Re:I don't want to believe, I want to be left alon
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Hackers And Mysticism?
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· Score: 1
Kintanon, I know this topic's dead by now, but instead of emailing you I'm going to post this in the hopes that you'll monitor your replies, see it and think about it.
But we do not understand Atheists. The fact that someone is actually willing to say that 'NO! There is no deity of any kind anywhere and I KNOW THIS FOR CERTAIN.' baffles us completely. Agnostics proclaim not to know the answer, perfectly understandable. Other religions have their own views, but all admit the possibility of an all powerful deity or multiple powerful deities somewhere doing something. Atheists proclaim that they have sure knowledge of the nonexistance of such a being despite there being no proof one way or the other.
In that case, you don't misunderstand atheists, you misunderstand what is meant by the term "atheist." It's rare for an atheist to claim they know for certain there is no deity of any kind; rather, they reject specific claims for the existence of a deity on the same grounds for which they reject the claim for the existence of the Easter Bunny, for example, or of Santa Claus.
You don't have a problem with someone rejecting the existence of (for example) Allah -- if you're a Christian, you no doubt do this yourself ("Thou shalt have no other gods before Me"). You say you understand other religions, which I take to mean you understand someone rejecting the existence of the Christian God. How then is there a problem with understanding the union of all these specific sets of disbelief?
Another way to put it is this: all the world's religions can't be right -- there's too much contradiction between them -- but they can all be wrong. I can't prove that that's the case, but after careful examination of a large number of religions, I have to say that it's pretty easy for me to conclude that the whole lot is not worth pursuing...
The article is long on details on what one can do with a big mirror, but it doesn't go into the major technical problems you'd run into.
I haven't read the paper, but Jim Crocker and John Trauger are both pretty smart cookies -- and they've apparently thought things through well enough that Bruce McCandless has bought off on it. Sure, the article doesn't go into this -- but the article is a Fox News article, fergawdsake, not a peer-reviewed publication!
My money says they've thought of everything you're bringing up as an objection, and have a fix for it. Crocker even commented that his first reaction was the same as yours: "Wow, that'll never work." I doubt that any of these guys would risk their reputations on something just slopped together.
Keep in mind that this isn't a quick and easy retrofit for the Hubble. This is a major undertaking which would require a major budget. The article comes off sounding like it would be cheap and easy and silly not to do, whereas it would probably turn out that for the kind of money you'd be talking about, you might as well spend a little more and build a new, better telescope from scratch.
I haven't read their proposed budget, either, but the article does talk about money -- and says it should cost maybe half of what doing it from scratch would cost. Other plusses are the fact that they're using a spare mirror from the Very Large Telescope (which is a ground instrument, BTW, which speaks to some of the excess thickness) and also using a proven spacecraft and subsystems. Sounds reasonable and relatively cheap to me...
I think the hardest, riskiest part of the proposal is the orbital refitting: working in microgee conditions is difficult, and they'll have to be extremely careful not to damage Hubble (old and new parts).
On the whole, it's an intriguing proposal: I'd like to see some details of what they intend to do, before condemning the whole idea.
it takes the entire Earth just to keep you from floating out into space - it would take another whole planet hovering above your head to levitate you.
Not quite -- you're ignoring the inverse-distance^2 dependence of gravity. All you need is enough mass at the proper distance...
But I suspect you knew that, and besides the concept is much more impressive the way you stated it.:)
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Re:No need for Jeff Goldblum yet
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TigerCloning
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· Score: 1
You are of course right: marsupials are one (primitive) branch of the mammals. Must've had my brain turned off, so soon after lunch.
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Re:No need for Jeff Goldblum yet
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TigerCloning
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· Score: 1
...but the Thylacine doesn't have any very close relatives - what're they talking about anyway, a wolverine? Tasmanian Devil? Wombat?
The story says Tasmanian Devil. BTW, while the TD and wombat are marsupials (like the thylacine), the wolverine is a mammal (IIRC related to the badger and weasels).
Look the fact that his pen cost $2M to make is completely irrelevant to the fact that it saved his life simply by being conductive. They didn't spend $2M trying to make it conductive; if they had invented a Teflon pen for $4M he would have been screwed.
You're overlooking the fact that it wasn't his pen that cost $2M, it was the research that went into developing the pen that cost the money. You can buy those pens for a few dollars now -- and they still have plenty of use. Amortize the developmental cost over the units used over the last 35 years, and it was cheap! (And Teflon wouldn't work nearly as well as metal, considering the ink cartridge has to be pressurized -- which was the better part of the trick.)
The point of the tale is that, expensive as it was, it was much less expensive than a lost mission (not to mention two human lives); granted it wasn't designed to be conductive, but a pencil wouldn't have replaced it... Just goes to show you that you can't predict the utility of expensive research, huh?:)
You can argue he wouldn't have had the pen there if they hadn't spent $2M on developing it, but so what; if I spend $30,000 on a rolex watch and find myself with 5 minutes to live lest I short out a bomb detonation device - it doesn't mean I chose the right watch.
But it means you chose the one of greatest ultimate value to you, doesn't it?
I'd also be glad to find a hairpin.
Yep. I'll bet Armstrong would have been glad to find a hairpin, too -- but I'll also bet there wasn't one on the LM. There were, however, two pens.
If, somehow, in some way - writing with Pen ink, and pen ink only had saved his life -- then it would be worthy. And writing with Pen ink in space over any other writing aid will never save a human life; you can quote me on that.
Wow! Both those statements are incredible... I fail to see the logic of the first one (to me, whatever I paid for the thing which saved my life is worth it, regardless of whether or not it was used for its intended purpose), and the second is simply nonsense. It doesn't take much imagination to come up with a scenario wherein waterproof ink survives, where pencil writing is washed or rubbed into illegibility -- and the outcome of a space mission would depend on reading the handwritten data. Your imagination is too limited, I think...
Incidentally, the applicability of his story is what I'm insulting in reference to his writing skills. The story starts by insulting a person against all forms of costly scientific progress, it then introduced the now infamous $2M pen, It goes on to say the Pen was available completely at random, to be used in a way $2M could not possibly justify, and again insults the person who didn't want to spend $2M on a 3" conducting piece of steel.
You're now arguing against the content of his writing, not his writing skills -- you've shifted the universe of discourse. And incidently mis-stated the content of his article, in my opinion... FWIW, Proxmire always gave me heartburn, too -- I found him ignorant, intolerant, and obnoxious (not to mention fundamentally lacking in imagination). OTOH, I found Spider Robinson to be a reasonably good writer. Neither of these statements addresses the issue at hand, any more than your statements did.
What about a metal, mechanical pencil? or a Metal mechanical chalk-holder:)
Yep, either one might have worked -- especially if they had a metal pocket clip. But all Neil had at hand was his pen... fortunately for him (and the nation, too, come to think of it). And there were good reasons to develop a space-qualified pen instead of the other two.
A gamma photon with enough energy can expell a proton or neutron from a nucleus -- what's left is a different element or a different isotope of the same element, which is sometimes unstable and decays radioactively. But this takes a very energetic gamma, and isn't particularly efficient (it has to hit the nucleus, which is quite small, and gamma photons aren't scattered easily by normal matter -- same reason that slow neutrons work better than fast neutrons in inducing radioactivity).
At the proper energies, it can also excite the nucleus into a higher-energy state, from which it decays by emitting a gamma photon (analogous to lower-energy photons exciting the electrons in an atom). But the emitted gamma (or sometimes a cascade of gammas, each at lower energies) are produced almost immediately -- not a longer-term radioactivity like the first case often is.
how is this different from sci-fi author Niven's "organ bootlegging?"...they're not really human. Their humanity is a "personal, private issue."
There is a world of difference between the mature, functional adults who were "broken up for parts" in Niven's stories, and a fertilized embryo which hasn't even begun to differentiate. If you can't see that, I can't help you (except to comment that no one I've talked to would even think of a full-scale funeral for a miscarried embryo at that stage -- it's extremely unlikely that the mother would notice anything more than a heavy period).
Sick. If this research goes anywhere, it'll open up a whole new world of mining dead babies for medical resources.
One more time: not "dead babies," but undifferentiated embryos. The ones under discussion are left over from in-vitreo fertilizations for couples unable to conceive; since they aren't used and are otherwise going to be destroyed, this use makes sense.
But I'm sure I'm wasting my breath (or finger motion, as the case is...) -- you no doubt have some problem with helping infertile women conceive, too. So let me further confuse the issue for you, and ask if (since the Scottish successes in cloning non-stem cells from adult animals) every cell in your body has recently acquired some sacrosanct status? Remember that you naturally shed a lot of skin cells...
It's this kind of shrugging off ethics once something profits you that's the core of everything that's wrong in society from corporate pollution to drug dealing.
I suspect you actually mean "morals" instead of "ethics," but the reply isn't that different between the two cases:
I'm going to challenge you to come up with a set of rules for us to follow, which incorporate the entire US population's collective set of ethics (and morals, just for good measure), without either limiting anyone's freedom or forcing anyone to do something they find morally or ethically repugnant. Note that the population under discussion includes a wide variety of Christian faiths, Islamic faiths, Hindu, assorted Asian and African and Native American religions, plus atheists and agnostics who don't practice any religious behavior but do have their own morals and ethics, and a whole lot more. And I'll tell you in advance that you can't do that -- there's too much internal inconsistency in the data set.
The only possible resolution I see is to have the minimal set of rules which are required behavior (another post of mine on this topic discusses this), and otherwise allow the individuals to decide within their own framework what they will or will not morally and ethically do. Otherwise, you're in the position of forcing your morality on others, and I can tell you in advance that's not going to work. Aside from constitutional issues, people aren't going to sit still for it.
But that requires people to be responsible for themselves, which is an unpopular notion at the moment, especially in some religious circles...
It didn't take a two-million dollar pen to hotwire the switch, it took a piece of metal.
Yep. And from the story Armstrong told, the only handy piece of metal he had was his pen. Remember, he'd already tossed the lifesupport system, and there wasn't much on that spacecraft that wasn't absolutely essential to its proper function, due to weight limitations (which is probably why the switch was so chintzy in the first place).
Incidentally, Pencil lead is conductive, and depending on the size of the gap and voltage present, it may very well have been possible to hotwire that lander with a pencil.
Yeah, maybe -- a very weak maybe. Graphite is conductive, but it ain't no great shakes compared to most metals. (It does work well in arc lamps, though, doesn't it? Tells you something...)
Besides, this guy is a horrible writer - I wouldn't read his book if I got paid for it.
And your lack of appreciation of his writing skills affects the applicability of his story how?:)
(There are days when I don't know whether to hate Netscape or M$ more...) Here goes a second try:
If you're talking about manned space exploration, you're sorta right: much of the public is more interested in other things.
If you're talking about space exploration in general, just think back about four years to the Mars Pathfinder landing... people loved it!
As to what might motivate them, I think finding extraterrestrial life would be pretty high on the list (and intelligent extraterrestrials even moreso. Except for the rioting).
Geez, I hate it when my font cache gets corrupted... here I go again:
Don't forget that Neil Armstrong used one of those pens to hotwire the ascent stage's arming switch, after he'd broken it off trying to move around the tiny LM cabin in his spacesuit. Let's see ya try that one with a pencil!
Don't forget that ?A href="http://news.globetechnology.com/search97cgi/ s97_cgi?action=View?VdkVgwKey=%2Fjules1% 2Fusr%2Flocal%2Fnewglobetechnology%2Farchive%2Fgam %2FTechInvest%2F19990715%2FTWSPID%2Ehtml ?DocOffset=12?DocsFound=18?QueryZip=spider+robinso n?Collection=Tech?SortField=sortdate?Vie wTemplate=TechDocView%2Ehts?SearchUrl=http%3A%2F%2 Fnews%2Eglobetechnology%2Ecom%2Fsearch97 cgi%2Fs97%5Fcgi%3FQueryZip%3Dspider%2Brobinson%26R esultTemplate%3DTechResults%252Ehts%26Qu eryText%3Dspider%2Brobinson%26Collection%3DTech%26 SortField%3Dsortdate%26ViewTemplate%3DTe chDocView%252Ehts%26ResultStart%3D11%26ResultCount %3D10?"?Neil Armstrong used one of those pens?/A? to hotwire the ascent stage's arming switch, after he'd broken it off trying to move around the tiny LM cabin in his spacesuit. Let's see ya try that one with a pencil!
If you're talking about manned space exploration, you're sorta right: much of the public is more interested in other things.?P?
If you're talking about space exploration in general, just think back about four years to the ?I?Mars Pathfinder?/I? landing... people loved it!?P?
As to what might motivate them, I think finding extraterrestrial life would be pretty high on the list (and ?I?intelligent?/I? extraterrestrials even moreso. Except for the rioting).
?blockquote??I?Any other questions??/blockquote??/I??P?
Yeah, this one: is rickets known to cause the demonstrated changes in Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA (compared to modern human mDNA)? Just curious...
Ummmm... not to be pedantic (okay, okay, so I'm being pedantic), but it's not radioactive.
The radiation in a planetary magnetosphere is high-energy electrons and protons. You wouldn't be happy being exposed to it, but all it's going to do is ionize you down at the molecular level, not make you (or anything else) significantly radioactive. That would require something like neutrons or gamma rays, neither of which are affected by the magnetic field which accelerates and guides the charged particles./pedantry
For me, the resolution goes like this: everyone gets to have their own opinion, regardless, and gets to exercise it at their discretion unless somebody else demonstrates conclusively that such exercise will damage said someone else. A logical extension argues that third parties should also be included, which is where the right-to-life issue stalls out.
As far as I can tell, though, this is something pretty new: from my viewpoint, the whole thing pretty much swings on the brilliant (or perhaps I mean "diabolical") coining of the term "right to life," which is pretty damned hard to fight... But it's interesting to note that virtually every right-to-lifer I've talked to only feels that way about embryonic people -- when it comes to war or capital punishment, they're on the other side (despite the fact that innocents die those ways, too).
So, Queen-hunny, I can't really answer the question except to say that accommodating the largest possible number of divergent viewpoints means having the least possible set of rules, regardless of how much any particular subgroup wants their own special set. Otherwise, you're going to annoy almost everyone, instead of annoying only a small subgroup (regardless of their conviction that they have the holy truth).
In the real world (the US part of it, anyway), however, it's getting harder and harder to defend this sort of freedom. On bad days, I think your last sentence most likely portends our future...
While you have a valid point about the inarguable fact that non-rightwing, non-religious pro-lifers do exist, that doesn't contradict my statement that it was the religious right who politicized the issue. I don't see how you can disagree with that statement -- just look at the people who introduced and then passed the legislation. Not many pagans, anarchists, libertarians, etc. in that group...
The simple existence of logical arguments opposed to my own logical arguments doesn't give either of us the right to legislate our own particular views. It would seem reasonable to therefore leave the implementation of those views in the personal and private realm.
Are you then arguing that political solutions aren't be the only recourse now? If we don't accept political solutions (i.e., "compromises"), it goes right back to the "religious" approach, doesn't it?
Verbal fencing aside, why do you assume that I'm prejudiced, simply because I disagree with you? I prefer my universe to be tolerant of diversity, thus allowing people like you and me to hold (and practice) their viewpoints.
Unfortunately, the religious right has completely politicized what should have been a personal, private issue all along... along with a bunch of other issues, which I'll save space by not going into.
Political solutions are the only possible solutions at this point, then -- and I'm glad that those are at least possible. It could easily be worse, and might get that way soon; I think my.sig pretty much says it all.
Don't you think that the discoveries made in the meantime will help generate the interest to keep expending the bucks to develop the infrastructure? Otherwise, why bother?
It would be more accurate to say that the Moon is not considered a planet because of one little detail. Doesn't orbit the Sun, but rather the Earth.
Interestingly enough, the orbit of the Moon is smoothly convex relative to the Sun -- it's orbital period around Earth is long enough that there aren't any cusps in its orbit, as there are in so many other moons. So in a sense it could be considered to orbit the Sun in gravitational association with Earth, and there have been numerous suggestions that the Earth/Moon pair should be considered a double planet rather than a planet/moon.
But there's that history thing again, so I think the nomenclature won't change...
Pluto was given "planet" status only as a reward to the discoverer
Uhhhh... interesting statement, but I have to disagree. When Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto on February 18, 1930, he was searching for a ninth planet predicted to exist because of discrepancies between the predicted and actual orbits of Uranus (and Neptune) -- the precise reason that the planet Neptune had been discovered, in fact (here's a detailed story of the whole affair). At the time, no one had any notion that Pluto would be so small: it was predicted to be between two and seven times the mass of Earth, and everyone expected it to be dim -- why else would it be so hard to find?
As it turned out, the most likely cause for Uranus and Neptune's orbital discrepancies is probably observational error, and Pluto just happened to be in the approximate neighborhood being searched. If it were discovered today, we might not call it a "planet" -- it's only the largest (so far) of a number of objects in the Kuiper belt -- but this has been the subject of a lot of controversy, and it's been officially decided to keep calling it a planet.
At the time it was discovered, no one had any notion that things would turn out this way, so it was just considered a planet and named as such. No special considerations or rewards -- just ignorance of the future, as always...
You can also find them at the official NEAR website, where they come in MPG, animiated GIF and both compressed and uncompressed QuickTime formats. Look in the Image of the Day Archive.
My textbooks are buried a bit too deeply to consult at the moment, but IIRC the assumption that the zero point energy is non-zero is axiomatic, not derivative; I also know there's speculation (controversial, admittedly) that useful energy can be extracted from the vacuum, and that the Casmir Effect has been demonstrated experimentally.
So my question is really, "is the nonzero vacuum energy part of the overall-zero energy balance of the Universe (as in the various inflationary theories)? Or does it require some other explanation?"
Slashdot Mirror
In that case, you don't misunderstand atheists, you misunderstand what is meant by the term "atheist." It's rare for an atheist to claim they know for certain there is no deity of any kind; rather, they reject specific claims for the existence of a deity on the same grounds for which they reject the claim for the existence of the Easter Bunny, for example, or of Santa Claus.
You don't have a problem with someone rejecting the existence of (for example) Allah -- if you're a Christian, you no doubt do this yourself ("Thou shalt have no other gods before Me"). You say you understand other religions, which I take to mean you understand someone rejecting the existence of the Christian God. How then is there a problem with understanding the union of all these specific sets of disbelief?
Another way to put it is this: all the world's religions can't be right -- there's too much contradiction between them -- but they can all be wrong. I can't prove that that's the case, but after careful examination of a large number of religions, I have to say that it's pretty easy for me to conclude that the whole lot is not worth pursuing...
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I haven't read the paper, but Jim Crocker and John Trauger are both pretty smart cookies -- and they've apparently thought things through well enough that Bruce McCandless has bought off on it. Sure, the article doesn't go into this -- but the article is a Fox News article, fergawdsake, not a peer-reviewed publication!
My money says they've thought of everything you're bringing up as an objection, and have a fix for it. Crocker even commented that his first reaction was the same as yours: "Wow, that'll never work." I doubt that any of these guys would risk their reputations on something just slopped together.
I haven't read their proposed budget, either, but the article does talk about money -- and says it should cost maybe half of what doing it from scratch would cost. Other plusses are the fact that they're using a spare mirror from the Very Large Telescope (which is a ground instrument, BTW, which speaks to some of the excess thickness) and also using a proven spacecraft and subsystems. Sounds reasonable and relatively cheap to me...
I think the hardest, riskiest part of the proposal is the orbital refitting: working in microgee conditions is difficult, and they'll have to be extremely careful not to damage Hubble (old and new parts).
On the whole, it's an intriguing proposal: I'd like to see some details of what they intend to do, before condemning the whole idea.
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Not quite -- you're ignoring the inverse-distance^2 dependence of gravity. All you need is enough mass at the proper distance...
But I suspect you knew that, and besides the concept is much more impressive the way you stated it. :)
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The story says Tasmanian Devil. BTW, while the TD and wombat are marsupials (like the thylacine), the wolverine is a mammal (IIRC related to the badger and weasels).
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Nope. Well, not much... ;)
You're overlooking the fact that it wasn't his pen that cost $2M, it was the research that went into developing the pen that cost the money. You can buy those pens for a few dollars now -- and they still have plenty of use. Amortize the developmental cost over the units used over the last 35 years, and it was cheap! (And Teflon wouldn't work nearly as well as metal, considering the ink cartridge has to be pressurized -- which was the better part of the trick.)
The point of the tale is that, expensive as it was, it was much less expensive than a lost mission (not to mention two human lives); granted it wasn't designed to be conductive, but a pencil wouldn't have replaced it... Just goes to show you that you can't predict the utility of expensive research, huh? :)
But it means you chose the one of greatest ultimate value to you, doesn't it?
Yep. I'll bet Armstrong would have been glad to find a hairpin, too -- but I'll also bet there wasn't one on the LM. There were, however, two pens.
Wow! Both those statements are incredible... I fail to see the logic of the first one (to me, whatever I paid for the thing which saved my life is worth it, regardless of whether or not it was used for its intended purpose), and the second is simply nonsense. It doesn't take much imagination to come up with a scenario wherein waterproof ink survives, where pencil writing is washed or rubbed into illegibility -- and the outcome of a space mission would depend on reading the handwritten data. Your imagination is too limited, I think...
You're now arguing against the content of his writing, not his writing skills -- you've shifted the universe of discourse. And incidently mis-stated the content of his article, in my opinion... FWIW, Proxmire always gave me heartburn, too -- I found him ignorant, intolerant, and obnoxious (not to mention fundamentally lacking in imagination). OTOH, I found Spider Robinson to be a reasonably good writer. Neither of these statements addresses the issue at hand, any more than your statements did.
Yep, either one might have worked -- especially if they had a metal pocket clip. But all Neil had at hand was his pen... fortunately for him (and the nation, too, come to think of it). And there were good reasons to develop a space-qualified pen instead of the other two.
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At the proper energies, it can also excite the nucleus into a higher-energy state, from which it decays by emitting a gamma photon (analogous to lower-energy photons exciting the electrons in an atom). But the emitted gamma (or sometimes a cascade of gammas, each at lower energies) are produced almost immediately -- not a longer-term radioactivity like the first case often is.
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There is a world of difference between the mature, functional adults who were "broken up for parts" in Niven's stories, and a fertilized embryo which hasn't even begun to differentiate. If you can't see that, I can't help you (except to comment that no one I've talked to would even think of a full-scale funeral for a miscarried embryo at that stage -- it's extremely unlikely that the mother would notice anything more than a heavy period).
One more time: not "dead babies," but undifferentiated embryos. The ones under discussion are left over from in-vitreo fertilizations for couples unable to conceive; since they aren't used and are otherwise going to be destroyed, this use makes sense.
But I'm sure I'm wasting my breath (or finger motion, as the case is...) -- you no doubt have some problem with helping infertile women conceive, too. So let me further confuse the issue for you, and ask if (since the Scottish successes in cloning non-stem cells from adult animals) every cell in your body has recently acquired some sacrosanct status? Remember that you naturally shed a lot of skin cells...
I suspect you actually mean "morals" instead of "ethics," but the reply isn't that different between the two cases:
I'm going to challenge you to come up with a set of rules for us to follow, which incorporate the entire US population's collective set of ethics (and morals, just for good measure), without either limiting anyone's freedom or forcing anyone to do something they find morally or ethically repugnant. Note that the population under discussion includes a wide variety of Christian faiths, Islamic faiths, Hindu, assorted Asian and African and Native American religions, plus atheists and agnostics who don't practice any religious behavior but do have their own morals and ethics, and a whole lot more. And I'll tell you in advance that you can't do that -- there's too much internal inconsistency in the data set.
The only possible resolution I see is to have the minimal set of rules which are required behavior (another post of mine on this topic discusses this), and otherwise allow the individuals to decide within their own framework what they will or will not morally and ethically do. Otherwise, you're in the position of forcing your morality on others, and I can tell you in advance that's not going to work. Aside from constitutional issues, people aren't going to sit still for it.
But that requires people to be responsible for themselves, which is an unpopular notion at the moment, especially in some religious circles...
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Yep. And from the story Armstrong told, the only handy piece of metal he had was his pen. Remember, he'd already tossed the lifesupport system, and there wasn't much on that spacecraft that wasn't absolutely essential to its proper function, due to weight limitations (which is probably why the switch was so chintzy in the first place).
Yeah, maybe -- a very weak maybe. Graphite is conductive, but it ain't no great shakes compared to most metals. (It does work well in arc lamps, though, doesn't it? Tells you something...)
And your lack of appreciation of his writing skills affects the applicability of his story how? :)
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If you're talking about manned space exploration, you're sorta right: much of the public is more interested in other things.
If you're talking about space exploration in general, just think back about four years to the Mars Pathfinder landing... people loved it!
As to what might motivate them, I think finding extraterrestrial life would be pretty high on the list (and intelligent extraterrestrials even moreso. Except for the rioting).
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Yeah, this one: is rickets known to cause the demonstrated changes in Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA (compared to modern human mDNA)? Just curious...
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Don't forget that Neil Armstrong used one of those pens to hotwire the ascent stage's arming switch, after he'd broken it off trying to move around the tiny LM cabin in his spacesuit. Let's see ya try that one with a pencil!
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The radiation in a planetary magnetosphere is high-energy electrons and protons. You wouldn't be happy being exposed to it, but all it's going to do is ionize you down at the molecular level, not make you (or anything else) significantly radioactive. That would require something like neutrons or gamma rays, neither of which are affected by the magnetic field which accelerates and guides the charged particles. /pedantry
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For me, the resolution goes like this: everyone gets to have their own opinion, regardless, and gets to exercise it at their discretion unless somebody else demonstrates conclusively that such exercise will damage said someone else. A logical extension argues that third parties should also be included, which is where the right-to-life issue stalls out.
As far as I can tell, though, this is something pretty new: from my viewpoint, the whole thing pretty much swings on the brilliant (or perhaps I mean "diabolical") coining of the term "right to life," which is pretty damned hard to fight... But it's interesting to note that virtually every right-to-lifer I've talked to only feels that way about embryonic people -- when it comes to war or capital punishment, they're on the other side (despite the fact that innocents die those ways, too).
So, Queen-hunny, I can't really answer the question except to say that accommodating the largest possible number of divergent viewpoints means having the least possible set of rules, regardless of how much any particular subgroup wants their own special set. Otherwise, you're going to annoy almost everyone, instead of annoying only a small subgroup (regardless of their conviction that they have the holy truth).
In the real world (the US part of it, anyway), however, it's getting harder and harder to defend this sort of freedom. On bad days, I think your last sentence most likely portends our future...
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The simple existence of logical arguments opposed to my own logical arguments doesn't give either of us the right to legislate our own particular views. It would seem reasonable to therefore leave the implementation of those views in the personal and private realm.
Are you then arguing that political solutions aren't be the only recourse now? If we don't accept political solutions (i.e., "compromises"), it goes right back to the "religious" approach, doesn't it?
Verbal fencing aside, why do you assume that I'm prejudiced, simply because I disagree with you? I prefer my universe to be tolerant of diversity, thus allowing people like you and me to hold (and practice) their viewpoints.
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Unfortunately, the religious right has completely politicized what should have been a personal, private issue all along... along with a bunch of other issues, which I'll save space by not going into.
Political solutions are the only possible solutions at this point, then -- and I'm glad that those are at least possible. It could easily be worse, and might get that way soon; I think my .sig pretty much says it all.
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Interestingly enough, the orbit of the Moon is smoothly convex relative to the Sun -- it's orbital period around Earth is long enough that there aren't any cusps in its orbit, as there are in so many other moons. So in a sense it could be considered to orbit the Sun in gravitational association with Earth, and there have been numerous suggestions that the Earth/Moon pair should be considered a double planet rather than a planet/moon.
But there's that history thing again, so I think the nomenclature won't change...
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Uhhhh... interesting statement, but I have to disagree. When Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto on February 18, 1930, he was searching for a ninth planet predicted to exist because of discrepancies between the predicted and actual orbits of Uranus (and Neptune) -- the precise reason that the planet Neptune had been discovered, in fact (here's a detailed story of the whole affair). At the time, no one had any notion that Pluto would be so small: it was predicted to be between two and seven times the mass of Earth, and everyone expected it to be dim -- why else would it be so hard to find?
As it turned out, the most likely cause for Uranus and Neptune's orbital discrepancies is probably observational error, and Pluto just happened to be in the approximate neighborhood being searched. If it were discovered today, we might not call it a "planet" -- it's only the largest (so far) of a number of objects in the Kuiper belt -- but this has been the subject of a lot of controversy, and it's been officially decided to keep calling it a planet.
At the time it was discovered, no one had any notion that things would turn out this way, so it was just considered a planet and named as such. No special considerations or rewards -- just ignorance of the future, as always...
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Do you mean like this?
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There are plenty of good stills and movies here.
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So my question is really, "is the nonzero vacuum energy part of the overall-zero energy balance of the Universe (as in the various inflationary theories)? Or does it require some other explanation?"
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