Delta1212

The ruler didn't change. It is always 1 foot in its rest frame and always 10 inches in a frame in which it is length contracted to 10 inches and 6 inches in a frame in which it is length contracted to 6 inches. You can shift which frame it is each of these corresponding lengths in by changing its velocity, but it is always all of those lengths. The length of the ruler never changes. Only the relative speed at which you will measure a given length changes.

Yeah, an odometer is a better comparison for a clock. A ruler is more like a metronome. The metronome has a tick rate that changes with time dilation, but doesn't record the number of ticks, and when returned to the original frame, the change in tick rate will return to normal with no discernible "record" of the elapsed time. Rulers don't record distance. An odometer would maintain a record of the distance traveled at the length contracted distance and not leap to a large number to reflect the change in the distance of the path it had already traveled as measured in the new frame, in the same way that a clock doesn't jump forward to reflect the change in the elapsed time as measured by the frame it is returning to. Your confusion seems to be that you are conflating the change in the length of the units used to measure travel through a temporal/spatial dimension with the duration/distance that is covered while moving through it. The units change to whatever the present frame measures with no memory of any previous frames. Recorded elapsed time/distance does not change. A clock measures both the units and the elapsed time. A ruler measures units but not distance traveled. Edit: For a concrete example: A clock measures your point in time in reference to other points in time. So if you start at 2:00 and after some time passes it is 3:00, you know that you are one hour in the future from when it was 2:00. If, however, you and your clock spends time dilated to half the tick rate, then returns to the initial frame when it reads three, your clock and you will have travelled one hour into the future but you will actually be two hours into the future in that frame. That gives you a one hour offset that you retain. Similarly, if you travel at a speed such that distances are length contracted to half, if you start at point A and travel 50 miles south, then return to your original frame you will have travelled 50 miles but discover that you are 100 miles from your starting point in your current frame, in the same way that 1 hour has elapsed but you are 2 hours into the future in that frame. We just tend not to measure distance in the same way that we measure time as a normal convention, and so the parallels are not as immediately intuitive.

There are also plenty of people who are simply sterile. Biology is far too complex and messy to try to define how people are 'meant' to be from an evolutionary perspective and then expect that to be followed in the population with any kind of consistency.

I sometimes wonder if people who think homosexuality is a lifestyle choice are themselves attracted to members of the same sex and think that everyone else has the same feelings and are just choosing not to act on them. I can't see how that idea would make sense to anyone just on a personally intuitive level otherwise.

In a similar vein, I rarely drive down the street and comment on all the houses that aren't on fire. Regardless, your contention that the trend of outside contracting is true on the surface level, but the deeper problem is not that employees are being labeled outside contractors, it is that they are not being offered the benefits of healthcare and overtime pay. I do not think that it is the regulations mandating that companies provide overtime pay and healthcare that are driving employers to find ways to circumvent the rules and avoid offering them. Or, to put it another way, I don't think that employers would start offering overtime pay and health benefits if the laws requiring them were removed. They might hire people on instead of employing them as contractors, but they would be employees in essentially the same position they are as contractors.

You can't physically build a neural network in two dimensions, though. The connections would intersect.

I have a tube 1 meter long with a set of very fast guillotines set up at both ends. I have a stick that is 1.1 meters long. I shoot the stick through the tube such that, in my rest frame, which is also the rest frame of the tube and the guillotines, the stick is length contracted to 0.9 meters. In my rest frame, once the stick is fully inside the tube, I dropped the guillotines, which slice past the openings very, very quickly. In my frame, this does nothing to the stick because it is fully inside the tube. But according to you, the stick cannot actually be 0.9 meters because this is a distorted view of reality and not the real length of the stick, which is the length in its rest frame. In the rest frame of the stick it is never fully inside the tube, but sees the guillotines falling at different times with the far one falling before it fully enters the tube and the rear one falling after it has already started to exit the tube. But if length contraction and time dilation are distortions that do not represent the true reality and the measurement from the rest frame is the "real" one, then the guillotines falling at different times is a distortion, and in reality, they fell simultaneously as that is what happened in their own rest frame. Which means that "in reality" a stick measuring 1.1 meters in length entered a tube 1 meter in length with blades at either end that fell at some point after the stick had started entering the tube but before the stick had fully left the tube and managed not to hit the stick despite the fact that the stick was never fully enclosed by the tube and the blades fell at the same time. That is literally impossible if there is only one true reality to things represented by what they are like in an object's rest frame.

My girlfriend just left a company where everyone in her department was an "outside contractor" thus making them ineligible for overtime or benefits despite the fact that they all had to come into the office, work 40 hours a week and had all materials and equipment related to doing their job provided by the company. One guy was even expected to work weekends. I can pretty much guarantee they all could have successfully sued the company because that's entirely illegal, but they all needed the job and who wants to hire someone that sued their last employer?

But the expansion of space is the only way you can get faster than c recessional speeds without breaking the speed of light. Stuff just moving apart from each other wouldn't give you the observations that we presently make.

Given infinite time and infinite useable energy, the number of sub-simulations is unbounded. We very probably don't have infinite useable energy in the universe, though. You have to remember that every nested simulation must be physically simulated in full in the "primary" universe. Everything that happens in the first simulation is simulated by stuff happening in the real universe. Everything in the second simulation is simulated by stuff in the first simulated universe, all of which must itself be simulated in the real universe. And so on. To have an infinite regression of simulated universes, you would need to be able to simply simulate an infinite number of universes to begin with. Nesting them one within another doesn't free you from that requirement.

You seem to be under the impression that the only reason that we think the universe is expanding is that there are distant objects traveling away from us at faster than c. You are picking out one of the things that expansion explains and acting as if it is just a fudge intended to explain that one thing, rather than a model that is built on a great deal of other evidence that also happens to explain that one thing, among other things. You can't just say "Well, couldn't there be a different explanation for this phenomenon than expansion" and ignore all of the other reasons why expansion makes the most sense.

No one has claimed that every encounter with police turns deadly. The problem is that far more encounters with police turn deadly than should be the case. That's not an especially high number on a per encounter basis. Most people will be just fine in any given encounter. Most officers are probably unlikely to shoot anyone. But just because everything went well from someone who did everything correctly does not mean that it goes well for everyone who does everything correctly. A single instance without a problem is not evidence that there is never a problem. It is simply evidence that there isn't a problem every single time. Which I think any reasonable person will admit. The problem is not that police shoot every person they encounter with a gun, or every black person they come across or anything like that. The problem is that those deadly encounters happen far, far too often. Either there are a lot of unjustified shootings taking place, or something about the way our society conducts its police work places officers in situations that we view as requiring the use of a firearm far too frequently. Just because a shooting can be justified does not mean that there wasn't a better course of action available leading up to that shooting that could have avoided turning a situation into a deadly encounter. And just because justified shootings happen does not mean that all shootings are justified. The fact that other countries manage to police themselves without killing their own citizens at the rate we do suggests that there is a serious problem somewhere that needs to be addressed.

Life is likely an emergent phenomenon that arises from the basic rules of chemistry. As are, frankly, pretty much all macroscopic structures and processes. There's not much reason to single life out from all of the other stuff in the universe except that we are life. There's some stuff life does that other things don't but there's also plenty of stuff that other things do that life generally doesn't. There's nothing particularly special about life that would require a creator instead of natural processes vs a diamond or a hurricane or a galactic supercluster. And yet people tend to have less of a problem with those things being the result of things simply following the laws of physics than they do with life. Probably because we all want to feel special, as if we're not quite as of a piece with the rest of the universe even though we're clearly made of exactly the same stuff as everything else and our bodies operate according to exactly the same physical laws as everything else. But there has to be something, somewhere, that we haven't identified yet about life that makes it special and not just a particularly efficient way to dissipate energy in a region with a high energy gradient. Because otherwise you have no more of a privileged place in the universe than a rock. And some people have a difficult time with that.

When American citizens are killed by their own police at a rate literally hundreds of times higher, per capita, than other Western countries, I don't need to look at the details of each individual case to know that we are doing something wrong in this country.

That's not actually a part of the theory of evolution, and it doesn't really matter where the first cell came from in order for evolution to take place. It's a theory describing how life evolves over time, not a description of where life came from. But most people do think that, yes.

Unless life is considered to be a natural process, in which case natural processes did, in fact, create a mobile phone.

Jesus wept.

Well, but it still travelled 14 billion light years. It's not that dividing the distance by the time doesn't give you c. It's that dividing the starting distance by the time may not give you c, because the distance between two points when the light is first emitted may not be the total distance that exists between those points by the time the light arrives, and therefore not the total distance the light actually travels while en route.

Well it would be weird for someone from a country other than Canada to refer to themselves as an X-Canadian. As someone who lives in New Jersey, though, I know a fair number of people who refer to themselves as Italian-American, going on third or fourth generation.

Consciousness is not a form of energy, and your brain doesn't run on mystical energy transferred from mother to child. It runs on energy from the food you eat, that was mostly converted into useable form from sunlight by plants.

Can you pinpoint the period in American history where we lacked a strong nativist faction that insisted immigrants were destroying the country and undermining traditional American values? When "America First" isolationism wasn't a significant voice in political discourse? We never lost any of the ideals that you're describing. As children, our education just tends to paper over the fact that there are lots of people in this country who simply disagree with all of them on a fundamental level, and so when we grow up and discover that those people exist, it seems like the ideals we were taught have suddenly started unraveling, when in fact they have always been rather threadbare and more aspirational than truly realized as a nation.

I still remember the first time I pushed down on the top of a table and realized that the resistance I was feeling was of a kind with the resistance felt when pressing magnets with the same charge together, just stronger over a shorter distance.

Well, that ignores the fact that life arising once may preclude, or at least render much less likely, any additional origin points for further life to have a unique origin event. Once life forms, it may quickly incorporate all or most available raw materials into its own development as well as altering the environment that gave rise to it in the first place. There's also the question of whether there was only ever a single origin of life, or whether the other "strains" of life were simply out-competed in the relatively early days such that only the descendants of a single origin point still remain (as far as we know).

One photon per what span of time?