StringJunky

Seizures triggered by blinking in a non-photosensitive epileptic Abstract An epileptic girl with Lennox-Gastaut syndrome had seizures triggered specifically by blinking, but not by other eye movements or by photic stimulation. Electrographic and clinical seizures were most reliably precipitated by repetitive blinking produced voluntarily on command, by reflex blinking on corneal stimulation, or by psychogenic triggers of blinking such as social stress or cognitive effort. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1028775/

By your logic then: a brick and a feather free-falling in a vacuum would fall at different rates because the Earth is pulling more on the brick than the feather, which is not correct. The gases with a higher molecular weight than helium push the helium atoms out of the way and assume a lower position.

Das mechanical keyboards. Not cheap though. http://www.daskeyboard.com/products/index.php?filter=.keyboard

I think she's confused about you using length and distance apparently as two different things.

We had this discussion a few years ago and the consensus was to keep it.

It might not* cause it to tick but it does determine the rate at which the clock ticks either via gravitational field strength or relative velocity.or both together. *On the other hand if there was no time there would be no 'tick'.

I can attest your grace in defeat.

Naegleria fowleri /nəˈɡlɪəriə/ (also known as the "brain-eating amoeba") is a free-living, thermophilic excavate form of protist typically found in warm bodies of fresh water, such as ponds, lakes, rivers, and hot springs. It is also found in soil, near warm-water discharges of industrial plants, and in poorly chlorinated, or unchlorinated swimming pools, in an amoeboid or temporary flagellate stage. There is no evidence of this organism living in salt water. It is an amoeba belonging to the phylum Percolozoa. N. fowleri can invade and attack the human nervous system and brain, causing primary amoebic meningoencephalitis (PAM). Although this occurs rarely,[1] such an infection nearly always results in the death of the victim.[2] The case fatality rate is greater than 95%. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naegleria_fowleri

Yes, we need something that changes regularly to measure time but it doesn't define time because it doesn't encompass all possible states like when a subject is doing nothing. Time is still passing for the subject even though it's apparently inactive, so you see, something changing is not sufficient. The real problem is trying to analyse and thus over-complicate something that is nothing more than a simple parameter.

To expand on what John said: I think truths are axioms that can be defined as consensually-agreed assumptions. These are the roots of any train of logic but are by their nature unprovable because they so fundamental. Because axioms are only assumptions the ‘truth’can only ever really be arbitrary i.e. we decide and agree what are the foundational pillars of our collective world.view. We use those truths until they go wrong and adjust them accordingly. In science and other logical endeavours I think 'truths' are evolving logical anchor-points that we use in our pursuit towards an accurate description of the world around us.

I've half a mind to start a thread on the ontology of length.

Change shows that time has passed but it is not time itself; time passes in the absence of change. We need a clock to measure it - which is something that changes - but it is not a necessary condition that the thing under observation also needs to change for time to be occurring. Time is happening everywhere where there is space because time - as per Relativity - is inextricably bound with it.

It's too strong for the scenario given.

What's that got to do with anything? It was a thought experiment. You disagreed that the force of gravity was too high on Earth and I illustrated that it is. Weight is function of gravity. Note that I didn't say 'mass'.

When you define some thing like time it must encompass everything and the problem with using 'change' in a definition is it doesn't, for example, cover the spontaneous decay of a radioactive atom. It decays in an unpredictable manner, when viewed as a single unit, but time still passes until it does.

If the two people were very strong, they could probably lift a car of 2000kg (Earth weight) on the moon since the weight - which is due to gravity - would only be 1/6th of that on Earth ie about 300kg each.

Yes, it becomes a car3

They can't lift it because the force of gravity is too high but they can push it because that force is mediated by the wheel assembly so all they have left to overcome to move perpendicular to the gravitational force is the inertia. Once this is overcome that effort is stored as momentum and that's what keeps it going and makes it feel easy; in gravity-free space that stored momentum would keep the car going indefinitely without any more pushing because there aren't any frictional forces to slow it down.

Aim to answer a scientific question within the attention-span of your audience; addressing only the salient points. After that let them ask more questions to fill the gaps. This way you are actually having a conversation instead of presenting a lecture.

Yes, the steps of progress have become shorter...and shorter. The christamas tree has been erected and now we are hanging the decorations.

Haven't we been here before?

The thing is though that most things now aren't paradigm-changing ideas and that's probably what the OP alludes to. i think it's just too technical now for casual readers for the most part.

The first thing that I notice is that the RAM in your machine is way too low for Windows 7. It wants to be at least 1GB preferably 2GB as a minimumum. Your computer is just going to run a bit and then hang then run all the time whilst it swap files info between the RAM and virtual hard drive it has to use because there isn't enough RAM. As a speculation, your connection might be timing out because your computer keeps hanging from the VERY low RAM.

If you clone cells from a person who is fifty years old the age of the baby they are made from starts at fifty years old and all the concomitant issues that go with that age appear prematurely. The baby's biological clock is not set to zero in cloning. Is it ethical to condemn a person to a preset shortened lifespan? "...But in January, the first mammal cloned from an adult cell, Dolly the sheep, was reported to have prematurely developed arthritis." "Ogura's team cloned 12 male mice and these were compared with seven males from natural matings and six others produced using in vitro fertilisation. The clones appeared active and healthy, gained weight normally and matched the control animals in 14 of 16 physiological measurements. But the first cloned animal died after only 311 days and, by day 800, 10 (83 per cent) of the animals were dead. In contrast, only three (23 per cent) of the controls died during the same period. The dead clones showed high rates of pneumonia, liver disease, cancer and a lower level of antibody production, suggesting they had an immune system defect". http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn1903-cloned-animals-meet-early-deaths.html One or two of the problems expressed in the mice in this research might be inherent in the methodology used but some of those are also likely to be down to the advanced preset age of the cloned subjects.

If they want to do that they are welcome. I'm happy with the answers now I've received so if you want to take it further I don't mind.