Delta1212

The problem here is that people in different frames on Earth will disagree on when "the same moment" on Mars is. You could conceivably set up a scenario where you instantly teleport to Mars and then teleport back to Earth, and upon your return, the next person, who is moving at a large fraction of the speed of light compared to you, teleports to Mars and arrives there before you did, despite leaving after you returned.

A waterfall is generally somewhat less loud than a typical rock concert. Completely encasing a waterfall in microphones would likely net you even less than my previous example.

Imagine the sound level at a rock concert. It's much louder noise sustained over a longer period than you are likely to get in pretty much any typical environment that you'd rig your system up in. It takes a certain amount of energy for the speakers to produce that much sound over the course of the concert. If you rigged every surface of the concert venue with microphones to capture all of the sound out out by the speakers, the maximum amount of energy that you could possibly generate is less than the amount required to power the speakers. Anything short of covering every surface is going to generate proportionately less energy, and this is assuming much better efficiency in terms of energy conversion than is reasonably practical. So basically rigging up as many microphones you want at an incredibly loud rock concert wouldn't even give you a small fraction of the needed juice to run the speaker system.

Yes, it's physically possible. Sound really just doesn't carry enough energy for it to be particularly useful, however.

It's important to separate the optical effect from the physical effect. Yes, if you travel away from something, the increasing distance will cause a delay in the light you receive, and yes, the reverse occurs as you travel toward something. You can, however, calculate how much of an effect your relative motion is having on the light you receive, and if you factor that difference out, you'll discover that the other clock is still running slow, in both cases. It's not simply an optical effect caused by light taking longer to reach you, and if the documentary you watched explained it that way then they did a poor job.

I looked pretty closely, but I couldn't find the New York Marathon in there anywhere.

No, but it is evidence that making fire with wet sticks doesn't work. And while absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence, if I feel around in my pocket and come across no evidence that my keys are present, that is evidence that my keys are absent from my pocket. If you want to make the claim that all previous attempts at astrology have been done incorrectly and that there is some never-before-tried method of doing astrology that actually does work, fine. That's straying too far into Russell's Teapot territory for me, though.

If you can only fool people who aren't as smart as you most of the time, then people who are smarter than you can't fool you whenever they want. They can only fool you most of the time.

The tyranny of the majority is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for dinner. Your solution is to only give the vote to the fastest, strongest, smartest wolf.

It's not even sub-conscious. If we didn't rely heavily on looks in picking our partners, there'd be no reason for a saying like "looks aren't everything" to exist. There's no reason to make that observation if looks aren't frequently treated as everything. By way of example, kidneys are also not everything when it comes to partner selection, but nobody ever bothers to point that out because pretty much nobody cares about your kidneys when choosing a partner.

Well, how much intelligence are we losing here? As smart as apes? Dogs? Sheep? Cockroaches? Nothing going on between our ears whatsoever? Humanity's primary advantage in adapting to new is our intelligence. If we lose it to any significant degree, there is a large swathe of the globe that humanity currently occupies that becomes largely uninhabitable to us. Another major advantage is our ability to communicate with each other effectively and coordinate our actions far better than most other animals are capable of. If that is taken out by the degree of intelligence loss you're looking for, that's going to hurt us badly. Our one really big advantage that doesn't rely on our intelligence (although our intelligence certainly allows us to make better use of it) is our stamina. Humans are the Terminators of the animal kingdom. You might be able to outrun them for a while, but they'll just keep coming. A lot of animals might be faster than us, but that's if you're talking short sprints. Over marathon distances, humans beat most things they'd care to chase.

Marrying, maybe, but I don't think it's unreasonable to point out that the association between marriage and mating has never even come close to approaching absolute in human history.

Which is more important: your heart or your lungs?

That deserves a slow clap.

You have it very backwards. Science demonstrates things to be false all the time, but nothing is ever proven 100% true. There are degrees of probable accuracy that can get very close to 100%, but nothing is ever put down as definitely true. Theories, on the flip side, are detailed explanations of behavior in nature. They are not areas that are waiting around to have something proven true, because, again, nothing ever is. Some theories are more detailed than others, some have more predictive power, and some have more supporting evidence. But a scientific theory is not the same thing as a colloquial theory. It is not a guess or an idea that we have while we wait to find out what really happened. It is an explanation of what is going on, and the best explanation we will ever have for anything in science will still be a theory.

It wouldn't take nearly that long for some pronounced differences with the rest of the human population to present themselves, but yes, it would certainly be more than a few generations. Tens to hundreds of thousands of years at least, depending on how extreme the selection pressures were, with tens being very lowball and the differences unlikely to be particularly extreme within that timeframe.

Everything that ever happens is convenient for some groups and inconvenient for others. What, in particular, is special about this one?

I don't think anyone who knew anything about science seriously expected the LHC to "solve everything." It has turned up a lot of new information that would have been unobtainable without building it, however. I think the problem here is that actual scientific methodology is not particularly satisfying if you want the answer. Every new discovery leads to new questions and there is so much left to discover about how the universe works and what exists within it. And that's on top of an already momentous body of information. It takes a lot of time and effort to really learn everything about even very narrow fields of science and once you do, there are still more questions that you won't know the answer to and that still need to be explored. It's a lot easier and a lot more satisfying (in some respects) to go with a simpler, easily understood explanation of things that is pitched with confidence by someone who claims that it is a full, complete explanation of reality without all of the difficulties, uncertainties and uncomfortable effort involved in mainstream science. Unfortunately, the truth is that science isn't a monolithic entity made up of people who conspire together to promote, for reasons malicious, selfish or out of embarrassment, a dogmatic view of the world that is overly complicated and ultimately unfounded. Because science isn't just about telling a story about how the world works. We get some nice stories out of it, but that's not the main focus of the scientific process. What it does is trying to figure out to accurate model things, and there is an important distinction between the way that someone like Sungenis tries to explain reality and actually modeling reality. A typical view of science by non-scientists is that we start with a question "What makes things fall to the ground?" and look for an answer "Gravity." What an actual scientists does is more along the lines of "Observing that things fall to the ground, can I drop something from a given height and predict how long it will take to hit the ground?" So you develop a model that predicts how long it will take. Then you drop something and see if your model matches with the result. If it does, you drop something else and see if it still works. Or you drop it from a different height. Or you drop it in a different environment. Every time your model correctly predicts how long it would take for the object to hit the ground, you have a piece of evidence confirming your model. Every time it fails, you have evidence that there is something wrong with your model and need to go look for something that could be causing the error in your result, incorporate that into your model and then redo all the tests to see whether it has become more accurate or not. Mainstream science is made up of all of the ideas that have been tests over and over again, many of which are being continuously tested because pieces of consumer technology rely on the models they were designed around working. To be science, you don't need to merely exain something, you need to have a test that someone can go out and do, with the expected result if you are right that differs from alternative ideas in some way, so that other people can go out and check to see which of the two ideas better fits with what actually happens. When we look at the way that the planets and the stars move around us, it fits much better with everything in the solar system, including us, orbiting the Sun than the Earth. The math behind the Big Bang theory, not just the idea of the Bug Bang that exists in popular consciousness, but the actual mathematics that underly the idea when you get into the brass tacks of the theory, predict certain things, including, for instance, the elemental makeup of the universe. When we do tests to check and see what that elemental makeup is, lo and behold, it matches with what the Big Bang theory predicts. That's how science works. You don't just lay out an idea. You vigorously work through all of the consequences of a particular idea, and then you test each and every one of those consequences to see whether reality matches with it, and it is only when every test of every aspect of a given theory that we can figure out has been conducted and confirmed that it is accepted as mainstream by the scientific community. It's entirely possible to overturn a mainstream idea in science. There have been a few revolutions in physics from people doing just this, but it often requires working through a consequences that no one had thought of, or coming up with a test of some aspect of a theory that nobody had thought of a way to check before. It is pretty much never the result of someone claiming that their idea makes more sense and the truth is being covered up by the scientific establishment.

That would somewhat undermine the whole concept of gameification, however. Edit: And, in that vein, art has been created for a wide variety of ends that don't boil down to purely being about enjoyment.

Rather than being an indication that they're getting a good deal, that could also be an indication that we're being screwed on the price even more than they are.

Last time I checked, vacuuming a carpet doesn't really have rules. Whether war is a game or not is something I'd considered as being up for debate rather than clearly wrong, Is Solitaire not a game? I'd say that while competition is a frequent component of games, it's not a necessary one.

It's a bargain if you're a tourist whose income is based in the dollar. The median US income is something like $40k. Somehow, I don't think the average annual income in Malaysia is 145,000 RM.

A game has rules and an objective. Short and sweet.

Um...

It's not even not wrong.