Delta1212

By their contents? Of course, it's easier to judge by their covers, which is why we do it, and why so much effort goes into designing covers that will convince people to buy what's inside of them without any relationship with the quality of the book. Cover judgements and first impressions exist because we don't have the time or energy to invest in thoroughly researching every book, person or idea that comes our way before deciding how to react to it. Unfortunately, that tendency is what makes it so easy to spread some truly stupid ideas by coating them in a thin, crowd-pleasing cover that most people won't bother to look past. "If global warming came from humans, then why is there still snow?"

I think you are misinterpreting ajb's comment. It is possible to observe an object moving away from you at 0.9c, and another object moving away from you in the opposite direction at 0.9c. You would therefore measure a separation velocity between the two of 1.8c. However, the speed of each object as measured in the other's frame is still less than c. That's what ajb means by local measurements of speed.

And this is where density comes in. Because the relationship between distance from the center and the strength of gravity that we use above the surface breaks once you go past it. As you go down, more and more of the mass is "above" you, no longer contributing to the gravity you feel underfoot, and in fact counteracting it, until you reach the center where everything balances out. With denser objects, you can simply get closer to the center before breaking the surface.

Assuming that you are located at the same distance from the center of the Earth that the Earth's surface currently is, yes. Force of gravity is dependent on mass and distance, so just saying that the force will be "the same" is tricky. At the same distance from the center, the force will be the same if the mass doesn't chance. You can get closer to smaller objects, however, and as you get closer, the strength of gravity will increase.

It's easy to get a reputation for making the trains run on time when anyone who complains about their train being late disappears.

I think based on how things have gone so far that a ruling mandating that states recognize the marriages of other states is coming down. Especially if even Scalia is quoting the full faith and credit clause at them. Regardless of how they rule on making same sex marriage actually legal in every state, that first ruling is going to be the final nail in the coffin of marriage bans. If all you have to do to get married is cross state lines and then come home after the ceremony, that battle is utterly and completely lost on the part of those trying to stop it.

That's quite a pickle.

What is it?

Yes, it is. But as you pointed out, we're all entitled to our points of view.

I hope so, too. But that is a bit different from selling it.

If I had taken that video, making money off of it would be way, way down at the bottom of my list of things to do with it, despite knowing perfectly well that there are people who would pay for it. Profiting from the sale of a recording I took of a murder feels incredibly ghoulish to me.

I'll take a look.

I'm not saying that it is (necessarily) the entire problem, but in order to establish a pay gap in terms of women being underpayed for the same jobs, we need to look within the same field and at the same levels of responsibility rather than just at income percentiles. Because right now there are definitely a lot of very high paying positions where women are underrepresented, and that can seriously skew the percentiles from the top all the way down through the middle, because it means more men are occupying top paying positions, which pushes women further down the pay scale. A quick google search (so expect the numbers to be rough): 55% percent of jobs under $10 an hour are held by women. And such jobs make up roughly a quarter of the workforce. Assuming equal numbers of men and women in the workforce, that means that the bottom 30% of women are under $10 an hour, while only the bottom 20% of men are. And women make up 47% of the workforce rather than a full 50%, so that number is going to be even more skewed. I've known enough people at that level of pay to know there is sometimes wiggle room in pay, but not always and never by very much. So while there may well be men getting $11 an hour to do what a woman is getting $10 an hour for, I have a suspicion that a major chunk of that is a consequence of woman being over represented in lower paying jobs, with men being over represented at the higher end. This means that at each percentile, you're basically comparing down. While you're still working through male CEOs, the female CEOs have run out and you're working your way through female lawyers and doctors. By the time you've just gotten into the beginning of male lawyers and doctors, the smaller number females in that profession has already run out and you've moved down to the next tier. And it goes on and on until you get to the lower paying jobs where women outnumber men, and then the gap starts narrowing just in time to catch up at minimum wage where the bottom whatever percentile makes the same because there aren't any lower positions for anyone to occupy. I don't know that this makes up the entire pay gap. I haven't seen a study that looked entirely within field and controlled for factors like experience and skill level, probably because that is difficult to do. I wouldn't be surprised to seem some pay discrepancy even in that, of course, but I have seen the statistics that show women being under represented in a lot of higher paying fields and over represented in lower paying ones, and this also represents a major issue, explains at the very least a big chunk of the pay gap, and requires a different kind of solution. I'm in favor of equal pay for equal work, but I think that's still going to miss a huge chunk of the root of the current problem, and that even achieving that goal at a rate of 100% isn't going to equalize that graph unless we can pull off a major cultural shift so that women are encouraged set the same career goals as men and given the same opportunity to succeed once they have. Neither of those is currently happening and will be much more complicated to fix than simply banning gendered pay discrimination.

As opposed to now...

I think there is a potential problem in focusing on the pay gap without context. It's existence definitely points to a problem, but the problem could be in one (or both) of two areas, and the way it generally gets framed focuses on one of them that may or may not be the root cause. If, for example (pulling numbers out of my ass), the top 5% of male earners are CEOs, while the top 5% of women are a mix of CEOs and doctors/lawyers because CEOs are disproportionately men, then the problem isn't that women aren't earning as much for doing the same job. It's that women are being discouraged in one way or another from getting those higher paying jobs. If that's the case, then the focus should be on opening up opportunities for women rather than equal pay for equal work (which should also be happening, but may very well do little to solve the problem depending on what the leading causes of the discrepancy are at this point).

Yes, people are entitled to vote. No one has disagreed with that. Just because someone is entitled to vote doesn't mean their votes are going to be intelligent and informed or lead to positive outcomes, but neither has anyone suggested that a poor outcome means that people's votes should be taken away from them, which is what you seem to be insinuating that people are advocating. I can be in favor of democracy while believing that it doesn't lead to 100% positive results in all cases. It just generally leads to less bad outcomes than most alternatives. I've never been a fan of the belief that if something is a net positive, everything that has to do with it must automatically be a good thing, and suggesting that it is not means you are somehow against the idea as a whole. It's a spurious argument at best and intentionally disingenuous at worst.

I don't think anyone suggested that democracy was all about "getting what you want." But just because it was a democratic decision doesn't automatically make it a good decision. An important part of the democrat process is being able to discuss the probable outcomes of one choice versus another. There are no good candidates currently likely to win the Republican nomination. There aren't a lot of great options on the Democratic side either, but the GOP has been especially crazy recently. Any one of the likely candidates would probably turn out to be a mess in office, which won't magically change just because a bunch of people voted them into the position.

Honestly, after the disaster that the post-Bush Court has been, and with the current crop of very underwhelming candidates for the office of President all around, Supreme Court nominations is pretty much going to be a driving factor in my vote. I don't care much for Hilary, and think that if a Republican actually won, the Dems would probably retake Congress fairly quickly so the damage would be at least somewhat limited. But there is no way in hell I'm going to vote for someone who's going to swing the Court even farther into nutso territory than it has already gotten at this point.

I was led to believe it was made of rubber.

I was under the impression that there wasn't actually a way to distinguish between SR and LET, it's just that LET assumes some things that there's no particular reason to assume, whereas SR doesn't assume anything that isn't already necessary for other things to work. Admittedly, I haven't spent a whole lot of time reading about LET, but what exactly are the distinguishing predictions? For my own curiosity.

Tracked down the paper: http://www.nature.com/npp/journal/v40/n5/full/npp2014315a.html

Totally unpredictable is a bit of a stretch, but yeah, the possibilities are many and they branch quickly enough that even if you can predict general trends over X period of time, it's very easy for small difficult-or-impossible-to-predict things to have very large effects and drastically throw off your predictions. That doesn't mean that you can't make predictions, just that the longer term you go, the less specific you can be with any hope of accuracy. Predicting the winner of a war that won't start for 5 years is difficult. Predicting the number of months of fighting in that war is practically impossible.

That's not how elements work. They aren't magic substances cooked from Hydrogen and Helium that could come out in an infinite number of ways. A hydrogen atom has one proton. A helium atom has two. Fuse two hydrogen atoms and you get a helium atom, by definition. An element is defined by the number of protons. If it's oxygen, it has eight protons. If it has eight protons, it is oxygen. We have everything covered up to just shy of 120 protons at this point, and elements stop being stable well before that point. The nucleus just starts getting too big and is prone to breaking apart. That's how you get al those radioactive elements with high atomic numbers. It doesn't matter if it's cooked in our start or another start, th number of protons defines the element, and you aren't going to get any novel proton counts unless you go over 120 or invent some new numbers. And a start turning out anything with a proton count that high is going to be difficult, because the higher the proton count, the heavier the nucleus is and the harder to fuse it is. A build up of heavy, difficult to fuse elements is what ultimately kills a star because it's turning part of its mass into material it can no longer use to sustain a fusion reaction. Plus, anything with that high of a proton count is unlikely to last very long, even if it does get produced in small quantities. We understand how elements work, and there isn't a limitless variety.

Well, it's not exactly the mother of invention in this particular case. I can't tell whether this helps my point or hurts it, but the steam engine was invented well before it was applied to mining operations. It just wasn't really used for anything other than saying "Oh, look what I can do with steam! Isn't that interesting?" until it found a commercial use in pumping mines, which is when it really became popular. So the steam engine would certainly have been invented without coal. It was, several times. It's just a matter of whether someone would have found a useful enough application for it that people would become familiarized with what it could do and look for other uses if there wasn't a massive coal mining operation that could use an automatic pump like that underway. I can certainly think of other uses, but the fact that the steam engine had been known for quite a long time before being applied to that particular problem and taking off as a commercial product, well again, I'm not sure whether that helps my case that we could have had industrialization without coal (steam power would definitely have been invented anyway), or hurts it (but nobody thought to do anything with it prior to having those mining operations). Although I suppose anyplace with major mining operations and a relatively high water table probably could have used something like that, regardless of what was being mined.

Which I don't disagree with. Industrialization allows for more efficient, centralized production, which fuels urbanization, which further fuels industrialization, and so forth. The question is whether that is possible to kick off without fossil fuels to feed the fire, though. Not whether an agrarian society is compatible with industrialization or a large urban population in the absence of industrialization.