imatfaal

mIchio kaku is such a lunatic that Harvard, Berkeley, Princetown/ioas, and CUNY have all been connected with him through employing/educating him. kaku enjoys going into fictional areas to get people involved and generate debate.

Widdekind - to describe something as 'out' or 'in', or from a global perspective you need a more general viewpoint and reference, ie you step out of the local and reappraise from a universal viewpoint - surely to attempt to step outside of spacetime is a large leap of faith.

I think Lemur has it right. Budrap, you seem to be calling for a model with no givens, no axiomatic base; all models, all theories, if you dig deep enough, rely on axioms that are not provable. No cosmologist would claim that we have the whole picture or that the current model is without flaws - but it is highly unlikely we will come up with a model that from its genesis is perfect. We model, measure, recalculate, and reappraise - just because it is a bit shonky now does not mean it won't get better. The model we have now does come up with predictable results which have been OK - it also as you point out has the problem of dark matter to balance galactic spin, and dark energy to drive expansion. However, dark matter is beginning to look a pretty cool shout - read up on the bullet cluster collision, pretty much as dark matter theories would have suggested.

I would have thought that reflection of photons (rather than reception/absorption) would generate the greatest force on the solar sail - if we conserve momentum then an absorption would give a "push" of a certain amount but a reflection would have to give twice that much.

No you cannot use FOIL - but I was illustrating the principle, and you seem to have got the idea. As these are just numbers represented by letters wouldn't you agree that Lh = hL, that lh=hl and that lL=Ll ; and I said simplify not cancel. ie similar to (x+y+z)2 = = x2 + xy + xz + yx +y2 +yz + zx + zy +z2 = x2 +y2 +z2 + 2xy +2xz +2yz you have to be a tiny bit more careful to get your signs right than the above example - but it seems you have that right so far.

Surely the obligatory xkcd calling for citations deserves its own citation or link .

Twinstar, As Timo pointed out you have not multiplied out the bracket correctly; unfortunately you cannot just take h2 out of the bracket. In the spirit of not giving an answer, perhaps this will help you realise/work out how to go about multiplying out brackets. we can look at the simple example of all just two terms (x-y)2 this does NOT equal x2 -y2 this would be making the same as the mistake you made above. The way I would do it in longhand is as follows: (x-y)2 is also written as (x-y)(x-y) now to get the correct answer we need to multiply each of the terms in the first bracket with each of the terms in last and add the results together. My maths teacher called this FOIL - you will see why First terms x times x = x2 Outer terms x time -y = -xy Inner terms -y times x = -yx Last terms -y times -y = y2 so (x-y)(x-y) = x2 -xy -yx +y2 obvious -xy is the same as -yz so we can rewrite as (x-y)2 = (x-y)(x-y) = x2 -2xy +y2 For your equation you still need to multiply each of the terms in the first bracket with each of the terms in the second bracket - This will give 9 terms, which will then simplify to 6 (because hL is the same as Lh etc.) Hope this has helped a bit. Come back when you have made a stab at it.

And Whisky

It's important to get definitions correct; paedophilia is an aberrant state of mind, a mental illness, an affliction - and as such cannot be illegal under any sensible system of law. Acting on those deviant desires is rightly illegal - sex with a minor is automatically rape (no consent can ever be given by a minor), distribution of pornography (visual or verbal) will be covered by obscenity laws or specially enacted laws, and I presume that any form of encouragement of others would be prosecuted under conspiracy, joint enterprise, or specific laws covering promotion of illegal acts. On this individual case it seems that ydoaps has a very good point - and it is a shame that more care wasn't taken to avoid procedural problems

Triple Sec, Tequila, Lime, Ice and Hash - now that is my sort of cocktail (but you can hold the salt, it's not good for me)

Dear Young and New Ideas - unless you work for an organisation devoted to promoting the ideas of evolution you have a great claim for unfair dismissal. If you are in the UK you must immediately contact your local Citizens Advice Bureau - if you are not in the UK I am sure you can find a similar alternative in your place of residence. Most employment lawyers will have a pro bono group that will be able to help those who have suffered discrimination for their beliefs and I think it likely you could get a payment and a lot of publicity - unless of course you are stretching the truth a little...

I would go with a few years later obviously - thus my pin example - but yes the industrial revolution and growth of the power of capital required a change in the exploitation of labour. However, I think you are conflating the attempt to rationalize the pool of unskilled labour from which the owners of the mean of production could draw workers; with a general rationalization of society which never happened apart from with in the minds of some philosophers at large. The great founding socialogists Weber, Durkheim, Comte et al were studying perhaps the most regimented yet most laisez faire era of modern history - the late Victorian / early Edwardian age (as we would call it in the UK). I realise that I have seemingly contradicted myself but that era was an age of contradictions - I would recommend History of Sexuality - Michel Foucault which starts with an exploration of the perception and reality of Victorian morals and ethics in We Other Victorians. The idea that if a concept works well in the economy (which is by its nature should be quantised and countable) that it must also work for all other areas is naive and blinkered and has never be successfully produced - and even more so now, we are learning that the economy is not linear and predictable, but chaotic and emotional.

Again it is difficult to understand whether the above is a manifestation of Poe's law or not. I only watched the embedded link 1. It wasn't a debate - it was two sound bites stitched together with a film clip. 2. Christianity doesn't exactly have a great non-aggression record - the church backed the iberian invasions of south/central america which almost wiped out a people, they encouraged the french expansion into africa and indochina, british brutality all around the world - even into the 20th century showed an astounding lack of reaction to fascist dictatorships in Italy, Spain, and Germany. And don't mention the crusades; I said it once but I think I got away with it. 3. Equating extremists in any group with the main stream is a flaw in logic. 4. "on any jihadist website" - is that where lawmakers get their information from? For crying out loud - give me ten minutes and I can find a website saying that the pentagon and whitehouse are just puppets of the scienceforums.net moderators who in fact are the twelve wise men of the la-li-lo-le-lu. Websites are not fact, nor are they representative. And that's just my initial reactions to 2:38 of the "debate". And before you paint me as a Islam apologist (in the new sense of the word), I am not; I really dislike Islam with a passion. But baseless assertions regarding the Koran and pointless allusions to battles in the 7th century are no way to promote one's views

Athena - you or your friend must get in touch with the local authorities quickly as others above have suggested. In the UK this would be through the county archaeologist - but if you are unsure just get in touch with the archaeology department at the nearest university who will be able to point you in the right direction and will probably be very interested. If you wait and it gets concreted over it will be lost for several generations, perhaps forever.

"You would think that all levels of rationality in a single society would be similar." Why would that be a necessary conclusion? In every sphere of life we can identify easily quantifiable things and others that are completely impossible to rationalise or measure. This was the basic problem with Benthamism - possibly neat idea but the calculus is impossible. An objective measurement is necessary - without that any analysis is merely ideology masquerading as science. We can measure that 5 men making pins from beginning to end are slower at making pins over a week than 5 men dividing their labour - we cannot measure how this affects society's happiness and wellbeing.

Give us a link!

Ferrofluid is a colloidal suspension - ie there are nano-particles of magnetic solid within a fluid.

Michel - Leonard Susskind's series of lectures "The Theoretical Minimum" have a term dedicated to Special Relativity. These lectures are given at Stamford for a mature/amateur audience, but are still pretty taxing and are not 'pop-science'. From your comments on this board I am sure you would be able to get a great deal from them - and Prof Susskind goes through the mathematics of Lorentz transformations in a fairly step-by-step basis. You can get the lectures from Stamford or from Itunes

Here in the UK we might just get to see it on the way to work - if we are mad wage slaves up and about before dawn. Full eclipse however is after sunrise - so no chance of seeing the full eclipse; shame, the druid sorts would be going mad trying to get into Stonehenge for a total eclipse on the winter solstice. I think the major stones line up for the equinoxes rather than the solstices but would still be worth seeing.

Jackson - although Geoffrey Robertson argued the fact that these alleged offences are not in fact rape under English law this was merely a tactic in the bail hearing. Although I am not really au fait with the European Arrest Warrant I believe that the need for a serious Criminal offence (which would be a serious criminal offence within extraditing country) and prima facie evidence of that offence are no longer strictly required. From the EuComm website describing the European Arrest Warrant - EAW "Simpler procedures: The dual criminality principle - which means that both the country requesting extradition and the country that should arrest and return the alleged criminal, recognize and accept that what he or she is alleged to have done, is a crime - is abolished for 32 serious categories of offences. " The list of examples they give does not include rape - but I would think that both rape and sexual assault are included.

JC Don't think that Heseltine is dead btw. Here is a clip of him a few weeks ago - he does have mild rhotacism (hope this is correct spelling).

Swansont - could you answer a follow up? Is the fact that the reduction of the gravitation potential dilation balances the increased relative velocity dilation a 'lucky' coincidence or is there some deeper connexion that causes this to be so?

Very good - I laughed out loud (I wont use the abbreviation)

Great post - just one thing, Britain (the UK) IS a democratic country; just not a republic but instead a constitutional monarchy. And to answer Marat's original point generalisation of speech patterns in a country with such a wide spread of accents and dialects is very dangerous.

http://www.dailyhitchens.com/2010/11/hitchens-dembski-debate-nov-2010-1-of.html I presume that the other sections are also available at the same source if you wish to watch.