Greg H.

I'm voting for Obama. He's done a reasonable job in his first four years (imo, obviously), given what he had to work with, and I am willing to give him four more to see if he can leverage some of that momentum in making more improvements. Not that he's been perfect - his cash for clunkers program was a fiasco that failed to obtain its stated goal in a huge way, for example. However, Mitt Romney's alliance with the radical far right Republicans gives me grave concerns about the future of this country, especially the middle and lower classes, and scientific research under his watch. Coupled with the dangerous precedent of the L'Aquila trial, I think handing the power of the POTUS to the extremist Republican groups at this time would be a serious problem for the scientific community in this country.

Please. Call it by it's proper name: Affirmative Action.

While I don't think this counts as stumping it, I did manage to convince it to admit it was dumb. Me: You are not clever. CB: Can you prove it? Me: You do not speak Klingon. Clever people speak Klingon. Therefore, you are not clever. CB: No I am not. Me: Thank you for admitting your faults. CB: You're welcome.

You're absolutely correct, and I missed that. I had forgotten. Thanks for catching it.

As I don't know what the material is, I'll make a suggestion and you can modify it as you will. IN the days of steam railroads, the railroads would use a very simple system to determine the level of water in water tanks (especially in the desert where you didn't get much rain). A wooden float, attached to a lightweight chain, was placed in the water, and the other end was fed through a clear tube (usually glass). The side of the tube was marked to indicate water levels with the highest level being at the bottom of the tube. As the water level varied, the float would move up and down inside the tank, and the indicator on the outside would move as well, indicating the current levels. A low tech solution, assuming you can do so safely, would be to drill a hole in the tank, and then replace the missing material with a plexiglass or lexan window. If you can see your liquid, empty the tank.

#1 looks correct to me. As for #3 I think you may have made an error in your addition for the final result. You may want to take a look at that again. I'll leave the rest for someone else.

It's not really FOIL at this point. It's just brute force multiplication.

Yeah, though I would write it like this to avoid confusion [math] (x^2+2dx(x)+dx^2)\times(x+dx) [/math]

You have to FOIL twice, basically. So you do (x+dx) * (x+dx) then multiply the product by (x+dx) again. My question is why are you bothering to do all this work when a simple application of the product rule will get the result you need.

And what makes your God any more self-evident or correct than any other deity? I mean, let's look at it logically - there are thousands of Christian denominations world wide. If it's so self-evident and correct, why all the difference of opinion on it?

Obligatory IANAL. That said, I think the real issue is that the laws (as I understand them) make no distinction with regards to the intent behind the possession or creation. Simply having the material is enough to receive the maximum sentence available, even if said material was captured to provide evidence. This is, in my opinion, what happens when you create knee-jerk laws instead of thinking a situation through slowly, carefully, and completely. Combined with mandatory sentencing guidelines, laws like this have, quite simply, emasculated the judiciary, and are, as has been noted in the articles you linked, destroying the lives of young people for being young and a little stupid. I wonder how many guilty people I could find if I crawled Facebook looking for pictures of children and playing in bathtubs or swimming pools. I'd be willing to bet there would be more than a few. Unfortunately the question of what to do about it is so politically charged that I'd be surprised if 10 years is enough time to get them changed in the US.

I will simply say this: Your post is, for the most part, word salad, and largely unintelligible. This sentence in particular: isn't even a complete thought. I had to read it three times to realize I wasn't skipping a line of text. What are you trying to explain? Also, speculation forum is where this belongs.

No, it wouldn't have. But you obviously do not care to hear about facts. So have a nice day.

I am starting to think you miss the point on purpose.

Actually there's a pretty simple way to determine if Mars is moving outwards or inwards. You just measure the time it takes to ping the lander. If that amount of time changes by a statistically significant amount (iow, outside the error bars expected for communicating with another planet, and based on the changing distance between them as they orbit the sun), then Mars is moving. But let us, for the sake of argument, assume Mars is moving outwards at a rate of 1 inch per year and has been doing so since 100 million years after the formation of the solar system. That means it will have moved something like 4.4 billion inches since the formation of the planets. That's only 69,000 miles. That's not even far enough to reach the moon. In order to move from the earth's orbit to it's present location (a distance of .5 au), in 4.4 billion years, Mars would need to be moving roughly 669 inches per year (assuming my math is right). With the precision required to land something on the surface of Mars, someone would have noticed that the planet kept moving a little bit at that speed.

They closed the thread because you refused to follow the rules of the forums, to wit failing to provide evidence and address the refutations of others. That aside, this isn't the place to discuss moderation. I merely brought up the old threads in the interest of making sure that anyone who decided to support reviewing your paper has all the available information on the topic.

In the interest of full disclosure: Discussion #1 Discussion #2

I never said it did. What's your point?

How do fictional characters in an animated TV series have "biological similarities" to anything? This at least is a potentially legitimate concern, but I don't know if there have been any studies done of the long term effects of a high sugar diet in livestock.

I will refer you to Cannibalism (Zoology) on Wikipedia. In particular, If the animals aren't really bothered by this, you do not need to be worried about it on their behalf.

It has an atmosphere now. It has an atmosphere right now. And it still has one today. Um, no. How many times do I need to say it? Mars - say it with me now - has an atmosphere. It's not difficult, just wrong. Wrong. No. Jupiter has an atmosphere, so does Venus, Mars, Neptune, Saturn, and Uranus. The fact that ours supports life is irrelevant, as has already been pointed out. The ozone layer does not hold the atmosphere in, it keeps the sun's UV rays from par broiling everything on the surface with UV rays. See there are a couple of things you need to form an ozone layer, and the first one of those is a lot of free (unbound) oxygen molecules floating around. Without that, you don't get ozone forming in the atmosphere. So you see, ozone doesn't cause the atmosphere - the atmosphere causes ozone.

And you'll still be wrong. Mars does have an atmosphere, albeit a thin one. According to NASA: Additionally, NASA landers have measured the average atmospheric pressure on Mars to be about 7.5 millibars. How do you measure wind speed and barometric pressure with no atmosphere again?

One of the things I have noticed, at least in the US, is a very much "With us or against us" kind of attitude towards a wide variety of subjects. There doesn't seem to be any room for common ground in the middle - you either vote like me, or you're against me. You go to church where I do or you're against me. You believe the way I believe or you're against me and my beliefs. I remember growing up (and maybe I am romanticizing this - I didn't pay as much attention to politics when I was younger), you could still have a substantive debate with someone of a different political persuasion than you without it turning into 5 year olds yelling "Nuh Uh!" back and forth at each other. Now, it seems more like each side automatically gainsays the other just because they're "on the other side of the aisle" rather than because what they say is actually right or wrong. I think it's that strict bilateral viewpoint that leads to this feeling of persecution from the religious groups - if you disagree with or reject our beliefs, you are automatically attacking them.

I can't really agree with this statement. If someone is having a colonoscopy, I'm going to go out on a limb and say it was probably medically necessary, which does not make it a want (assuming they enjoying being alive). Having a breast augmentation done is a medical want. Having a procedure to determine if you have a life threatening illness is not. That would be like saying having an appendectomy so you don't bleed to death internally is something you wanted to do.

As you have not, and never do, provide any evidence to back up your WAG about the whole thing, what do I have to disagree with? Henceforth, when you post these kinds of threads I am just going to start reporting them out of hand. Your nonsense is gone beyond funny to irritating.