Delta1212

I suppose they picked 4/20 to maximize the percentage of the population who will be in a docile state during the takeover?

Why use weeks? That's a fairly arbitrary period to distinguish. For that matter, what's the point of hours and minutes? Just use seconds. Then 5pm would be 61,200. Much simpler.

By "moving" I think he meant the rate of time passing on the clock, rather than approach speed.

It's interesting. I know that the bullet drop thing felt counter-intuitive when I first heard it, but it took me a moment to remember why. It now feels counter-intuitive that it wouldn't hit at the same time because the way I conceptualize bullet trajectories has changed from what it was some years ago. Intuition is just applying past experience to current circumstance without putting in a lot of thought. That works great for getting approximately correct answers to many questions without having to spend a lot of time mulling it over but tends to break horribly when applied to areas you don't have any past experience with.

We know that General Relativity is wrong/incomplete because it conflicts with QM. They're two of the most well tested and accurate theories in science, but they cannot both be correct as currently formulated. There are, however, degrees of wrongness. The idea that gravity is a result of magnetism is more wrong than General Relativity because it doesn't provide accurate results for areas that General Relativity does. In fact, gravity really doesn't behave like magnetism at all except on a very, very superficial level and barely even then. This is very important to remember: gravitational theory and magnetic theory are not "Hey, gravity is what pulls us down" and "Hey, magnetism is what causes magnets to work." The theories are precise mathematical description of how things behave. So for instance, if you gave me some information about two objects (charge, mass, distance, etc) I could tell you exactly how they will interact with each other due to magnetism. I could, for instance, tell you exactly how far apart to place two magnets before the attraction overpowers friction and inertia and they "leap" together. And if you placed them at that distance you would find the math predicted that distance accurately. I could do the same for gravity and tell you, for instance, how fast you would need to go to orbit the Earth at a given distance from the surface. You could go up and move at that speed and see that the prediction was correct. If, however, you attempted to apply the math for gravitational interactions to an electromagnetic interaction, or vice versa, you would get a completely different result, one that is wrong. The same descriptions do not apply to both phenomena, which means they are not simply the same thing. Science would love to unify the forces, but you can't just say "Gravity is caused by magnetism." You have to be able to provide a description of how these very different behaviors are derived from a common source, and no one has been able to do that.

As far as avoiding junk science: if something is claiming that a scientific consensus is wrong, it's safest to ignore it. That's not to say there aren't plenty of scientists out there banging away at one established theory or another trying to test its limits or prove some aspect of it wrong, but 1: you're much more likely to come across crank sites than you are websites dedicated to these people's research and 2: you should start with a foundation of what we know (or at the very least think we know) before branching off into more speculative areas. Hopefully by the time you've covered the basics in a decent level of depth you'll have a better feel for how the scientific process works and you'll have a better "feel" for who is and is not playing fair with their claims. Also good to remember: most scientists are hesitant to make claims that go against established theory until they've quadruple-checked their results and then had everyone else check them as well. They want to have rock solid evidence before making any major challenges to existing ideas. Those peddling junk science (and science journalists covering actual science who have a tendency to sensationalize) rarely show such restraint. Case in point, when CERN results showed neutrinos traveling slightly faster than light (something that is supposed to be impossible), their response was "Hey guys, we got a weird result. Could somebody check our work and see if we're doing something wrong?" while all the headlines were screaming "Einstein was Wrong!" The former is how an actual scientist sounds. If you read something along the lines of the latter, it's a red flag that whatever you are reading probably wasn't written by an actual scientist. (Incidentally, someone did eventually discover what was wrong at CERN, which is precisely why scientists don't go spouting off about overturning all of physics at the first sign of discrepancy).

Human combustion is like your significant other: They always claim to be spontaneous, but when it comes down to it they rarely take the initiative, and if you want anything to actually happen, you have to light a fire under their ass.

This is true and needs to be compensated for when calibrating clocks that need to be very precise while orbiting the Earth. This is speculative and doesn't have much bearing on the above.

The problem here? That could be a bulging calf... or it could be a wrinkle in a suit. That could be a bend in the hand... or an ill-fitting glove. That could be a moving brow... or an artifact of the low resolution footage.

Acknowledging up front that I think this is all nonsense but like working through the internal logic of it anyway: It would take at least 120+ years for that to occur to anyone, but presumably you would yes. Not understanding why something is happening rarely prevents it from happening. If you assume that every event has multiple outcomes, and that a new universe is created for every outcome, then the number of universes generated each month where you are dead would begin to outnumber the universes generated where you are alive on average somewhere around the mean life expectancy. The odds of someone continuing to live at 150 would be vanishingly small and so generate a fairly sizable number of universes where they are dead. We don't live in a universe where someone has lived that long because the number of universes containing people who have are overwhelmed by the universes where those people died.

What if, for instance, it is impossible to control how all of the universes work from inside one of them (and impossible to escape from whatever universe you are in, as well). If this is the case, then your scenario is impossible and therefore not probable.

An emotional state is a chemical process. How can anything but an organized chemical structure develop emotion? The "will to live" isn't magic. It's a set of behavioral drives and emotional states regulated by your bodies hormones and neural pathways. Those structures are all inherited. That makes the feelings and behaviors they produce heritable as well. Those individuals that inherit behaviors that make them avoid dying are less likely to die and therefore more likely to reproduce. It's chemistry, not magic.

I'm looking forward to next year: 3/14/15

Why do you start conversations that will never effect you in life? Why must you be so judgmental of other people's lives?

Intelligence is a talent; wisdom is a skill.

The problem is treating something that is "possible" in the sense of "I don't have enough information to determine definitively that it is impossible" as if it was "possible" in the sense of "there is a chance it could actually happen. If I hold a coin in my hand without looking at it, I could reasonably state that it is possible that, were I to flip it, it would come up tails. In fact, I could say that if I were to flip it an infinite number of times, it is highly probable that it will come up tails at some point. If, unbeknownst to me, it is a two-headed coin, then it will never actually come up tails because it is physically impossible even though I imagine it to be fairly probable. If there can exist no universe where a being is capable of figuring out how to control the multiverse, then it won't happen. Even if there are an infinite number of universes, there is no reason to suppose such a universe is necessarily among them, in the same way an infinite number of those coin flips will never include tails.

Also, as he is accelerating, he wouldn't have the sensation of being a body at rest. He'd have the sensation of being in an Earth-equivalent gravitational field, but those aren't exactly the same thing.

The dog has been around for only tens of thousands of years, yet it sprints much faster than us. What makes the dog so successful at evolution. (The answer is that we value things that humans are good at because we are human, and when you define success that way, humans come out on top. If you pick a different metric, many, many animals beat us in a great number of categories. Evolution doesn't have an "end goal" of making things smarter).

I believe it brings factorization down to polynomial time rather than from polynomial time.

And just to follow on: The portion of the universe we can observe (and potentially the only portion we will ever observe) is finite in size. That finite portion of the universe was once extremely tiny. It is possible, however, that rather than the entire universe being tiny in size, it was already infinitely large (or even just much bigger than that tiny portion; who knows?) and merely very dense. As it expanded, that tiny portion became the volume of space we can observe and the rest lies outside the range of our detection because the expansion is too great. In any case, the universe may or may not be infinite, but the observable universe (the thing packed into that tiny space before the Big Bang) is certainly not infinite.

Americans hate Communism because our rival and Cold War enemy the USSR claimed communism as its ideology of choice. Full Stop. The philosophical merits (or lack thereof) are really beside the point because most people in this country don't even know what communism is let alone why it does or doesn't work. I've literally had this conversation: "Aren't Al-Qaeda communist?" "Do you know what a communist is?" "Someone who hates America, right?" And from what I've seen, that's representative of a fair portion of the population.

I'm pretty sure George W Bush was behind that.

Your mistake is assuming that all of the people who are telling you that ancient aliens are garbage will disagree with this premise.

I wouldn't call that a scientific attitude. It's an attitude that is common among people of a scientific bent, but that doesn't make the attitude itself scientific.

It took something like a billion years for the first cells to appear after the formation of the planet. Perhaps we have a different definition of the word 'short?'