Realitycheck

You really underestimate the power of human ingenuity, mankind's ability to be aware of the world around us, and it's ability to modulate its reaction to those changes. Being familiar with economics, you should know that the world behaves like a machine, inputs and outputs, it's all interconnected, the weather, the price of rice, the law of supply and demand. So what's the problem? Mankind isn't behaving efficiently enough for you? Prove that it's a problem and that mankind is ignoring it.

It looks like we've got some work to do on cultured meat. At a current production cost of 2 million dollars a pound, costs seem to be a bit prohibitive. The fibers must be stretched to develop, you know, like the real thing. Seems like maybe we need to go at it from a different direction, but I still think it has potential, an animal rights dream.

Bristlecone is a poor example, pretty inefficient, so fairly unknown and not so popular, it's only known for being the absolute oldest. But take a redwood or giant sequoia of similar age, and you get a lot of bang for your buck. After all, it didn't happen overnight.

Interesting, how much Hawking has flip-flopped on the issue of infinitely dense universal singularities, starting at infinitely dense, then not, then back to infinitely dense in his latest book, according to ajb. At least, we have a consensus on black holes. I wonder why he went back to infinitely dense. I wonder if it has a mythological component.

The Annunaki were demolished in their collision with Jupiter, long before they ever reached Earth. Elliptical orbits in and out of the solar system have been proven to be extremely dangerous, not to mention cold. Unless their planet was a brown dwarf, but then the radiation would be just a bit weird, causing numerous hideous mutations, not griffins, and minotaurs, and pegasi, oh my. Notice how the disclaimer on his linked site explicitly states, "Don't believe a damn thing you read on this website."

I wonder what happens to all of the protons. Converted to photons and some other particle(s)? They never escape the horizon, or their volume seems trivial in comparison. Maybe they are somehow layered into a core. Too odd of a configuration. Where do they go?

Who actually does believe that? I think we'll have to make some changes a lot sooner, but it won't be because of immigration. Let's not mince words. The main reason we support immigration is for the cheap labor, right? (Seriously, not in all circumstances.) I would be more inclined to support tightening our borders (something we've supposedly started doing) for its effect on our unemployment rate (even if it meant a nominal increase in wages), rather than because of its nominal effect on the costs of living for everybody else. We have lots of jobs available in Texas (at least Dallas), which is likely a result of the slowdown in crossings reported. Who actually does believe that? I think we'll have to make some changes a lot sooner, but it won't be because of immigration. Let's not mince words. The main reason we support immigration is for the cheap labor, right? (Seriously, not in all circumstances.) I would be more inclined to support tightening our borders (something we've supposedly started doing) for its effect on our unemployment rate (even if it meant a nominal increase in wages), rather than because of its nominal effect on the costs of living for everybody else. We have lots of jobs available in Texas (at least Dallas), which is likely a result of the slowdown in crossings reported.

I think we have updated figures on phosphorus, as in 290 billion metric tons of rock and 60 billion metric tons of "concentrate", whatever that consists of. Seeing how its biggest use is for fertilizer, I have a hard time seeing how it's a problem, since only a small fraction of fertilizer gets absorbed into the plants. http://www.ifdc.org http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/peak_phosphorus

So you are asserting that the gigantic horizons of galactic cores are actually that big, superdense and all?

What causes black holes, as opposed to just big conglomerations of mass? Maybe something like a specific condition such as when a star explodes and great masses of atomic schrapnel are flung apart, coalescing into a conglomeration of atomic particles, without reforming back into the constituent atoms? I guess the particles would be too ready to reassimilate, though maybe not necessarily. Time to read this book and get caught up. Any ideas? Maybe if it had a binary of a specific makeup which it then collided with.

It's not infinitely dense, just take away all that space between the electrons and nucleus. Anybody have any other ideas? Maybe once the mass reaches a certain critical level, the atomic structure just collapses? Maybe there is a magnetic factor? Maybe they're as big as they look and nowhere near as dense as we are concluding?

Training the other side of your brain takes practice, nothing more. Learn some jokes, good ones. Making a girl laugh is the key to her heart. Many girls secretly dig nerds.

What made King Solomon great was his ability to turn the other cheek, to have the wisdom to know the difference between what he could change and what he couldn't. On the other hand, he could be construed as a selfish, apathetic bastard. It's kind of hard to know for sure, but I'm not holding anything against him. I really have a hard time being critical over such a thing as natural resources. It was going to happen sooner or later anyway. We really didn't want to be burning oil anyway, right? We still have an entire planet to mine through for everything else, and a moon, and asteroids. I would venture to say that our problems lie in our tendency to choke ourselves, shooting ourselves in the foot. Restricting stem cell research because of supersticous reasons so we're second place in the healthcare field. Overextending ourselves being the world's cop, wreaking havoc on fragile markets (talking about Iraq, NOT Afghanistan). Living beyond our means running up a credit card, devaluing ourselves in the process, assets less greater and greater liabilities. Who is paying us to fix the world? I guess all of that collateral damage was a bit too expensive in light of our desire to assert our will. We just need to focus on ourselves, like Solomon, arguably.

This seems kind of weird because I thought Capn would have caught this oversight. I may be missing something, but doesn't the inequality state that the solid has less PE than the gas, when in all actuality, the opposite would be true?

http://www.illegalimmigrationstatistics.org 113 billion dollars a year, half of which is spent on educating their kids, most of which is absorbed by the states. Obviously, it's been a problem in California (is that considered a blue state, as in illegal immigrant friendly?) and presumably Arizona. In Texas, there are no income taxes, only sales taxes and corporate. I guess you could conclude that consumption taxes are a way to make sure you tax everybody (it's only 7 or 8%), though costs have started escalating recently. Interesting how they state that immigration has slowed to a crawl, due to changes made in Mexico (and perhaps a partially built fence?).

I regret saying what I did. I have often wondered why there is no economics forum, but there could probably be a case made that it wouldn't be used that much, and if we're talking strict economics (not mixed with politics), then applied mathematics isn't so bad.

Interesting perspective.

Boohoo. How many people with a dream had it all figured out from the beginning? I'm not arguing that reality couldn't set in at any given moment. Too many variables.

I would say biggest risk factor for early death is poor diet (ie. junk food) causing heart disease (since it is the #1 killer), as described in other thread, though I guess early death and biggest killer is not necessarily the same thing. What perplexes me is how it is supposedly ignored by health expert. Also, since fats and sugars tend to be inflammatory in nature, this would tend to have a depressive effect on people, not to mention the typical effect of sugars causing a temporary rush, then crash.

Don't waste your time on his puffs and giggles. Just look at his links with all of the bright colors.

But with plagues and barbarianism and superstition, it was hardly the age of enlightenment. We invest so much in foreign policy, I have a really hard time seeing that. But mathematically, I agree that it's no guarantee.

There are no innards. Black holes are like planets, only much denser. I don't have the exact figure handy, but a teaspoon of black hole weighs something like a million tons, much like a neutron star. If you consider that an atom is, for example, 2 million nanometers wide, the nucleus is, say, a hundred nanometers wide while the electrons spin around at an average radius of a million nanometers. The overwhelming gravity of a black hole essentially crushes the atoms and eliminates all of that extra space. The apparent size of the black hole is misleading because the overwhelming gravity prevents light from escaping much farther away than just the surface.

Yes and yes.

Yes, of course, the size of curves is largely irrelevant. I've been having a bit of trouble iterating just what exactly my issue was with the history of black hole theory but I've just stumbled across something which likely factored into the mystique, an Einstein joke. Never really knowing that it was part of a joke, I would always ask myself, "Why would anyone ever divide by zero?" (seriously)

You mean like this one? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UDFy-38135539 Oops. I thought you said 13 bly ago. My mistake. I guess 13 bly ago is kind of irrelevant, but it looks pretty large and organized for being that old. But then again, 300 million years is a pretty long time in a much more condensed universe.