Greg H.

No worries. I've always had a problem with condensing my arguments too far and leaving out salient bits that I assume people will understand to be included. My math teachers used to hate me because I rarely showed all of my work, just the parts I didn't do in my head. I will make a renewed effort to be more clear in the future.

I was merely pointing out that passage as one of the many issues in translation and interpretation of the bible - not the only one. And yes, I did disparage all of organized religion. I find it to be of little value in living my life, and so I do my best to avoid it. That's a personal opinion, however, and I'm not presuming to speak for anyone else here. Unlike the Bible, it's pretty simple (relatively) to determine which of a group of competing theories is the correct one. You test them, and see which one validates itself with empirical evidence. And while yes, you may find differences of opinion in the interpretation of the data for a given experiment, the fact is, the experiments are repeatable, by any group of scientists who chooses to test the theory. You can come up with your own methods to test those theories. Eventually those differences of interpretation can be resolved. The differences of interpretation of the bible have lasted for hundreds of years. That's a lot of biblical scholars, philosophers and theologians all looking at the same "data" and they still can't come to a consensus on what large portions of a relatively short book actually mean. I think my criticism of religion was reasonable on that basis. Feel free to disagree. Many people will.

I thought my conclusions were fairly clear. Maybe if you read my posts a little more deeply they'll become self-evident. With the sarcasm out of the way, let me be clear. I was raised in a Methodist family. I went to church, I went to Sunday school, I was baptized, and I did the youth group and church camp thing. I did spend the time reading the scripture, but as I got older, and spent more time studying science and math, I started to recognize the contradictions and outright disagreements in the biblical texts. What you dismiss as "making a noise" I refer to as living an examined life.

Or you could always calculate it by obtaining the mass of a known volume of said glues.

That's a pretty big difference in translation there. So basically this girl is like Schrödinger's Cat. Neither dead nor alive until you decide which iteration of the Bible you believe. And yet people still wonder why there are those of us who are wary of organized religion.

Interesting article on CNN on applied use of Markov Chains in scheduling (or rather NOT scheduling) buses at Georgia Tech. Waiting for a Bus? Math May Help - Lightyears Blog, CNN.com

I read it to mean they are broken, meaning that some flaw leads them to follow this belief. I don't necessarily think religious individuals are any more or less broken than the rest of us, but I cannot fathom the depth of religious conviction given the contradictions of the published material, the inability of the faithful to agree on basic matters of doctrine and faith, and the general lack of physical evidence. But then, I suppose, that is why they call it faith.

AFAIK, broken is always an adjective. (to) Break would be the verb. Unless you were being sarcastic, in which case ignore this post.

Speaking in terms of pure probability, the idea that the world will suffer some kind of natural apocalypse is, indeed, well founded. Cataclysmic events have already happened to the planet at various times in it's history, and as the years roll by, the certainty of another one happening approaches 100%. In my personal opinion, we're overdue for one. What is very much up in the air is exactly what will happen, and when. The Yellowstone super-volcano could erupt next week. Another K-T style extinction event could occur in a thousand years. Or a million. How much you worry about these events depends on your idea of long term planning, I suppose, and your own estimation of your chance of survival.

The real problem is that no one can seem to agree on what the "teachings of Christ" mean, and how they are interpreted. If the truth of these teachings is as self-evident as every Christian I know states ("just read them more deeply, you'll understand") why are there literally hundreds, if not thousands of Christian denominations scattered across the globe? Seems to me if they were that self-evident, we'd only need one church because there would only be one interpretation of the discussion and texts. But that could just be me.

I'll second that one, and add in A Brief History of Time by Hawking as well. Evolution Isn't What it Used to Be: The Augmented Animal and the Whole Wired World by Walter Truett Anderson The Dinosaur Heresies by Richard Bakker Edit to add A Shortcut Through Time: The Path to the Quantum Computer by George Johnson

My wife and I met online in a role playing game chat room. We've been married 11 and a half years, and have three wonderful children between the two of us. Funnily enough that seems to run in my family. My cousin also met her husband in a chat room, and they later discovered they lived 15 minutes from each other. They started dating and have been married for 10 years.

If we accept the axiom, no proof is needed. It's automatically false, because it would require a set to be an element of a subset of itself. Consider the following (small) practical example. Let us say that set A is the set of all counting numbers, and set B is the set of all counting numbers less than 10. We can easily demonstrate that set B is a subset of set A. We can also just as easily see that there's no way set A can be a subset of set B, because it not only contains all of set B, but an infinite number of other members as well. I think (and this is just me thinking out loud - I don't have the chops to prove it) that in this case, if we should find a set A and a set B so that each are subsets of the other, they'd end up being the same set. In the interest of full disclosure, I should point out that, according the sources I checked earlier (see my previous posts) there are set theories that do not obey this axiom - obviously the practical example I gave in my initial post in this thread demonstrates one. But we can also see that these kinds of sets lead to certain problems in practical application. See also: Set Theory ZF Set Theory Axiom of Regularity

I would build something more akin to a submarine, myself. Align the decks perpendicular to the axis of acceleration and spin the whole ship for gravity.

Considering it's currently on the front page of CNN (as alink to the Time website) it's probably being inundated with traffic.

If we were designed this way, I'd have to give serious thought about using the word intelligent to describe it.

As I said, by definition, you can't prove axioms. They are commonly accepted as being true without proof. If you have to prove it, it's not an axiom. Edit: Grammar failure.

And in a curved space-time plane, the Euclidean axioms would not hold true, but there would be other axioms used in their place. An axiom is only useful (and accepted as true) in the framework it's defined in. Some other Euclidean postulates (from Wikipedia): A straight line may be extended to any finite length. A circle may be described with any given point as its center and any distance as its radius. All right angles are congruent. I'm sure some of these would also fall by the way side in a non-Euclidean space, but when you're dealing with flat surfaces they all hold true.

I've never done any in depth set mathematics, but I'm pretty sure it's an accepted definition of set theory that you can not construct a set that contains itself. A quick google search turned up this: Axiom of Regularity By definition, you don't prove an axiom. And it does make a kind of sense (not that "common sense" is always a reasonable way to prove things) in that if I define a set, say Car Parts. I would expect it to contain elements like transmission, engine, steering (all of which are, in turn sets themselves containing still smaller members). I would not expect to find, tacked onto the end of that list, the very car I was describing. As a practical example, when iterating over an active directory listing, bad things happen to your application when you find groups that are members of each other (which in turn makes them members of themselves). It leads to things like infinite loops, application server failure, arguments with your security team over why they are flaming morons, and having to code around their inability to grasp the obvious. Not that I am bitter or anything.

The point of life is living it.

My suggestion would be to keep in mind that if both objects (the ball and the player) start moving at the same time (t=0) and arrive at the same place in the same amount of time (which you found in answer c), then the velocity they travel is dependent on the distance they need to cover to reach that point.

Quantum mechanics is counter intuitive a lot of the time, but that doesn't mean it's wrong.

That's not an atheist explanation of the universe - it's a vague generalization that says we cannot (or at least should not) make the assumption that a causal agent necessarily exists or is even necessary for the universe to exist. That statement, in and of itself, makes no attempt to explain how the universe came into being. The key word you seem to be overlooking, or ignoring, is might, implying that the question is still unanswered and awaiting evidence.

Actually, the other thing was the area of the quadrilateral being exactly equal to one-half the area of the triangle. Joat already answered it for me. I like math, so I tend to nibble at ideas that seem interesting to me. This one came to me one afternoon when I was doodling during a conference call. I think I vaguely remember the term circumcentre from my geometry classes, but they were more years ago than I care to count. I may have to re-familiarize myself with the concept. As a further exercise, supposing I once again have a right triangle, ABC, whose sides are of known lengths a & b. Given the pythagorean theorem, it is possible that I can compute the area and circumference of the circumcircle (I went and read a bit on them) in the following manner: [math]A = \pi r^2[/math] [math]C = \pi d[/math] Since we know that [math]a^2 + b^2 = c^2[/math] and for a right triangle, we know that the radius of the circumcircle equals exactly [math]\frac{1}{2} c[/math], we can say [math]A = \pi\left(\frac{1}{2}\sqrt{a^2 + b^2} \right)^2 [/math] and [math]C = \pi\left(\sqrt{a^2 + b^2} \right)[/math] Or am I talking out of my butt here?