Tau Meson

That may be true for Elephants, but then they are enormous. Chimps don't eat plants all the time though. And neither do pigs, or horses, or this guy. For example, typical fruit already has a higher protein content than most meats, with the exception of fish. Soybeans are much higher in protein content, and so are roots.

Can't time be defined at a point if it is parameterized though?

Well, I guess I would have to ask is what is wrong with having different definitions of geometry? For the average person, the only thing that they are vaguely familiar with is Euclidean space, and that is the definition that everyone ends up using. I'm just beginning to learn what Riemann geometry and Topology is, but I think the normal definition of geometry for these spaces don't quite cut it. I am more inclined to describe them using graph theory or mappings.

I personally think that our future is in solar. It is very easy to collect the energy from it, and the only real problems it has at the moment are problems of scale. But it's nothing that a little technical ingenuity can't accomplish.

I can fly in my dreams, does that count?

Well? Which aspect do you think probably contributed a lot more to our intelligence? I seriously doubt scavenging played an important part in our diet very early on since they were in constant competition from true predators, and when we did hunt most of our food came overwhelmingly from the gathering part (like seeds, fruit, nuts, etc.). If anything, eating meat contributed more to our ability to adapt to different environments rather than brain growth and intelligence. Why don't you attack the science rather than the source. No offense, but this objection sounds just like the sort of thing you would hear from a global warming denier complaining that the global warming data comes from the UN, or a creationist complaining that the information for evolution came from talkorigins.org or richarddawkins.net. Besides which, there is nothing wrong with feeding your dog a vegetarian diet. Dogs are true omnivores, after all. Personally, the only pets to which I feed meat to are my cats, since they are carnivores and can survive only from a meat-based diet. And real meat at that, from an organic farm, none of the BS that comes from the regular supermarket or from the pet-store. I did, and some of your links clearly admits that this conclusion is very shaky at best. Note that the article itself does not really delve into great detail as to what kind of nutrients the meats that they ate had, nor which ones would have been important. Or how it made bigger brains possible. Another one of your article flat out admitted that the calories that the brain actually needs for development are starches! So, where do most of these carbs come from? Also note that when this article talks about malnutrition, it is talking about the modern diet, which is horribly nutrient deficient. Today's diet is based on primarily 3 or 4 sources of food, such as corn, potatoes, wheat, and rice. It is therefore biased to begin with; in order to reliably asses how we evolved with respect to diet it is far more useful to look at the diets of hunter-gatherers, since their diet is much more varied. As for the time spent eating, I'm pretty certain that has much more to do with how massive an animal is (or the speed of metabolism), not so much where the calories come from. The whales that eat meat also have to spend a huge amount of time consuming calories too, since they have to support all of that huge body mass. Think about it this way, if meat was really all that great, then all of those carnivores wouldn't need to sleep so much, now would they? If they are not too active, they probably don't have that much energy to begin with. That doesn't really make any sense though. The whole argument was that eating meat contributed to brain size, and yet the only animals, at least as far as land based animals are concerned, with the bigger brain to body ratios are either herbivores or omnivores. It makes since that if meat contributed to brain size, then carnivores should be getting bigger and bigger brains as time goes on... (The only exceptions are some whales and dolphins, but look at the nutrient content of their food). I don't know of any hunter-gatherer tribes that based their diet on monkeys. And if our modern diet is the supposedly the ideal one, then why is it killing us? This is an evasion. I just provided a link that showed the diet of wild chimps, and with the exception of insects (which doesn't really qualify as meat, and is only a very small percentage of their total diet), they eat vegetables and fruit pretty exclusively. How much do we really get from meat? As far as I'm aware, most of the concentrated calories that you like to cite are from saturated fat, not the more essential nutrients like carbs or lipids. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged That's true, but I have to ask, where does an elephant (or cows, pigs, chimps, any other large-brained herbivore/omnivore) get it's protein? Also, here is data for the composition of the human brain: http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/facts.html Water and lipids make up the significant majority of the human brain. Sure, protein is third on the list, but not quite as important as far as mass goes. If anything, having lots of protein can be quite dangerous. And not all proteins are good, look up prions for example. I guess. I will openly admit that my previous statement about greater intelligence=less sleep is based entirely on anecdotal observation rather than hard data, as I am basing it only on my observations of my college peers. And I can tell you that despite sleep deprivation, most college graduates and undergrads can function quite fine. Although, less sleep is probably more correlated to a decline in mental health than to intelligence.

I was just wondering if there were any good books or videos on Complex Analysis? I'm currently taking a class in it, and the textbook doesn't really adequately go over the proofs or examples. In particular, I'm having a hard time being able to understand mappings. Any help would be appreciated.

I would also like to add that I looked up space based solar power all over the net, and from what I'm reading these systems would have to be pretty huge. And this is only from orbit. Does anyone know how much power is lost through a beam? We might be able to come up with a quick calculation for how strong the beam from the moon would have to be in order to power the Earth, and thus how large the solar power plants on the moon would have to be.

And I am very skeptical about that, since the main power source for our brains is glucose, and it's primary composition are water and lipids. So are other scientists: http://news.bio-medicine.org/biology-news-3/Early-humans-on-the-menu-8054-3/ http://www.ivu.org/history/early/archaeology.html http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/6983330.stm Ok, but that doesn't really answer my question. Why aren't they at least as intelligent as we are? I'm sorry to hear about that. I hope you get well soon. Source? It's a moot point anyway, since monkeys aren't in their principle diet. I don't think it can be considered a major contributor to their intelligence, certainly not on an evolutionary time scale.

Are you sure? We are predators only in the sense that we hunted, but most hunter-gatherer societies got most of their food from the gathering part. Hunting was often unsuccessful, dangerous, and very time consuming in general (of course, when they did get something, it was very useful, but not so much for nutritional purposes). And in "civilized" times, only the elite were able to eat a significant amount of meat. The availability of meat to the general populace is a very recent phenomenon, made possible only by industrial agriculture. And if eating meat did contribute to our large brains, then why didn't the rest of the predators out there become at least as smart as we did? Take a look at the diet of our nearest biological species, the primates: http://web.cast.uark.edu/local/icaes/conferences/wburg/posters/nconklin/conklin.html As you can see, they eat very little to meat whatsoever. How much do you sleep on average? Note that I'm not trying to imply a causation, but that intelligence seems to be greater for beings with less sleep in general.

I understand that, but whats to stop them from just simply supplying only what is in demand, rather than just taking it all in constantly? For one, you can only make solar panels so big, so there is a physical limit to how much energy you can collect. Even fossil fuel power plants don't just keep generating large amounts of electricity when very little of it is in demand.

I don't see how that follows. Human beings require way less sleep and have had a largely vegetarian diet for most of their existence (prior to the 20th century, that is), and we evolved to be the smartest animals on Earth. Elephants and whales are very smart too and they are herbivores. EDIT: Just looked up the diets of whales, and not all of them are herbivores. Sorry. Also, what matters more is the ratio of brain size to the rest of the body when determining intelligence, not so much the size of the brain itself. If anything, greater intelligence is inversely correlated with sleep. Some of the greatest geniuses of all time usually went by on very little sleep, like Nikola Tesla for example (he averaged about 4 hours a night).

Would it be possible to somehow store that energy, rather than beam it all the way from the Moon back to Earth? This way the only logistics that need to be worked out would be transportation, rather than figuring out how not to fry the Earth.

Time also differs in a gravitational field; the further away you are from it, the faster your clock ticks. Also read up on the Pound-Rebka experiment, in which they measured the gravitational red-shift of photons at different floors of the building.

Have you ever heard of a Non-Sequitor? Just because you don't understand something, doesn't mean that they don't exist or aren't real.

What could possibly be so bad about the History Channel, Science Channel, etc. Before they used to have such boring and educational shows like Cosmos, and now they have such interesting programs like Barbecue Tech, Dirty Jobs, and the History of Moonshine! Oh yeah, did I mention Two Weeks in Hell? All they do is talk about how people train in the military. Who wants to guess at what else they could possibly think of? Next time on Discover Health, we are going to explore the physics of Lord of the Rings. And then on 2 p.m., on the History Channel, the first episode of Food Fight! will premier.

I personally know someone who is getting his Ph.D in computer science right now, and he's 33 years old. He started his program when he was 27. 25 years old is certainly not too late for a Ph.D. program.

Have you ever heard about Lojban? This language is based on Boolean Algebra and it is specifically designed to make human language much more efficient and less ambiguous. Less does not necessarily mean better though. If anything, less vocabulary words means more ambiguities, and thus more energy usage trying to translate it. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged Most people who have those also play games like Crysis or Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. I personally think what really needs to change is our perception of how much stuff we actually need in general. The vast majority of all people can probably get by just using public resources like computer labs or internet cafes, for example.

But what about this data mapping, which clearly shows that the temperature rose the greatest where there was little to no civilization-related activities near by (i.e. the North and South Poles): The years 2000-2009 was by far the warmest decade on record, and it is not unreasonable to conclude that, well, the world is warming up and burning...

So, I've been looking at compressed air cars: http://www.popularmechanics.com/automotive/new_cars/4251491.html They apparently have zero pollution and low running costs, and seem really really cool! Any idea as to when I can get one? On a more serious note, is the air car a credible alternative to the gasoline cars that are polluting our atmosphere?

Antimatter has positive mass though, the only thing different about it is it's charge. What I'm talking about is matter with negative mass, better known as exotic matter. And, antimatter does exist in real life, not just in star trek. It's existence was postulated by Dirac and confirmed in the 1930's.

I understand, but there is also lot more to it than just being comprehensible. Again, lets go back to that Romans with a computer example. Lets assume that they do understand the principles. So, where are they going to get the materials from? Where are they going to get the infrastructure to even support their use? Just think about what had to come in place before we can have computers; we need not only the materials, but the industrial processes, the economic motivation, a system of distribution, and electricity to power them all. It's easy to come up with the economic motivation, but where would they get everything else? Lets move on to a more contemporary example, could the Aztecs reverse engineer muskets from the Spaniards? They had no metal or gun powder, and thus they had no blacksmiths to actually make the things. Now lets go back to the task of reverse engineering the alien space ship and say, for example, that we do understand how its engines work. So, where are we going to get the materials, industry, technology, the fuel and the infrastructure necessary to reverse engineer the thing from? So sure, there is some technology that we use that date back to Roman times. The Romans might be able to reverse engineer the zipper. But I think that misses the point; they wouldn't be able to reverse engineer a computer, and we probably would not be able to do a whole lot with an alien spaceship other than study it's origin and composition. I believe, in my honest opinion, that it could take centuries, if not millenia, before we can actually reverse engineer their tech. A crashed alien spaceship would tell us just as much about advanced technology as an airplane teaches the cargo cults about advanced technology.

Yes, that is true, and a good point. I just got the impression from the OP that if an alien spaceship did crash and was studied by the military, that he was expecting that we should have, say, photon torpedoes or giant laser cannons by now. It is already hard enough for us to reverse engineer technology built by other human beings, never mind advanced alien tech.

I've read in countless popular science books and magazines that wormholes require negative mass to maintain, and that even then it may not be possible to travel through them because any mass, even a subatomic particle, would cause it to collapse before it can get through. So I don't know if they can exist naturally, or for any significant amount of time. As for bending, yes, we are already bending space right now, since any mass can do that. But to produce any significant curvature one would at least has to have the mass of a star. The shortest path that light can travel through in curved space is known as a geodesic, which is the minimum length around a curve.

I see. But, what I really want to know is what would the data look like if it was positively curved or negatively curved? And how small does the angle have to be, with respect to the power spectrum, to be able to decide if it is flat, round, etc.