There are far more ways to write bullshit than accurate information, almost by definition. People get very tired trying to repeat the same reasons over and over, some of which apply to a lot of different bullshit ideas. One way to handle this is to refer people to a high-quality explanatory site (cf. Talk Origins or The Panda's Thumb for creationism/ID) which works online, but in conversations people become exhausted saying the same stuff repeatedly.
Give an example of this "dramatic" error. General relativity is classical mechanics with a limiting speed -- which is beyond common experience. Orbital mechanics, kinematics of all types except for very high speeds are all done using Newton's Laws (or their equivalents, like Lagrange's and Hamilton's Equations). Quantum mechanics is adding interference effects to the Hamilton-Jacobi wave equation. For things that are big enough, classical mechanics is a very good approximation and is used then.
We don't bother to discuss why "no aliens because God said so" is an inadequate theory or explanation - and indeed, you didn't - we simply dismiss it as a priori irrational, and vow never to discuss it.
No, it's not discussed because it requires incredible regression to challenge. For this to be valid:
One must assume deity or deities exist.
One must assume the name of at least one of them is "God."
The deity called "God" knows whether there are aliens or not (this assumes that He isn't an alien Himself)
This deity would have the capacity and the willingness to inform James Dobson (or someone who told him) whether aliens exist.
None of those are intrinsically obvious, but all of them must be assumed true for that claim to make sense.
Weather reporting is remarkably accurate, actually. When something usually works, it's particularly noticable when it doesn't. All the days the forecast calls for rain and it happens, and when it calls for sunshine and it happens, there's no sense of "Wow! They were accurate today!"
[B]ut because of the gift of knowledge we are becoming like gods, able to predict the weather, cure disease, and control procreation.
Good grief what a crappy gift; it takes only six millenia for it to work! Do you believe that if Gutenburg never invented the printing press (which made science (and Protestantism) feasible) we actually wouldn't have received the benefits of this alleged "gift"? What a sadistic deity it is who, once you get eternally cursed for a "gift" won't even let you reap its benefits for sixty centuries!
If you were going to truely [sic] look at it from a scientific standpoint you would not be calling him stupid since there is no "proof" to most of your claims ("and a prior supernova explosion.") just as their is no proof that there isn't a God, so both "theories" are equally valid.
The only way I said he might be stupid is if he doesn't believe the results of science, not that he believed in a deity (being a creationist only means you are ignorant; everyone is ignorant in some matters, differing from person to person). As to the second part, we can observe the spectra of supernovae and they are a remarkably good match for the elemental composition of our solar system. This doesn't "prove" it, of course, but generally a natural explanation has predictive power, which really is the aim of science.
The final phrase is sort of weaselly since in English usage, "God" can be generic or specifically the Biblical chief deity. Even then, there is no way to rule out some interpretations of the Bible (as they admit figurative language wherever it is more plausible), but normally someone calling themselves "creationist" is identifying with the text-literalist version of the Christian (or, rarely, Jewish, Islamic or Hindu) deity. And the Fundie God is disprovable since a worldwide Noah-scale deluge never happened.
Why do people insist on viewing the Earth as a stable planet? If you look at the climatic and geological history of the planet, you would see that, if anything, chaos is the norm. These warming trends that people study? Not significant when viewed in the context of the history of the planet.
Bloody-minded, isn't it? We should welcome the rainforests in Montreal (or the beautiful, though deadly, glacier covering what once was St Louis). Crazy people wanting to keep the environmental conditions conducive to, of all the damnable things, human civilization! Environmentalist wackos, all.
Do not believe a tree-hugger when he tells you he has evidence. Insist on seeing it for yourself. Then get an independent analysis of it. It will invariably turn out to be either fake, or not evidence of anything.
I agree wholeheartedly. The Association of Subcontracted Scientistics Harassing Overwrought Liberal Enviro-Socialists is an excellent resource in these matters. Operators are standing by! You need someone to give a "different perspective" on sewage disposal policies? We'll send over a PhD in astronomy -- he'll be a scientist with a PhD and he'll tell you anything you want to hear! People getting annoyed by that big oil spill? We'll send a PhD mathematician, renowned in his field! For the last 90 years, ASSHOLES have distorted reality for profit. Yours and ours!
So your saying I'm stupid, that I don't believe in science?
Assuming these are apposite (i.e., that the comma should be there), I would say you are ignorant, which is a wholly different matter. If they are not apposite (so you meant, "Is it stupid not to believe the results of science?") then yes, you are stupid.
[W]ho do you think created earth[?]
Not who but what. Basically gravity (accretion), angular momentum (so most solar bodies rotate in the same sense) and a prior supernova explosion.
People don't want to admit there is a God so they bury their head in the sand and search for decades for evidence that doesn't exist.
Over the last four centuries, the things one might plausibly say a god is responsible for have steadily been reduced. At one time, weather was considered the sovereign acrion of the gods, while now we determine days in advance what the weather is likely to be using scientific methods. Although Darwin described descent with modification 145 years ago, gene sequencing is now allowing us to know much more detail about how it actually happened. The greatest triumph of science over religious philosophy in our time, though, has been the revolution of medicine. As late as World War I, medicine was a combination of folklore and religion (look up Dr. Kellogg if you want to see a local maximum of that weirdness). Life expectancy and survival of various maladies has improved breathtakingly during a century of science as compared with (at least) ten millenia of religion.
Albert Einstein belived that God created the earth, You think he's full of BS too?
Einstein referred to 'God' at times, but was emphatic that it was impersonal, and most of the time he used it as a synonym of 'the mechanism(s) of the universe.' Einstein was not full of BS (though he was occasionally wrong); you, however, might be.
Elemental sulfur has the same property as this new stuff. It melts at 96 C and reversibly polymerizes around 150 C to form a semisolid syrup which then turns much more fluid 50 C warmer.
The absence of an action is not the same as actively doing something. For example, my failing to stop someone from falling from a building is in no way equivalent to me pushing them off.
That the two are exactly equivalent morally is unnecessary to my argument (i.e., if you didn't make any attempt to stop the man from falling, and if no risk or harm accrued to yourself in doing so, I claim it must still be unethical based on a moral duty for life protection). If, however, your argument is that positive action is never a moral imperative to save a life, do you then find no fault in the Tuskegee Experiments? They did not harm the population sample, they merely made sure they received no treatment. If you find the circumstance of an embryo as an exceptional case, please explain why.
To comment on the remaining issues, I would need to know your answer to this. I want to say I am enjoying this conversation and look forward to a reply.
I'm glad you are consistent (it's amazing how many "pro-life" folks say IVF is OK, which is completely incomprehensible).
If the technology is developed to clone a baby from cells of an adult human, does that mean that not cloning yourself would violate your ethics? It is ensuring that viable life would fail to develop.
If the technology were to develop to permit in vivo splitting of a blastocyst, so as to produce identical twins rather than one, would it be incumbent on the potential mother to do it? No other life is destroyed, and this increases the amount of life produced by the same set of cells. If not, until the number of potential fetuses is determined, is it accurate to describe it as "an" organism rather than merely a cluster of human cells? A blanket protection of human cells, of course, requires all sex to be vaginal and unprotected (remember the Monty Python skit?) and that cancer could not be treated, among other bizarre things.
Except, of course, that 70% of the time that "new organism" never develops past a blastocyst. (By the way, should in vitro fertilization be outlawed? A great majority of those embryos get destroyed, you know.)
I just went to Wikipedia and perused the articles you mentioned. My confusion is about what you found erroneous in them? They said that evolution is by far the most widely held belief about the origin of species, except in the United States and Southeast Asian Islamic countries (I am not certain about sub-Saharan Africa -- given the recent strong importation of US fundamentalist Christianity, evolution may now be a minority position there also). They said even in these places, the majority of scientists are convinced by evolution, although the percentages are dramatically lower than in the rest of the world. Although it is most strongly championed by fundamentalists in Christianity (and to a lesser extent Islam), creationism is also an important influence politically among mainline denominations of Christianity, which is also true.
Now if you are arguing the articles are too lenient with respect to creationism, note that the great majority of discussion is in the realm of philosophy, politics and religion, which is where it does have (in the countries they mentioned) a significant foothold. And at the bottom of the creationism article, a rather extensive bibliography of creationist/IDist websites are given as well as sites that explain objections to them in more detail. I would have preferred The Panda's Thumb to be added to the bibliography, but otherwise it's a rather strong pair of articles, in my opinion.
I couldn't let this one pass. In the late 19th century it was known that the roughness of the surface of a tube effects the amount of fluid that flows through a pipe under pressure (look up any discussion of the Reynolds Number and pipe or tube flow). The roughness of the pipe is a very small cause that causes a large macroscopic effect.
Their has been no proof, or even suggestion by the voters, of such massive voter fraud.
The problem is that no voter could know (it's trivial to display 'Voted for Gore' but record a vote for Bush). And the infamous trial vote for Gore recorded as -16,000 votes shouldn't help one's confidence either. And a quote that he would "deliver votes for Bush" would make me leery as well.
My point is that although this won't conflict with physical laws, time do flow forward for all matter.
Causality is always the same direction, but the sign of the momentum of a particle in the time direction is independent of causality. (So an observer comprised of antimatter agrees with a matter observer on which direction is "after" and which is "before.") Any forces acting inside a composite particle react in a causal way, of course. A fundamental particle (like a lepton, a gauge boson and, likely, a quark) has indeterminate direction in the time coordinate of itself; only the relative phase can be determined (thus the separation between 'matter' and 'antimatter' leptons and quarks). It is then impossible to get the intrinsic directions of the particles on their worldlines, so all you determine at the end is that both particles obey causality.
As to the black hole photons, you need to understand that the photon that reaches the outside will not be the same one that originates inside. The question of the interface, though, is made finite because the proper time of a photon's lifetime motion is identically zero, no matter how far it must move. It is precisely this reason that allows charge to be detectable from the outside of the black hole, while other things cannot (e.g., baryon number cannot be determined because the force carriers, primarily pions, are massive and cannot move at the speed of light).
I'll agree it looks neat and tidy on a Feynmann diagram, but think about how the world would look to the anti-particle for a moment.
You are having a problem with anthropomorphizing antimatter (and matter). The equations of motion of the universe are time-symmetric (excepting a few violations of CPT invariance); it doesn't make any difference whether the 'particles' are moving forward or backward in time. It is not, for example, any less difficult to imagine 'matter' (or even 'matter' quarks but not 'matter' leptons!) moving in the negative time direction rather than antimatter. The really important part,
which way would entropy go?
is the real answer. The direction we associate with 'positive' time is that direction where the entropy of the uiverse increases, since that is also necessarily the direction in which effect succeeds cause.
[H]ow would the photon know what charge it's originater had?
Photons, both 'normal' and 'virtual' have intrinsic spin 1. The spin of the virtual photon flux can then distinguish the direction toward a negative (or away from a positive) charge.
Oh, and with those popular charged black holes, how whould the virtual photons carrying the force escape?
Remember that virtual photons are everywhere, not just in the black hole. The force carriers inside the black hole would not be able to escape, but the field of photons passes in a uniform fashion across the event horizon as the curvature of spacetime reduces enough to permit them to escape. Since there is a continuum all the way toward 'singularity', local communication of the field happens all the way from the singularity to the outside even though no photon can make it all the way out from the inside.
The trouble with "relativistic mass" is that there are two such things -- longitudinal rest mass (the one you define) and transverse rest mass, which is gamma^2 times the longitudinal one. It is less weird to think of mass as a scalar than as a second-order tensor!
Of course, just like everything else. After all, when your body uses food and oxygen to produce carbon dioxide, water, ATP and NAD[P]H, the process increases the entropy of the universe, heading for heat death. [Of course, if you were killed, microbes would do the job for you instead. As they say, 'You can't win' and 'You can't even break even.';)]
You don't know what you are talking about. Einstein's equation should always have a delta written in front of the mass and energy; the change in energy of a system is proportional to the change in (rest) mass. The full expression of the energy equation is mc^2 + 1/2 mv^2 + 3/4 mv^4/c^2 +... including the first relativistic correction. (The exact formula is mc^2/(1-v^2/c^2)^(1/2).) It is, however, an acceptable shorthand to write mass as being energy (viz., the electron has a rest mass of 511 keV).
As to gravitational lensing, what is happening is that the shortest distance physically between two points around a massive object is not a (Euclidean) straight line. The photons do travel in the "straightest" line, a geodesic, around the star. This is one of the severely counterintuitive aspects of relativity.
Bollocks. The reason OPEC tries to fix market prices isn't because there is a nearly unlimited supply of oil, it's because the aim is to maximize year-to-year income, as opposed to maximum discounted present value of cash flow. The short-term thinking involved here is one of the serious flaws of a corporation system; quarterly earnings are held to be more important than long-term viability.
You did the math wrong, I'm afraid. There are four chemical groups (adenine, guanine, cytosine and thymine), but there are a whole lot of base pairs in any gene, which makes your math basically useless. But the most conservative estimate, there being only four choices per gene, would be 4^210, which is on the order of 10^126 (using the quick and dirty rule of 2^10 is approximately 10^3). This is about 40 orders of magnitude more than the total number of atoms in the observable universe.
The sooner people in the US figure out that "anti-Americanism" is different from not wanting to lick the US' boots and ask "how high," the better the US will be and the better the remainder of the world will find us. The "you're with us or against us" and "American Good vs. Evil" stuff has consequences when it comes from the POTUS.
Yeah, but we [in the US] don't kill our own people [with WMD].
Au contraire. The now infamous plutonium injections caused very similar results to what a dirty bomb would (actually worse). And the Tuskegee Experiment was an exercise in "studying" biological warfare as well. However, we did do our Agent Orange testing on yellow-brown skinned people instead of Americans excepting those who were inadvertently exposed, so that's OK, I guess, right?
Slashdot Mirror
Two minutes per idiot adds up to a lot of time!
Give an example of this "dramatic" error. General relativity is classical mechanics with a limiting speed -- which is beyond common experience. Orbital mechanics, kinematics of all types except for very high speeds are all done using Newton's Laws (or their equivalents, like Lagrange's and Hamilton's Equations). Quantum mechanics is adding interference effects to the Hamilton-Jacobi wave equation. For things that are big enough, classical mechanics is a very good approximation and is used then.
No, it's not discussed because it requires incredible regression to challenge. For this to be valid:
None of those are intrinsically obvious, but all of them must be assumed true for that claim to make sense.
Weather reporting is remarkably accurate, actually. When something usually works, it's particularly noticable when it doesn't. All the days the forecast calls for rain and it happens, and when it calls for sunshine and it happens, there's no sense of "Wow! They were accurate today!"
[B]ut because of the gift of knowledge we are becoming like gods, able to predict the weather, cure disease, and control procreation.
Good grief what a crappy gift; it takes only six millenia for it to work! Do you believe that if Gutenburg never invented the printing press (which made science (and Protestantism) feasible) we actually wouldn't have received the benefits of this alleged "gift"? What a sadistic deity it is who, once you get eternally cursed for a "gift" won't even let you reap its benefits for sixty centuries!
If you were going to truely [sic] look at it from a scientific standpoint you would not be calling him stupid since there is no "proof" to most of your claims ("and a prior supernova explosion.") just as their is no proof that there isn't a God, so both "theories" are equally valid.
The only way I said he might be stupid is if he doesn't believe the results of science, not that he believed in a deity (being a creationist only means you are ignorant; everyone is ignorant in some matters, differing from person to person). As to the second part, we can observe the spectra of supernovae and they are a remarkably good match for the elemental composition of our solar system. This doesn't "prove" it, of course, but generally a natural explanation has predictive power, which really is the aim of science.
The final phrase is sort of weaselly since in English usage, "God" can be generic or specifically the Biblical chief deity. Even then, there is no way to rule out some interpretations of the Bible (as they admit figurative language wherever it is more plausible), but normally someone calling themselves "creationist" is identifying with the text-literalist version of the Christian (or, rarely, Jewish, Islamic or Hindu) deity. And the Fundie God is disprovable since a worldwide Noah-scale deluge never happened.
Why do people insist on viewing the Earth as a stable planet? If you look at the climatic and geological history of the planet, you would see that, if anything, chaos is the norm. These warming trends that people study? Not significant when viewed in the context of the history of the planet.
Bloody-minded, isn't it? We should welcome the rainforests in Montreal (or the beautiful, though deadly, glacier covering what once was St Louis). Crazy people wanting to keep the environmental conditions conducive to, of all the damnable things, human civilization! Environmentalist wackos, all.
Do not believe a tree-hugger when he tells you he has evidence. Insist on seeing it for yourself. Then get an independent analysis of it. It will invariably turn out to be either fake, or not evidence of anything.
I agree wholeheartedly. The Association of Subcontracted Scientistics Harassing Overwrought Liberal Enviro-Socialists is an excellent resource in these matters. Operators are standing by! You need someone to give a "different perspective" on sewage disposal policies? We'll send over a PhD in astronomy -- he'll be a scientist with a PhD and he'll tell you anything you want to hear! People getting annoyed by that big oil spill? We'll send a PhD mathematician, renowned in his field! For the last 90 years, ASSHOLES have distorted reality for profit. Yours and ours!
I'm a creationist.
Sorry to hear that.
So your saying I'm stupid, that I don't believe in science?
Assuming these are apposite (i.e., that the comma should be there), I would say you are ignorant, which is a wholly different matter. If they are not apposite (so you meant, "Is it stupid not to believe the results of science?") then yes, you are stupid.
[W]ho do you think created earth[?]
Not who but what. Basically gravity (accretion), angular momentum (so most solar bodies rotate in the same sense) and a prior supernova explosion.
People don't want to admit there is a God so they bury their head in the sand and search for decades for evidence that doesn't exist.
Over the last four centuries, the things one might plausibly say a god is responsible for have steadily been reduced. At one time, weather was considered the sovereign acrion of the gods, while now we determine days in advance what the weather is likely to be using scientific methods. Although Darwin described descent with modification 145 years ago, gene sequencing is now allowing us to know much more detail about how it actually happened. The greatest triumph of science over religious philosophy in our time, though, has been the revolution of medicine. As late as World War I, medicine was a combination of folklore and religion (look up Dr. Kellogg if you want to see a local maximum of that weirdness). Life expectancy and survival of various maladies has improved breathtakingly during a century of science as compared with (at least) ten millenia of religion.
Albert Einstein belived that God created the earth, You think he's full of BS too?
Einstein referred to 'God' at times, but was emphatic that it was impersonal, and most of the time he used it as a synonym of 'the mechanism(s) of the universe.' Einstein was not full of BS (though he was occasionally wrong); you, however, might be.
Elemental sulfur has the same property as this new stuff. It melts at 96 C and reversibly polymerizes around 150 C to form a semisolid syrup which then turns much more fluid 50 C warmer.
The absence of an action is not the same as actively doing something. For example, my failing to stop someone from falling from a building is in no way equivalent to me pushing them off.
That the two are exactly equivalent morally is unnecessary to my argument (i.e., if you didn't make any attempt to stop the man from falling, and if no risk or harm accrued to yourself in doing so, I claim it must still be unethical based on a moral duty for life protection). If, however, your argument is that positive action is never a moral imperative to save a life, do you then find no fault in the Tuskegee Experiments? They did not harm the population sample, they merely made sure they received no treatment. If you find the circumstance of an embryo as an exceptional case, please explain why.
To comment on the remaining issues, I would need to know your answer to this. I want to say I am enjoying this conversation and look forward to a reply.
I'm glad you are consistent (it's amazing how many "pro-life" folks say IVF is OK, which is completely incomprehensible).
If the technology is developed to clone a baby from cells of an adult human, does that mean that not cloning yourself would violate your ethics? It is ensuring that viable life would fail to develop.
If the technology were to develop to permit in vivo splitting of a blastocyst, so as to produce identical twins rather than one, would it be incumbent on the potential mother to do it? No other life is destroyed, and this increases the amount of life produced by the same set of cells. If not, until the number of potential fetuses is determined, is it accurate to describe it as "an" organism rather than merely a cluster of human cells? A blanket protection of human cells, of course, requires all sex to be vaginal and unprotected (remember the Monty Python skit?) and that cancer could not be treated, among other bizarre things.
The Constitutional Party?! The wackos who wanted to get Roy Moore for President? The only reason to vote for them is if you actually want a theocracy.
Except, of course, that 70% of the time that "new organism" never develops past a blastocyst. (By the way, should in vitro fertilization be outlawed? A great majority of those embryos get destroyed, you know.)
My guess would be H&R Block, but I didn't see the show. :)
I just went to Wikipedia and perused the articles you mentioned. My confusion is about what you found erroneous in them? They said that evolution is by far the most widely held belief about the origin of species, except in the United States and Southeast Asian Islamic countries (I am not certain about sub-Saharan Africa -- given the recent strong importation of US fundamentalist Christianity, evolution may now be a minority position there also). They said even in these places, the majority of scientists are convinced by evolution, although the percentages are dramatically lower than in the rest of the world. Although it is most strongly championed by fundamentalists in Christianity (and to a lesser extent Islam), creationism is also an important influence politically among mainline denominations of Christianity, which is also true.
Now if you are arguing the articles are too lenient with respect to creationism, note that the great majority of discussion is in the realm of philosophy, politics and religion, which is where it does have (in the countries they mentioned) a significant foothold. And at the bottom of the creationism article, a rather extensive bibliography of creationist/IDist websites are given as well as sites that explain objections to them in more detail. I would have preferred The Panda's Thumb to be added to the bibliography, but otherwise it's a rather strong pair of articles, in my opinion.
I couldn't let this one pass. In the late 19th century it was known that the roughness of the surface of a tube effects the amount of fluid that flows through a pipe under pressure (look up any discussion of the Reynolds Number and pipe or tube flow). The roughness of the pipe is a very small cause that causes a large macroscopic effect.
The problem is that no voter could know (it's trivial to display 'Voted for Gore' but record a vote for Bush). And the infamous trial vote for Gore recorded as -16,000 votes shouldn't help one's confidence either. And a quote that he would "deliver votes for Bush" would make me leery as well.
My point is that although this won't conflict with physical laws, time do flow forward for all matter.
Causality is always the same direction, but the sign of the momentum of a particle in the time direction is independent of causality. (So an observer comprised of antimatter agrees with a matter observer on which direction is "after" and which is "before.") Any forces acting inside a composite particle react in a causal way, of course. A fundamental particle (like a lepton, a gauge boson and, likely, a quark) has indeterminate direction in the time coordinate of itself; only the relative phase can be determined (thus the separation between 'matter' and 'antimatter' leptons and quarks). It is then impossible to get the intrinsic directions of the particles on their worldlines, so all you determine at the end is that both particles obey causality.
As to the black hole photons, you need to understand that the photon that reaches the outside will not be the same one that originates inside. The question of the interface, though, is made finite because the proper time of a photon's lifetime motion is identically zero, no matter how far it must move. It is precisely this reason that allows charge to be detectable from the outside of the black hole, while other things cannot (e.g., baryon number cannot be determined because the force carriers, primarily pions, are massive and cannot move at the speed of light).
I'll agree it looks neat and tidy on a Feynmann diagram, but think about how the world would look to the anti-particle for a moment.
You are having a problem with anthropomorphizing antimatter (and matter). The equations of motion of the universe are time-symmetric (excepting a few violations of CPT invariance); it doesn't make any difference whether the 'particles' are moving forward or backward in time. It is not, for example, any less difficult to imagine 'matter' (or even 'matter' quarks but not 'matter' leptons!) moving in the negative time direction rather than antimatter. The really important part,
which way would entropy go?
is the real answer. The direction we associate with 'positive' time is that direction where the entropy of the uiverse increases, since that is also necessarily the direction in which effect succeeds cause.
[H]ow would the photon know what charge it's originater had?
Photons, both 'normal' and 'virtual' have intrinsic spin 1. The spin of the virtual photon flux can then distinguish the direction toward a negative (or away from a positive) charge.
Oh, and with those popular charged black holes, how whould the virtual photons carrying the force escape?
Remember that virtual photons are everywhere, not just in the black hole. The force carriers inside the black hole would not be able to escape, but the field of photons passes in a uniform fashion across the event horizon as the curvature of spacetime reduces enough to permit them to escape. Since there is a continuum all the way toward 'singularity', local communication of the field happens all the way from the singularity to the outside even though no photon can make it all the way out from the inside.
The trouble with "relativistic mass" is that there are two such things -- longitudinal rest mass (the one you define) and transverse rest mass, which is gamma^2 times the longitudinal one. It is less weird to think of mass as a scalar than as a second-order tensor!
Of course, just like everything else. After all, when your body uses food and oxygen to produce carbon dioxide, water, ATP and NAD[P]H, the process increases the entropy of the universe, heading for heat death. [Of course, if you were killed, microbes would do the job for you instead. As they say, 'You can't win' and 'You can't even break even.' ;)]
You don't know what you are talking about. Einstein's equation should always have a delta written in front of the mass and energy; the change in energy of a system is proportional to the change in (rest) mass. The full expression of the energy equation is mc^2 + 1/2 mv^2 + 3/4 mv^4/c^2 + ... including the first relativistic correction. (The exact formula is mc^2/(1-v^2/c^2)^(1/2).) It is, however, an acceptable shorthand to write mass as being energy (viz., the electron has a rest mass of 511 keV).
As to gravitational lensing, what is happening is that the shortest distance physically between two points around a massive object is not a (Euclidean) straight line. The photons do travel in the "straightest" line, a geodesic, around the star. This is one of the severely counterintuitive aspects of relativity.
Bollocks. The reason OPEC tries to fix market prices isn't because there is a nearly unlimited supply of oil, it's because the aim is to maximize year-to-year income, as opposed to maximum discounted present value of cash flow. The short-term thinking involved here is one of the serious flaws of a corporation system; quarterly earnings are held to be more important than long-term viability.
You did the math wrong, I'm afraid. There are four chemical groups (adenine, guanine, cytosine and thymine), but there are a whole lot of base pairs in any gene, which makes your math basically useless. But the most conservative estimate, there being only four choices per gene, would be 4^210, which is on the order of 10^126 (using the quick and dirty rule of 2^10 is approximately 10^3). This is about 40 orders of magnitude more than the total number of atoms in the observable universe.
The sooner people in the US figure out that "anti-Americanism" is different from not wanting to lick the US' boots and ask "how high," the better the US will be and the better the remainder of the world will find us. The "you're with us or against us" and "American Good vs. Evil" stuff has consequences when it comes from the POTUS.
Yeah, but we [in the US] don't kill our own people [with WMD].
Au contraire. The now infamous plutonium injections caused very similar results to what a dirty bomb would (actually worse). And the Tuskegee Experiment was an exercise in "studying" biological warfare as well. However, we did do our Agent Orange testing on yellow-brown skinned people instead of Americans excepting those who were inadvertently exposed, so that's OK, I guess, right?