This approach might not work out so well with r-strategy breeders --- you'll fill the house up for sure with happy little roaches, but they won't be leaving the neighbors' homes to get there (just exponentially exploding their population to catch up with the expanded resources). Setting up "guard rows" of tasty pesticide-free crops to lure pests away from agricultural fields works to the extent that said pests are highly mobile and individually "exploring" a wide enough area to "find" the guard rows in preference to the main crops. However, roaches tend to locate and nest in one area (with only "excess population" expanding out into new territory) --- some very lucky bugs will find the new house (and start breeding to fill it), but the roaches behind your kitchen cabinets will stay behind to raise their kids behind your kitchen cabinets.
Sorry, but this war has been fought, and your side lost. I'm not using GNU/Linux/x.org/XFCE anymore than others are using Windows/CrystalReports/Office/PhotoShop.
Actually, people *do* typically refer to their computer software stack at a level appropriate for the task being described. If someone asks, "what did you photoshop that picture with," do you say "Mach microkernel"? --- No, you describe what you're using at a level appropriate to the activity: you might say "Gimp, on Ubuntu." Thus, if your work consists of using GNU utilities and applications, or writing programs linking against GNU libraries (and compiling them with a GNU compiler) --- it's perfectly reasonable to say you're using GNU on Linux (just like someone might say "Office on Windows" to describe their computer work environment, instead of saying "I write company newsletters using a Core i5-3350p").
Well, if you'd research the IRA some yourself, you'd see that they belong in a rather different category for analysis than typical terrorist threats within the US (the context of this discussion). Specifically, the IRA was operating very close to "home base," with a rather large sympathetic (or at least not wildly apathetic) portion of the population --- greatly altering the balance in how hard it is to recruit. One might expect IRA-like tactics to show up where the terrorist organization is operating as a large grassroots guerrilla resistance network --- and indeed, in countries "closer to home" for Al Qaeda, you do see different tactics where recruits are plentiful and can "vanish into the woodwork" of society.
Most states have passed anti-gay, one-man/one-woman marriage laws.
There's a reason we're not a democracy, we're a democratic republic. "Most people" are rather dumb.
So, how's that democratic republic been working out? Looks like we *still* get most of the stupid we'd get in a pure democracy, plus a big helping of suck-up-to-the-Oligarchy. Things like anti-gay laws only seem to go away *after* there's a solid majority opposing them --- so they'd get implemented and rolled back on approximately the same schedule in a purer democracy. Maybe faster, if there weren't big political power interests fueling the flames of bigotry as an electoral issue.
Earth's atmospheric pressure at sea level is roughly equivalent to having ~10m of water (1g/cm^3 density) above our heads. At a density of ~1.5g/cm^3, and a thickness between 5 and 10m, lunar regolith is in many areas equivalent to *less* mass than the atmosphere protecting our heads. That "solid rock" might be a bit less tough than you think compared to the crazy big chunk of air covering us on Earth.
Unfortunately, they stopped transmitting in 1977 (so no useful information to correlate with today's more advanced remote sensing capabilities). Either a few more (simple) landers are in order, or perhaps we could get some seismic information from laser interferometry off the the corner-cube reflectors we left on the moon (from an Earth-orbiting satellite with an *incredibly fast* fringe counter --- looks hard with today's technology, but perhaps not *that* far away to measure shifts to the O(10GHz) varying optical light interference pattern from an orbital-speed craft).
C'mon, they know they're talking to dummies, they have to K.I.S.S.
That's exactly why you don't use an uninformative description like "size of a small boulder." Someone familiar with details of geological jargon might know that "boulder" often technically refers to a rock over 25cm (so "small boulder" is an accurate estimate for 30-40cm object) --- however, for a "dummy" in a general audience, the term is completely useless. If you want to be more visually descriptive than 30-40cm (12-16 inch) diameter, say something like "large watermelon sized" or "beachball sized," etc.
I'll admit my "units" dig was somewhat of a worn-out trollish dig. However, the substance of the criticism --- poor science reporting for engaging the general public --- remains. NASA is usually pretty good at relaying scientific information to a general public audience; I'd expect better than this type of unhelpful jargon (correct using a technical definition of boulder at slightly larger than 10 inches / 25cm, but pretty useless to most readers). Clarity in communications is a major part of the *job* of top researchers who will be first in line for producing media soundbites, along with the writers deciding which selected quotes to put on a press release page.
Given the ridiculous number of orders of magnitude in expenditure between "defense spending" and analyzing data from a video camera pointed at the moon to see if we can learn anything interesting, I'm not particularly seeing the validity of your comparison. If NASA did *nothing else* over the past year than produce this video (no Mars rovers or anything else), they'd still be a fantastically cheap and productive enterprise compared to defense spending (which spends ~40x more per year that all of NASA to make the world a more violent and dangerous place).
An explosion is a rapid increase in volume and release of energy in an extreme manner, usually with the generation of high temperatures and the release of gases.
--Wikipedia (not the final word on technical sources; feel free to reply with a more definitive description)
The impact converts the massive kinetic energy of fast-moving space items into a lot of localized *friggin' hot* material: the white-hot flash that you see in the video, as the lunar surface is explosively vaporized into a blast of ionized plasma. Impact kinetic effects (with enough energy) *are* very similar to an explosion from some other source releasing similar energy. When we send landing crafts, they try not to dump 5 tons of TNT equivalent in a fraction of a millisecond --- that's generally bad for the craft.
Granted, at that point they were talking about not staying out in a meteor shower if you're *on the moon*. That might be more appropriate advice than on Earth --- it's the atmosphere that keeps people safe from being killed by the average 40 tons a day of space debris raining down on the planet. Staying a bit less exposed won't protect you from a 5-ton hit, but it might keep you from getting punctured by some pea-sized shrapnel arriving at far higher than normal frequency in the same debris clusters with 40cm chunks.
"On March 17, 2013, an object about the size of a small boulder hit the lunar surface in Mare Imbrium," says Bill Cooke of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office.
"size of a small boulder"? This has to be one of the most useless size descriptions possible (I suppose they could have said "the size of a random rock"). Given that they later indicate
The 40 kg meteoroid measuring 0.3 to 0.4 meters wide
it's not as if they shouldn't have been able to come up with a more descriptive metaphor.
From observational evidence that *actual* terrorists groups don't seem to be into intentional "false alarm" style attacks (regardless of how "attractively effective" these would appear to be). Our own law enforcement agencies and fearful public create some of these, but there has yet to be evidence of, e.g., Al Qaeda affiliated groups leaving boxes of alarm clocks in airport terminals. Why wouldn't terrorists do this? For one thing, they're *extremely rare* (at least in this country). This leads to the second consideration: the few that are here tend to want to do something big and flashy (actually damaging), which entails *not getting caught* pulling stupid harmless stunts beforehand.
At the same time, AQAP, for example issues a claim of responsibility.
We had an (unfortunate) test case for this recently, with the Boston bombings: no one was stepping up to claim responsibility. This indicates that AQAP, for example, isn't in the business of opportunistically issuing false claims for threats they didn't cause.
it's still a lot easier to recruit pranksters than hard core murderers.
Where is there any evidence for "pranksters" being recruited? There have been more hard-core murderers than "recruited" pranksters. Pranksters work on their own, for their own agenda --- trying to recruit one would probably end up with you being on the wrong end of a prank with "FBI bust" as the punchline.
You'll probably still get jailed, but it'd be hard to justify a life term for it.
"Hard to justify" hasn't seemed to have stopped the government from carrying out plenty of atrocities against US citizens and foreign nationals so long as the word "terrorist" is involved.
Hmm, and exactly what crime would you be committing?
I have full confidence in our legal system's ability to manufacture a really scary sounding terrorism-related set of charges requiring harsh punishment. Sufficient legal memos will be generated to make whatever actions are taken fully retroactively legal. We're past the bad old Bush days of carrying out illegal imprisonment, torture, and executions on any flimsy pretenses of terrorism --- thanks to the tireless work of the Justice Department, we can now carry out fully legal imprisonment, torture, and executions on any flimsy pretenses of terrorism.
I was assuming the parent poster wasn't so much a terrorist as a mischievous prankster --- if your level of evil mastermind planning is to tag mostly harmless minor radioactive sources around the city (causing distress and embarrassment to the officials running the phone tracking scheme, but not exactly the mass terror of an actual bomb), then you might well be deterred by jail time. An actual terrorist unafraid of getting caught would just head to the target, phones be damned, and set off a bomb before phone data analysts had time to recognize and neutralize the threat. Fortunately, actual terrorists are *extremely rare,* and not worth the massive efforts/resources expended to prevent hypothetical movie-plot threats.
Idea -- check sources (e.g. 137Cs) are pretty cheap. Attach them to the outsides of public transit, pigeons, anything that moves around. The more the merrier.
There aren't particularly restrictions on who can purchase them, but the companies that make radioactive sealed sources do keep records (and are often wary about shipping to addresses outside a university or research corporation). If you order a couple dozen 137Cs sources strong enough to show up on cellphones a meter or two away, and then they suddenly start appearing on buses around town --- I hope you wanted to see beautiful Guantanamo Bay, because you're likely to end up in a big mess of trouble fast.
And what in the context implies that "a little love of money" is OK? The context does imply that the rich --- with their corresponding great love of money --- are those most grievously ensnared by the evils coming from money-loving. But there is nothing promoting some "middle path" where a moderate amount of money loving becomes acceptable. The following verse (1 Tim 6:11) reads "and thou, O man of God, these things flee, and pursue righteousness, piety, faith, love, endurance, meekness". Elsewhere in the scriptures, indicating the contemporary theological background shaping the 1 Timothy text, love of God (and, by extension, love of God's beloved children, our fellow humankind) is presented as an absolute ideal for *all* one's attention --- love of other things (e.g. money) are presented as being, to *any* extent, competing against and infidelity to the totalizing demand to love God. Interpolations that money loving "in moderation" is OK are the products of later mammon-worship apologists working to reconcile the world's popular money-loving beliefs with Christianity.
And the literal greek translation is: Root for all the evil is the love of money.
I included the "[kinds of]" possible interpretation, as this is found in many modern translations --- I'm willing to grant the translators some credibility that they have decent scholarship behind their translation choices for "panton ton kakon" (and grant Paul some credibility for not making an overly-narrow statement; since in other epistles he isn't particularly a "blame everything on the rich" type). I'm not personally dedicated to that translation, but I don't think it detracts from the message that "loving money"="bad shit".
When a man loves money more than personal morals and ethics
From where in the quote, or elsewhere in the scriptures from which the quote is drawn, are you getting the "more than" qualification? The text seems pretty clear that "the love of money" is problematic ("the root of all [kinds of] evil"), period. There is no exception made for "a little love of money is OK," any more than "a little love of murder is OK."
I think you're just proving my point: how much does your concept of "trillion = shitload" differ from "trillion and three = shitload"? I can conceptualize the difference between "four" and "four and three," but by the time you hit a trillion, all the integers start to seem pretty much the same --- the only way I can "tell the difference" is to symbolically ignore the "trillion" and ponder only the difference between zero and three.
If you go against the consensus and huge amounts of data and research with no similarly rigorous research of your own you are anti-science! FTFY. Past instances of "unpopular new theories revolutionizing science" happened when the "unpopular new theories" had their own scientifically compelling evidence behind them --- at which point the scientific community was fine with changing their minds. Global warming denialists don't have their own body of rigorous evidence and theories --- they have laundry lists of long-ago-debunked falsehoods and strawmen that they repeat over and over and over to spread FUD.
If nobody can think of a number, one may question if it exists at all.
How specifically do you have to think of a number for this to count? In vague terms, people have thought of "all" numbers in large classes (described properties of, e.g., real and complex numbers). For "specific" numbers like "a trillion" --- no one ever intuitively understands such a number as they do "four" --- you might know some properties of it, or how to write a symbolic representation of it, but you can never conceptualize "a trillion apples" like you can "four apples". So, where do you draw the line between "thought of in detail" numbers like 1,2,3, or 42, "thought of abstractly" numbers like "a trillion and three", or "thought of very abstractly" numbers like "all complex numbers" to figure out "which ones exist"?
Also,
Since the universe is infinite
is a very iffy assumption. We know it is *big*, but have zero evidence for big=infinite.
but let's not forget he started out as a programmer.
You mean, he started out as the kid of a highly paid and highly placed IBM executive. His programming skills were presumably decent, but there's no evidence he ever did anything groundbreaking for the era himself --- his big bucks started from leveraging corporate connections through mom to undercut real programming competitors to get the contract for providing DOS on IBM's personal computers. Gates isn't a "rags to riches" story --- only "riches and inside connections to mega super riches".
Say you went on vacation to India and took some photos of your significant other in front of the Taj Mahal; Google Plus will leverage its database of information to recognize that as a prominent landmark and pluck those photos out of the pile as 'special.'
Great, just what you need: a megacorporation to filter all your memories into cliched copies of a zillion other tourists' Taj Mahal photos. No need for building special memories of your own, with the person you're with --- that one shot, in some bland and unmemorable location, that would bring back with perfect clarity some jewel of laughter shared with your significant other: scores too low on Google Reality Rank Algorithm. But you can replace all your pitiful personal experiences with the postcard-perfect majestic landmarks conforming to the mind of the New Google Man: why live your own life, when a server farm can decide what is true and beautiful for you?
Become indistinguishable from all his peers, who are hip young technofetishists today, but will be fellow crotchety luddites complaining about the new kids on the lawn (and their pointless faddish brain implants and stupid music) in another 30 years?
"Ideal" is an overstatement --- it's a good fiber for some applications, but not magically universally optimal. Consider the pattern of hemp use versus alternate fibers in plenty of (historical and present) societies where marijuana prohibition is/was not a determining factor: while hemp was prized for certain applications (such as nautical ropes and cables, due to good strength and weather/wear resistance), those societies *also* produced a wide variety of alternate fibers (cotton, linen, silk, wool, etc.) for other uses. If hemp was "ideal," then every other fiber source would have been driven out of wide-scale production long ago.
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This approach might not work out so well with r-strategy breeders --- you'll fill the house up for sure with happy little roaches, but they won't be leaving the neighbors' homes to get there (just exponentially exploding their population to catch up with the expanded resources). Setting up "guard rows" of tasty pesticide-free crops to lure pests away from agricultural fields works to the extent that said pests are highly mobile and individually "exploring" a wide enough area to "find" the guard rows in preference to the main crops. However, roaches tend to locate and nest in one area (with only "excess population" expanding out into new territory) --- some very lucky bugs will find the new house (and start breeding to fill it), but the roaches behind your kitchen cabinets will stay behind to raise their kids behind your kitchen cabinets.
Sorry, but this war has been fought, and your side lost. I'm not using GNU/Linux/x.org/XFCE anymore than others are using Windows/CrystalReports/Office/PhotoShop.
Actually, people *do* typically refer to their computer software stack at a level appropriate for the task being described. If someone asks, "what did you photoshop that picture with," do you say "Mach microkernel"? --- No, you describe what you're using at a level appropriate to the activity: you might say "Gimp, on Ubuntu." Thus, if your work consists of using GNU utilities and applications, or writing programs linking against GNU libraries (and compiling them with a GNU compiler) --- it's perfectly reasonable to say you're using GNU on Linux (just like someone might say "Office on Windows" to describe their computer work environment, instead of saying "I write company newsletters using a Core i5-3350p").
Well, if you'd research the IRA some yourself, you'd see that they belong in a rather different category for analysis than typical terrorist threats within the US (the context of this discussion). Specifically, the IRA was operating very close to "home base," with a rather large sympathetic (or at least not wildly apathetic) portion of the population --- greatly altering the balance in how hard it is to recruit. One might expect IRA-like tactics to show up where the terrorist organization is operating as a large grassroots guerrilla resistance network --- and indeed, in countries "closer to home" for Al Qaeda, you do see different tactics where recruits are plentiful and can "vanish into the woodwork" of society.
Most states have passed anti-gay, one-man/one-woman marriage laws.
There's a reason we're not a democracy, we're a democratic republic. "Most people" are rather dumb.
So, how's that democratic republic been working out? Looks like we *still* get most of the stupid we'd get in a pure democracy, plus a big helping of suck-up-to-the-Oligarchy. Things like anti-gay laws only seem to go away *after* there's a solid majority opposing them --- so they'd get implemented and rolled back on approximately the same schedule in a purer democracy. Maybe faster, if there weren't big political power interests fueling the flames of bigotry as an electoral issue.
Earth's atmospheric pressure at sea level is roughly equivalent to having ~10m of water (1g/cm^3 density) above our heads. At a density of ~1.5g/cm^3, and a thickness between 5 and 10m, lunar regolith is in many areas equivalent to *less* mass than the atmosphere protecting our heads. That "solid rock" might be a bit less tough than you think compared to the crazy big chunk of air covering us on Earth.
Unfortunately, they stopped transmitting in 1977 (so no useful information to correlate with today's more advanced remote sensing capabilities). Either a few more (simple) landers are in order, or perhaps we could get some seismic information from laser interferometry off the the corner-cube reflectors we left on the moon (from an Earth-orbiting satellite with an *incredibly fast* fringe counter --- looks hard with today's technology, but perhaps not *that* far away to measure shifts to the O(10GHz) varying optical light interference pattern from an orbital-speed craft).
C'mon, they know they're talking to dummies, they have to K.I.S.S.
That's exactly why you don't use an uninformative description like "size of a small boulder." Someone familiar with details of geological jargon might know that "boulder" often technically refers to a rock over 25cm (so "small boulder" is an accurate estimate for 30-40cm object) --- however, for a "dummy" in a general audience, the term is completely useless. If you want to be more visually descriptive than 30-40cm (12-16 inch) diameter, say something like "large watermelon sized" or "beachball sized," etc.
I'll admit my "units" dig was somewhat of a worn-out trollish dig. However, the substance of the criticism --- poor science reporting for engaging the general public --- remains. NASA is usually pretty good at relaying scientific information to a general public audience; I'd expect better than this type of unhelpful jargon (correct using a technical definition of boulder at slightly larger than 10 inches / 25cm, but pretty useless to most readers). Clarity in communications is a major part of the *job* of top researchers who will be first in line for producing media soundbites, along with the writers deciding which selected quotes to put on a press release page.
Given the ridiculous number of orders of magnitude in expenditure between "defense spending" and analyzing data from a video camera pointed at the moon to see if we can learn anything interesting, I'm not particularly seeing the validity of your comparison. If NASA did *nothing else* over the past year than produce this video (no Mars rovers or anything else), they'd still be a fantastically cheap and productive enterprise compared to defense spending (which spends ~40x more per year that all of NASA to make the world a more violent and dangerous place).
An explosion is a rapid increase in volume and release of energy in an extreme manner, usually with the generation of high temperatures and the release of gases.
--Wikipedia (not the final word on technical sources; feel free to reply with a more definitive description)
The impact converts the massive kinetic energy of fast-moving space items into a lot of localized *friggin' hot* material: the white-hot flash that you see in the video, as the lunar surface is explosively vaporized into a blast of ionized plasma. Impact kinetic effects (with enough energy) *are* very similar to an explosion from some other source releasing similar energy. When we send landing crafts, they try not to dump 5 tons of TNT equivalent in a fraction of a millisecond --- that's generally bad for the craft.
Granted, at that point they were talking about not staying out in a meteor shower if you're *on the moon*. That might be more appropriate advice than on Earth --- it's the atmosphere that keeps people safe from being killed by the average 40 tons a day of space debris raining down on the planet. Staying a bit less exposed won't protect you from a 5-ton hit, but it might keep you from getting punctured by some pea-sized shrapnel arriving at far higher than normal frequency in the same debris clusters with 40cm chunks.
"On March 17, 2013, an object about the size of a small boulder hit the lunar surface in Mare Imbrium," says Bill Cooke of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office.
"size of a small boulder"? This has to be one of the most useless size descriptions possible (I suppose they could have said "the size of a random rock"). Given that they later indicate
The 40 kg meteoroid measuring 0.3 to 0.4 meters wide
it's not as if they shouldn't have been able to come up with a more descriptive metaphor.
How do you tell the difference?
From observational evidence that *actual* terrorists groups don't seem to be into intentional "false alarm" style attacks (regardless of how "attractively effective" these would appear to be). Our own law enforcement agencies and fearful public create some of these, but there has yet to be evidence of, e.g., Al Qaeda affiliated groups leaving boxes of alarm clocks in airport terminals. Why wouldn't terrorists do this? For one thing, they're *extremely rare* (at least in this country). This leads to the second consideration: the few that are here tend to want to do something big and flashy (actually damaging), which entails *not getting caught* pulling stupid harmless stunts beforehand.
At the same time, AQAP, for example issues a claim of responsibility.
We had an (unfortunate) test case for this recently, with the Boston bombings: no one was stepping up to claim responsibility. This indicates that AQAP, for example, isn't in the business of opportunistically issuing false claims for threats they didn't cause.
it's still a lot easier to recruit pranksters than hard core murderers.
Where is there any evidence for "pranksters" being recruited? There have been more hard-core murderers than "recruited" pranksters. Pranksters work on their own, for their own agenda --- trying to recruit one would probably end up with you being on the wrong end of a prank with "FBI bust" as the punchline.
You'll probably still get jailed, but it'd be hard to justify a life term for it.
"Hard to justify" hasn't seemed to have stopped the government from carrying out plenty of atrocities against US citizens and foreign nationals so long as the word "terrorist" is involved.
Hmm, and exactly what crime would you be committing?
I have full confidence in our legal system's ability to manufacture a really scary sounding terrorism-related set of charges requiring harsh punishment. Sufficient legal memos will be generated to make whatever actions are taken fully retroactively legal. We're past the bad old Bush days of carrying out illegal imprisonment, torture, and executions on any flimsy pretenses of terrorism --- thanks to the tireless work of the Justice Department, we can now carry out fully legal imprisonment, torture, and executions on any flimsy pretenses of terrorism.
I was assuming the parent poster wasn't so much a terrorist as a mischievous prankster --- if your level of evil mastermind planning is to tag mostly harmless minor radioactive sources around the city (causing distress and embarrassment to the officials running the phone tracking scheme, but not exactly the mass terror of an actual bomb), then you might well be deterred by jail time. An actual terrorist unafraid of getting caught would just head to the target, phones be damned, and set off a bomb before phone data analysts had time to recognize and neutralize the threat. Fortunately, actual terrorists are *extremely rare,* and not worth the massive efforts/resources expended to prevent hypothetical movie-plot threats.
Idea -- check sources (e.g. 137Cs) are pretty cheap. Attach them to the outsides of public transit, pigeons, anything that moves around. The more the merrier.
There aren't particularly restrictions on who can purchase them, but the companies that make radioactive sealed sources do keep records (and are often wary about shipping to addresses outside a university or research corporation). If you order a couple dozen 137Cs sources strong enough to show up on cellphones a meter or two away, and then they suddenly start appearing on buses around town --- I hope you wanted to see beautiful Guantanamo Bay, because you're likely to end up in a big mess of trouble fast.
And what in the context implies that "a little love of money" is OK? The context does imply that the rich --- with their corresponding great love of money --- are those most grievously ensnared by the evils coming from money-loving. But there is nothing promoting some "middle path" where a moderate amount of money loving becomes acceptable. The following verse (1 Tim 6:11) reads "and thou, O man of God, these things flee, and pursue righteousness, piety, faith, love, endurance, meekness". Elsewhere in the scriptures, indicating the contemporary theological background shaping the 1 Timothy text, love of God (and, by extension, love of God's beloved children, our fellow humankind) is presented as an absolute ideal for *all* one's attention --- love of other things (e.g. money) are presented as being, to *any* extent, competing against and infidelity to the totalizing demand to love God. Interpolations that money loving "in moderation" is OK are the products of later mammon-worship apologists working to reconcile the world's popular money-loving beliefs with Christianity.
And the literal greek translation is: Root for all the evil is the love of money.
I included the "[kinds of]" possible interpretation, as this is found in many modern translations --- I'm willing to grant the translators some credibility that they have decent scholarship behind their translation choices for "panton ton kakon" (and grant Paul some credibility for not making an overly-narrow statement; since in other epistles he isn't particularly a "blame everything on the rich" type). I'm not personally dedicated to that translation, but I don't think it detracts from the message that "loving money"="bad shit".
When a man loves money more than personal morals and ethics
From where in the quote, or elsewhere in the scriptures from which the quote is drawn, are you getting the "more than" qualification? The text seems pretty clear that "the love of money" is problematic ("the root of all [kinds of] evil"), period. There is no exception made for "a little love of money is OK," any more than "a little love of murder is OK."
I think you're just proving my point: how much does your concept of "trillion = shitload" differ from "trillion and three = shitload"? I can conceptualize the difference between "four" and "four and three," but by the time you hit a trillion, all the integers start to seem pretty much the same --- the only way I can "tell the difference" is to symbolically ignore the "trillion" and ponder only the difference between zero and three.
If you go against the consensus and huge amounts of data and research with no similarly rigorous research of your own you are anti-science!
FTFY. Past instances of "unpopular new theories revolutionizing science" happened when the "unpopular new theories" had their own scientifically compelling evidence behind them --- at which point the scientific community was fine with changing their minds. Global warming denialists don't have their own body of rigorous evidence and theories --- they have laundry lists of long-ago-debunked falsehoods and strawmen that they repeat over and over and over to spread FUD.
If nobody can think of a number, one may question if it exists at all.
How specifically do you have to think of a number for this to count? In vague terms, people have thought of "all" numbers in large classes (described properties of, e.g., real and complex numbers). For "specific" numbers like "a trillion" --- no one ever intuitively understands such a number as they do "four" --- you might know some properties of it, or how to write a symbolic representation of it, but you can never conceptualize "a trillion apples" like you can "four apples". So, where do you draw the line between "thought of in detail" numbers like 1,2,3, or 42, "thought of abstractly" numbers like "a trillion and three", or "thought of very abstractly" numbers like "all complex numbers" to figure out "which ones exist"?
Also,
Since the universe is infinite
is a very iffy assumption. We know it is *big*, but have zero evidence for big=infinite.
but let's not forget he started out as a programmer.
You mean, he started out as the kid of a highly paid and highly placed IBM executive. His programming skills were presumably decent, but there's no evidence he ever did anything groundbreaking for the era himself --- his big bucks started from leveraging corporate connections through mom to undercut real programming competitors to get the contract for providing DOS on IBM's personal computers. Gates isn't a "rags to riches" story --- only "riches and inside connections to mega super riches".
Say you went on vacation to India and took some photos of your significant other in front of the Taj Mahal; Google Plus will leverage its database of information to recognize that as a prominent landmark and pluck those photos out of the pile as 'special.'
Great, just what you need: a megacorporation to filter all your memories into cliched copies of a zillion other tourists' Taj Mahal photos. No need for building special memories of your own, with the person you're with --- that one shot, in some bland and unmemorable location, that would bring back with perfect clarity some jewel of laughter shared with your significant other: scores too low on Google Reality Rank Algorithm. But you can replace all your pitiful personal experiences with the postcard-perfect majestic landmarks conforming to the mind of the New Google Man: why live your own life, when a server farm can decide what is true and beautiful for you?
Become indistinguishable from all his peers, who are hip young technofetishists today, but will be fellow crotchety luddites complaining about the new kids on the lawn (and their pointless faddish brain implants and stupid music) in another 30 years?
"Ideal" is an overstatement --- it's a good fiber for some applications, but not magically universally optimal. Consider the pattern of hemp use versus alternate fibers in plenty of (historical and present) societies where marijuana prohibition is/was not a determining factor: while hemp was prized for certain applications (such as nautical ropes and cables, due to good strength and weather/wear resistance), those societies *also* produced a wide variety of alternate fibers (cotton, linen, silk, wool, etc.) for other uses. If hemp was "ideal," then every other fiber source would have been driven out of wide-scale production long ago.