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In this particular case, I agree wholeheartedly with rigney's post. What JohnStu wrote was incorrect, ignorant, and repugnant. It's repugnant because any loss of life on behalf of our country is significant. It's incorrect and ignorant in many regards. The "death of low ranking ambasadars [sic] in warzone is extremely common" is false, and Chris Stevens was not a low ranking ambassador. Chris Stevens was the US ambassador to key country in the Middle East, and he was only the fifth US ambassador known to have been killed in the line of duty. Deaths of "low ranking ambasadars [sic]" is not extremely common. It is extremely rare. Another issue is that Libya is not a warzone. Yet another issue, one that is both incorrect and ignorant, is that there is a huge difference between a consulate and a military base. An attack on a US consulate is very significant because it represents an attack on US soil. That the first attack in Benghazi was against our consulate raised things to an entirely different level. That said, this is the full extent on where I agree with rigney. His comments on the Benghazi attack are also incorrect, ignorant, and repugnant. He is parrotting all the excrement coming out of Fox News and the Republican party. At some point, Fox and the Republican party need to realize that the best thing to do when one is digging oneself into a hole is to stop digging.

Emphasis mine. In other words, a pack of lies. You really should broaden your sources beyond Fox News. Fox News and their lyin' cohorts played a big role in the utter spanking the Republican party received last Tuesday. Romney lost Ohio in part because of the Jeep lie, Florida in part because of the $710 billion Medicare lie, Virginia in part because of the military lies. Those lies motivated people to vote against Romney, even though some might not have preferred to vote for Obama. Those lies also dispirited the Republican base, keeping some at home.

Yep. Nonsense. That's exactly what I think. Now why don't you answer some questions, for once. What do you think happened in Bengazi? Why do you think Petraeus's is in the least bit relevant to this thread?

What in the world does Petraeus's going "All In" with his embedded biographer have to do with this thread? Rather than piling on ever more right wing nonsense that has nothing to do with the topic at hand, why don't you try, just once, to answer questions put forward to you?

At face value, obviously not, since Venus' rotation is retrograde. However ... Let's start with Mercury. Is it tidally locked? Since Mercury completes three rotations for every two orbits, Mercury is not tidally locked to the Sun by the strictest definition of "tidally locked". It is however tidally locked in the sense that this 3:2 ratio is stable, thanks largely to Mercury's rather large eccentricity. If Mercury's rotation is slightly perturbed by some other planet, it will quickly regain that 3:2 rotation rate to orbital rate ratio. This suggests a broader meaning of "tidally locked", which is that the average (average in a virial sense) total angular momentum is constant. In this sense, Venus may well be tidally locked. Venus has an incredibly thick atmosphere. Like Earth's atmosphere, Venus' upper atmosphere has a fast prograde rotation. In fact, Venus' upper atmosphere rotates almost as fast as does the Earth's -- in spite of the fact that Venus proper has a slow retrograde rotation. The slow retrograde planetary rotation and the fast prograde atmospheric rotation is consistent with the hypothesis that Venus as a whole is tidally locked. However, planetary scientists don't yet know enough about Venus as a whole to say whether Venus is tidally locked in the sense that it's total angular momentum is more or less constant.

Surely not. Tidal locking doesn't happen instantaneously. It takes time. How much time? That depends on a number of factors. One key factor is the distance between the two bodies. All other things being equal, the time to tidal locking is proportional to the distance raised to the sixth power. The distance between the Earth and Sun is very large compared to the distance between the Earth and the Moon. That power of six means that while the Moon became tidally locked to the Earth in a relatively short period of time, it will take tens to hundreds of billions of years for the Earth to become tidally locked to the Sun.

Are you so sure about that? It appears that Referendum 74 and Initiative 502 in the state Washington are old-time religion. After all, the Bible says that "any man who lies with another man shall be stoned".

Except Florida. With its perpetual status as the closest of all swing states, Florida is a huge attractive nuisance to those hurricane gods.

Today you completely misinterpreted a cartoon. That cartoon depicts gravitational potential at the surface of a planet, but scaled so that it has units of length rather than energy. The chosen scale factor is 1/(9.81 m/s2), which by design makes the Earth's potential depth equal to the Earth's radius. The potential depths of the Sun, Jupiter, and Mars are respectively, 28 times the Sun's radius, 2.7 times Jupiter's radius, but only 0.38 times Mars' radius. There's absolutely nothing in that depiction about atmosphere.

Olbers' paradox results from assuming an infinitely old, infinitely large, and static (non-expanding) universe. A universe that is infinitely large but has a finite age and is expanding does not run afoul of the paradox.

A couple of things are wrong. First off, you inserted numbers way too early in the game. The math game is best played if one stays symbolic as long as possible. Do that and you will find that the ratio of the gravitational acceleration at two different distances r1 and r2 from the center of the Earth is [math]\frac{g(r_1)}{g(r_2)} = \frac {\frac 4 3 \pi G \bar{\rho}(r_1) r_1}{\frac 4 3 \pi G \bar{\rho}(r_2) r_2} = \frac {\bar{\rho}(r_1)}{\bar{\rho}(r_2)}\,\frac{r_1}{r_2}[/math] Notice you the common factor [imath]4/3\pi G[/imath] nicely drops out. Now substitute [math]r_2=R_E=6371\,\text{km}, r_1 = r_2/2[/math] and you get [math]\frac{g(R_E/2)}{g(R_E)}\frac 1 2\,\frac {\bar{\rho}(R_E/2)}{\bar{\rho}(R_E)}[/math] Using your 6.70 gm/cc3 as the average density for the halfway point does lead to your 60%. This leads to the second problem. That density value of 6.70 gm/cm3 is completely wrong. Inside a spherical body, it's only the matter below that contributes to gravitational acceleration. All the stuff that is at a distance from the center of the body greater than that of the point in question contributes nothing. Halfway down to the center is about 300 km into the Earth's outer core. The Earth's core is mostly iron, compressed iron at that. We call liquids and solids incompressible, but that is a misnomer. The density of the material at this halfway down point is about 10.35 gm/cm3. Density builds up to 13.088 gm/cm3 at the very center of the Earth.

You had the first part correct (halfway down you would weigh half as much as your surface weight if the Earth did have a uniform density) but you were well of the mark on the second part. Inside our real Earth, you would weigh more halfway down, not less.

I strongly suggest that you apply your own definition of insanity to yourself. You are the one who is making no sense but is still insisting upon being right. You are the one that has no evidence to support your nonsense. You are the one who has been told what Newton's third law means, but still deny it. Repeating the same nonsense over and over does not suddenly make it sensible. Only the external forces acting on some object contribute to that object's acceleration. The forces exerted by that object on other objects are external forces acting on those other objects. They are not external to the object in question. Had you come to this forum and asked whether Newton's third law is always true in light of electrodynamics, quantum mechanics, and relativity, the answer would have been no. However, that is not what you did. You instead came here with the typical crackpot attitude of someone who doesn't know one iota about physics, but yet thinks that all of physics is wrong. That is insane.

If he is, he's wrong. That shoots down the local but non-realistic many worlds interpretation as well as the non-local but realistic Bohmian mechanics, basically leaving only the Copenhagen interpretation. AFAIK, MWI, Bohmian mechanics, and the Copenhagen interpretation all have survived the onslaught of Bell's Theorem. Norsen's critique, along with Zeilinger's experiments do not apply to Bohmian mechanics (which Zeilinger acknowledges), mainly because the hidden variables in Bohmian mechanics are weird, just like the rest of that interpretation. Aside: I used the term "scientific realism" when it would have been better to use "counterfactual definiteness". The latter term is the correct one, but nobody outside physics knows what it means. The former term is not quite correct (unless one reinterprets scientific realism to mean counterfactual definiteness, that is).

Whoa, dude. There's a name for what you wrote: Wall O' Text. There are these nifty devices in English called paragraphs. Please use them, and please separate those paragraphs with blank lines. Otherwise many of us will just see an unreadable wall of text. Aspect's experiment, to name but one. There have been a slew of tests of Bell's theorem (which is what the OP is alluding to) since Aspect. None have contradicted Bell's theorem. These experiments have closed off the various loopholes in Bell's theorem, leaving but one conclusion: Bell's theorem is correct and does apply to our universe. Bell's theorem is a rather disturbing part of quantum mechanics. Basically, you can't have both locality (quantum mechanics is restricted by the speed of light) and scientific realism (The Moon is still there when you don't look at it). You have to discard one or the other, or both. Pick your poison. However, Bell's theorem does not say that FTL communication is possible. It just says that spooky action at a distance is one way to look at quantum mechanics. There are a number of no-communication theorems that do preclude FTL communication and that are compatible with Bell's theorem.

Simply put, that is illegal at x=0. Let's look at ax=bx. Here's a couple of ways to look at this. One is to rewrite this as (a-b)*x = 0. This equation has two solutions, a=b or x=0. At x=0 you cannot make any inference about the relationship between a and b. Any values will satisfy (a-b)*0 = 0. Another way to look at is to multiply both sides of ax=bx by 1/x, yielding a=b. This multiplication by 1/x (division by x) is illegal at x=0. So once again the inference that ax=bx implies a=b is invalid at x=0.

I disagree. That 4.59 billion years figure is a bit of a red herring (and also a bit off; 4.54 is the currently accepted number). The very early Earth was a molten blog of magma, completely inhospitable to life. The hypothesized collision with Theia added to the Earth's heat. The late heavy bombardment regularly pummeled the young Earth with impacts that made the Chicxulub impact look like child's play. The time span between the end of the late heavy bombardment and the origin of life was quite short in geological and biological terms.

You did divide by zero. You did so by assuming ax=bx implies that a=b. This is not valid with x=0 because you are dividing by zero.

It doesn't make sense, period. You demonstrated nothing. Instead you made a bare assertion, a fallacy. Demonstrate this please, and do so without using an illegal operation such as dividing by zero or assuming that the only solution to x2=1 is one. It's quite simple. Saying that 0/0 is any particular value opens the door to contradictions. Mathematics must be contradiction free.

You're right. There's a lot of ignorance going on here. It is ignorant to explain unknowns in science to some religious cause such as ancient aliens. It is ignorant is to take the word of some random, crackpot website as truth, yet ignore science. These dishonest, crackpot proselytizers have found that there is a whole lot of easy money to be made from a gullible, ignorant public. Shame on them for their dishonesty, and shame on those who fall for this tripe. That Lloyd Pye has been barred from editing that page disproves your thesis that anyone can edit that page. As for the rest of your long nonsense post, tl;dr.

I didn't call you stupid. Even the smartest people around can say some pretty stupid things. I called your use of name calling and fallacious arguments stupid. Stop using name calling, stop with the fallacious arguments, stop with the use of the silly term "Atheist Biologists" as if only biologists who happen to be atheistic worry about abiogenesis. Aside: what's with the capital A, capital B? Even if that is the case, it's a far stretch from "god". What you are doing here is creating yet another god of the gaps style argument. Is the universe finely tuned for life? Perhaps. There is some dispute, but a good number of cosmologists and physicists do think this is the case. Why? We don't know. The sciences attempt to be honest. Answering "we don't know (yet)" is far preferable to some just-so story that fills the gap. Those god of the gaps arguments are highly problematic because the sciences have this uncanny knack for filling in those gaps.

If "starting right from the beginning" is what that long post full of bunk was supposed to be, there's one word to describe it: FAIL. There were no Anunnaki/Nephelim/Enki. There is no planet Nibiru. King Tut was not an Anunnaki. Half of European men do not share his DNA; iGENEA is just a scam company. The people who built Pumapunku were more advanced than the Incas who followed. This happened all the time in the ancient world. Technologies were developed, only to be lost when the civilization collapsed. It wasn't aliens. It was just humans being humans: Treating key technologies as state secrets. We still do that today.

The word theory means something special in the sciences, a well-substantiated, coherent explanation of some aspect of reality. In mathematics, the word means a consistent body of knowledge, such as knot theory, Galois theory, set theory, and so on. This is a scientific forum. The one thing "theory" does not mean is "a wild guess I came up with after finishing off a quart of tequila." Yep. Sacrilege. And nonsense. First off, what made you pluck that function out of the clear blue sky? What about f(x)=2x/x? or f(x)=-3x/x? Secondly, that's not how division is defined. a/b=c means that a-b*c=0. Now let's look at a=b=0. We're trying to find a number c such that 0-0*c=0. Any and every number satisfies this expression. 0/0 is indeterminate. It has to be. Arbitrarily assign it a value, any value, and you have just opened the mathematical door of death. It allows you to prove that 1=2. The first thing that a mathematical theory (remember the definition) must be is consistent, or contradiction-free. An axiomatic system that is known to allow consistencies isn't a theory. It's trash.

Stop with the stupid implied name calling and the explicit stupid arguments, please. Biologists for the most part don't care how life arose. Other than professional curiosity, most biologists don't even care what happened hundreds of millions of years ago. Their profession is what's happening now, or what happened in the recent past. Most biologists aren't paleobiologists. Other than professional curiosity, even most paleobiologists don't worry about abiogenesis. That of course is yet another fallacious argument. The correct answer is we don't know. There's nothing wrong with saying we don't know in the sciences. There is a lot that is known. It is now known that simple life appeared rather shortly after the Earth had cooled enough to be hospitable to life. It appears to me that the origin of life as we know it is close to a certainty if the conditions are right. This raises the question, what are the odds that conditions will be right? The answer is we don't know. That's because they are so blinded by their beliefs that they can't see, and are so threatened by challenges to their beliefs that creating out-and-out lies is preferable to confronting those challenges. It wasn't impossible. The arguments saying it was are fallacious. One of the many impossibility arguments assume a DNA molecule assembled itself from scratch. It didn't. Others based on the second law of thermodynamics ignore that an influx of energy allows entropy to decrease. For example, my air conditioner is working today. This newer set of arguments based on information have exactly the same problem as those tired old second law of thermodynamics arguments. Energy is information. Those ID arguments against abiogenesis are fallacious, every single one of them. Maybe it just happened. It's called emergent behavior.

It isn't the case, so everything that follows is wrong. You are implicitly assuming that clocks everywhere tick at the same rate. They don't. When cosmologists say that the universe is 13.75 billion years old, they are referring to a clock that is well-removed from any small scale variations in density such as planets, stars, black holes, and galaxies, and is locally at rest with respect to the cosmic microwave background radiation. I do see your way of writing as ugly. I also see it as a sign of laziness, arrogance, and stupidity. It's lazy in that you clearly can't bother taking the time to spell out words, write proper sentences, or express your thoughts clearly. It's arrogant because your writing gives the impression that you think your time is worth so much more than that of those who read your rot. It's a sign of stupidity because the ability to express oneself clearly is a key indicator of intelligence. If you aren't lazy, arrogant, and stupid, show it. Please take the time to avoid text speech, write proper sentences, and communicate clearly. If you are lazy, arrogant, and stupid, why should I waste my time responding to you?