iNow

Through use of a crytographical key or primer. Geesh... Didn't anyone read Carl Sagan's Contact? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_%28cryptography%29

We don't. We only have models which seem to describe the universe. Once we realize those models fail or are inaccurate, we try to find out where they were lacking and find a better description to replace or supplement them.

Copying Text [math]\ne[/math] Reverse engineering Completely different abilities being described, so it's important not to conflate the two.

This is all just retarded. The guy could have been jerking off and cumming on the window... It's his right to do so. The woman has equal right to turn around and not watch. Case closed. Didn't we kill the Puritans in the 1800s or something? As an aside: These are the types of stories we've come to expect from Fox News... Just enough information to get everyone pissed off, but not enough detail to have a well-informed opinion. Keepin' it classy, Fox News.

Yes. I'm rather inexperienced with modern cosmology and theoretical physics and I got a lot out of it. He also was presenting to a biology oriented audience, and they too are not cosmology or physics experts (in sum, the talk was tailored to a lay audience like you and me).

As defined in the talk, zero total energy.

Indeed. There are a couple of links on Cosmology and quantum gravity in the URL I shared (which, funny enough, I got from Martin )

Dr.S - I know you are sincerely trying to be helpful, and that is a laudable trait. However, especially here in the HW Help forum, it's important not to respond unless you have a clear enough understanding of the topic to teach it to others. Again, while I know you are seeking to be a good person and help others (and I commend that), your half answers based on stuff you googled are more likely to lead the questioner to be more confused. Let someone who is well versed on the topic respond, and then once the OP has been addressed and the questioner is satisfied, you can offer your own ideas and/or questions. I am not saying this to attack you. My intentions are kind. It's best not to contribute to HW Help threads unless you KNOW for CERTAIN how to approach the question and what the answer is. Take care.

Will a Mod kindly please change the thread title by adding: [ANSWERED: No, You Can't]

I suddenly got an image of him wearing a speedo and you stuffing your dollar bill into the elastic band as if he were a chip-n-dale dancer.

The links on this site do a FINE job, and are rather accessible even if you haven't formally studied the topic: http://www.aei.mpg.de/einsteinOnline/en/spotlights/cosmology/index.html Reviewing those for a little while would probably get you farther than any short answer I could offer.

So, essentially Cap'n is equivalent to thinking about your naked grandmother since he just made it shrink?

Geez.. Get a room you two.

Thought I'd toss these links into the proverbial hopper: http://www.onguardonline.gov/ http://www.dhs.gov/files/programs/gc_1158611596104.shtm

Wow... That was a particularly robust one. Nice finds, Mr.S.

This might help: RjlpamhrId8

To the person who neg repped me for the above quoted post #15 saying that my argument was weak and silly... If my argument is so weak then why did you choose to neg rep me instead of rebutting/debunking it openly? I have a genuinely desire to correct faults in my understanding. If you see any, please have the integrity to point them out openly so I may respond/correct any misunderstandings. Thanks.

Actually, I think you are glossing over a VERY controversial part of this approach. The system you advocate... the system argued heavily for by Mises and his students... attempts to treat peoples preferences as... essentially equal in value and only different in terms of rank. However, since much of this work regards humans as acting beings, then it becomes critical to accurately reflect their thought processes and decision making schemes... For... if this foundation of your position is questionable, inaccurate, or flawed, then your whole argument collapses. Following what led me into this point, we know WITHOUT A SHADOW OF A DOUBT that humans treat their preferences as cardinal... That our preferences have different intensities and subjective value... that what we choose to act upon is about much more than a simple ranking... Our preferences and motivations are also about the intensity of the desire. The approach you advocate attempts to ignore that humans have different intensities for their various preferences... You attempt to treat all human preferences as equal, just differentially ranked relative to one another... and that is simply an errant and inaccurate view of human behavior... an errant and inaccurate premise which destroys the credibility of your assertions. In short, your system again... being based on logic and deduction... begins with a flawed premise which is non-representative and not reality-based, hence the conclusions derived from it are equally flawed. How do you respond? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordinal_utility Another entirely different problem is whether ordinal utility is indeed an observable variable in real world. For example, in closed hypothetical system like above, there are only orange and apple to choose from. Therefore, when an individual choose orange, one can definitely say that an orange is preferred over an apple. However, in real world, when a consumer purchases an orange, it is often impossible to say what good or set of goods or collection of behavioural choice (including not purchasing anything at all or doing something else) were discarded as options.

I really like the studious approach we're seeing from ole' Al... An SNL vet. Here, from last weeks hearings: TgqqSHr0wVA h/t Effect Measure

Interesting. Thanks for the confirmation. It's nice to know this was a system-wide change, and not something isolated to my user account. All the best.

About a week ago, my rep power showed 23. Why does it show 18 now? I've received one neg rep (last night), but it was at 18 before then. Has something in the calculation been changed recently?

Thanks for all of the awesome discussion above, guys. This is part of the reason I really like it here so much... So many intelligent thoughts and good faith discussions with people. However, I think Sisyphus has a valid point, and that much of the above might warrant its own thread. With that said, here is a pretty powerful evisceration of the Austrian school, and one of the things I like about it is that it comes from a group who is... at their core... libertarian and against government involvement. I'll quote a few parts which stood out to me, but it's worth the full review at the link below: http://www.infoshop.org/faq/secC1.html#secc16 The Austrian school is close to neoclassical economics in many ways. The key difference is that it rejects the notion that the economy is in equilibrium and embraces a more dynamic model of capitalism. It is rooted in the notion of entrepreneurial activity, the idea that entrepreneurs act on information and disequilibrium to make super profits and bring the system closer to equilibrium. Thus, to use their expression, their focus is on the market process rather than a non-existent end state. As such, it defends capitalism in terms of how it reacts of dis-equilibrium and presents a theory of the market process that brings the economy closer to equilibrium. And fails. The claim that markets tend continually towards equilibrium, as the consequence of entrepreneurial actions, is hard to justify in terms of its own assumptions. While the adjustments of a firm may bring the specific market it operates in more towards equilibrium, their ramifications may take other markets away from it and so any action will have stabilising and destabilising aspects to it. It strains belief to assume that entrepreneurial activity will only push an economy more towards equilibrium as any change in the supply and demand for any specific good leads to changes in the markets for other goods (including money). That these adjustments will all (mostly) tend towards equilibrium is little more than wishful thinking. <...> There is another reason to think the Austrian self-adjusting perspective on capitalism is flawed and this is rooted in their own analysis. Ironically enough, economists of this school often maintain that while equilibrium does not exist their analysis is rooted on two key markets being in such a state: the labour market and the market for credit. The reason for these strange exceptions to their general assumption is, fundamentally, political. The former is required to deflect claims that "pure" capitalism would result in the exploitation of the working class, the latter is required to show that such a system would be stable. <...> If unemployment is included in the Austrian model (as it should) then the bargaining position of labour is obviously weakened and, as a consequence, capital will take advantage and gather profits at the expense of labour. Conversely, if labour is empowered by full employment then they can use their position to erode the profits and managerial powers of their bosses. Logically, therefore, we would expect less than full unemployment and job insecurity to be the normal state of the economy with short periods of full unemployment before a slump. Given this, we would expect "pure" capitalism to be unstable, just as the approximations to it in history have always been. Austrian economics gives no reason to believe that would change in the slightest. Indeed, given their obvious hatred of trade unions and the welfare state, the bargaining power of labour would be weakened further during most of the business cycle and, contra Hayek, unemployment would remain and its level would fluctuate significantly throughout the business cycle. Which brings us to the next atypical market in Austrian theory, namely the credit market. According to the Austrian school, "pure" capitalism would not suffer from a business cycle (or, at worse, a very mild one). <...> Ironically, therefore, the Austrian business cycle is rooted in the concept of dis-equilibrium in the credit market, the condition it argues is the standard situation in all other markets. In effect, they think that the money supply and interest rates are determined exogenously (i.e. outside the economy) by the state. However, this is unlikely as the evidence points the other way, i.e. to the endogenous nature of the money supply itself. This account of money (proposed strongly by, among others, the post-Keynesian school) argues that the money supply is a function of the demand for credit, which itself is a function of the level of economic activity. In other words, the banking system creates as much money as people need and any attempt to control that creation will cause economic problems and, perhaps, crisis. Money, in other words, emerges from within the system and so the Austrian attempt to "blame the state" is simply wrong. <...> While its open and extreme support for free market capitalism and its inequalities is, to say the least, refreshing, it is not remotely convincing or scientific. In fact, it amounts to little more than a vigorous defence of business power hidden behind a thin rhetoric of "free markets." As it preaches the infallibility of capitalism, this requires a nearly unyielding defence of corporations, economic and social power and workplace hierarchy. It must dismiss the obvious fact that allowing big business to flourish into oligopoly and monopoly (as it does, see section C.4) reduces the possibility of competition solving the problem of unethical business practices and worker exploitation, as they claim. This is unsurprising, as the Austrian school (like economics in general) identifies "freedom" with the "freedom" of private enterprise, i.e. the lack of accountability of the economically privileged and powerful. This simply becomes a defence of the economically powerful to do what they want (within the laws specified by their peers in government). Ironically, the Austrian defence of capitalism is dependent on the belief that it will remain close to equilibrium. However, as seems likely, capitalism is endogenously unstable, then any real "pure" capitalism will be distant from equilibrium and, as a result, marked by unemployment and, of course, booms and slumps. So it is possible to have a capitalist economics based on non-equilibrium, but it is unlikely to convince anyone that does not already believe that capitalism is the best system ever unless they are unconcerned about unemployment (and so worker exploitation) and instability. <more at the link> As for my own "criticism," I really can't find myself taking an ideology seriously when they explicitly reject empirical evidence and falsification. As it shows in the wiki article posted in the OP: The main criticism of modern Austrian economics is that it ostensibly lacks scientific rigor. Austrian theories are not formulated in formal mathematical form, but by using mainly verbal logic and what proponents claim are self-evident axioms. <...> This criticism of the Austrian school is related to its supposed rejection of the use of the scientific method and empirical testing in social sciences in favor of self-evident axioms and logical reasoning. In essence, it's all about deduction... starting with a set of axioms which may or may not have any validity or accuracy. They are so against empirical testing and evidence based claims that some even go so far as to say... when something happens in reality which shows their ideas incorrect or wrong... that reality itself is wrong, not the theory. That fundamentally goes against every scientific and analytical bone in my body, hence my heavy criticism of this economic school of thought.

My preference would be to follow the path you've taken, TBK, and merge this with the existing thread, while maybe a mod could delete some of the off-topic tripe in the other (including some of the things in my own OP). As it is, I've already been neg-repped and called a troll for the OP in the other (I posit that this action was taken by user ajb). I'd like such nonsense to stop, and have an actual conversation about this topic. Your summation above seems to be an excellent jumping off point to do just that.

No, Dr.Syntax. That work is flawed. You ought to stop suggesting others engage with it.

Along similar lines, implementing it here and not anywhere else on the globe would put us at a significant disadvantage. We are, after all, a global economy connected to ALL of the worlds economies. If we pursue the ideas of the Austrians, we would be slaughtered by our competitors who did NOT adopt the approach.