How immature.

The racism is really very apparent. You need to be tuned into it, which is probably difficult if you are racist yourself. But if you look objectively at what is said, you can see repeatedly that one race is talked about as though they are an inferior sub-human species. With no right to a certain quality of life that we take for granted, that need to "have their guts blown out". That lowers the tone of the discussion.

Half of what you say is just plain racist. The other half is factually misguided or simply wrong. Too bad the quality of discussion is so low.

One has to feel for the people of Gaza. Israel has no heart. The underlying causes of this tension should be dealt with. A military "response"* only brews more hatred and resentment. *subjective

This is certainly the Israeli stance. Incredible to me that one could absolve themselves of any responsibility by simply blaming their crimes on "the other side". And yes we are talking about crimes. International law states that any "response" must be proportional to the threat -- anything more is a crime. I wouldn't be able to murder your entire family because you had conspired to murder me. If I did that it would be a bit rich of me to blame it on YOU.

Israel are responsible for their actions. Hamas are responsible for their actions. Forget all the rhetoric. Look at the situation. In Israel I see pictures of people running in the street with a loud siren going off in the background ** not good **. In Gaza I see pictures of children's blood soaked clothes, lying still in a mass of rubble, the clothes are covering flesh remains of a disassembled body ** terrible **. It is clear that the real crisis is in Gaza. Who is responsible for that? Israel.

Arc, YOU HAVEN'T SHOWN ANYTHING. The emperor is STARK naked. You keep reposting the same tired old material that has holes in it -- if you will allow me to borrow your phrase -- "the size of tectonic plates". I have tried to help you to see these holes, I have even tried to make suggestion on how you can improve your presentation and analysis. But all I ever get in return is reactionary, overtly defensive, often aggressive backlash, followed by a torrent of the same tired old error ridden material. I guess it's a shame that that hasn't happened then. I look forward to your paper in Nature magazine. Until that day happens I think you should keep these ARROGANT thoughts to yourself.

A couple of important points here: 1. You still haven't shown the correlation exists. i) You have not answered about how you deal with the sampling bias in the earthquake data. ii) You haven't done any statistics to show that a correlation exists above (for example) 95% significance level. So you better get to work if you are to keep trumpeting this idea. 2. The question was does the mantle convect. All that "waffle" and "wasted babble" was strong evidence in favour of the hypothesis that it does. You think the mantle does not convect. Now please, present evidence that it does not convect. The first point (1) is important because you claim it to be your "strongest evidence" in favour of your hypothesis. Essentially, the evidence looks very very fragile so this does not bode well for your theory. The second point (2) is important because it highlights the very real limitations of your knowledge. You do not understand exactly what it is you think you are arguing against. This puts the very premise of your theory on very shaky foundations. A charming thought. I guess ignorance really is bliss.

Re/ the earthquake catalogue problem. Arc, burying your head in the sand will not make it go away. But I doubt anyone here who's followed the argument still believes post #275 so I'm happy to let that one settle. Now, to move on.... This point is one of confusion for arc, so let's break it down: 1) Does the mantle convect? Arc has said "no." (My view that it does has caused me to be accused of practicing religion, and had words like "shame on you" thrown at me.) This was the subject of genuine debate some 50+ years ago. It seemed the mantle was too rigid to convect. However, observations of isostatic rebound (when the land bounces up after the heavy load of ice sheets is removed) showed that the mantle can and does deform as a fluid over long time scales (visco-plastic deformation). Using reasonable parameters, it has been calculated that the Rayleigh number in the mantle is about 1 million times higher than it would need to be to just barely convect -- so in fact, the mantle should convect vigorously! Then we see that the oceanic plates are actually the upper thermal boundary layer of a convecting system. The Earth swallows up its outer thermal boundary layer once it's cooled down -- which is how convecting systems work. We see this at subduction zones. Furthermore, the subducting material causes earthquakes that go down and outline the geometry of the subduction process (so called Benioff zones). In addition seismic tomography shows the cold dense material go down into the mantle at these locations (because cold dense material is anomalously fast). And then there's the gravity. The geoid shows that the integrated column of mantle beneath the subduction zones is dense -- it is negatively buoyant. All this points STRONGLY towards the conclusion that yes the mantle does indeed convect. In fact, in the very link arc references it says: http://www.dst.uniroma1.it/sciterra/sezioni/doglioni/Publ_download/E6-15-03-13-TXT.aspx.html#10._Plate_Kinematics_versus_Mantle_Dynamics_ Which is an indication of how poorly arc understands the very science he is claiming to be revolutionalising! (He uses a reference to fight against something, but that reference in fact fights in the wrong direction, against HIM!) 2) Where does arc go wrong? Arc seems to think the mantle does not convect because of a bit of text he took out of context. In order to understand the argument it will be necessary for me to provide some background. 2 -- i) Background There is a genuine problem in the Earth sciences at the moment trying to place plate tectonics in a firm dynamical framework. Mantle convection is certainly going to be a major part of the dynamical framework. Plate tectonics was originally developed as a kinematic theory -- it describes the movement of the plates using geometry rather than physics. We would ideally like to describe the motion of the plates using just physics of the Earth. Doglioni argues that ridges are not fixed, whereas convection cells should be, and therefore mantle convection alone cannot drive plate tectonics -- he calls for a rotational component to be important. In fact Doglioni's view that convection cells have to remain fixed is a little outdated, he is considering older generations of convection models. At the moment there are two types of numerical Earth models (from a branch of study called "geodynamics"): (i) those that describe the physics of the system and are allowed to run wild just following the laws of physics built into them, (ii) those that have the plate tectonics hard wired into the model, and run under the conditions imposed by those plate movements. Type (i) models have been able to produce "plate-like" behaviour -- a fine achievement! But no model has yet made anything that looks quite like the Earth. The fact that we can now generate models that have plate tectonics characteristics shows that we are on the right path. The fact that no model quite looks like Earth suggests that we are missing some inputs (e.g. starting conditions are off, some physical parameters are a bit wrong, perhaps some more physics is need (e.g. phase transition modelling), etc.) 2 -- ii) So why is arc wrong? Nowhere does anybody ever talk about mantle convection not existing. He's just completely got the wrong end of the stick. He's taken an argument he doesn't understand and somehow used it to jump to an unsupported conclusion. (He has been known to do exactly this with the "plume debate" also.) I can't rationalise that, but I can point it out. Arc, do you still hold that the mantle does not convect?

Wow this must be the record for your shortest ever post! Good on you, keep it up! I realise you are trying to apply the same bias to present day events as you believe should exist in the historical record. However the historical record is incomplete for all sorts of reasons. In Japan for example, language is a major barrier, earthquake catalogues in English will not include historical events from records not translated into English. Another simple problem is that ancient records are more likely to have been lost or destroyed. Furthermore, large, deep events with epicentres away from civilisation will not have caused significant damage and so will be less likely to have been recorded -- whereas since the modern seismometer was deployed such events are routinely recorded. These problems combine. Unfortunately the limitations of the data preclude the type of analysis you wish to perform.

1) OBVIOUSLY I was implicitly talking about Mw 7.0+ events. Do I REALLY have to say everything explicitly? (GET IT!) 2) It's a funny coincidence that the number of earthquakes in your catalogue suddenly gets much greater around about the time the modern seismometer was invented, isn't it? 3) Where are the mods? Can we have some impartial intervention to sort this mess out please?

I wrote some FORTRAN code (ugh!) a while back to figure out what tectonic plate any given (lat,lon) point is on. This could be extended to any arbitrary region (continent, country, city, national park, lake, whatever) provided a database with polygons defining the regions. If you have a database of polygons defining regions then the solution to find out whether you are inside the region or not is quite elegant. Imagine shooting a ray in any direction from the point of interest, if the ray crosses the polygon boundary an odd number of times then you are inside the polygon, if it crosses an even number of times then you are outside the region. This works for an arbitrarily complex polygon.

That doesn't mean there isn't convection. It just means that convection does not equal plate motion -- i.e. there is some amount of decoupling between the rigid lithosphere and the underlying mantle. Convection in the Earth is a consequence of physics, and there is plenty of maths there for you to read in the literature should you search for it. Let me ask you a question. Without convection how does anisotropy develop in the mantle? Grrrrr. How can you honestly believe that there were only 22 earthquakes in over 1200 years, followed by over 40 in the last hundred years? You actually believe there has been double the seismic activity in the last 100 years than in the previous 1200 years combined????? Are you that naive? You are taking the bias in your dataset as your trend!! Come on, please, this is a basic error! It makes me so frustrated to have to have this argument. If you were serious about science you would simply seek out a better dataset -- I could help you -- but alas you are not serious about science, only the propagation of your beloved mechanism.

I haven't run out of tactics, I've run out of patience. The problem is that this would not serve the debate. Your model is under scrutiny here, not the standard one. The standard model of plate tectonics links together the palaeo magnetic lineation data, the palaentology data, the volcanology data, the seismic tomography data, the seismic anisotropy data, the seismic earthquake mechanism data, and other geological data. The kinematic theory of plate tectonics predicts where the plates will end up in millions of years. It can also be used to work out basement evolution and predict where oil will be, for example. Geodynamicists have used physics (and guess what they're past the Boussinesq approximation these days) to predict planetary evolution, and they have repeatedly developed models that show plate-tectonic behaviour, with convecting mantles. What's so difficult to understand? Why don't you use a proper earthquake catalogue? You still haven't answered that question. You're attempts to ridicule me are not working. Your "catalogue" is incomplete and biased towards recent events. Accept it, change it, move on. Stop being a stubborn donkey. You mean if you use decent data your model doesn't work. Welcome to science my friend.