Ophiolite

And don't foget the Chinese!

Sympathy to all impacted by this natural force. Regretably I think the simple explanation for the less than robust construction is economy. Flimsy houses cost less to build. My home has granite walls over one foot thick and is almost two hundred years old. (My main concern is radioactive radon, not a structural collapse.) Again, my sympathy to anyone who suffered through this. I have a number of colleagues with friends and family in Oklahoma city and am waiting to hear from them as to how they fared.

Let's work through this point by point, shall we? I see four problems here: 1) CMEs, like the sun itself, contain very few elements from which a solid 'planetary seed' might form. 2) No such 'seed' has ever been observed, yet we have seen very many CMEs. 3) The path of a CME has little of the spiral in it. The CME moves outward and gradually blends with the solar wind, then merges with the interstellar medium. 4) And thus the tendency is to dissipate, not accrete. How do you deal with these points?

I compliment you, Kramer, on your imagination and originality. Your enthusiasm also merits positive words. If you would now take the time to add an education and a critical mind, then you could be awesome.

Serious question: if you have been considering these ideas for years why are you still gripped by teenage angst?

you also need to check out the meaning of hypothesis. Your interpretation, if it can be called that, does not even merit being called a guess. It is criminally silly. If you intended it as a joke you need to hire new scriptwriters. Good luck with that. Please note and accept that nothing unusual is occurring on the sun. And normal stupidity is reigning in a subsection of humanity.

Correct. Inner solid - outer molten. The inner core has been growing as it slowly cools. I imagine the new data interpretation on core - mantle temperature will modify our estimate of when solidification began.

Several posters seem to be ignoring the fact that 3 billion years is three order of magnitudes longer than the time separating us from our last common ancestor with the ancestor of chimpanzees. Do you think it likely that humans will still exist?

Russian biologists in the second half of the 19th century, while accepting evolution, rejected the Darwinian interpretation. This was based upon their perception of the inter-relationship of species in hostile environments, such as the tundra and taiga. Thus the hostility to Darwinism preceded by half a century the Leninist and Stalinist rejection.

If your drugs are legal, start taking them. If your drugs are illegal, stop taking them.

Has anyone ever noticed that if you are playing darts, the darts form a triangle on the board? That has to mean something, right?

Well, it is interesting that you should ask. Arabic was my only language success. When I moved to Cairo I resolved, based on my previous experience of failing to learn lanaguages, that I would not learn Arabic. When I left Cairo four years later I had achieved my goal! Apart from thank you and good morning I could speak no Arabic at all.

To my great shame I speak only one. I have attempted to learn and failed at the following languges: French, German, Italian, Spanish, Norwegian, Danish, Finnish, Dutch, Russian, Japanese, Chinese, Indonesian and Malay. I was able to stumble through schoolboy French at one time. I had a low grade conversational grasp of Spanish. I used to be able to talk Indonesian, but it only worked when I was actually in Indonesia. When I was lost on the Moscow Metro the only two phrases I could remember meant "I do not speak Russian" and "There is an American worker." (These were of no value to me.) I judge the difficulty of a language by how much alcohol you have to drink in order to believe you are speaking it fluently. Thus Spanish, a straighfroward lanaguage, is a three pints of lager lanaguage. In contrast Chinese requires two bottles of Jack Daniels and is therefore potentially lethal.

So, is Stephen Hawking seriously disabled, or superhuman? Or is that a false dichotomy?

That is your opinion. Fukuyama held a contrary opinion. In your OP you object to Fukuyama's end of history claim on the basis that events will continue to happen. I understand that you have now agreed that your initial objection was invalid. If you think Western liberal democracy s not the end point of human social evolution then it is logical to assert that history, as defined in this context by Fukuyama, has not ended.

1. Bake a layer cake, with each layer appropriately coloured and, after explaining it, serve everyone a slice. 2. Create a Powerpoint presentation in which hovering the mouse over each layer of a diagram of the Earth activates more information/illustration about that segment. 3. With coloured rope/twine mark out a series of arcs defining, to scale, the various layers. Do this on the school sports ground and walk people from the centre of the Earth to the surface. Place signs at various points. e.g. Here be earthquakes. 4. Take a long rope and attach symbols/signs to it at appropriate positions and suspend it from the roof or upper window of the school reaching to the ground. 5. Start thinking outside the box - the foregoing to a loss less time to think of than they took to type. (Speaking of thinking outside the box, can you see a way of representing this inside boxes?)

Fukuyama's proposal was based on a particular meaning of history. I believe he saw history not as a series of events and their related causes, but the story of the evolution of the structural elements of human society in general and our governmental systems in particular. In that sense, he saw the end of the cold war as victory for Western liberal democracy and the final step in the evolution of human society. Everything that was to happen after that was merely the dotting of i's and crossing of t's. This is a point of view that, despite 911, could be argued.

@seriously disabled You said: If a person has superhuman abilities and by superhuman I mean like the Cyborgs you see in the Terminator franchise for example) like being strong, resilient, extremely energetic and doesn't need to eat and drink much to stay in top shape, then it cannot be just genetics which gives him these abilities John replied: But no such person exists so it's pointless to speculate about them in this way You replied: Of course they exist. Just look at astronauts or pilots for example. Astronauts must be extremely resilient and healthy because they must deal with the harsh environment of space and they also don't get to eat and sleep much when they are on a space mission. Are you seriously suggesting that the astronauts possess superhuman abilities? That is what you have said. You also have said that bus drivers possess superhuman abilities. Nonsense. They possess very normal human abilities. They have good eyesight, coordination andd attentiveness - all very normal human attributes, arising out of their genetics and their environment. Several times a year I find myself teaching an intesive class for nine hours a day, doing further work in the evening and averaging, if I am lucky four hours sleep a night, for two weeks. I can assure you I am not superhuman, but boringly normal.

First, I wish you success in achieving your goal. However, I am not sure just what your goal is . There is ambiguity in your post. Specifically: You give the impression that you want to learn about physics by reading textbooks and research papers. That is an admirable goal and, I think, a worhwhile one. However, theoretical physicists are individuals who have passed that phase of the learning process, or at least made it a secondary mechanism. They learn by experiment and by formulating and testing hypotheses. Is that what you see yourself doing? If so, I suspect you almost certainly need to take the formal route.

How would you go about proving that?

I have done a bad job of explaining these terms. I shall try again. Convergent evolution involves quite diverse groups evolving a characteristic that is superficially similar and likely fills a comparable funciton, but is in detail quite different. Bats, birds and pterasaurs all had wings, used for flying. The portions of their anatomy adapted to become wings were, in detail, different. This is convergent evolution. Diverse groups converge to produce a similar, but not identical outcome. Fish shapes are a further example of convergent evolution. Convergent evolution was a term frequently used when I studied palaeontology. No one spoke of divergent evolution since that is, as I noted above, just normal, standard, vanilla flavoured evolution. The term divergent is - as far as I can see - redundant. (However, it is possible that term is used in some applications in a specialised way, where a distinction exists fom 'normal evolution.) Parallel evolution is perhaps best understood by looking at wikipedia article on it. If two canines, of different genera, both independently evolved semi-acquatic forms, that would be parallel evolution as I understand it. Does that help?

For completeness we should note that theEarth would have cooled substantially eons ago if it were not for heating from radioactive elemtns within, primarily, the mantle.

Convergent evolution is the emergence of a similar structure in organisms that are only distantly related. Thus most free moving vertebrates living in the sea have evolved a fish shape, since this is very efficient for movement in that environment. This has occured multiple times - five Classes of 'fish', ichthyosaurs and cetaceans. Divergent evolution is 'normal' evolution, whereby as a consequence of mutations, natural slection and the other evolutionary mechanisms populations split and build differences until they are spearates species, or genera, or families, etc. Parallel evolution is where similar, but different groups (species, genera, etc) evolve in similar directions in terms of one or more of their characteristics. I think the last, parallel evolution, merits a better description, but its not one that I would typically use.

Thank you for your response. However, your OP appears - strongly - to take a deterministic position that does not allow for free will. In that case we would only move to advocate the improvements you speak of if we were 'destined' to do so by the theoretically predictable behaviour of the atoms composing our brains.

Radar returns are not black and white, either or, there or not. (And we would be more likely to use sonar to spot sharks. )