Severian

I would agree with Kitcher and Gould that there is no such thing as general intelligence. Some people are better at some things, and some are better at others. Correlations in school children's tests are due to other things, such as the ability to concentrate in class, levels of nutrition, ability to communicate etc.

Does that matter? After all, you eat them without their informed consent too. (Or are you a vegan?)

Isn't that a moral judgement? In order for sex with a blow-up doll to be less healthy than gay sex you need to use psychological health, but what is good psychological health and what is bad is a matter of perspective. I think you would be offended if someone said about gay sex: "I said it should be illegal and considered a mental condition. I also consider it un-natural and sick even if the other man is "ready and willing"." What is the difference?

Anyone who claims to make scientific statements about morality is being unscientific. Since moral decisions require, by definition, a choice between "moral" and "immoral" actions, morality presupposes the existence of free will. However, free-will is not testable, so a non-scientific concept. To put it another way, you have no scientific methodology of determining whether or not the decision or view point of an individual has a moral basis, or is just a consequence of genetically favoured behaviour or self interest. And anyway, this thread has devolved into yet another religion bash, so is against the rules.

Doesn't California have a 'civil union' which provides the same rights to couples as being married and is not restricted to heterosexuals? If so, then isn't this a discussion purely about the word 'marriage'?

I think Special Relativity is the 100% correct description of dynamics on a flat geometry. I think General Relativity is an incomplete description of gravity, but only because it isn't a quantum theory. But to say it is 'wrong' is, well, wrong.

Then you don't have enough information. If x is an N-dimensional vector, you have N+1 unknowns with only N equations. In a traditional eigenvalue problem, this doesn't matter because you don't need the magnitude of x (since every term is linear in x), but here the b term sets a scale.

If [math]A- \lambda \mathbf{1}[/math] has an inverse, then the solution is [math]x= \left[ A- \lambda \mathbf{1} \right]^{-1} b[/math]

I have.

Only if they aren't married.

Antiquarks don't really count since they are just conjugated states. Most people say there are 6 quarks. That in itself is inconsistent though. There are 3 colors, so in some sense there are 18 quarks. Some may argue against that by saying that the different colors are related by an SU(3) transformation, so they are really just different facets of the same quark. But then the up and down (and higher generation equivalents) are related by an SU(2) isospin rotation, so in the same way as for color, maybe they are really the same object. Perhaps there are only 3 quarks. Then again, the electroweak symmetry is broken by the Higgs mechanism so maybe you shouldn't count the SU(2) transformation at all. Which brings us back to six quarks. Of course, if we eventually find a Grand Unified Theory, perhaps something like this, then everything is related by a transformation (that is, a member of the same multiplet), so maybe there is only one particle...

Is that just a supply and demand thing? Do Americans feel the need to have more powerful cars than Europeans? Or is it simply that that Europeans are more careful about fuel economy because of higher fuel prices? Or something more sinister...?

You may find it helpful to think of it as a limit of another fundtion, that is, [math] \delta(x-x_0) = \lim_{a \to 0} \frac{1}{a \sqrt{\pi}} e^{-(x-x_0)^2/a^2}[/math]. It is probably most useful when used to facilitate Green's Functions. If you can solve a differential equation with a Dirac delta source, you can solve it for any source you like simply by integrating this solution (the Green's Function) over space weigthed by the source.

No. It is petrol. You can find its specs here.

I am confused by this thread too. My car is a BMW, which I wouldn't expect to be very fuel efficient, but my official fuel consumption is 48mpg (and I would say that is pretty much what I experience). Are American cars really so much less fuel efficient or is this a difference of definition?

As soon as you have converted it to decimal, it ceases to be an irrational number. So it is impossible to "convert and irrational number from decimal to binary".

No shit SH3RLOCK! If I was to move, my principle motivation would be to have nicer weather. I am a bit fed up with rain 300 days a year.

Surely an irrational number can't be written down in decimal in the first place?

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I was meaning that the "SAP" was altered in the way I described. The "AP" as you called it is not even considered an anthopic principle at all in physics. It is just confroting data with theory. Cosmological data is open to interpretation. It uses models to deduce things about fundamental physics. If you disagree with the models you can disagree with the data's application. Also it is hard to know what the consequences for fundamental theories are - maybe data which appears to rule out a fundamental model can be accomodated by a trivial change. The classic example is the baryon asymmetry of the universe. The Standard Model doesn't have enough CP violation in it to explain why there is more matter than antimatter. If matter and antimatter were created in equal amount in the big bang, and asymmetry since has to be caused by this CP violation (and the other Sakharov conditions). But one could argue, maybe there has always been more matter than antimatter and we don't need CP violation at all (in other words, maybe the big bang model is wrong). Alternatively, a trivial extension of the SM would include neutrino masses, and a sterile right-handed neutrino in order to give the neutrinos a small mass via the see-saw mechanism. If so, then there could be CP violation in the neutrino sector which could provide enough CP violation to solve the problem.

It seems to me that the argument in the physorg article requires us to be very sure of the mechanism for how dwarf galaxies are created. Personally I would think the evidence for the mechanism of their creation is a lot weaker than the evidence in support of dark matter. The effects consistent with Dark Matter have been observed as long ago as 1933 [Zwicky], and the existence of dark matter is predicted by many models of new physics, independently of cosmology. Finally, two papers suggesting alternatives to dark matter does not mean dark matter is losing support. The number of papers in support of dark matter are much much more. I don't see dark matter losing support anytime soon.

That is not quite the definition used in my field (though it may be in yours - I don't know). Your description "AP" is indeed used, and provides constraints on models. This is done pretty much routinely, though I stress that it is a rather weak constraint and is often ignored. (The Standard Model itself would fail this test.) Your "SAP" is almost the anthropic principle as used in String Theory, but instead they would say "those constants must be fine tuned in any universe we exist in". This gets around your logical error, and in fact, if the landscape view of string theory vacua were correct, then you would expect other regions of the universe with non-tuned constants where life didn't exist.

And if that comment makes me hate you, should you be arrested and locked up?

I would almost agree with that (I disagree with Bascule's redefinition of the term). However, I would just say that this makes free-will incompatible with, or rather unexplainable using, the scientific method. It is our scientific ansatz that either things are random or are predictable, but reality needn't really be like that. I do think though, that you have to accept either that you have no free-will, or the existence of non-predictive phenomena.

It is difficult to get past the nerd factor of watching a Star Trek movie.