Strange

Unintended humour (I hope): Yesterday, Secretary of State Tillerson blamed Russia for the attempted murder of an ex-spy in Britain with nerve agent. Today, Trump fired him and said the reason is "chemistry".

This blog post: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=36996 I think it is amazing that, at that time, a word was borrowed across civilisations thousands of miles apart. And that we can trace the fact from words still in use.

Today I learned that the Japanese word ‘ken’ for dog, which comes from Chinese ‘quan’, shares the same root as Latin ‘canis’ (and hound etc). It was a Bronze Age borrowing from an early Indo-European language.

I'm quite sure there is no reason you couldn't buy a company and then just wind it up. It would be considered foolish, but I can't see how it could be considered illegal.

Why would they do that?

At least one investment company (Black Rock) has said they will offer investors this choice.

This seems self-reinforcing. In popular entertainment, the first thing the hero does is reach for a gun (because it is easy to get one) so people expect it to easy to do and so, in fiction it is plausible for the hero to have a gun and so ... I guess a lot of this goes back to the “frontier spirit” that is idealised by westerns and hunting stories, and embedded deep in American culture.

Damn! I meant to add that parenthetically. You couldn't make this stuff up: "NRA Board Member Blames 'Sympathy Factor of Kids Getting Killed' for Possibility of Gun Control Laws Passing" These guys are not human. http://www.thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/davidbadash/nra_board_member_blames_sympathy_factor_of_kids_getting_killed_on_possibility_of_gun_control_laws_passing

And it is worth remembering that there is no good evidence that people with mental illness are any more likely to commit crime.

Correlation in not causation.. The majority may heave been on medication because they were the types more likely to do this sort of thing.

I'm guessing that, behind the scenes, the NRA is pushing to have new laws passed making it illegal for shops and individuals to apply their own (more restrictive) rules when selling guns. And maybe make it illegal for investment companies like Black Rock to offer investments that "discriminate" against gun manufacturers. And making criticism of the NRA equivalent to blasphemy or treason.

I found out the other day that the NRA has passed legislation (*) that means government funding cannot be used to research many topics related to gun deaths (like, is mental health a risk factor). And that it is not possible to have a searchable database of gun owners. People have to search the paper records - they can be scanned but if that is done, they can't be OCR'd because that would make them searchable. (*) A slight exaggeration. They obviously didn't pass the legislation. They paid others to do it for them.

Q. How many hipsters does it take to change a lightbulb? A. An obscure number. You’ve probably never heard of it.

You have no idea how bizarre this argument sounds to those outside the USA. It might have made some sense at the time, because of the history of the colonies, but now it just sounds ridiculous. America boasts about the importance of democracy and about being a great democracy. And yet you cannot trust the democratic system. Most other democracies work very well without the constant threat of civil war or revolution to keep their politicians in line. There are certainly countries that depend on armed militias to maintain some semblance of order. But do you really want to compare the USA with third-world countries run by local warlords? The times when American democracy has gone horribly wrong (for example the internment of Japanese-Americans during the war, the McCarthy witch-hunts) no one rose up to use their weapons overthrow the government. And when, arguably, "the people" did use their weapons (the civil war) it was one bunch of politicians (and wealthy businessmen) against another group, both of them just using the people for their own ends.

I like the current style - if only because it means undeserved negative votes can be hidden completely. And it is simpler.

I have always assumed that (up or down) votes on old posts are from new members who have been catching up on old threads.

It is a normal dimension in GR (but maybe that depends on what you mean by "normal"). It is just different in some ways from spatial dimensions.

Any velocity, actually. I don't understand the question. The direction of motion doesn't make any difference to how much time is slowed. This is irrelevant as relativity is a classical theory. Measurement doesn't;t change the outcomes. There is no known method for travelling backwards in time. (If you could, the pilot would get younger rather than age faster.)

I did see that you were ten, and I didn't;t really make any allowance for that. So sorry if I came over as a bit tough. But I think it is great that you are interested in science and imaginative to come up with ideas. Keep it up. But remember that science is quite strict about ideas being tested against evidence, so coming up with ideas is the easy bit. Good luck with your future studies. It's OK to be wrong. In fact, science is all about being wrong; that is how it progresses! Actually, growing up is all about being wrong, as well. The fact we can see them means that some of the light escapes and is never sucked in.

There are lots of other things that we can't see for a variety of reasons. We can't see dark matter, neutrinos, the bodies in the Oort Cloud, stars inside the Horse Head Nebula, and on and on. Does that mean all those things don't exist? BTW, there is a project to image the black hole at the centre of our galaxy: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/03/global-telescope-may-finally-see-event-horizon-our-galaxys-giant-black-hole

A black hole doesn't suck all light. It prevents light escaping, which isn't quite the same thing. We can see stars orbiting the black hole at the centre of our galaxy so it isn't sucking all their light. Also, "observable universe" isn't a description of things that are visible around us it is about the greatest distance lighten reach us from. So black holes and dark matter cannot be seen but they are still in the observable universe (if they are less than 47 billion light years away).

"If I can read the title, I can understand the thread"

That is actually quite an interesting idea (although nothing to do with black holes!) You are suggesting something like the equivalent of holes in semiconductors; a point with lower energy than the vacuum (zero point) energy. I have no idea if such a thing is possible or has been hypothesised, though. The Big Bang is not the source of all matter. It is just a model describing the universe expanding and cooling over time.

As far as we know. But a theory of quantum gravity might change this. There are several theories that attempt to combine GR and quantum theory where space is quantised. But all test of quantised space have shown it to be smooth. The hypothesis is that there is some fundamental similarity between wormholes (which are purely hypothetical) and entanglement. If this turns out to be the case, I expect it will be because a theory of quantum gravity gives us a different understanding of both wormholes and entanglement.

Thank you. Praise, indeed!