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That is John Baez crackpot test .

exactly. I'd speculate that these techniques have been combined and in use for some time.

Just look at how long GPS has been around. For those not aware, it uses spread spectrum CDMA, with a signal is well below the noise level. I've speculated (in my mind) that you could easily combine the techniques to transmit and receive reasonable data at a level 'below the noise threshold' for some time. Just like GPS, you just need some reasonable clocks (hand held GPS quality), some decent processing (like an FPGA), and the rest is how far you can push the bandwidth in the real world. You can include other comms techniques, phase, multi-band, etc. it just comes down to processing power and a heap of math that is way above my head.

the basics of GPS spread spectrum is here: http://alumni.cs.ucr.edu/~saha/stuff/cdma_gps.htm

R is an excellent language to learn for just about every field. It's ability to import and export data to MS based resources such as Access, Excel, MS-SQL and other non-MS sources makes it a versital tool. It's commerical parent is S-PLUS and is nearly syntax identical with minor variations. Buy the book, use the tool, impress your Eve Online players by pinning down the July Tritanium prices and hitting the weekly averages within .5 ISK by doing time series analysis using regression plus ARIMA on the residuals. Find out cool things like Hulkageddon impacts frigate prices more then exhumers and MORE! FUN FOR THE WHOLE FAMILY (Except your big sister because she's icky and into boys....) For those what want to do google searches but find 'R' difficult there is the rseek.org site and a few quick links to get you started while you wait for the nutshell book to arrive in the mail. R Intro : http://www.itc.nl/~rossiter/teach/R/RIntro_ov.pdf Programming in R: http://manuals.bioinformatics.ucr.edu/home/programming-in-r R Graph Gallery: http://addictedtor.free.fr/graphiques/ Big Resource I use: http://www.math.yorku.ca/SCS/StatResource.html The Little Handbook: http://www.tufts.edu/~gdallal/LHSP.HTM The Big N: http://www.itl.nist.gov/div898/handbook/ There are hundreds of PDF references out there that can help as well, too many to list. Good luck, have fun.

I just happen to have a serious and concrete suggestion. http://www.cs.ucr.edu/~eamonn/iSAX/iSAX.html The referenced research paper includes experiments in which significant yet subtle changes in large time series data, such as a full night of EKG recording, can be identified two orders of magnitude faster than previous methods. The approach is relatively simple (the paper isn't heavy on math), and should scale very nicely to a parallel processing attack on the SETI signal detection problem.

About libelf - 6 years ago Groklaw closed this "issue": http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20040722135616439 The varable names are the same in both headers, because they correspond to Tool Interface Standard (TIS) 1.1 (Oct 1993). http://webster.cs.ucr.edu/Page_TechDocs/pfmt11.pdf

Light has momentum NOT mass. There is a difference. Photons are massless particles and all that, the usual edge case quirks of physics aside since they don't matter here.

To be more accurate, photons do have relativistic mass (pure energy) even though their rest mass is zero.

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/ParticleAndNuclear/photon_mass.html

Tell a kid to hand-write a story that's minimum 3 pages long

Why stop at 3 pages? Why not go the full 100 pages or 10000 words? Or even better, why not ask them to write the 14-line sonnets? From my experience, schools that constantly ask for short bits of writing haven't trained students on how to actually write them. Something short and simple can be done easily on Slashdot, while something long (or requires adhering to arbitrary guidelines) requires much more ability to complete.

But still, the comparison is between something from 1999 and 2010. While significant, it's not a huge generational shift, with the only difference being exposer to miniature high-tech stuff rather than computers in general. It has less weight than something between 1989 and 2010, and even less than 1910 and 2010. If I recall, there was an exam that alleged to be posted from the era of 1910 that showed quite advanced questions for a Grade 9 exam - and that was discredited on snopes.com. It's also moot, since knowledge required to survive in 1910 is different than knowledge required today; even something like farms operate differently to keep up with the demand.

Also, it's not the tech that causes stupidity - it's the substandard means to educate children. This includes teaching incorrect information and not accepting evidence to the contrary.

Okay, I'll bite.

So just because you measure the speed between them as c doesn't mean they are each moving at half-c. They are still both moving at c, in opposite directions, for an effective 2c with regards to their eventual position.

No. Your conclusions stem from a fundamental misunderstanding of relativity. It makes no sense to talk about "eventual position" in the way you are, because it requires talking about an absolute time. There is no absolute time. You may have heard this sentence being thrown around before in special relativity, but perhaps you haven't appreciated the full meaning of it.

Let's talk about "eventual position". What you're saying is, we measure the positions of A and C, then wait some time t, then measure their positions again, and, lo and behold, if we divide the distance travelled by the time taken we are left with the impression that A and C are moving apart at 2c. This is true if you measure t and the distance in B's reference frame, but not from A's or C's reference frames, even though these are equally valid.
Once again, there is never one way of looking at things that is just a little bit "truer" than the others, even if your intuition may tell you that, since B's reference frame is at rest, it should provide a less distorted and more objective measurement than A's/C's. Truth is, you could look at the same problem in a different way, where A is at rest. Then B is moving away from it at nearly-the-speed-of-light, and C is moving away at even-more-nearly-the-speed-of-light, at a speed defined by the equation on this page.
We have no definition of which of the above observations is the "correct" way of looking at things, because they are physically indistinguishable from each other. They are, in fact, the same thing; different realities exist for different observers, which is why the name "relativity" is so fitting.

Here's a better example. The furthest objects in the universe are about 13b light-years away. The light they emitted 13b years ago is getting to us now. Do you think, in the past 13b years, that they haven't moved any further??

Sure, 13b light-years away must mean that a photon arriving on earth right now must have been emitted 13b years ago, right? From our perspective it does. From the photon's perspective, it made the journey in less than the blink of an eye. Does this mean the photon travelled many multiples of the speed of light to get here? No, it just shows, once again, that different realities exist for different observers.

Spend a few hundred hours researching the issue, and you can be qualified to comment, too.

When you say "research" do you mean enrolling in graduate physics courses at an accredited university to learn about the radiative physics of the atmosphere? (This would involve some kind of objective measure of your ability to construct and solve equations.)

Or does "research" mean reading crackpot websites, then using trick #11: "10 points for beginning the description of your theory by saying how long you have been working on it. (10 more for emphasizing that you worked on your own.)"

Considering your other comment (which is wrong), it's probably not necessary for you to answer this question.

Keep in mind that all the creationists I've seen are convinced that they understand evolution better than 97% of evolutionary biologists. Just like you seem to be convinced that you understand radiative physics better than 97% of climatologists, and the overwhelming majority of scientists in all fields.

Hi, AC! I see you were modded down, and probably rightfully so, but I chose to answer anyway. Isn't life grand? :0)

Ditto.

I simply asked you a polite question. ... a simple question is a "nonsensical outburst"? That's interesting. I wonder how you would judge an actual rant. ...

No, you didn't "simply ask a polite question." You went on a rude, nonsensical rant. Let's review:

Nice pretty picture... especially when you consider it's a picture of something that very possibly doesn't even exist. [Jane Q. Public, Sunday March 28, @07:10PM]

This comment is similar to all the other crackpots in this thread who dispute modern physics which clearly shows that some amount of some kind of dark matter exists.

It exists. Educate yourself. [Abcd1234, Sunday March 28, @07:44PM]

Abcd1234 clearly assumed you were expressing support for MOND, and helpfully linked impressive evidence which convinced many physicists that dark matter explains the evidence better than MOND. Then I chimed in:

... Measurements of galactic rotational velocities conflict with expected velocities based on the amount of matter observed to be present. ... At this point, dark matter was simply an hypothesis. MOdified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND [umd.edu]) was another hypothesis with equal weight. But then in 2006 measurements of the Bullet Cluster supported the dark matter hypothesis over the MOND hypothesis ... [Dumb Scientist, Sunday March 28, @07:57PM]

The next day:

... There are alternative theories, such as MoND, that might explain this (since it explains the apparent gravitational anomalies in spiral galaxies, it is possible that it could explain this kind of gravitational anomaly equally as well). Most "evidence" I have seen that is supposed to support the Dark Matter theory tends to also support the alternative theories. ... [Jane Q. Public, Monday March 29, @12:28PM]

You present as evidence exactly the same sort of imaging techniques that were used to make the image in question? That's really lame. ... You offered the wikipedia link as evidence that OP's picture is correct... yet they used exactly the same techniques (having to do with gravitational lensing) to produce the pictures. Therefore you can't use one as evidence of the veracity of the other. [Jane Q. Public]

Nonsense. You made what sounded like a general statement about dark matter "very possibly" not even existing, which implies that physicists who overwhelmingly do think it exists are either incompetent or suffering from frequent hallucinations. The only reasonable objection to dark matter was MOND, and the Bullet Cluster presented very strong evidence that seems to rule out MOND with no dark matter. It's not "exactly the same technique" as the current survey because the main point of the Bullet Clust

That's all it is. This guy is a crackpot. He came up with a "theory" dressed up in science, that is nothing but wild speculation. Actually, it's not even speculation. It's Religion. He just decided the earth is a sentient being, without providing any kind of evidence for this ridiculous claim.

He also makes ridiculously close predictions for the "end of the world" and other unscientific predictions.

Now we know he's also against democracy.

What a nice guy.

Please, go ahead and try to measure him here http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html. My crackpot-o-meter went off-scale after trying to measure his theories.

For those of us that don't like dredging around the website for the actual "top 30%" "peer reviewed" paper, here is the link:
http://www.cs.ucr.edu/~marek/Charlie_Zola_Paper/paper2.pdf

Read http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html.

We don't need no education http://vitamind.ucr.edu/milk.html

With respect to the speed of light, it gets used to define the meter, while the second is defined in terms of oscillations of the cesium atom. So the speed of light is *exactly* 299,792,458 m/s and it's the definition of 'meter' that has all the experimental error.

Source

Special relativity, of course, forbids sending information faster than light. A theory supplanting the space-time unification of General Relativity would also supplant special relativity, and hence might not have that limitation. Here's an inteersting tidbit from the article: "Gia Dvali, a quantum gravity expert at CERN, remains cautious. A few years ago he tried a similar trick, breaking apart space and time in an attempt to explain dark energy. But he abandoned his model because it allowed information to be communicated faster than the speed of light."

I'd call that a feature, not a bug!

As it is written, so shall it be done.

In TFA: "he explains that within this regime, space stretches only a third as quickly as time." Take the inverse of the space-like concept, and space is compressed 3:1 vs time not at all. The speed of light itself may still indeed be glued to space, but information might still travel faster. In particular, this may apply to the theorized disparity between the speed of gravitational waves and gravitational radiation (see http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/GR/grav_speed.html and http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/GR/grav_radiation.html ). The former has been estimated at 0.8 to 1.2 c and there's little reason to think it's other than c. The latter is not necessarily constrained, and as this article states could be determined if a very high energy event involved both EM and g propagation could be detected.
 

Special relativity, of course, forbids sending information faster than light. A theory supplanting the space-time unification of General Relativity would also supplant special relativity, and hence might not have that limitation. Here's an inteersting tidbit from the article: "Gia Dvali, a quantum gravity expert at CERN, remains cautious. A few years ago he tried a similar trick, breaking apart space and time in an attempt to explain dark energy. But he abandoned his model because it allowed information to be communicated faster than the speed of light."

I'd call that a feature, not a bug!

As it is written, so shall it be done.

In TFA: "he explains that within this regime, space stretches only a third as quickly as time." Take the inverse of the space-like concept, and space is compressed 3:1 vs time not at all. The speed of light itself may still indeed be glued to space, but information might still travel faster. In particular, this may apply to the theorized disparity between the speed of gravitational waves and gravitational radiation (see http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/GR/grav_speed.html and http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/GR/grav_radiation.html ). The former has been estimated at 0.8 to 1.2 c and there's little reason to think it's other than c. The latter is not necessarily constrained, and as this article states could be determined if a very high energy event involved both EM and g propagation could be detected.
 

After only 2 years (from the perspective of the crew.. 3.75 years from the ground) at a constant 1g acceleration (you know, nice to have a sense of gravity for at least half of the trip..), you'll have traveled 2.9 light years.

After 5 years (using that same perspective) you'll have traveled nearly 83 light years (and nearly 84 years on the ground) and reached .99993 of c.

All of this is to say that from the perspective of the crew, this isn't necessarily a multi-lifetime trip.

See http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SR/rocket.html for more details

why didn't anyone in the Star Trek universe ever come up with the idea of using warp drives as weapons in a systematic way? A runabout crashing into a borg cube at warp seven would do quite a bit more damage than a photon torpedo, I would imagine. I guess kinetic energy just isn't "futuristic" enough.

According to some of the best speculative physics out there, warp drive must operate by either manipulating space-time itself, or by creating an artificial wormhole or some other means of traveling in extra dimensions. Within your local frame of reference your velocity would be quite low, as would your kinetic energy. You could also move at EXACTLY the speed of light by reducing the relativistic mass of your vessel to zero. Still no kinetic energy weapon there.

Using warped space itself as a weapon is a possibility, but who is to say that phasers don't already do some of that. Phasers certainly can't work merely by firing a beam of photons at the target, like a laser. If they did work like lasers, you wouldn't be able to see the beam.

Sublight engines, on the other hand, might be a possibility as the basis of a kinetic energy weapon. IIRC impulse drive could move a starship somewhere around 1/2c.

Well, for most of the Cenezoic era (the age of mammals, from 65 million years ago to now) there have been no polar ice caps. We are currently below the average temperature for the Cenezoic era and the average temperature for the Cenezoic era is below the average temperature of all prior eras since life has existed on Earth. http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/temperature/
Another interesting fact, the most dramatic global warming period in the geologic record, the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), was accompanied by a dramatic diversification of terrestrial life.

The eye can respond to single photons, but the brain filters them out below about a hundred per second.

You're quite literally correct of course. I was reflecting a more colloquial phrasing. I guess what I was trying to get at is that when faced with multiple alternative explanations for something, Occam's Razor is a good heuristic for picking one. Scientists sometimes employ Occam's Razor for selecting the simpler among competing but otherwise equivalent theories that match existing empirical evidence.

I tend to use it as a method of weighting scenarios. We live in a time when we don't "directly" know a great many things. We take very many things on faith - faith in others' expertise. When the "experts" or "leaders" cannot agree and the field is such that becoming personally aware of the mass of empirical evidence is not necessarily feasible, then Occam's Razor can be a useful heuristic for assigning likelihood.

Of course, the assumption behind Occam's Razor is that the universe doesn't prefer overly complex solutions. You could argue that there is a basis in reality to this - where our knowledge is sure, that seems to be what is reflected.

There's a great discussion of Occam's Razor here:
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/General/occam.html

I just want the fastest one.

I, for one, love to hand-optimize loops in Assembly. No, I don't. I read Hyde and said, "Yeah, I'll wait until after the YAGNI moment passes".

Technically, the internet is the largest library of information ever known to man. To dismiss it only shows his inability to truly grasp it.

Hmmm, no, I would not be so quick to dispute that statement at all.

There is so much crap on the internet that it undermines all the information that is out there. Conversely, if you go to the 500 and 600 sections of the library, you can be somewhat assured that you are getting at least -something- that is accurate.

This is wrong on so many levels (I counted 3). First there is a lot of reliable information on the internet and if you know where to look and how to evaluate stuff all the crap definitely does not undermine the good part. Second there is a ton bad information in print. From horoscopes to "alternative medicine" there's stuff out there that could cause quite a lot of harm you if you take it to heart. Which brings me to the final point. If the internet made some people realize that just because something is presented to a wide audience it doesn't need to be true it's already served a very useful purpose.

Also, there's really not anything that approaches the value of a good textbook available on line.

Are you serious? There are a ton of good textbooks online that you can download legally. Here are a few (from point 3): http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/week260.html That's one example from a pretty narrow field. And of course you can get pretty much anything through p2p though that might be illegal in some places.

If there's any problem with libraries, its more a lack of funding and a lack of societies attention to pay librarians seriously and to respect the field. A good librarian is a skilled position, somebody who can reach into all the various fields and find what's good, and gather it up into one spot.

I don't necessarily disagree with this, but a lot of the technical stuff librarians used to do, like cataloging stuff is becoming less and less important. Search is just superior, and while a good librarian is probably better at this too in the end everyone has to learn it. Finally, separating the useful from the useless is something that should not be relegated. It's just too important. Sure, if you're new to something you are going to need some advice where to start. But at some point you should decide for yourself, or at least critically evaluate any advice you receive or read.

Please, stop making up words. We don't seen any morphoniche filled, because there is simply no such thing.

http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/ridley/a-z/Morphospace.asp
And, for a word pedant, you seemed to have used the word 'Theory' incorrectly.
The nearby gradstudent seemed to understand me just fine. So.

w= resulting speed
u= speed of one object
v= speed of the other object
c= speed of light

                              u + v
                  w = ---------
                            1 + uv/c2

Under 'human' circumstances the u and the v would be soo small compared to c, that uv/c2 would approximate to 0, and w could be considered u + v.
Yet if u and/or v are high, for instance half the speed of light, w would not be u + v = .5c + .5c = c = the speed of light, but c/(1 + (.25c2/c2)) => c/1.25 = .8c

Better explained here: http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SR/velocity.html

I believe transmitting information faster than light is explicitly ruled out by the special theory of relativity, and leads to all sorts of paradoxes if it's posited to be possible. That's not just a practical limitation on materials science, but a fundamental physical law, so I suspect there must be some other explanation for why this marble thought experiment doesn't work.

My guess is that the intuition of the incompressible-marbles-transmit-signals-instantly example discounts relativistic effects, so only really works at much-lower-than-c speeds. I can't offhand explain what exactly the relativistic effect that makes it fail would be, but one guess is the one explained here, that you're setting up a scenario with infinite phase velocity, but where information can still only be transmitted at a lower group velocity.

The first part of your idea would work - you can get word of an earthquake out shortly before it actually hits areas not near the epicenter. However, the problem is that the amount of warning time is - in most realistic cases - not nearly enough for people to be able to get out of unsafe buildings and into safe ones. This would get you literally 10-20 seconds of warning - which is still useful, potentially giving you time to duck under your desk.

Some seismologists at UC Riverside are actually developing a system that uses data from the accelerometer in your Macbook or Thinkpad to map seismic events in real-time - seismometers have a 10-15s delay in reporting, which eliminates the 10-20s warning, but your computer (or purpose-built devices, obviously) can update in real-time. If all the computers in an area start shaking at once, you know it's not just someone bumping their desk, and can signal the warning immediately to give people that time to duck and cover. See http://newsroom.ucr.edu/news_item.html?action=page&id=1806 for a news-type explanation, and http://qcn.stanford.edu/ for the current state of the project, which is developing into a world-wide network of monitoring stations.

The reason 10-20s is still useful is that the best thing you can do to increase your chances of surviving an earthquake while indoors is to stay indoors. Many people are injured or killed because they run outside after feeling the initial p-wave, thinking the building may collapse, only to get hit by bricks that fall off the building's facade (for example) when the bigger s-wave hits and the real shaking happens. Most buildings - especially if you live in an earthquake-prone area - will survive an earthquake (though obviously not in places with a lot of old buildings, like Italy). If you have 10-20s of warning, you can duck under your desk and avoid getting smashed in the head by the bowling ball you keep on your bookshelf (the shelf itself should be attached to the wall) which is the real danger of earthquakes while indoors.

(IAAG - I am a geologist)

So if the graviton is massless, how does it interact with matter?

Well, given a photon is massless, yet still interacts with matter, I'm really not sure where the problem is...

Maybe you're thinking of this? It's not hosted at UC Berkeley, but it does sound like what you're talking about. I found a reference to it at Wikipedia.

I hate misleading articles like this.

Have to say Im pretty sure this guy would have been able to walk as described sans spider bite. In fact, if he had been hospitalized several years before maybe the outcome would have been the same.

And on top of that, I doubt even more that he was bitten by a brown recluse. These are extremely rare if not nonexistant in California (http://spiders.ucr.edu/myth.html).

And on top of THAT, what looks like a brown recluse spider bite is most often a misdiagnosed staph or other necrotic infection (http://spiders.ucr.edu/necrotic.html).

And despite all this misinformation, probably safe to say people will believe that brown recluse spider bites are like the next stem cell technology.

I hate misleading articles like this.

Have to say Im pretty sure this guy would have been able to walk as described sans spider bite. In fact, if he had been hospitalized several years before maybe the outcome would have been the same.

And on top of that, I doubt even more that he was bitten by a brown recluse. These are extremely rare if not nonexistant in California (http://spiders.ucr.edu/myth.html).

And on top of THAT, what looks like a brown recluse spider bite is most often a misdiagnosed staph or other necrotic infection (http://spiders.ucr.edu/necrotic.html).

And despite all this misinformation, probably safe to say people will believe that brown recluse spider bites are like the next stem cell technology.

I've had this argument many times over with Californians. http://spiders.ucr.edu/myth.html

There are no populations of brown recluse spiders living in California. In case, this upsets your applecart, I repeat, there are no populations of brown recluse spiders living in California. The common name "brown recluse spider" refers to one species of spider, Loxosceles reclusa, which lives in the central Midwest: Nebraska south to Texas and eastward to southernmost Ohio and north-central Georgia (see map). Only a handful of specimens (less than 10) have ever been collected in California and usually there is some connection between the spider and a recent move or shipment from the Midwest.

I remember from the Usenet Physics FAQ that quarks are normally bound together too tightly to be observed (although that article is almost fifteen years old). Is this an exception or is something else going on? Have other single quarks been observed too?

Human eye is actually able to detect single photons but we're programmed not to notice them unless they are above a certain threshold.

Quote from: http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Quantum/see_a_photon.html

The human eye is very sensitive but can we see a single photon? The answer is that the sensors in the retina can respond to a single photon. However, neural filters only allow a signal to pass to the brain to trigger a conscious response when at least about five to nine arrive within less than 100 ms. If we could consciously see single photons we would experience too much visual "noise" in very low light, so this filter is a necessary adaptation, not a weakness.

Have them follow John Baez at: http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/ The can look over the past several years of his postings. He covers lots of topics in math and whatever else interests him.

You may be interested to know that the blog's author invented the Crackpot Index.

Thanks, I checked it out. It's weak. I've seen much better.

You might be interested to know that the commenter (myself) is a kookologist of long standing, and was a frequent contributor of both administration and material to the operations of alt.usenet.kooks and the many kookological awards dispensed. I've studied networkish psychoceramics for well over a decade. I know it when I see it, whether it's in its natural native form, is developed intentionally as an art form (Meow), or is an effort conducted in response to a perceived kook of choice with or without wrong doing directed at those exhibiting kookness. TFA is of the last form, and I suspect perceived wrongdoing against them to be the driving force.

You may be interested to know that the blog's author invented the Crackpot Index.

Thanks, I checked it out. It's weak. I've seen much better.

You might be interested to know that the commenter (myself) is a kookologist of long standing, and was a frequent contributor of both administration and material to the operations of alt.usenet.kooks and the many kookological awards dispensed. I've studied networkish psychoceramics for well over a decade. I know it when I see it, whether it's in its natural native form, is developed intentionally as an art form (Meow), or is an effort conducted in response to a perceived kook of choice with or without wrong doing directed at those exhibiting kookness. TFA is of the last form, and I suspect perceived wrongdoing against them to be the driving force.

You may be interested to know that the blog's author invented the Crackpot Index.

You may be interested to know that the blog's author invented the Crackpot Index.

IMHO, I think Assembly is the best because it forces you to start thinking about how the machine itself functions underneath. Art of Assembly is where I got my start.

or is it?

See here for what the heat death of the universe would be like.

Regarding your thought experiment: the cosmic microwave background radiation is a much larger influx than the Hawking radiation outflux of any stellar (or larger) black hole. So unless the black hole is isolated from the rest of the universe, it will always grow from cosmic radiation, even if no matter falls in. (Or at least until the universe expands enough that the background radiation becomes cooler than Hawking radiation; see here, in the second half.)

If the universe is smaller than its Schwarzschild radius, it should collapse into a singularity. It hasn't, so it apparently isn't.

As mentioned here, the concept of a Schwarzschild radius is one limiting case of Einstein's equations of general relativity. It is a useful concept with various rules-of-thumb, but one must be careful in applying it to all situations. In particular, the approximation breaks down, and a full treatment using the equations of general relativity is instead necessary, for "extreme" situations (like inside a black hole, during the big bang, when applied to the entire universe, etc.).

More specifically (this site seems to explain it somewhat), the "Schwarzschild black hole" is just one solution to the equations of general relativity--it is a limiting case for nominally static matter (that is also non-rotating, spherically symmetric). Other solutions are required in other cases (e.g. the Kerr solution for rotating black holes). The Schwarzschild solution doesn't apply to dynamic systems (e.g. rapidly expanding matter). In particular the big bang and subsequent expansion of the universe represent a different solution to the equations of GR. This solution provides for a roughly flat space but massive expansion (hence highly curved spacetime, as one would expect for such high mass-density). Our best understanding suggests that inflation occurred (where space was expanding faster than the speed of light, although light/energy/matter/information was still constrained by c).

In my previous post I was just pointing out that the expected size for the Schwarzschild radius is very large. However that is based on a naive application of the usual rules-of-thumb. The big bang, if you will, is extreme enough that it requires a more careful treatment. Moreover, our best data right now suggests that the universe is roughly flat and infinite (and thus with infinite or at least extremely large mass), meaning that there is probably no meaningful way to apply the "Schwarzschild radius" concept to it.

Disclaimer: I'm not a cosmologist. Hopefully I didn't make a mistake.

Just a thought, and a bit off-topic, I know, but I was wondering if there is an Absolute Maximum Temperature?

In at least one sense, there obviously is a highest possible temperature, and in another, there can't possibly be. If there is a highest temperature, it is probably the planck temperature, unless it's the hagedorn temperature, or, under a certain crafty merger of cosmology and negative temperatures the maximum might be -0k.

Unless it's something else. Or unless there isn't one.

--MarkusQ

Both of those are assumptions. If they were true, there wouldn't be a logical explaination for tachyons.

Who cares if there's a logical explanation for tachyons, since we don't have evidence for any?

Anyway, even if tachyons existed you'd never actually observe anything traveling faster than light; see this FAQ.

In other dimensions things DO move faster then light.

Says who? In any relativistic quantum field theory or string theory, c is the limit in any dimension.

Furthermore, the speed of gravity is much greater then c.

van Flandern's website is a bunch of crackpot nonsense. He was pretty notorious on Usenet for years. He misapplies perturbation theory; if you apply his same arguments to electromagnetism, you "conclude" that light travels faster than light too (see here). In fact, you can rigorously prove in general relativity that the speed of gravity cannot exceed c (see here, assuming that the gravitational waves aren't produced by weird things like negative mass). The 1993 Nobel prize in physics was awarded, in part, for an observational determination of the speed of gravity. (You can deduce it by the rate at which gravitational energy is radiated by orbiting bodies.) The measurements indicate that the speed of gravity is c, to within a few percent accuracy.

The speed of light limit has some caveats. Wormholes, which Relativity predicts, offer a way out. You dont need to actually travel faster than light, if you can find shortcuts through other dimensions. The physicist Kip Thorne formulated the mathematics of transversable wormholes. Just because its something beyond out current physics, doesnt mean that FTL cant exist. After all, do any of you really think that the current theories are entirely correct? Just like Newton was supplanted by Einstein, so Einstein will be supplanted one day. The fact is, if you take brane theory into account there could be other universes where our laws of physics dont even apply, and if a wormhole bridge can exist between them, not only FTL but time travel is a real possibility. As a matter of fact, Theoretical physicists like Kaku state that, with cosmic censorship in place, that FTL and time travel are a real possibility.

No, gravitational effects travel at the speed of light. If something happened to the Sun, we would feel the gravitational effect at the same time we saw the light from the event, 8 minutes later. You can find somewhat more technical details in this FAQ.

There are some subtle effects due to relativity; the direction of gravitational attraction appears to point toward where the Sun is now, not where it was 8 minutes ago. Actually, it doesn't really point to where the Sun is now. It points toward a linear extrapolation of where the Sun "should be" now based on where it really was 8 minutes ago, which solves the paradox: no information about the Sun's current position is transmitted faster than light. This also happens in electromagnetism with the Lorentz force experienced by a charged particle. There is a somewhat notorious crackpot on MetaResearch.org who misunderstands this point and uses it to argue that gravity propagates nearly instantaneously. (For some reason he doesn't apply the same logic to argue that light travels faster than light, which is what that error implies.)

Both of those are assumptions. If they were true, there wouldn't be a logical explaination for tachyons.

Who cares if there's a logical explanation for tachyons, since we don't have evidence for any?

Anyway, even if tachyons existed you'd never actually observe anything traveling faster than light; see this FAQ.

In other dimensions things DO move faster then light.

Says who? In any relativistic quantum field theory or string theory, c is the limit in any dimension.

Furthermore, the speed of gravity is much greater then c.

van Flandern's website is a bunch of crackpot nonsense. He was pretty notorious on Usenet for years. He misapplies perturbation theory; if you apply his same arguments to electromagnetism, you "conclude" that light travels faster than light too (see here). In fact, you can rigorously prove in general relativity that the speed of gravity cannot exceed c (see here, assuming that the gravitational waves aren't produced by weird things like negative mass). The 1993 Nobel prize in physics was awarded, in part, for an observational determination of the speed of gravity. (You can deduce it by the rate at which gravitational energy is radiated by orbiting bodies.) The measurements indicate that the speed of gravity is c, to within a few percent accuracy.

There's a more in-depth article on Javascript's functional capabilities here:

http://www.hunlock.com/blogs/Functional_Javascript

Other stuff I pulled out of Google for your perusing:

http://dankogai.typepad.com/blog/2006/03/lambda_calculus.html
http://math.ucr.edu/~mike/lc2js.html
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/08/01.html
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/wa-javascript.html

What this all means is that Javascript is the most widely deployed functional language in existence! And that's a fact you can take to the bank.