swansont

Da Vinci. Darwin. Walker. Cuvier. Mendel. Crick and Watson. Haldane. EO Wilson. Eldredge and Gould. For medicine there's Salk, Christiaan Barnard, Lister. The problem with pharmaceutical discoveries is that there is probably a large team of people involved.

You have several different quantities that are conserved, such as charge (Z) and nucleon number (A) which are denoted in the [math]{_Z^A}X[/math] notation, where X is the chemical symbol. If an isotope were to emit a proton (H-1), the charge of the parent would be reduced by 1, and the nucleon number would be reduced by one. The total charge can't change, and you have to have the same number of nucleons — they can't just disappear all by themselves. All of the numbers on each side of the reaction are constant. [math]{_Z^A}X \rightarrow {_{Z-1}^{A-1}}X + {_1^1}H[/math] The same concept applies to alpha decay Beta decay is slightly more complicated, because an electron will be accompanied by an antineutrino, which has no charge and A=0. The beta is denoted by [math]{_{-1}^0}e[/math]

I can only determine that he isn't here.

Yes, the RH rule applies; you still have classical interactions, and a moving charge will feel a force perpendicular to the field and velocity. [math]\vec{F} = q\vec{v}\times \vec{B}[/math] The spin will indicate the magnetic moment, and if you have an inhomogeneous magnetic field, will allow you to see some nonclassical behavior. Orbital electrons will show this nonclassical behavior as well. But this has a different dependence on direction of the magnetic field, since the interaction is [math]\vec{\mu}\cdot{\vec{B}}[/math], so the force will be along the direction of the field gradient.

Pixelization sounds like an analogy to quantum mechanics. Processor speed as an analogy for relativity might go something like processor speed * size of instructions is a constant, but that's still not very good.

If it was something other than abduction, bascule could come along and debunk it. Of course, we wouldn't know if someone hacked the account, either.

I believe Sisyphus's point was that if you are going to call this a Democrat plan (rather than Democratic) then you have to say Bush was a Republic president. It's a language thing. edit: which he has confirmed while I was composing this.

It adds up. The "it's a small effect, so why should I bother" inertia points to one reason legislation is enacted. One bulb or its equivalent in my example multiplied by 100 million households is a reduction of 14.6 million kWh (or 14.6 GWh). I don't know what the situation is down under, but higher efficiency computers and appliances are also tagged in the US (Energy Star) I used 100 W because that's the first bulb to be affected by the US legislation, and the example of cost savings scales linearly. I assume the people here can do the math. (The US legislation will not affect bulbs smaller than 40W)

With thermodynamic systems, you can do this with the importation of energy (not material), which is part of the second law. There is no corresponding law that applies to information.

"I'm not seeing the savings" isn't very rigorous. The math is pretty simple. If a 100 W bulb is normally on for 4 hours a day, and you pay $.10 per kWh, that's $14.60 a year in electricity costs. If you replace it with a CFL that draws 26W (which has the same luminous output), that's $3.80, or a direct savings of more than $10, which is more than the cost of the bulb (you would also save in air conditioning, since you don't have to remove as much waste heat) Now, that's less than $1 a month per light (using these parameters) on your bill, so you might not notice it among the fluctuations. If you pay less for electricity, the savings go down (and from what I can tell, Aussie electricity rates are among the cheapest in the world). If you pay more, the savings go up. Because the lighting cost less, people have a tendency to leave lights on longer. This is Jevon's paradox (though I think it's not a paradox at all, it's just simple supply and demand), but that's not really a fault of the bulbs. The drawback is that CFLs generally have a limit on how many times you turn them on — they only make sense for lights that are on for a reasonable length of time. Incandescents are still your best bet for a closet, for example, which may only be on for a few minutes at a time. LEDs are even more efficient, last even longer and AFAIK don't suffer from the power cycling limit. That's just it though. It is cheaper, overall, to buy a CFL. And yet people resist, for arguments including the one you make here — they can't (or won't) see past the up-front pricetag. They won't do similar things, like invest in projects that will pay off in the long run. One of the first things the republicans announced was a cutback in research spending, which is much like cutting back on preventative maintenance (which we've been doing for decades now). It looks great on the bottom line, because it shows an immediate savings. The end cost is much greater, but you don't see that until later. It's like arguing that you can save money on your car by never changing the oil.

Bills are double-spaced with large margins, so page count isn't very meaningful as a comparison to anything other than other bills. Typical? No. http://www.slate.com/id/2225820/ If you pass a few several-hundred page bills, there have to be a whole lot of single-digit-pagers to keep the average at 15. Democrat? No. http://www.opencongress.org/articles/view/1375-For-Bills-in-Congress-How-Long-is-Long-

The excitation can be to even higher states than the p–d transition you describe, depending on the energy added. But the excitation is relatively brief, and the atom will de-excite back to the ground state — the odds of undergoing a reaction in the excited state are small, and that's a much more advanced concept (photoassisted reactions)

There might be some physical therapy that works for one injury but isn't appropriate for another. I had a bout of adhesive capsulitis, and exercises I did to regain range of motion included "walking" my fingers up a wall, and lightly hanging (i.e. supporting only a small fraction of my weight) off of an overhead bar or moulding of a doorframe.

That's true. Feynman discusses something similar in one of his books.

It represents new information, and as such, cannot exist. Ha! You disappear in a puff of logic! "Seem incapable?" There is no law that supports this.

I concur. Biology and medicine are often a lot easier to justify under the "what good is that?" heading. The line from discovery to application is usually more direct. In the US , the NIH's budget is north of $30 billion. NSF got $7 billion. There are, of course, other funding sources, but that gives you a glimpse of the landscape.

There are bad professors. No doubt about this. If you are at a university and the professor is doing research, s/he may have been hired with the emphasis primarily on research and teaching is something done on the side. And it's quite likely that the professor never had any training at all on how to teach. So they adopt a method that you were exposed to, and what worked for them. But that's not going to work for everyone. No one method ever will. How many people are in a class a professor teaches — 20? 40? 100? Every student can have a different misconception. There isn't enough time to go through each one of them. So as a teacher you address the common ones, and try to figure out the uncommon ones by the questions that are asked. Here's a tip, though: "I don't understand" gives the teacher absolutely nothing to go on. I TA-ed labs in grad school, after having been trained to teach, And I had some students who complained about the equipment, in particular one whiny engineering student who once asked what grade he would get if he only did the first half of the lab. (He didn't like the answer of "5," but I figured half-lab equals half-grade). One lab he was complaining about his oscilloscope being old and sucky, and in the few minutes I could spare (with a dozen lab groups asking questions) I didn't immediately see what the problem was — everything had checked out earlier. Turns out someone had unlocked the calibration knobs, which gave a gain other than 1 to the signal. IIRC locking the knobs was part of the instruction set on how to use the scope, so it was his own fault, but I'm sure he thought I was an incompetent asshole for not magically diagnosing the problem. The point is that professors running a lab get a lot of complaints like this, and most of the time it's user error. That's the default. If you knew what the specific problem was, you needed to point that out instead of a generic "my equipment is crap." You call him ignorant, but it does not appear you attempted to fix that ignorance. Like I said, the professor could be incompetent. But from what you've said, I can't conclude that for sure, because it's the same kind of criticism I heard about for years in reading not only my own but others' student evaluations. When 95% of the class is neutral or positive about something, your own observation concurs (we had periodic monitoring of all teachers when I was in the navy) but you get one or two complaints, it's not something that the teacher is likely going to try and fix, because it works for the large majority of the class. So something that doesn't work for you does not automatically, or even usually, equate to incompetence.

You can't complain about models and also claim "red herring" when someone brings up ones that work well. Simplified models contain errors, by definition. You have contradicted yourself.

Introspection is hardly an objective method for gathering data. What laws of information theory are violated? AFAIK, there is no "second law," as in thermodynamics, which would preclude increases in information. Biological diversity only "lacks a validated explanation" in your view (and others), who generally apply a different set of standards to one aspect of science than to others. No, the ideological ship is still in port. Do you really want to baldly assert that creationism doesn't exist now, much less claim that it did not exist in the 20th century?

The links mention two legally unrelated stories; their commonality is that they mention sharia law. The incident in NJ influenced the ballot measure in Oklahoma, but the cases themselves have no overlap, as far as I can tell. The legal challenge in no way would legalize spousal battery. Edit: the actual NJ case was about whether to issue a restraining order, rather than being a trial about domestic violence http://lawlibrary.rutgers.edu/courts/appellate/a6107-08.opn.html

Oh, well.

On the Daily Show, I saw that the photographer said he filmed it for 10 minutes or so. How does anybody leap to the conclusion that it's a missile, given that information?

! Moderator Note Hypothetical musings belong in speculations. The are not appropriate as answers to questions outside of speculations.

Since we do not appear to be amoral (we "invented" morals), feel free to give examples of humans violating physical law. Feel free to give an alternate validated causal coherent explanation for what we call evolution. Quite. Of course, one must be careful not to let an ideological bias change the criteria for what is "causally adequate" (as compared to other areas of science)

Neither are you. But, as I wrote, it doesn't matter. It is impossible to violate physical law; physical law is amoral. One cannot use it to justify an immoral act. The problem is that the two parts of this are not mutually exclusive. If we are to not constrain ourselves with a "commitment to materialism," than we should have to consider that we can design and program a computer that works by magic. The design and programming tell us what type of magic to implement for a particular problem. But invoking "design" does not sweep the "magic" part under the rug. So why is nobody investigating magic as a basis for technology?