Delta1212

It's 186,000 mps, which Janus used 5 times in that post compared to the one 182,000, so I'm assuming that was just a typo.

The thing is, this is how most of the US left actually feels. I consider myself decidedly left of center in US politics and you've perfectly summarized my economic views with that sentence.

No, it's not "They did it so we're allowed to do it." It's "everyone is always allowed to do it but it's kind of gross when anyone does it."

I don't think it is hypocritical to trust different people with different levels of power. It does betray a certain degree of short-sightedness, though.

Trump tweeted "Who can guess the real meaning of "covfefe" ??? Enjoy!" a few minutes after 6 am ET. People were already making fun of it, but it definitely picked up after that point.

I agree with you, although the fact that he seems to be insisting that it was not a typo is mildly embarrassing and somewhat bizarre.

Also, of course it is impossible to be in two times at the same time because "the same time" implies a single time coordinate. For the same reason, you can't be in two places at the same place.

Light emitted from a ship will never arrive at its destination at the same time as the ship, assuming everything is traveling in straight lines. The light will always arrive first. The question is simply one of by how much.

Assuming the target is 1 light second away from the ship when the beam is turned on, and all of this is from the frame of the target, then yes.

Your argument reminds me of the mathematical description of a black hole in general relativity: It seems quite complex, but in reality there is no point. (Also, tangent, but it just occurred to me as I was writing this that the distance within which an event horizon will appear is literally called the Black Shield Radius).

The real test of the effect a president has on the economy is not what the market is doing in his first year but in his last year.* *Offer not valid if they happen to be the same year

Or saying that having seatbelts disproportionately saves the lives of bad drivers, keeping them from being bred out of the population and weakening humanity's natural driving ability over time.

Depends on what your goals are, I would imagine.

The thing about emergent properties is not that they are fundamentally impossible to predict so much as prohibitively complex to predict. It's more of a practical impossibility than a theoretical one, but practically speaking, there isn't much difference.

If I could give any advice to my younger school age self, it would be to take school more seriously and study more. You have an unbelievable amount of time and resources dedicated to helping you learn during those years, and it becomes significantly harder to pursue areas of interest once you are out of the school system. It's very easy to take it for granted and fail to fully utilize that opportunity.

I don't think that animal cognition is identical to human cognition, but I do think that many people react against that idea by going too far in the other direction and vastly underestimate animals and especially their ability to form relationships outside of strictly familial and mating bonds.

Well, two of our best and most well-tested theories for describing the behavior of reality also seem to be fundamentally incompatible, so, yeah, probably. Ultimately, though, we simply don't know what we don't know.

Basically, yeah. The larger more diverse population will contain the smaller "fitter" population as a subset. If a challenge arises that would kill of the people that aren't part of that population, then you're essentially back where you would have been anyway. If a challenge arises that a different subset is more capable of surviving, then the "pre-fit" population will have a significantly smaller or non-existent number of indivisible able to survive it as compared with the larger more diverse population.

That's really the kind of thing that gets people in trouble. They can't imagine spending all of that money, so it comes as a surprise when they end up doing it. You need a realistic plan of how to handle money if you don't want to mismanage it into oblivion. There at some pretty secure funds that can pay out 4% returns per year without depleting the principle. That allows you to live off the interest pretty much indefinitely. With a 300 million dollar windfall, properly managed, you could spend $1 million a month without ever eating into that $300 million. Ideally, on a smaller scale, that's what retirement should look like. The only questions are how much principle you need to have invested to comfortably live off of and then how much you need to save each month during your working years to reach that goal.

Phi, I think you are vastly overestimating the necessity of thumbs. That's not to say they didn't contribute to how our intelligence evolved, but I think cetaceans and certain birds are near the top of the list of intelligent non-primates that would be candidates for being considered sapient or near sapient and none of them have anything remotely approaching thumbs. Plus, we're talking about using genetic engineering and artificial selection to foster the desired traits, which doesn't necessarily require reproducing all of the specific environmental pressures and physiological structures that naturally pushed us in that direction in our own history. The first movie was rather ambiguous about how the apes ended up that way, although it turns out that all of the intelligent apes are descended from the son of the two chimps that helped Charlton Heston in the first movie after they traveled back in time to present day Earth in one of the sequels. The new movies skipped out on all of that and started with what was the last movie in the original series but with the apes originating from genetic engineering gone wrong rather than time travel.

That is extremely common. Most people do not know how to manage money, especially large sums of it.

The primary thing to take into consideration is that natural selection does not make a species more fit in general. It makes them better adapted to dealing with the specific thing that is applying the selection pressure. So allowing people to die of a particular illness will select for people with an immunity or resistance to thag illness and will make humanity more fit for an environment where that disease is a killer. It will not make humanity more fit for any other condition, and will probably make it less fit for some other potential environments since fitness for one environment pretty much always comes at the expense of being somewhat less fit for some other environment. General fitness comes from being able to adapt to a changing environment, and the best defense against future changes to the environment is vareity. The more diverse the population, the more likely that some individuals in the population will be well suited to a new selection pressure. The less diverse a population, the more likely that an environmental change will occur that none of the population is suited to survive. Selection pressures inherently cut down on diversity in a population by herding the gene pool towards specific traits and eliminating less successful traits. By easing the effect of certain pressures, you give more room for the population to diversify and guard against unpredictable future changes to the environment. By applying a pressure unnecessarily, you are decreasing population diversity in order to make it better at surviving an environment that has that specific selection pressure. An environment that only exists because we are choosing to create it by not removing that pressure.

There are elements with extremely long half-lives above 82 to the point that they might as well be considered stable for most purposes. "Islands of stability" is a term generally applied to elements with much higher atomic numbers that are relatively more stable than those around them. These would still most likely have half lives measured in days at best, not be actually stable elements. They are also thus far theoretical and have not been physically produced or synthesized as yet.

You'd expect it to look like the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation, not a bunch of little points.