Mr Skeptic

Applying to jobs, crafting a well-written resume, thinking of an idea and actually implementing it, all of these create opportunities for gainful employment. All these have aspects of chance to them, true, but also effort.

Again something people have done. I believe the socially acceptable way to do it was to abandon the baby somewhere. Edit: also as sacrifices to the gods, such as Moloch.

You are right and that was considered proof of a finite universe some time ago -- the skies would have had to be infinitely bright. However, there's two ways it doesn't really work that way. First, we now know the universe is finite in time (15 billion years, give or take), so that light from some stars would not have been able to reach us. More importantly, however, is that space is expanding. For each unit of space, some time later there will be a little more space there, and the numerical value of that is the Hubble constant. It also means that the distance between two points can increase faster than the speed of light if they are far enough away (this is not motion but expansion of space). And when the distance between two points is increasing faster than the speed of light, nothing can travel from one point to the other, not even light. And so we are limited to the observable universe.

If it is dark enough, you can get away with much less light. Hitting a piece of flint with a hammer, perhaps? You could use a hammer as part of an electric circuit, but not with an incandescent light because they take time to heat up. Maybe with an LED. Or small firecrackers, if those are legal where you live.

No, it doesn't. Why is it that you believe in private ownership but not group ownership? Why can you own a house but a people can't own a country?

I think D H has a fetish for facts. Sometimes it simply turns out that reality is a bitch. This counts double for interstellar flight. Incidentally, I think D H is on the right track with air-breathing engines, for the first stage. Check out the specific impulse for commercial jet engines if you don't believe us.

http://xkcd.com/810/ As always with xkcd, you should read the comment on mouseover of the image (on their site).

Prove it.

Or are you asking about error margins?

I'm certain the earth is flat. Whether killing babies is bad or not is an arbitrary judgment based on the moral values held by the person making that moral judgment. This even dispite your use of the word murder implying the act is illegal and the word innocent implying they did nothing wrong. For example, While I doubt God's actions would be considered murder by the people in question, it seems close enough. Since God is considered good by definition, many Christians will say the act described was not immoral. The only way to convince someone who disagrees with you about morality is to convince them to reject their old values and replace them with new ones, or by using science or logic to deduce from their own values that the action does not maximize those values. But you can't prove a value. I agree with you about the importance of instinctive behaviors and values. However, much of our morality deals with suppressing our instinctive impulses. We have both a biological system for judging value (candy is good because it tastes good), we have a social system for judging values (candy is bad because it rots your teeth and is empty calories), and I'd say most people have a personal system for judging value, similar yet distinct from the social and biological ones. The only chance we have for now of finding universal values are those that are biologically based, yet some of those are obsolete or for other reasons looked down upon.

I think it needs changing significantly. People on food stamps can buy the subs at the deli, but only if they are the cold subs. The hot ones aren't allowed. That seems pretty dumb to me -- they're essentially the same. Soft drinks on the other hand aren't even food. However I'm also not sure anyone wants the government going in and looking at the details of each product before deciding whether people can have those or not under food stamps. It might be a good idea but it would seem too much like a precedent. So we'd want to have it work with a simple rule, maybe based on dollars per calorie and excluding things with too much of the calories from sugar -- but then people could eat expensive foods if it was dunked in oil. Another aspect to the buying soft drinks with food stamps, is that soft drinks are really bad for you and contribute to obesity, diabetes, and increased healthcare costs (which these people are probably not paying for either).

You do whatever you like. But not everyone agrees with you. Maybe you could start a union in mexico that boycotts jobs that benefit countries that deport people. Just don't expect it to be very popular. (oh, and what if the person in that analogy used a fake ID to sign up for his original job, but then was allowed to work with his real ID at a lower wage?) Altruism is nice but don't expect everyone to share your sentiment. Are you really surprised that people don't want other people taking their jobs and getting benefits paid for by their taxes, due to entering their country without permission? The government should do the will of the people, and the will of the people isn't the will of lemur. American public property is the property of the American public, just as your house is your property. If you want to go start a country in Antarctica or in the oceans (which are international territory, unowned by any countries/people groups), be my guest.

Sadly, from what I checked the nuclear rockets that have actually been built, they barely generate enough thrust to lift the weight of their own engine.

Morality is at its heart an arbitrary choice of values, used to define the terms "good" and "evil". Once you arbitrarily choose your values, science and logic can guide you in deducing what you should do to maximize those values. By using science and logic you can base your entire moral system on a single value, for example maximizing human happiness (however you define that), rather than using an inflexible set of rules like the Ten Commandments and other such laws. Also, science can help you find what instinctive value systems we have.

Incidentally, breathing pure nitrogen will remove oxygen from your lungs, which is worse than holding your breath, and in addition you won't feel out of breath because your body measures CO2 not oxygen. I think that if anyone truly wants to try this method they should have some portable oxygen.

Tautologies and definitions are not falsifiable. Tautologies are true because tautologies are always true. Definitions are true because we said they are. They might or might not be useless, because they don't "tell us something we didn't know" so you could consider them useless in that sense, like all the math theorems. Definitions don't make predictions. You're looking in the wrong place for predictions and falsifiability.

Perhaps countries would be better off making super-citizens. Then they have an advantage in production, research, and also war.

They can if they want to. Just because they got kicked out of one country doesn't mean that they should be excluded from certain jobs in their own country, nor that they have to hate the country that kicked them out, nor anything like that. As for your sentiment, how would you feel if people decided to walk into your home and live there, without your permission? Why should any government have to allow people they don't want on their land but you want to forbid people you don't want on your land? Maybe these poor, discriminated against people just don't care about that issue as much as you do. You're being unnecessarily rude and are also at least somewhat wrong. There's about 2 billion chickens in the US, and about 100 million families, so that would last for 3 weeks at 1 chicken per family per day, without imports nor reproduction. Also, insults and presuming things about someone is rather inappropriate. And there's no law requiring self-interest.

They're big, expensive, untested, and some crazy person or jealous country is going to blow it up. On top of that, on one has the money to build this considering the risks. The space elevator has the additional problem that it won't work. It won't work because we probably can't build one, and even if we could good luck trying to climb it. The launch loop seems like the best option to me, but it requires the loop to go all the way around the earth, over countries and over international waters. Good luck keeping it safe, or getting people to agree to have something with as much energy as a nuke over their heads. The space gun might work, but the acceleration would make it useless for humans or even some items. As for plasma and ion, they work fine. Only you have to be in space to use them. Alone they won't work but we use them fine now, all you have to do is lift them up first.

Odds are it would have been decomposed by bacteria. Under good conditions DNA can survive -- it is a very stable molecule. Also, it can't evaporate.

This is why there was opposition to including the Bill of Rights... that it would be taken to mean that you only have the rights listed. No, you have rights regardless of the government, the government cannot give you rights, and the government can't really take them away though they can threaten you not to exercise them. The constitution is a limitation on the government, so they don't try to punish people for exercising certain rights, among other things.

Well it's much easier if you consider all the children equal, then more children=better, similarly if you consider the children superior when the parents have more. But if your can have more but inferior children things get complicated. Perhaps you would be interested in the difference between r-selected and K-selected species. Cancer significantly decreases your reproductive fitness, so it is not surprise there. Your cells aren't individual Homo sapiens. Here's a little secret: the only things we know are true are tautologies (by "know" here I mean absolutely certain). To prove a math theorem is true it is quite common to prove that it is a tautology. Tautologies are always true...

You are quite right, but you misunderstood the concept of fitness. Fitness means roughly what you think it should mean than what you seem to think it does mean. As your thought experiment shows, fitness is not just about having kids. You need your kids to survive and have kids too, and their kids need to have kids too, etc. However this cannot be done in an altruistic manner else those who are lacking this altruism will prosper at their expense. So for example we have huge denial of human overpopulation, and those who don't deny it largely aren't attempting to do anything about it, and yet we do have some built-in mechanism, a reduction in fertility when we go hungry. Many species have a solution that involves investing more effort in fewer offspring when food becomes scarce, and more offspring with less investment when food is plentiful. In some species its a somewhat unsolved problem, for example predators with over-reliance on a particular prey species can have cycles of population growth and population crashes. Anyhow, when people talk about fitness they often speak of surviving offspring. This is why.

Nah, just the equations for the tides. If you give the equation for gravitation, show how you can derive the equations for the tides from that. Or do you just accept that we know how the tides work by faith, but don't actually know yourself, other than that it has something to do with the sun and moon and gravity? Thanks, but I'd rather A Tripolation's explanation than yours, since he knows so much about tides.

Did you think we treat unsubstantiated accusations with more respect? Or that we ban people for replying to a request for clarification/substantiation? Anyhow, I think there is a big distinction between being polite and being politically correct. I think of the government somewhat as an enemy, only one with which we have a truce. The government is necessary but it needs to be kept in check. It's not so much about anything in particular, just about preventing things that might happen.