Delta1212

A year is based off of how long it takes to orbit the sun, not off of the length of a second. That said, yes, both are arbitrarily defined units of time and therefore "made up." We all understand this. I'm not sure what your point.

How does being in night mean someone is moving faster?

I made the mistake of reading the comments.

I think I thought a thought is what I think a thought is.

"Measuring and observing and predicting the impact that something has is not the same as measuring and observing and predicting the thing itself, even if your results are consistent and sensible." Can you name one way of observing "the thing itself" rather than the impact it has? Not just for photons; anything at all.

And now we've strayed into word salad territory. I tried.

Night does not stop light, the Earth does. Night happens, not because light slows does or stops, but because it travels in straight lines (sort of) and the straight line between you and the sun happens to go through the Earth at night. Since light can't go through the Earth, sunlight can't reach you at night unless reflected off of something else (like the moon). All the light is still moving at the same speed, there is just less of it reaching you because it is bouncing off the day side of the Earth. That light is all still traveling at the same speed it always does. And anyway, there's no law that says the amount of light in a given place is always constant, only that the speed it travels at is always the same.

The glass is not more reflective at night. But it is easier to see your image. Here's why: Imagine you are watching TV. You have the volume set to a moderate level that is easy to hear. Now imagine that someone turns on a vacuum cleaner and someone else starts using a blender. Suddenly the room is very noisy and the TV is hard to hear. Did the volume on the TV decrease? No, it just has more competing noise that is interfering with your ability to hear the sound coming from the TV. The reflection in glass works similarly. At night, a certain amount of light is reflected by the glass and, because it is dark out, a very small amount of light comes through the glass from the other side. Most of the light you see when you look at the window is from the reflection and it is easy to see. During the day, the same amount of light is reflected but a lot more light is coming through from the other side and interfering with your ability to make out the reflection in the glass. In both cases it is not that the source you are concerned with has diminished (sound from the TV or light from the reflection in the glass), it is that it is much harder to make out when there is a lot of competition from other sources.

Thank you, that was very helpful. Do you know of any books that have many such examples with specifics for different situations?

Well, now that I know that the essence of war is to outflank the enemy, could you perhaps recommend a reference that would teach me how to accomplish that in different scenarios?

I think the major takeaway here is that it is better for children to live in a household with more wealth that actually desires to care for them rather than a lower income household and/or one that isn't prepared for them, and that this fact does not change based on the sexual orientation of the parents, in contradiction of several GOP talking points over the last few years.

It's a pretty famous riddle.

I think it helps to take a top-down approach. Learn how the various organ systems operate and what they do. Narrow in on how the individual organs operate to contribute to overall function, how the tissues are formed on a cellular level, how the cells themselves work, and that'll draw you into molecular biology. From there the chemistry will take you down to the quantum level if you want to pursue it that far.

Anecdotal is not equivalent to hearsay. Anecdotal evidence is evidence based on limited personal experience rather than a generalized study. I can factually state that every time I have had shrimp at a diner more than 20 miles from the ocean, it has made me ill. That is anecdotal evidence about the quality of diner shrimp because it is my personal experience. Unless I sample and compare data from a wide number of people at a variety of diners in different locations and compare how frequently people get sick, or even better directly test the shrimp at diners in different locations for bacteria (after is has been cooked) then my personal experience, even though it happened to me and is not something I heard about, is not scientific evidence. It is anecdotal. Edit: The problem with anecdotal evidence is, essentially, that each of us is a single data point. We cannot say "It happened to me, therefore it is generally true that."

Could they? I suppose it's still physically possible in a hypothetical world where that becomes everyone's top political priority. Will they? No.

Then we probably won't find any.

It seems like you think there is a dichotomy there. I'm not sure why. The Copernican principle is a reasonable assumption to make until and unless observations demonstrate otherwise, and the (weak) a anthropic principle is a reasonable couner to the idea that discovering physical laws are compatible with life is surprising and indicative of anything other than that we live in a universe that can support life.

Everything is just degrees of abstraction from physics. At one level of abstraction, you get chemistry. Biology is specific type of chemistry that gets abstracted a bit further. And evolutionary biology is a specific branch of biology.

But generally, yes. Bacteria, viruses, and what have you generally evolve to specifically infect a particular host or set of hosts and crossover to something else is generally accidental and not terribly common. It would likely take quite a long time and very consistent exposure to any bacteria-analogue on an alien world before a strain cropped up that was capable of infecting humans. It'd be a bit like give a tree a cold.

Not to get ally xkcd-y but pretty much everything studied by science is just some level of abstraction of physics. It's all about studying the way that the world behaves, so you could fairly swap out the words physics in his post for science and it would be just as true.

I seriously doubt the cup sitting on the paper forms an air-tight seal.

Aside from that being woefully poor use of metaphor: What? I assume that your "assumption" that I don't have standards is meant as an insult, but how do you reconcile that with the idea that any man will have sex with any willing woman? It's like you think men are compelled to have sex with anything that moves and there's no way around it. For the record, I've met plenty of women that I absolutely wouldn't touch even if they threw themselves at me, and I guess you don't think males have any responsibility for staying monogamous in a relationship. Holy @&%# what kind of people do you interact with? I mean, just on a personal basis, not caring if you get a woman pregnant? Like, on purely selfish grounds that can have a huge impact on your social and financial well-being. Any guy that doesn't care if he impregnates someone is an imbecile. Second, the fact that you think all men see all women as sex objects and that if they couldn't be used for sex women they would be hunted just betrays some really warped views on women. I'm seriously at a loss for how to respond to that.

The anthropic principle is a pushback against the argument from incredulity that the Earth/Universe/Whatever is finely tuned to human life and that this implies that the universe must have been purposely constructed so that we could live within it. The point of the anthropic principle is, roughly, that since we are here, we can assume that the universe's underlying framework is conducive to our existence or we wouldn't be here, and since we are here, it shouldn't be that surprising that the universe is a place we are capable of living in. In other words, the fact that we are capable of living in the universe shouldn't be treated as evidence for a specific reason why the universe exists as it does. It's a bit like a fireman thinking that there must be an arsonist running around town because every time the firetruck takes him to a house, it's on fire. The anthropic principle would be pointing out that if the houses weren't on fire, the firetruck wouldn't be taking him there, so the mere fact that they are on fire shouldn't be surprising and isn't evidence one way or another of what caused the fires.

Because it moves at c in every frame. You don't need to have a universal frame in which it is moving at c when it moves at c in every frame.

If I set a house on fire, are you going to blame the house for being flammable?