Mr Skeptic

I think the best method of suicide would be to shoot yourself in the brainstem, in a hospital with "do not resuscitate" and "organ donor" written all over yourself. At least that way you might save someone else's life, or at least improve it. Even better odds of helping if you volunteer to donate a kidney too, so that they do the compatibility matching ahead of time. Of course, an even better idea is not to kill yourself -- there are really very few reasons to commit suicide, and most people who attempt suicide and fail change their minds about it (for obvious reasons we can't ask those who succeeded, though some religions say those people go to hell). Anyways, go on a giant roller coaster and if you get scared, you know that you don't want to die.

You might be able to get away with using a cell phone for most of that. And the cell phone battery instead of the solar panel.

True enough, but add to that the presumption of innocent until proven guilty, and it seems nearly impossible that someone could be charged with reading her mail without her permission given that she gave him the password at one point in time. It would just be her word against his.

You know very well I never intended to have airflow into the refrigerator -- that should have been obvious by my saying the refrigerator was a closed (but not isolated) system. The only way that can be is if the refrigerator is airtight, which it can be, but you insist on making the problem more complicated to obfuscate the obvious truth that you are wrong. The same with your lies that I'm not accounting for the inputs and outputs -- it is you who is failing to do so. I told you that if you like you can keep track of the increase in entropy of the surroundings, but that I wanted the entropy of the refrigerator contents treated separately. The entropy of the contents of a refrigerator can drop, an increasing the entropy of the surroundings won't change that fact. You're confusing "system" and "universe". I'm asking about a system, and the answer you're trying to give is about the universe.

1 won't work once the craft gets into space. 2 and 3, is that laser being used as propulsion or as an energy source?

Well, I'm done explaining. Go ask anyone who knows thermodynamics, and they will tell you that the entropy of a system can be reduced. As for the fridge, either make it a airtight and the entropy will be reduced for sure since heat flows out but no materials can flow in, or add enough material that the entropy decrease will make up for any air that flows in.

It's not or should not be legal to hack your spouse. But if she gave him the password, that's not hacking and that is also pretty much indistinguishable from giving permission. Unless she can prove that he acquired the password illicitly, there really is nothing to go on. Innocent until proven guilty would be pretty tough for this one.

It rather depends on the speed difference. A heavy enough object moving slowly will simply crush you very slowly. I suggest you find out how many pounds force must be applied to the cargo to stop it. This could be either using Force = mass * acceleration if the ship is constantly accelerating, or using distance = (1/2) a t^2 + vt with the distance set to the person's height, if there is just a speed difference v.

First, I'd avoid using gas because it is harder for you to understand, and also lighter and can do extra things like expand and contract. Why not do it with a solid or a liquid; those exist at many different densities too. However, whatever energy you get when the heavy thing falls or the light thing rises, you have to put back when the heavy thing must be lifted and the light thing dragged down. And on top of that, there is the losses due to friction.

There's several flavors of atheism as well, and not all are materialistic. And that's not particularly unusual, especially among the religions in the East. No one is looking for supernatural aliens. In case you didn't realize, materialists consider design to be possible without the supernatural, for example humans. Just because you may not agree with them doesn't mean you can pretend they believe things your way. ... We like to set our bar high, so that what we claim as true can be reliably believed. That you admit that you cannot prove to science's standards the things you believe in, yet still persist in believing them, shows you aren't going to be arguing scientifically. As for why we don't believe in extra things, it is Occam's Razor, and is used as a tie-breaker. Absent any reason to believe something, it is best not to include that in the theory since it can only reduce the odds of the theory being correct. So if someone says that "things fall because God pulls them downwards" and another says "things fall", the second one gets accepted absent any evidence of the extra entity. The second one encompasses the first; perhaps things fall because god pulls them downwards, perhaps not, but fall they do. By removing the unnecessary extra entities from a theory, a theory's odds of being true can only be increased. People using Occam's Razor to try to disprove the existence of things are misguided. The Razor just says to remove extra entities from the theory, not to add an extra axiom that such things don't exist.

Then you need to know how the volume of your materials change when they are dissolved in each other. If you add 1 mL of salt to 100 mL of water will you really end up with 101 mL of salt water? You won't be able to calculate it, not exactly, without knowing the density of the solution and the density of the things you add. That will get messy quickly. So, we do it without the calculation, just filling to the 1 L mark in special, very accurate flasks.

Any amount of mass you like can be a black hole, if you fit it into a small enough radius. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwarzschild_radius

You have to prove it to be true, and one of the administrators or moderators has to be able to understand your proof. But if what you have really is true, you really want to publish it in a peer-reviewed journal.

What do your letters stand for? And did you know elements come in isotopes, which have different masses?

You can use all three wires either as a thicker wire or a longer wire. As a thicker wire it will carry more amps, as a thinner wire you will get less amps but each will be used better due to more turns.

Your question is too ambiguous. Is the laser on the spaceship? Is the light used for propulsion or for energy via solar panels?

Yeah, put 100 grams of your solute in a 1 L container, than fill with water. If your solute is already dissolved, calculate how much is in the solution and just add enough to get 100 g solute, then fill to 1 L. (that's to get a 100 g/L solution). There's two ways to measure concentration, either as moles/L or mass/L, there's also other ways but chemists hardly ever use them. To convert between the two you need to know the molecular weight (that's grams/mole). If you don't know it, just add it up from your periodic table.

Well scientists like to use platinum for that, but you can use some big steel nails. They'll probably corrode, but not as quickly as the copper wire, and should last long enough.

Everything has gotten better, including our bigger and better Big Brother. And that will continue -- newer and better toys for us people, and computerized recording techonlogy for our ever-vigilant Big Brother. And less of a discrepancy in power of countries with a lot of people, with China and India becoming more powerful.

Haha, I got 60% out of 30. I'm better than better than a monkey.

Well, there is the tiny inconsistency in that Genesis is a clearly geocentric and human-centric explanation, and so the order of creation is wrong. The order they have is, first in the Bible is the earth and heavens, but no light (Genesis 1:1,2). Then light, day, and night, but no celestial objects including the sun. Then land, oceans, and clouds. Then plants. Then the sun and stars. Then the aquatic creatures, probably including aquatic mammals, and also birds before land animals. Then land animals. And finally humans. Please go reread your holy book, you don't know it as well as you thought, and the order it has is in many places inconsistent with science.

Whether that is fair or not depends entirely on the context of the debate. For making philosophical arguments it's perfectly fair to invent anything you like as long as it is logically possible, and unfair to complain about that. But under the rules of science, these rules restrict all hypotheses to be testable, and also the tie-breaker rule of Occam's Razor requires that the explanation with the least extra assumptions be accepted. And yes, historical hypotheses are testable too -- they have to correctly predict the past. What's not fair is to take conclusions made under one set of rules and apply it to another, and apart from being unfair it is also invalid. To the best of my knowledge there is no source of truth other than definition and tautology. The only things that are absolutely true are those that are defined such, and that's because that makes them a tautology. And a tautology is true because we said it is. I have a thread about that here if you think you can give a counterexample. I consider science a source of "useful truth", and the best one at that, but not of "absolute truth". Science rejects many possible truths outright, but these turn out not to be of any use anyways so this isn't a problem in practice. Whether gravity is caused by the expansion of spacetime, or by little imps, or by things trying to reach "their level", it doesn't really matter to me and science only cares that the predictions are correct. But by rejecting possible truths science cannot claim to be searching for "truth" like the philosophers are, just for a subset that happens to be useful. On the other hand, while philosophers try their best to search for truth they cannot prove even the simplest of things. Because of the way science is designed, a god who's actions cannot be predicted cannot ever be part of science. Yes, there are scientists who believe in a god, but that god has to either stay out of their field of expertise or act in a manner that is predictable, or unseen, or at the very least not understood by them. So when I was a theist I believed in God but he had to stay out of anything I understood, eventually remaining in only historical things, though I also figured he ought to be in charge of choosing the results of "random" quantum events which I figured was sufficient to let him be all-powerful despite staying out of the way. Theology likewise is not a search for absolute truth because it makes unproven assumptions, so rejecting the possibility of truths that contradict those assumptions. This is in practice no different than assuming something like the Lord of the Rings books are true and using those assumptions as a basis for deducing things. We of course do this automatically as part of suspension of disbelief required to enjoy books not set in the real world, and become very annoyed should some of the characters not behave as they "should" under those assumptions. Of course, religion claims to apply to the real world and this presents great problems because if true it should not require suspension of disbelief. Thus to be credible religion would have to conform to whatever standards of evidence the person in question requires to accept things in the real world. For example to even be considered by science (due to Occam's Razor), first they'd have to prove that something was impossible to explain via the accepted processes thus requiring a new entity, or by providing more accurate predictions than current theory -- both of which the various religions have repeatedly failed to do (and discussion of this here would be off-topic, so consider this opinion). Religion also has eyewitness testimony, but again this can easily be explained away by non-believers as people either delusional or lying. On the other hand, science has not yet explained everything, so that there are a few little areas which might make a god necessary should we ever gain enough knowledge in those areas to make a credible argument from ignorance (that we can't explain it without something more, and know the subject well enough that we should be able to were it possible). While religion has consistently held its own on its own turf (despite countless attempts to disprove god), the areas people accept as explained by religion and explained by science are shifting towards science. God no longer controls lighting, the winds, rains, growing of crops, most of medicine, psychological disorders, and other such areas traditionally controlled by god, although some still attribute random aspects of those to god. So unfair as it may seem to a theist to have to play by the scientists' rules, it seems to me that soon they will run out of their own turf and have no other choice.

You need to formulate the equation of the cost of the system. Then you can find the minimum by using derivatives. The derivative will be zero at every minimum or maximum, so if there is more than one place it is zero you need to check to make sure it is indeed the best minimum. As for the equation, we're only supposed to provide some hints. Show your work first, and then we can help you from there. If you don't know where to start, you have to make sure that you have enough surface area for your heat exchangers, and consider there are also costs associated with the various temperatures, as they affect the performance of your heat pump. Since you won't know the optimal configuration, you want some of these to be in the equation as variables.

I don't believe in that sort of thing. Even if there were spirits to answer the questions it seems an unlikely venue for them to do so. However, feel free to test it. Ask questions for which there is only one correct answer, and do so multiple times so that the statistical probability of it happening by chance is less than some threshold (let's say, less than 1 in 10 billion, so that you can't just say you were the lucky person who happened to get it).

I'm pretty sure that if you die in a dream you wake up from a nightmare. Perhaps not always though. I guess if you have a really weak heart the fear from a nightmare might be enough to induce a heart attack, but other than that it doesn't seem like a dream could kill you. Or maybe if you dream that you're jumping off a bridge but in reality you're just sleepwalking.