npts2020

Thanks for the correction. It has been about 30 years since I read any of the series, shoulda checked.

C'mon now, haven't you guys ever read Niven's "Ringworld"? All you need to do is build it out of scree, have some auto-fired rockets to keep it in place, and call on Louis Wu when things screw up.

Michel; If the mass of the Earth changed enough to allow gravity to significantly change, how would that affect the moon's orbit? Is there any evidence that it has ever changed much beyond the current miniscule amount it is receding at the moment?

All of the logos so far have been good and we should be proud to have any of them no matter which is ultimately decided on.

We could start our own 2012 cult to take over the world after it all ends.

Firstly, I would not call ingesting an abortifacient a complex or sterile process. Secondly, how is a blastocyst any more a human life than is a more highly developed organ like a heart or kidney? The only difference is that a blastocyst is not yet differentiated into its constituent parts. Even then the real argument is about what is considered to be a "person". Is a blastocyst a person? IMO the only part of the process where a line can be clearly drawn is in giving birth. I would not argue that abortions a week before the baby is due would be a good thing because it seems like a choice should have been made a long time before that point. However, it seems that there is no clear line before that time anyone can point to which will be consistent without granting personhood to a fertilized but not yet divided egg. That is why I believe that it should be up to the woman to decide for herself and not the government or anyone else.

I would say that if you can't distinguish it from reality, then yes. I would also say that such a scenario is highly unlikely at best, though.

Personally I have only looked at transit using vehicles, so I can't answer many of your questions. However, when building a tunnel, you have to be able to pump out water from leakage, rain etc. and the same pumps would be used to pump it dry in the first place. Each section has some kind of seal to minimize leakage and only some construction methods require that the ends be sealed since you can pump the water out once it is completed.

It seems to me the reconciliation route is about a day late and a dollar short. Nobody I have talked to has a good idea of what any sort of reconciliation bill is going to look like but it also seems to me that, if this had been done a year ago, there would have been enough time before this coming election to see if it was working or not. As it stands now, Republicans will gain from painting it in the worst possible light because there will not be time enough to see if it works and they know Americans will not vote for a second party when the more liberal side of their own party (Democrats) screws up.

If you are on the anti-choice from the time of conception side of the debate, it seems to me that destroying any human cell should be considered "murder" since technology might one day make any cell into a person. What happens when biologists discover how to convert say a grasshopper cell into a human one? Does that then mean that squashing a grasshopper underfoot becomes murder? Or what if they discover how to turn inert materials into cells etc., etc. That is why at birth seems to be a more objective criteria.

Nondenominational nontheist is a better term than atheist for most people. If I define "god" as simply anything greater than ones self, who would argue that there was nothing greater than themseves?

I was raised in a pretty strict Methodist household but was always interested in reading anything and everything. By the time I was 20 I began to question why whatever Jesus, Mohammed, Confucius or whoever had any more validity than what Neitsche, Marx, or Sartre had to say. Although most religious people would likely refer to me as an atheist, "god" can be defined in such a way that nobody is truly an atheist. I use the term nondenominational nontheist.

If a hallucination is truly indistinguishable, it is reality. Reality is subjective, although I will grant that when more than one persons realities coincide, you are closer to a more "objective" reality.

I had heard that the 1.26 microsecond difference wasn't even measurable yet, that is why it had to be calculated.

It might be interesting to compare the amounts of anti-oxidants in wild vs. domestic varieties of strawberries or blueberries.

Isn't this the reason you allow the woman to decide at what point that is?

To paraphrase someone more famous. "I'm not sure if I can define reality but dammit I know reality when I see it".

TomBooth; A turbine puts out a constant amount of work for a given gradient across it, that's why they usually have some form of throttle. The killer in the design, however, is the compression (air?) to run a turbine. In every design you have shown, there is still an external input to compress the gas going across the turbine blades. The laws of thermodynamics are pretty persistent about not letting you get more work out of that compressed gas than it took to compress it in the first place.

They are using natural gas to power the ones at google and e-bay but may be doing it more efficiently than a coal fired plant. The problem is that they are pretty expensive and it looks like those companies are going to be 6-10 years at recovering their investment the way it stands now. IMO it is better than most of the technology we are now using but not by a great amount and no better than most sustainable sources.

Be happy they rate gems that way, otherwise, a decent manufactured diamond would cost even more than it does.

How about a water filled container? Figure out a drainage rate in drops per minute and count the number of drops, you should be able to adjust the rate to whatever rate you desire. More drops will be harder to count but more accurate if done right. As long as your reservoir is much greater than the amount of water you use the drainage will have negligible effects on accuracy.

TomBooth; It is not really correct to equate Coefficient of Performance with Efficiency. However, I see what you are getting at about a heat pump or drinking birdy (which still requires a heat sink and source to work). The problem is that they both operate at such a narrow range of relatively low temperatures that extracting work in this manner is always a pretty inefficient enterprise. I say build a model. If a small scale machine works, it can always be scaled up. Even a slightly more efficient motor would be a worthwhile thing to have invented but I am very skeptical about being able to do it using the method described.

Since the military is such a waste of money, does that mean we should privatize it? Would the government then just bid on the contractor it felt was best for providing the services required?

Sometimes they are even used for optics that require high clarity lenses. It is because they don't have impurities to give them color, that they are considered to be inferior gem quality, IIRC.

A spring with a ratchet mechanism is how most wind-up watches and many clocks work. You could probably even find an alarm clock to get one out of for only a few bucks or less.