Actually, the deal with the methane is this: Its lifetime in the atmosphere is ~ 350 (earth) years. Thus, for the amount of methane detected, either there was recent (years ago, not Ma or even Ka) volcanic activity, or there is life currently producing the methane. Either of these two speculations is valid.
Your other suggestions are valid also, but require something to help them release their trapped methane. Ices/clathrates need to be melted, which means they need energy input. Hydrocarbon deposits would require life to have existed in the past, and would require something to release just the methane form rather than a bunch of other stuff. i.e., we would see other (than just methane) evidence for a degassing hydrocarbon resevoir.
The volcanism argument is very difficult to sustain because we don't see evidence for it NOW (however, as my advisor is always looking for opportunities to point out, "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."). I like the volcanism argument because I like volcanism, but the most recent flow fields are 10 Ma, and seem to have been the last gasp of a dying planet. Unless they released a LOT of methane into the atmosphere, the current methane is not from those flows.
The life argument has some major problems, but it's at least worth investigating. There needs to be some sort of energy to maintain these putative methanogens, and that's one of the issues right now (we don't know where to look for life because we don't see any* evidence for subsurface energy).
We can't directly look for concentrations of methane because the in situ measurements would provide something like 1 PPM, and averaged through the atmosphere would be undetectably low compared with the amount of the methane in the (presumed well-mixed) atmosphere (ppb).
* There are small east-west trending fissures (canyons) that may be the best places to search for life-sustaining energy because they collect daytime sunlight but don't effeciently reemit it at night, thus increasing their temperatures relative to the surroundings and possibly conducting heat to the subsurface and possibly collecting enough heat to sustain life. . . I'll let you know in a week or so if this pans out. . .
Sure they would. Any device that is used to remove energy from the tides, whether they're large barriers that "stop" the tides or small props, which will remove kinetic energy from the water (thus slowing the movement of the water), will have adverse affects on the local ecologies.
Just because they're hidden under the water doesn't mean the energy they harness is any less important to the species that rely on it.
Tidal energy basically comes from the origins of the solar system. . . That is, because the moon is trapped in orbit around the Earth, it causes the Earth to change shape slightly (because it's not a circular orbit, though it's close; e=0.05). This slight change in shape will eventually become a permanent bulge, when the earth-moon system has completely evolved its orbit (like Pluto-Charon). When this happens, the moon will always be in one point in the Earth's sky, and the Earth will always be in the same point in the moon's sky--they'll be tidally locked, and the moon will be further away than it is today.
The effect of tidal generators on this system is nothing. The effect of tidal generators on oceanic ecosystems is unknown, but is very likely to be substantial, as very many species depend on the tides, and though the Earth as a massive body will not be affected, the oceans themselves will be affected (even little changes will matter to life on Earth).
I don't know about you, but when I was in school, I was "required" to say the pledge. If I tried to stay seated during the pledge, I was threatened with suspension. Whether there is a legal standing to do such a thing is not the point, the point is that the "teachers" and administrators had the kind of power over the kids that made it a requirement for the kids to say the pledge. This is especially when most people don't have the money to take on a school district in a law suit over something as "unimportant" as their childrens' rights.
Here's the best part: It's not 137 years, it's 216 years.
Aritcle IV, Section 2:
Section 2. The citizens of each state shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of citizens in the several states.
And,
Section 1. of Amendment XIV: All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
Clearly, the freedoms/immunities/privileges provided to the people (citizens) by the federal govt. were protected from the states at the signing of the Constitution. Also clearly, some states decided to ignore that part of the Constitution, and it had to be reiterated in the Constitution that they can't do that. The federal govt. has ALWAYS, under the Constitution, had the power to hold the states in check when it came to limiting the rights of the citizens of the US.
I constantly find this in all the forums I read. . . People (I don't want to generalize too much, but so-called libertarians seem to be, by far, the worst) who don't read the Constitution but rather allow some schmuck to do it for them then rail at others to read it. . .
Section 2. The citizens of each state shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of citizens in the several states.
Therefore, the citizens of each state are entitled to the protections that the Congress of the United States provides (by legislation), or the Courts provide (by judicial review), for ALL citizens of the United States. If one state (New Hampshire, for example) wants to provide MORE privileges or immunities, it's quite welcome to, but it CAN NOT remove privileges or immunities provided for by the Constitution or the federal govt.
Amendment I [Religion, Speech, Press, Assembly, Petition (1791)] Amendment II [Right to Bear Arms (1791)] Amendment III [Quartering of Troops (1791)] Amendment IV [Search and Seizure (1791)] Amendment V [Grand Jury, Double Jeopardy, Self-Incrimination, Due Process (1791)] Amendment VI [Criminal Prosecutions - Jury Trial, Right to Confront and to Counsel (1791)] Amendment VII [Common Law Suits - Jury Trial (1791)] Amendment VIII [Excess Bail or Fines, Cruel and Unusual Punishment (1791)] Amendment IX [Non-Enumerated Rights (1791)] Amendment X [Rights Reserved to States (1791)]
The "declartory articles" are the Articles of the Constitution, and there are only 7. Article V sets up the Amendment process to the Constitution. Notice the dates for the first ten Amendments? They're not the date of the signing of the Constitution (1787), they were added 4 years later.
The "Original" Constitution consisted of:
Preamble ["We the people...."] Article I [The Legislative Branch] Article II [The Presidency] Article III [The Judiciary] Article IV [The States] Article V [The Amendment Process] Article VI [Legal Status of the Constitution] Article VII [Ratification] Signers
Basically, an object needs a specific amount of energy to escape the gravitational well of some other object. Remember that kinetic energy is KE = 1/2 mv^2,
where m is mass and v is velocity.
Gravitational binding energy is the energy required to escape a gravity well (basically):
GE = GmM/R,
where G is the gravitational constant, m is the mass of the escaping object, M is the mass of the planet, and R is the planet's radius.
Setting KE=GE and solving for velocity gives you the escape velocity (the very minimum INITIAL velocity required to escape with NO ADDITIONAL ACCELERATION). Notice that the object's mass cancels, so you're left with a constant value for the planet's escape velocity (of course, you need more energy to accelerate a more massive object to the same velocity). Earth's escape velocity is actually 11.1 km/s. Not sure where that 9 km/s comes from.
It's actually quite common, and with the green laser pointers (have not RTFA), one can easily see the beam along its length and can thus follow it to the star in question--it's basically allowing one to extend their finger out a few hundred meters so that others can see what you are pointing at.
I'm using Firefox 0.8 (I haven't gotten around to updating). I used the Secunia link in two ways, the first by allowing a new window to be opened up by Secunia when I clicked on the link to citibank. This allowed Secunia to hijack the "popup". The second way was to open the link in a new tab (via middle mouse click for me). This did not allow Secunia to hijack the "popup", even though the link originated at Secunia.
Really? Why? Because some people object to it on "moral" grounds?
Well, what about the invasion of Iraq that killed thousands and thousands of civilians for no reason? Many people objected to that on "moral" grounds, but we still funded it with public money, and it sure wasn't for defense.
If they can be used to destroy human lives, why can't public funds be used to help preserve and better life by using a line of embroyonic stem cells from an IVF batch that will NEVER have a possibility of becoming human?
Unfortunately, unless you have a subscription to J. Neuro. Sci., or you attend a university (or other institution; or at least have access to a computer from such an institution) that does, you can only get the abstract.
I don't agree that the current (ideal) scientific method is a cheap hack. There is no reason to think that the current method of reviewing scientific "fact" is going to cause some kind collapse of science. The scientific method has built-in safeguards against the kind of problems that plagued the dark ages. It expectsto have basic, foundation theories revamped or replaced from time-to-time.
However, there are also established facts that are observations, not theories. These observations may be explained by a number of theories. If those theories contradict or are inconsistent with other observations or they are insufficient to explain other observations, they are regarded as incorrect or incomplete. Most theories that "were never accepted to begin with" were not accepted because they didn't adequately explain all available data. Gathering more data will not provide better evidence for incorrect theories.
If I provide a "theory" that objects shaped like a torus will never fall to the surface of the Earth, regardless of their density, and observational evidence shows that the "theory" is wrong (You drop a doughnut and it falls to the floor), no amount of additional evidence will convince anyone (reasonable) that my "theory" was correct. Revisiting it is pointless--let's move on to other theories to show how they do or do not work with the available evidence, or let's gather more evidence to test well-established theories.
Non-theories (like those proposed by creationists) are also a waste of time in the scientific communtiy because they can never be tested. I could propose that there is a tribe of invisible gnomes living in my garden. How would you test that? Well, say we look for their footprints? Oh, I forgot to mention that they don't leave footprints. OK, what about other kinds of evidence: maybe they're visible in the IR? No, they're completely transparent at all wavelengths.
I'll just keep adding on addition superpowers to these gnomes until you give up in frustration, but you never were able to provide any evidence to prove my theory wrong, so it must be right and the truth. . .
About there being a correct theory: I didn't really state that well. Yes, you are correct, there can be a correct theory, which is the truth. However we can never know that the theory is 100% correct. We will never have collected all available evidence to test any theory, so all we can do is agree to call a well-tested theory a law. The scientific method has no (meaningful) aspirations toward finding absolute truth (*) because we will not know it when we have it. The scientific method is simply a way for us to make the universe meaningful in ways that are consistent from one observer to another.
* There are statements (let's call them axioms or postulates), like Einstein's Relativity Principal: "Every observer in the Universe must experience the same natural laws", that seem like absolutes, and are, in fact absolutes, but they are not the truth, they are the building blocks of our sciences. If we can't use those, then there is nothing that we can trust about our sciences, as everything is just magical because the laws don't apply to everyone equally. Notice that this axiom says nothing about knowing what those natural laws are, just that everyone follows them.
Or, maybe Euclidian space is a better example. In 2-D Euclidian space, given any straight line and a point not on it, there "exists one and only one straight line which passes" through that point and never intersects the first line, no matter how far they are extended.
This is intuitively correct, except that it's impossible to prove for all cases. That's because it's an axiom for given, limited set of geometries (Euclidian geometries). There are other, self-consistent geometries which are non-Euclidian
While I don't think you were trolling before, I do think you have some problems with your premises:
1) There is no assumption that we will find the perfectly correct solution to a problem. The assumption is that we will get so close with approximations to the exact solution that for all intents and purposes it'll be "right". There's a difference--one implies that science can get to the "absolute truth", and the other implies that science can provide a working model that is very close to reality.
2) There really is no such thing (see 1)) as a "correct theory", just an approximately correct theory. All theories, by nature (ours) are only approximations to the truth. We know some things, we approximate others, and we ignore others that we either don't understand or we don't know about. Case in point: I research heat flow from lavas to volatiles. There are only so many parameters that I can input into my mathematical model of the heat flow (density, specific heat capacity, time, latent heat, temperature, etc.) before my approximations are "good enough" and any other parameter inputs makes the model cumbersome and unnecessarily complex. I say unnecessarily because the gross behavior is what I'm trying to get at, not the behavior of every single molecule (or atom, or quark). Also, I will NEVER, EVER be able to actually model what a real lava flow will do because I don't have every detail of the "experiment"--what will happen to the lava flow if a cloud passes overhead? what if an observer takes the temperature of a toe lobe? what if . . . None of that really matters when I'm attempting to estimate the gross behavior of something. What does this have to do with 2)? Well, the closer a theory is in function to the truth, the "better" the theory is. If I can approximate the behavior of interacting lava and water well enough to be able to warn people not to come close when the lava enters the ocean in Hawaii, then that's good. If my theory is incorrect, we'll find out soon enough, and either the entire theory (think of the crystal spheres of the heavens before Copernicus) needs to be thrown out or some of the parameters need to be adjusted. This leads us to 3)
3) If my lava flow theory is incorrect, then we WILL find out eventually that it is incorrect. This is the goal of science--to provide enough evidence to overthrow current theories and to "better" approximate nature. If a theory proves to be incorrect, we get rid of it in whole or in part and come up with something that works better. The adding on of special cases does not make a theory work better, it's basically just hanging on to something that doesn't work well because a) we don't have something better or b) someone wants that theory to be correct. b) sucks.
4)There is nothing wrong with agreeing to use a set of approximations because they haven't been shown to be incorrect. You (unknowningly?) use Newton's laws of gravitation every day. You may play basketball, or fly an airplane, or whatever--you use Newton's approximations to Einstein's approximation to reality. It's OK that Newton was "incorrect" because his theory has been so useful, and on "normal, human" scales, it is correct.
5)I'm not sure what you're trying to say here, but basically, yeah, we build up from "first principles" to more and more complex theories. However, we abandon those "first principles" when they turn out to be unuseful because of new evidence. We don't, on the whole, cling to old theories just because they're old and well oiled.
6-10) these are just re-iterating arguments.
Basically, you conclude that we need to "re-review" theories from time-to-time. We do. When we get new evidence that contradicts an established (by that I mean well tested) theory, we first check that the evidence is not flawed. Why do we do this first? Well, because humans are inheriently flawed and there are many, many ways to screw up the taking of data. After we've determined (probably through many independent observations) that the new
As a chronic back pain sufferer, this article was of interest to me. So, instead of just reading the posted link, I found the actual article. Most of the method that others are complaining about (only 26 people, etc.--read the article, they're doing things just fine) seems fine to me, but what really bothers me is this:
Skull-normalized whole-brain neocortical gray matter volume (excluding the cerebellum, deep gray matter, and brainstem; SIENAX analysis) was 528 +- 44 cm^3 (mean SD; n 26) in the CBP brain and 559 +- 42 cm^3 (n 26) in controls, matched for age, sex, and scan type (Fig. 1 A). The 30 cm^3 difference in gray matter volume, a 5.4% decrease, was highly significant (paired t test=3.7; p less than.001). A similar measure was derived from the VBM regional analysis: whole-brain mean gray matter density per voxel (VBM modulation analysis). This measure showed a 5.9% decrease in overall gray matter density (0.251 +- 0.031 in CBP subjects; 0.267 +- 0.027 in controls;
They're claiming that a 30 cm^3 decrease is significant when their 1 sigma error is 42-44 cm^3! 1 sigma! In my field of science, nobody believes you unless the error bars don't overlap (much) with two or three sigma. Basically, everything is essentially the same to within one sigma: 528+44=572>569; 569-42=527528.
Anyway, I'm sure there's some stuff that I missed, but until a larger study is done with better error analysis, I'll take what they've done as probably correct, but with some doubt. . .
How is this a troll? If our method is wrong, but we just adjust the model (it's not exactly relevant here because the actual problem is not accurately described in the article), we may still get the approximation to reality incorrect.
The problem is simply that the solutions generally found are not necessarily unique, if one assumes a very simple model and doesn't apply additional, independent knowledge to the problem.
However, as another person posted, the reality is that "we've" been doing a pretty good job for a while, and the reason is that "we're" not doing seismology blindly--there is other information that helps to correct misunderstandings or non-uniqueness to JUST the seismological data.
For example, knowing the chemical composition or temperature (e.g., from volcanic eruptions) helps to pin down the more accurate solution to the seismic data.
Also, the experiments were done with a single wave source, and generally we use multiple sources, which will help to clarify the structure of the region of interest.
The structure of the Earth is very similar to what we "see" using the combined data sets that make up "seismological remote sensing".
Yes, they typically employ a Radon transorm during the inversion. Seismology is very much like a CAT scan w.r.t. methodology.
The problem described in the paper (http://acoustics.mines.edu/preprints/vanwijklevsh in04.pdf) is that the multiple scattering caused by small heterogenieties near the surface of an object can cause the same sort of signal (to within error) as a multiply layer object. The radon transfer will have just as much of a problem as any other inverse transform simply because the matrix (data) is "bad". That is, the solution is non-unique and without some other a priori knowledge, we wouldn't be able to distinguish different forward models.
I think having two good, loving parents is best for children. I don't think having two male parents is necessarily any worse for a child than having one of each sex, and it is better if the alternative is an uncaring (or worse) parent.
I have never stated (or meant to imply) that the state necessarily should give tax breaks to couples, just that the state should treat all couples equally. If you (people in general) are going to make the argument that gays should not be allowed to marry because of the supposed inability for them to produce children, then the sillyness of that argument needs to be pointed out: There are many married couples without children, and many of those couples will never have children. Basing the argument against allowing gay marriage on possibilities for procreation is a cover-up for bigotry.
The "state" (i.e., the government, not the people of the state) gains little out of giving tax breaks to anyone. The people of the state (the society) gain a lot by making it easier on the parents of a child to raise that child. The child has a better chance of becoming a productive member of the society.
Regardless of specific taxes on specific "classes", the society has a compelling interest to treat people as equally as possible. The people of that society benefit, and the society as a whole benefits.
Do you really believe this? In some very small percentage of cases it may be true, but in general men and women are very different. Most men are attracted to women, not men. That alone should convince you they are different in a fundamental way.
I am absolutely certain that the gender or sexuality of a parent does not matter when it comes to being a good parent.
If it's "mean spirited" to tell a sterile (heterosexual) woman she can't have marriage breaks because she became sterile how is it not "mean spirited" to tell a homosexual they're not allowed to to have those same marriage breaks with someone they love?
Yes, I am serious. If the laws of the US really considered marriage as a means of reproduction, married people would be required to "generate" at least one child and anyone who was unable or unwilling to participate in procreation would not be allowed to marry. Your examples have absolutely nothing to do with hetero-/homosexuality, they have to do with treating people fairly and justly. Excluding one group of people because they love differently it wrong.
Let me get this straight (correct me if I'm wrong): In your view, a heterosexual married couple that may or may not intend to have kids should get a tax break that is "designed to help in the raising of children", but a sterile couple who may or may not adopt should not get those same tax breaks?
How many years after marriage (sans children) should those tax breaks last? How should it be determined that someone intends to have children? What if the heterosexual, non-sterile couple think they want kids when they get married, but wait a couple of years and then decide they don't want kids? do they have to give back those years of tax breaks they got because they may have been able to have childred? what if they don't want kids when they first get married and then later decide they want to have kids? do they get back tax credits?
Why can't the laws, if we're really trying to make it easier for children to grow up with a family, just address whether someone has children, and not address the gender of the parents? Other than that specifically addressing the issue of whether there are actually children involved, the law should simply reflect whether people have entered into a (permanent) contract with one another to take care of each other, to love each other, and to be partners for life. It should not matter what the genders are.
The fact that there are laws protecting children during a divorce does not imply that marriage is all about children. It simply means that, in the views of the State, children are more important than a struggling marriage.
No, I am not gay, yes, my child lives with me, so does my wife, his mother. My point is that anyone who is a decent parent will answer that the most important thing is their child, and the gender or sexuality of that parent does not matter. It doesn't matter whether that child was adopted or born of one of the parents. A good parent loves their child, and nothing else really matters.
If it's for the purpose of reproduction, then why do we allow people who CAN NOT EVER REPRODUCE to get married?
Find a stay at home mom who also happens to be a lesbian and ask her what is the most important thing in her life. She'll respond "my kids." Find a stay at home dad and ask the same question, you'll get the same answer. Find a single parent and ask the same question, you'll get the same answer. I have no argument against children being important. I have a child of my own, and that's the answer you'll get from me. That's not the point.
I have a problem with the idea that marriage is ostensibly for procreation when it's CLEARLY not viewed as such by the laws of the land (disregarding the very few legal benefits married couples get for having children). I especially have a problem with that idea when it is espoused by people who are not also arguing that all marriages between people who can not or choose not to have kids be revoked.
Slashdot Mirror
We need a reason to be seeing the methane. It is destroyed in the atmosphere pretty quickly, so there needs to be a recharge mechanism.
Regardless of the mechanism, the discovery of methane in the atmosphere is a very important result. . .
Actually, the deal with the methane is this:
Its lifetime in the atmosphere is ~ 350 (earth) years. Thus, for the amount of methane detected, either there was recent (years ago, not Ma or even Ka) volcanic activity, or there is life currently producing the methane. Either of these two speculations is valid.
Your other suggestions are valid also, but require something to help them release their trapped methane. Ices/clathrates need to be melted, which means they need energy input. Hydrocarbon deposits would require life to have existed in the past, and would require something to release just the methane form rather than a bunch of other stuff. i.e., we would see other (than just methane) evidence for a degassing hydrocarbon resevoir.
The volcanism argument is very difficult to sustain because we don't see evidence for it NOW (however, as my advisor is always looking for opportunities to point out, "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."). I like the volcanism argument because I like volcanism, but the most recent flow fields are 10 Ma, and seem to have been the last gasp of a dying planet. Unless they released a LOT of methane into the atmosphere, the current methane is not from those flows.
The life argument has some major problems, but it's at least worth investigating. There needs to be some sort of energy to maintain these putative methanogens, and that's one of the issues right now (we don't know where to look for life because we don't see any* evidence for subsurface energy).
We can't directly look for concentrations of methane because the in situ measurements would provide something like 1 PPM, and averaged through the atmosphere would be undetectably low compared with the amount of the methane in the (presumed well-mixed) atmosphere (ppb).
* There are small east-west trending fissures (canyons) that may be the best places to search for life-sustaining energy because they collect daytime sunlight but don't effeciently reemit it at night, thus increasing their temperatures relative to the surroundings and possibly conducting heat to the subsurface and possibly collecting enough heat to sustain life. . . I'll let you know in a week or so if this pans out. . .
Sure they would.
Any device that is used to remove energy from the tides, whether they're large barriers that "stop" the tides or small props, which will remove kinetic energy from the water (thus slowing the movement of the water), will have adverse affects on the local ecologies.
Just because they're hidden under the water doesn't mean the energy they harness is any less important to the species that rely on it.
Tidal energy basically comes from the origins of the solar system. . . That is, because the moon is trapped in orbit around the Earth, it causes the Earth to change shape slightly (because it's not a circular orbit, though it's close; e=0.05). This slight change in shape will eventually become a permanent bulge, when the earth-moon system has completely evolved its orbit (like Pluto-Charon). When this happens, the moon will always be in one point in the Earth's sky, and the Earth will always be in the same point in the moon's sky--they'll be tidally locked, and the moon will be further away than it is today.
The effect of tidal generators on this system is nothing. The effect of tidal generators on oceanic ecosystems is unknown, but is very likely to be substantial, as very many species depend on the tides, and though the Earth as a massive body will not be affected, the oceans themselves will be affected (even little changes will matter to life on Earth).
You could try http://www.magnatune.com/.
I don't know about you, but when I was in school, I was "required" to say the pledge. If I tried to stay seated during the pledge, I was threatened with suspension. Whether there is a legal standing to do such a thing is not the point, the point is that the "teachers" and administrators had the kind of power over the kids that made it a requirement for the kids to say the pledge. This is especially when most people don't have the money to take on a school district in a law suit over something as "unimportant" as their childrens' rights.
Here's the best part: It's not 137 years, it's 216 years.
Aritcle IV, Section 2:
Section 2. The citizens of each state shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of citizens in the several states.
And,
Section 1. of Amendment XIV:
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
Clearly, the freedoms/immunities/privileges provided to the people (citizens) by the federal govt. were protected from the states at the signing of the Constitution. Also clearly, some states decided to ignore that part of the Constitution, and it had to be reiterated in the Constitution that they can't do that. The federal govt. has ALWAYS, under the Constitution, had the power to hold the states in check when it came to limiting the rights of the citizens of the US.
Mod parent up, insightful, funny!
I constantly find this in all the forums I read. . . People (I don't want to generalize too much, but so-called libertarians seem to be, by far, the worst) who don't read the Constitution but rather allow some schmuck to do it for them then rail at others to read it. . .
Aritcle IV, Section 2:
Section 2. The citizens of each state shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of citizens in the several states.
Therefore, the citizens of each state are entitled to the protections that the Congress of the United States provides (by legislation), or the Courts provide (by judicial review), for ALL citizens of the United States. If one state (New Hampshire, for example) wants to provide MORE privileges or immunities, it's quite welcome to, but it CAN NOT remove privileges or immunities provided for by the Constitution or the federal govt.
Have you read it? because actually, you're mixing the Articles with the Amendments. The commonly known "bill of rights" is the set of the first ten Amendments:t ion/constitut ion.table.html#amendments)
(http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitu
Amendment I [Religion, Speech, Press, Assembly, Petition (1791)]
Amendment II [Right to Bear Arms (1791)]
Amendment III [Quartering of Troops (1791)]
Amendment IV [Search and Seizure (1791)]
Amendment V [Grand Jury, Double Jeopardy, Self-Incrimination, Due Process (1791)]
Amendment VI [Criminal Prosecutions - Jury Trial, Right to Confront and to Counsel (1791)]
Amendment VII [Common Law Suits - Jury Trial (1791)]
Amendment VIII [Excess Bail or Fines, Cruel and Unusual Punishment (1791)]
Amendment IX [Non-Enumerated Rights (1791)]
Amendment X [Rights Reserved to States (1791)]
The "declartory articles" are the Articles of the Constitution, and there are only 7. Article V sets up the Amendment process to the Constitution. Notice the dates for the first ten Amendments? They're not the date of the signing of the Constitution (1787), they were added 4 years later.
The "Original" Constitution consisted of:
Preamble ["We the people...."]
Article I [The Legislative Branch]
Article II [The Presidency]
Article III [The Judiciary]
Article IV [The States]
Article V [The Amendment Process]
Article VI [Legal Status of the Constitution]
Article VII [Ratification]
Signers
Basically, an object needs a specific amount of energy to escape the gravitational well of some other object. Remember that kinetic energy is
KE = 1/2 mv^2,
where m is mass and v is velocity.
Gravitational binding energy is the energy required to escape a gravity well (basically):
GE = GmM/R,
where G is the gravitational constant, m is the mass of the escaping object, M is the mass of the planet, and R is the planet's radius.
Setting KE=GE and solving for velocity gives you the escape velocity (the very minimum INITIAL velocity required to escape with NO ADDITIONAL ACCELERATION). Notice that the object's mass cancels, so you're left with a constant value for the planet's escape velocity (of course, you need more energy to accelerate a more massive object to the same velocity). Earth's escape velocity is actually 11.1 km/s. Not sure where that 9 km/s comes from.
It's actually quite common, and with the green laser pointers (have not RTFA), one can easily see the beam along its length and can thus follow it to the star in question--it's basically allowing one to extend their finger out a few hundred meters so that others can see what you are pointing at.
I'm using Firefox 0.8 (I haven't gotten around to updating).
I used the Secunia link in two ways, the first by allowing a new window to be opened up by Secunia when I clicked on the link to citibank. This allowed Secunia to hijack the "popup".
The second way was to open the link in a new tab (via middle mouse click for me). This did not allow Secunia to hijack the "popup", even though the link originated at Secunia.
Really? Why? Because some people object to it on "moral" grounds?
Well, what about the invasion of Iraq that killed thousands and thousands of civilians for no reason? Many people objected to that on "moral" grounds, but we still funded it with public money, and it sure wasn't for defense.
If they can be used to destroy human lives, why can't public funds be used to help preserve and better life by using a line of embroyonic stem cells from an IVF batch that will NEVER have a possibility of becoming human?
Yeah, sorry I forgot to do that.
http://www.jneurosci.org/content/vol24/issue46/
http://www.jneurosci.org/cgi/reprint/24/46/10410
Unfortunately, unless you have a subscription to J. Neuro. Sci., or you attend a university (or other institution; or at least have access to a computer from such an institution) that does, you can only get the abstract.
However, there are also established facts that are observations, not theories. These observations may be explained by a number of theories. If those theories contradict or are inconsistent with other observations or they are insufficient to explain other observations, they are regarded as incorrect or incomplete. Most theories that "were never accepted to begin with" were not accepted because they didn't adequately explain all available data. Gathering more data will not provide better evidence for incorrect theories.
If I provide a "theory" that objects shaped like a torus will never fall to the surface of the Earth, regardless of their density, and observational evidence shows that the "theory" is wrong (You drop a doughnut and it falls to the floor), no amount of additional evidence will convince anyone (reasonable) that my "theory" was correct. Revisiting it is pointless--let's move on to other theories to show how they do or do not work with the available evidence, or let's gather more evidence to test well-established theories.
Non-theories (like those proposed by creationists) are also a waste of time in the scientific communtiy because they can never be tested. I could propose that there is a tribe of invisible gnomes living in my garden. How would you test that? Well, say we look for their footprints? Oh, I forgot to mention that they don't leave footprints. OK, what about other kinds of evidence: maybe they're visible in the IR? No, they're completely transparent at all wavelengths. I'll just keep adding on addition superpowers to these gnomes until you give up in frustration, but you never were able to provide any evidence to prove my theory wrong, so it must be right and the truth. . .
About there being a correct theory: I didn't really state that well. Yes, you are correct, there can be a correct theory, which is the truth. However we can never know that the theory is 100% correct. We will never have collected all available evidence to test any theory, so all we can do is agree to call a well-tested theory a law. The scientific method has no (meaningful) aspirations toward finding absolute truth (*) because we will not know it when we have it. The scientific method is simply a way for us to make the universe meaningful in ways that are consistent from one observer to another.
* There are statements (let's call them axioms or postulates), like Einstein's Relativity Principal: "Every observer in the Universe must experience the same natural laws", that seem like absolutes, and are, in fact absolutes, but they are not the truth, they are the building blocks of our sciences. If we can't use those, then there is nothing that we can trust about our sciences, as everything is just magical because the laws don't apply to everyone equally. Notice that this axiom says nothing about knowing what those natural laws are, just that everyone follows them.
They're like the field axioms of algebra http://mathworld.wolfram.com/FieldAxioms.html.
Or, maybe Euclidian space is a better example. In 2-D Euclidian space, given any straight line and a point not on it, there "exists one and only one straight line which passes" through that point and never intersects the first line, no matter how far they are extended.
This is intuitively correct, except that it's impossible to prove for all cases. That's because it's an axiom for given, limited set of geometries (Euclidian geometries). There are other, self-consistent geometries which are non-Euclidian
While I don't think you were trolling before, I do think you have some problems with your premises:
1) There is no assumption that we will find the perfectly correct solution to a problem. The assumption is that we will get so close with approximations to the exact solution that for all intents and purposes it'll be "right". There's a difference--one implies that science can get to the "absolute truth", and the other implies that science can provide a working model that is very close to reality.
2) There really is no such thing (see 1)) as a "correct theory", just an approximately correct theory. All theories, by nature (ours) are only approximations to the truth. We know some things, we approximate others, and we ignore others that we either don't understand or we don't know about. Case in point: I research heat flow from lavas to volatiles. There are only so many parameters that I can input into my mathematical model of the heat flow (density, specific heat capacity, time, latent heat, temperature, etc.) before my approximations are "good enough" and any other parameter inputs makes the model cumbersome and unnecessarily complex. I say unnecessarily because the gross behavior is what I'm trying to get at, not the behavior of every single molecule (or atom, or quark). Also, I will NEVER, EVER be able to actually model what a real lava flow will do because I don't have every detail of the "experiment"--what will happen to the lava flow if a cloud passes overhead? what if an observer takes the temperature of a toe lobe? what if . . . None of that really matters when I'm attempting to estimate the gross behavior of something. What does this have to do with 2)? Well, the closer a theory is in function to the truth, the "better" the theory is. If I can approximate the behavior of interacting lava and water well enough to be able to warn people not to come close when the lava enters the ocean in Hawaii, then that's good. If my theory is incorrect, we'll find out soon enough, and either the entire theory (think of the crystal spheres of the heavens before Copernicus) needs to be thrown out or some of the parameters need to be adjusted. This leads us to 3)
3) If my lava flow theory is incorrect, then we WILL find out eventually that it is incorrect. This is the goal of science--to provide enough evidence to overthrow current theories and to "better" approximate nature. If a theory proves to be incorrect, we get rid of it in whole or in part and come up with something that works better. The adding on of special cases does not make a theory work better, it's basically just hanging on to something that doesn't work well because a) we don't have something better or b) someone wants that theory to be correct. b) sucks.
4)There is nothing wrong with agreeing to use a set of approximations because they haven't been shown to be incorrect. You (unknowningly?) use Newton's laws of gravitation every day. You may play basketball, or fly an airplane, or whatever--you use Newton's approximations to Einstein's approximation to reality. It's OK that Newton was "incorrect" because his theory has been so useful, and on "normal, human" scales, it is correct.
5)I'm not sure what you're trying to say here, but basically, yeah, we build up from "first principles" to more and more complex theories. However, we abandon those "first principles" when they turn out to be unuseful because of new evidence. We don't, on the whole, cling to old theories just because they're old and well oiled.
6-10) these are just re-iterating arguments.
Basically, you conclude that we need to "re-review" theories from time-to-time. We do. When we get new evidence that contradicts an established (by that I mean well tested) theory, we first check that the evidence is not flawed. Why do we do this first? Well, because humans are inheriently flawed and there are many, many ways to screw up the taking of data. After we've determined (probably through many independent observations) that the new
Most of the method that others are complaining about (only 26 people, etc.--read the article, they're doing things just fine) seems fine to me, but what really bothers me is this:
They're claiming that a 30 cm^3 decrease is significant when their 1 sigma error is 42-44 cm^3! 1 sigma! In my field of science, nobody believes you unless the error bars don't overlap (much) with two or three sigma. Basically, everything is essentially the same to within one sigma:
528+44=572>569;
569-42=527528.
Anyway, I'm sure there's some stuff that I missed, but until a larger study is done with better error analysis, I'll take what they've done as probably correct, but with some doubt. . .
How is this a troll? If our method is wrong, but we just adjust the model (it's not exactly relevant here because the actual problem is not accurately described in the article), we may still get the approximation to reality incorrect.
The problem is simply that the solutions generally found are not necessarily unique, if one assumes a very simple model and doesn't apply additional, independent knowledge to the problem.
However, as another person posted, the reality is that "we've" been doing a pretty good job for a while, and the reason is that "we're" not doing seismology blindly--there is other information that helps to correct misunderstandings or non-uniqueness to JUST the seismological data.
For example, knowing the chemical composition or temperature (e.g., from volcanic eruptions) helps to pin down the more accurate solution to the seismic data.
Also, the experiments were done with a single wave source, and generally we use multiple sources, which will help to clarify the structure of the region of interest.
The structure of the Earth is very similar to what we "see" using the combined data sets that make up "seismological remote sensing".
Yes, they typically employ a Radon transorm during the inversion. Seismology is very much like a CAT scan w.r.t. methodology. The problem described in the paper (http://acoustics.mines.edu/preprints/vanwijklevsh in04.pdf) is that the multiple scattering caused by small heterogenieties near the surface of an object can cause the same sort of signal (to within error) as a multiply layer object. The radon transfer will have just as much of a problem as any other inverse transform simply because the matrix (data) is "bad". That is, the solution is non-unique and without some other a priori knowledge, we wouldn't be able to distinguish different forward models.
I think having two good, loving parents is best for children. I don't think having two male parents is necessarily any worse for a child than having one of each sex, and it is better if the alternative is an uncaring (or worse) parent.
The "state" (i.e., the government, not the people of the state) gains little out of giving tax breaks to anyone. The people of the state (the society) gain a lot by making it easier on the parents of a child to raise that child. The child has a better chance of becoming a productive member of the society.
Regardless of specific taxes on specific "classes", the society has a compelling interest to treat people as equally as possible. The people of that society benefit, and the society as a whole benefits.
I am absolutely certain that the gender or sexuality of a parent does not matter when it comes to being a good parent.
If it's "mean spirited" to tell a sterile (heterosexual) woman she can't have marriage breaks because she became sterile how is it not "mean spirited" to tell a homosexual they're not allowed to to have those same marriage breaks with someone they love?
Yes, I am serious. If the laws of the US really considered marriage as a means of reproduction, married people would be required to "generate" at least one child and anyone who was unable or unwilling to participate in procreation would not be allowed to marry.
Your examples have absolutely nothing to do with hetero-/homosexuality, they have to do with treating people fairly and justly. Excluding one group of people because they love differently it wrong.
Let me get this straight (correct me if I'm wrong): In your view, a heterosexual married couple that may or may not intend to have kids should get a tax break that is "designed to help in the raising of children", but a sterile couple who may or may not adopt should not get those same tax breaks?
How many years after marriage (sans children) should those tax breaks last? How should it be determined that someone intends to have children? What if the heterosexual, non-sterile couple think they want kids when they get married, but wait a couple of years and then decide they don't want kids? do they have to give back those years of tax breaks they got because they may have been able to have childred? what if they don't want kids when they first get married and then later decide they want to have kids? do they get back tax credits?
Why can't the laws, if we're really trying to make it easier for children to grow up with a family, just address whether someone has children, and not address the gender of the parents? Other than that specifically addressing the issue of whether there are actually children involved, the law should simply reflect whether people have entered into a (permanent) contract with one another to take care of each other, to love each other, and to be partners for life. It should not matter what the genders are.
The fact that there are laws protecting children during a divorce does not imply that marriage is all about children. It simply means that, in the views of the State, children are more important than a struggling marriage.
No, I am not gay, yes, my child lives with me, so does my wife, his mother. My point is that anyone who is a decent parent will answer that the most important thing is their child, and the gender or sexuality of that parent does not matter. It doesn't matter whether that child was adopted or born of one of the parents. A good parent loves their child, and nothing else really matters.
If it's for the purpose of reproduction, then why do we allow people who CAN NOT EVER REPRODUCE to get married?
Find a stay at home mom who also happens to be a lesbian and ask her what is the most important thing in her life. She'll respond "my kids." Find a stay at home dad and ask the same question, you'll get the same answer. Find a single parent and ask the same question, you'll get the same answer. I have no argument against children being important. I have a child of my own, and that's the answer you'll get from me. That's not the point.
I have a problem with the idea that marriage is ostensibly for procreation when it's CLEARLY not viewed as such by the laws of the land (disregarding the very few legal benefits married couples get for having children). I especially have a problem with that idea when it is espoused by people who are not also arguing that all marriages between people who can not or choose not to have kids be revoked.