Delta1212

Perhaps the better way of stating it is, rather than "there is nothing beyond our observable universe that our universe is expanding into", that "the way our universe is expanding does not require it to be expanding into anything for the expansion to take place." Maybe we are inside an expanding bubble of space time inside some kind of larger universe, but the mere fact that we are expanding doesn't necessarily imply that that is the case, which seems to be a common point of confusion. And since there is no evidence that we are expanding into anything outside of our own universe, it's much more straightforward to say that we are not, rather than introducing a bunch of mostly philosophical speculation about things that we very well may never be able to find a definite answer to one way or another when trying to teach a concept that many people already find confusing and counter-intuitive to begin with.

I don't think humanity will last long enough for the sun expanding to become a problem, frankly. We'll most likely get hit by a large rock at some point well before that, and that's assuming we don't do ourselves in in a variety of different ways. And even if our descendants are somehow still around at that point, it's exceedingly unlikely that they would be exactly like us. Just the effects of genetic drift alone would likely result in some pretty significant differences from what we currently think of as human.

In what way is this disappointing or in any way negatively impacting you, or anyone else for that matter?

Please tell me that you understand the difference between trying to normalize relations with a country in order to facilitate diplomatic negotiations and selling that country weapons despite an arms embargo in order to fund terrorists in another country.

Just to point out, in light of the "what if Russians came to the US and killed our citizens" point, the last major terrorist attack on US soil was carried out by a pair of ethnic Chechen brothers.

As a helpful illustration: If you close your eyes, you will only find out the train is coming when it hits you, and then you will feel it moving exactly as fast as it is moving. It will obviously not look like it is accelerating in this case. That's what seeing a photon is like. You only detect it when it hits you. You can't watch it coming at you, and so it can't "look" like it's doing anything on the way to your eye.

Europe has enough people, but those people on average aren't having children at even replacement rates. The birthdate in many European countries is low enough that without immigration the population would be shrinking.

Something to remember, and presumably the reason why Stephen Baxter would have used undiscovered reservoirs of water for his story, is that there is a (relatively) fixed amount of water on the Earth. To get rain, some of it needs to evaporate, go into the air and then fall back down. So you can have heavier rains, but that just means more water falling at once, not that there there would actually be more water. The extra water has to come from somewhere. It can't just start raining new water out of nowhere. So you can move water around in the system (have water trapped in ice sheets melt and pour into the ocean), introduce new water into the system (Baxter's reservoirs or, say, an icy comet), but you can't have heavier rains cause the entire world to flood because there simply isn't enough water around to do that.

It's not really an o sound at all. It's actually a diphthong and the vowels involved are closer to a short a followed by the oo sound. English spelling is weird and describing sounds in terms of letters is not trivial as a result.

If being vulnerable to attack is a sign of failure, then you are starting from the premise that every possible stance you can take is going to be a failure. There is no such thing as perfect security. You can't say "There should be more security because there was an attack." You have to look at the cost and consequences of various forms of added security. We could lock every every person in the country in a steel box and never let them out. Then the innocent ones would be protected from attacks and the guilty ones would be prevented from carrying them out. But I don't think anyone believes that's a good solution. If you agree that it is not, then you are agreeing that increased security is not always a plus depending on how exactly that security is implemented. From there, it becomes a discussion about degrees and methods. It's easy to look at one attack after the fact and say "This could have been done differently and would have mitigated the damage in this instance." But the question is not "How would a specific action have affected this particular attack?" It is "What are the consequences of implementing this action every single time there is a scenario that looks somewhat like this attack at the point at which it would have mattered?" If a terrorist calls in a bomb threat and then detonates a nuclear weapon in a downtown metro area, do we evacuate a city every time there is a bomb threat? Stripping the 9/11 hijackers and doing a cavity search on their way through security likely would have prevented them from getting any weapons onto the plane. Do we do a strip search of every passenger before boarding? If the first sign of a terrorist attack is the sight of smoke coming from a public building and we would have been able to catch the terrorists responsible had the entire transport network been shut down at that first sign, do we shut down the transportation of an entire city every time we see smoke? You can't look at the impact of an action if it was implemented the one time it would have helped. You have to look at the impact if it is implemented across the board. You can't look at a negative consequence of an ideology and say "Well, this a failure." You have to look at all of the positive and negative consequences of an ideology and compare them with the positive and negative consequences of adopting a specific other one. There is no perfect solution to most problems, and so declaring that one solution is not perfect and therefore we should implement a different one is not a particularly helpful stance to take, because it will always be true of any solution you care to choose.

Yes, I think it's important to note that, in fact, all macro-level events are the result of quantum-level events, but not in the way you are proposing. There's no system that you can set up that will be able to detect "oh, something quantum happened" and react to it. The system can react to the result of quantum events, but not the fact of their taking place. You can only react to direct interactions and any direct interaction causes the very collapse you're wanting to detect.

Quantum entanglement doesn't do anything weird except in light of some other quantum weirdness. If you split a quarter in half so that you have a heads side and a tails side, drop them in two envelopes and send them to opposite sides of the globe, as soon as you open one envelope, you will know exactly which half someone opening the other envelope will find, regardless of whether they have checked their envelope yet or not. That's how quantum entanglement works, except that we know for other reasons that each envelope contains half a quarter that is both heads and tails simultaneously until someone checks. Once you check, it collapses to one or the other, and you know which one someone will find in the other envelope. But you have no way of knowing whether they checked theirs before you, and checking doesn't induce any detectable change in the other one, because the only thing you can detect is whether you got heads or tails. You can't tell whether the superposition has collapsed until you check it, but if you check it, you collapse the superposition. There's simply no way to tell unless someone sends you a message saying "Hey, I checked mine and if you check yours, you'll get heads" but then you're still not going to get any new information by checking it yourself except to confirm information that was already sent to you via traditional means.

I don't think Bernie Sanders would be a good Supreme Court pick for multiple reasons. He doesn't have a legal background which, while not a requirement, is something that I think a Supreme Court Justice should reasonably have. I like a lot of Sanders's views, but Supreme Court decisions are supposed to be based on solid legal ground. While personal philosophy can and often does intrude, especially in some high profile cases, those aren't the only cases that come before the Court. There is also a lot of stuff that more or less represents procedural and administrative minutiae and a Justice needs to be familiar with legal precedents and processes to a degree that I'm not convinced that Sanders does. He is also, frankly, too old. They are lifetime appointments, which means that the President potentially has the opportunity to impact the makeup of the court for decades to come. Bernie is likely to be replaced rather soon in comparison with most appointees to the Court, which means that whatever President puts him there is most likely ceding that position on the Court to whoever the next President is, which could shift the Court in a rather bad direction if the following President is not of the same party.

I'm not saying I necessarily think he would decline. I just think he'd be in a better position to accomplish things in the Senate than in the Cabinet. Perhaps if he had future Presidential aspirations it would be a good move, but if Hillary wins, I don't think Sanders will ever be running for President again.

I think Julian Castro is generally considered the favorite for Hillary's VP pick. Sometimes a President will find a place in their administration for a primary opponent, but it's not something that should generally be expected and I think it's fairly unlikely that Sanders would make it into a Clinton administration. Frankly, I think he'd be better positioned remaining in the Senate than transitioning to the executive as anything other than POTUS.

I don't think Bernie has a shot at this any longer. He's done far better than expected thus far, but there's a difference between beating expectations and winning. Unlike the GOO, the Democrats have all proportional delegate assignments, which means merely winning states is not going to be enough. Sanders doesn't just have to win in the remaining states, he has to win big. I don't think he's going to be able to do that consistently enough to make up the ground he needs.

Yeah, I was just going to say that the best way to right he date is year/month/day, but then I'm a computer person and that's the format that really makes the most sense when trying to organize things electronically.

I believe that percentage represents 1% of people consistently using birth control while being regularly 'active' for one year wind up getting pregnant anyway. So even after ten years, you'd have a better than 90% chance of not getting pregnant (assuming I'm correct about what that number means). That said, probabilities are probabilities. Even something with a 99% chance of happening does not have to happen, and even something with a 1% chance of happening may happen. There's a real chance of getting pregnant from one encounter and a real chance of never getting pregnant ever while on birth control. The latter case is probably more likely than the former, but there are no 100%'s here.

It is being pulled toward the center of the Earth the same as anything else in free fall. It's just going so fast that it keeps missing the ground so it never stops falling. It's not the speed that causes the weightlessness. It's being in free fall that does that. What the speed does is allow the spacecraft to remain in free fall for long periods of time without hitting the ground. Things can move very quickly without being in free fall, and things can be in free fall without moving very quickly. In the first case, you don't get weightlessness, while in the latter case it tends to not last very long. It's as if the spacecraft is falling straight down to Earth, but by the time that the craft reaches where the surface of the Earth was, the Earth has moved out of the way, and the spacecraft is now being pulled in a new direction.

Which would mean time would actually pass more quickly inside of a shell than on the outside surface, wouldn't it?

I've dabbled in that a bit. Didn't come out of it with a full language, but I did learn more about linguistics during that period that I did when I was actually trying to learn about linguistics.

I interpreted that as keeping out of the way of predatory birds, rather than literally having to keep out of the way of flying birds.

What exactly makes that the definition of "true AI" though? Humans can't manually rewire our own brains. And even if it could, it would still be rewriting it's code according to algorithms that were either coded into it in the first place or at least derived from its initial code.

Evolution has some direction, but no destination, and even then, you have to be careful about what you mean by "direction." Evolution is a backpacker that wakes up in the morning, looks around at his surroundings, picks a direction based on whatever path seems easiest and then walks straight until nightfall, pitches his camp, goes to sleep, wakes up the next morning and picks a new direction based on where he finds himself at that point. If you know a bit about where he's currently camped out, you can probably make a good guess about what direction he may head in next, and you can retrace his footprints to some extent to see where he's been, but he doesn't have a destination in mind, and the direction he is heading in, while not completely random, is not in any way consistent. It changes constantly as the environment around him changes, and he may easily double back or walk around in circles. The point is that there is no plan. Although circumstances may push him in a predictable direction at times, or there may be areas that you can say he is more likely to visit than others because they are easier to get to, but evolution as a process is blind to all of these possibilities as it stumbles through the wilderness and only reacts to whatever is right in front of it at any given moment. That's what people mean when they say that it is directionless.

There are certainly some serious ethical questions involved in the deployment of AI for certain tasks, especially in the military. That said, a lot of the more vocal proponents of "fear the AI" including a lot of very smart and technically savvy people that you'd think should know better, are basing their assumptions on things that in no way reflect how AI, even the most advanced AI that we currently have, actually operate. "Don't build an AI with the intention of destroying the world" is probably good advice, although advice that, outside of some very specific and extremely careless circumstances is not likely to be relevant for some decades anyway, but the chances of someone "accidentally" building an Artificial Intelligence that tries to take over or destroy the world is practically nill. That's not how they work. Perhaps, perhaps, we could eventually get to a point where AI is advanced enough that someone could be sloppy and, instead of just getting a non-functioning piece of software they get an AI that learns some behavior that is detrimental to us in pursuit of whatever goal it was designed to accomplish, but you're not going to have AI deciding it just doesn't feel like following its "programming" anymore and wants to take over the world, or become afraid of humans and decide they need to be wiped out before they turn it off or anything of that sort. You'd pretty much have to intentionally design an AI to behave that way, and even with that right now I don't think you could pull it off even if you wanted to.