swansont

"every conceivable danger known to man" is where you jump the tracks, and why this is a strawman. We have government agencies in place to protect us from significant dangers, and ones that we can't deal with individually. I can't assess the safety of chemical additives in food or of drugs. I can't stop other individuals or corporations from dumping pollution and poison into the ecosystem. And someone has spiced up their call to action with a rhetorical device. Stop the presses! (No, not really, it's just an expression.)

AFAIK the oath of office doesn't contain any language about representing only the people that elected the official. The US Constitution isn't simply majority rule. A bad analogy is a strawman, though, or at least it is in this case. The government does take action (at a local level) to try and mitigate the damage of fire, and another reason the analogy isn't apt is that it isn't in the context of other peoples' actions affecting you. If a forest fire threatened many homes and the government did nothing to try and save them, mightn't you refer to their inaction as criminal? (even if no crime were technically committed?) Can people refer to e.g. Mike Brown and FEMA's inaction concerning Katrina as being criminal? (they have, so are folks going to jump on them for doing so?)

Yes, but that's still not really the same as saying all motion is perpetual — that's not the context of the law. It affirms that motion stopping (or increasing) is due to external influences, and is not an intrinsic property.

Planck's constant is one of the terms in the Planck length, but they aren't the same thing. The different units tell you that some other terms must be involved, and in the case of the Planck length G is involved (which is small), and so is c (in the denominator, cubed) which makes the terms smaller still.

No, but it's a conditional statement. IF there is no external force. But there always is.

Not with an analogy as flawed as yours. Perhaps you should start with getting my assertion right. Stubbing your toe and blaming the government as an example misses the point.

I have no idea how you connect this with the ongoing discussion.

If you consider poisoning the well and strawman arguments "nailing it" I suppose. It's somehow not OK to use rhetoric in public speeches anymore? This isn't about criminalizing dissent. Ignoring the evidence is not the same thing as presenting contrary evidence. But there is a decided dearth of contrary studies being published in the scientific literature. But that's not the point. Would you be unjustified in calling their actions (or inaction) criminal? Should US politicians be free to introduce legislation that is blatantly unconstitutional or physically harmful? Can I not suggest there be a price to pay for such action?

Actually quite a bit of sensitivity — their peak response is typically in the red or near-IR http://68.4.248.85:800/observatory/ccdfltr/ccdfiltr.html http://www2.edmundoptics.com/techsup/reform/CCDfinal.gif

You may be confusing the planck length with planck's constant. (the former being the scale where you'd need a quantum theory of gravity because general relativity breaks down)

That's the opposite case, though. People that support teaching creationism are the analog of the people that have dismissed the evidence of global warming, because they have dismissed the evidence of evolution. It would be similar to the case if the government had done nothing to try and warn people that smoking is bad for them, despite all of the evidence. If that had been the case, wouldn't it be justified to think the politicians might be criminally liable?

That would be the third law. Perpetual motion is not really addressed by Newton's first law. As Mr Skeptic points out, that law merely tells you that motion will be uniform if there is no force, but there is nothing that assures us that this will be the case.

The amount of angular momentum is the linear momentum multiplied by the moment arm length (and a trig function if those aren't perpendicular). Linear momentum is mv, or kg-m/s, and multiply by the moment arm (m) to get kg-m^2/s. Well, a kg-m/s^2 is a Newton (force = ma) and a kg-m^2/s^2 is a Joule (work or energy) So a kg-m^2/s is a J-s Angular momentum (L) is also related to torque (T), T = dL/dt which gets you to the same point (it can be misleading that torque and energy have the same units, because energy does not always involve rotation, so this unit analysis isn't generally used for macroscopic objects. Torque is usually left as N-m rather than represented as a Joule)

If only. Hydrinos, zero-point, cold fusion, overbalanced wheels, antigravity. The woo spreads far, wide and deep.

Things at the quantum level behave like they spin. If the spin vector is pointed in one particular direction, or has a particular magnitude, it can't smoothy change to another value. It would be as if a motor could only go at 100 rpm, 200 rpm or 300 rpm, etc. but no value in between, or could only be aligned in a limited number of directions. Planck's constant would be the equivalent of the 100 rpm increment. Except the "spinning" isn't a physical object actually spinning. (QM is quite weird) This also applies to things behaving like they orbit, except in QM they don't really orbit like a planet orbits. You simply wouldn't be allowed to have a planet in any old orbit. Mars is OK, Earth is OK, but the spaceship orbit getting from one to the other isn't permitted.

It depends on how good your clock is. Highway speeds have registered it. That's because they are in accelerating reference frames, so you know who is moving. If you didn't have an acceleration, there would be no way to prove which one was moving. We almost always assume we are at rest, but that's not from the physics Usually the number is smaller, and for mechanical clocks their inherent flaws will often swamp this kind of difference. But in principle, yes.

A very small layman? It's the quantum of angular momentum in quantum physics; all changes in angular momentum come in steps no smaller than this. It's also the conversion factor from frequency to energy.

You don't need extremely high speeds to see it, and you can see the effect no matter who is moving (one implication of relativity is that you can't be sure who is moving and who is at rest). And it all works for more than one type of clock.

No, because there is more weirdness to it that cements relativity as being the correct answer. It matters if you go east or west. None of those forces can explain this, as far as I am aware — they experience similar gravity, magnetism, and whatever. Only their speed and the gravitational potential matter. Atomic clocks are well-shielded against electromagnetic perturbations anyway, and different types of clocks see the same shift.

And if he's more or less unopposed at this point, he can drift toward the center instead of having to worry about the far right, and be better positioned than the democratic nominee (assuming that takes a while to get sorted out), as Hillary and Barack will be fight for support from those farther away from center.

6 MP for a non-SLR is apparently the sweet spot, especially for pocket cameras. Unless you make the sensor physically bigger, or get really good lenses (like you can with an SLR) you don't generally get better pictures. 1/1.8" is a small sensor. http://6mpixel.org/en/

Yep. Gotta wonder why nobody has bothered to plug it in to itself and remove the wall plug, and report on what happens. It still draws power to do that.

In the US at the undergraduate level you generally don't have too much of an emphasis on what type of physics; maybe if you do a research project or something, or take electives, but the curriculum is mostly standardized. Everybody takes general physics, thermo, "modern" physics, advanced mechanics, E&M, quantum mechanics. (and some required math and probably chemistry classes) Specialization pretty much waits for graduate school. And, personally, I'd rank a schools reputation lower than whether the characteristics of the school (e.g. size, university vs college, campus/off-campus life, location) are a good fit. Plenty of decent schools within a few hours of Chicago.

It's the same thing; (negative) exponents of 10. Parts per million per Kelvin.

http://www.webelements.com/webelements/elements/text/Be/heat.html Be coefficient of thermal expansion is 11.3 x 10^-6/K