1-...the First Amendment is government intervention.
2-...therefore it is itself a government document.
These are not the same thing. By your reasoning, making a document stating a rule that "we will not intervene in X" would count as intervening in X. Next thing you know you'll be telling me that the phrase in the constitution letting Congress regulate "trade between the several states" lets them regulate things that aren't traded and that don't go between states. Wait a sec, the Supreme Court ruled that it does. So that's your problem - you're taking a Constitutional Law class and it's obliterated the verbal reasoning part of your brain, replacing it with politically-motivated mumbo-jumbo.
Don't worry, one semester of science/math/engineering classes, where words actually mean what the dictionary says they mean, and you'll be back to normal.
Although Americans once laughed at Europeans for favoring kinder, gentler labor policies that "hindered" economic growth, the Europeans now have the last laugh: the unemployment rate in America now exceeds the rate in several European countries.
Yep, there may be a lesson there. On the other hand, if it takes a once-in-a-century recession to get the US unemployment rate up to European levels, that suggests that most of the time it's actually lower. Maybe there's a lesson in there as well.
As a former president of an Abstinence organization, I can tell you that most abstinence organizations teach all about birth control methods.
Sex-ed programs all teach about abstinence and point out that it's the safest option. Abstinence-only programs suck because they don't have any more success than traditional programs at delaying the onset of sexual activity, and pregnancy and STD rates of those students are almost always significantly higher.
And creationists raise several important challenges to evolution that have not been addressed.
No, they don't. All they do is find something that they can't imagine a material explanation for, and shoehorn a god into that gap. The problem with that is that things are discovered all the time that people just couldn't have imagined before. Even worse, even if they did find something that couldn't possibly have a material explanation, that still doesn't mean that it had to be an "intelligent designer", it would just mean that we wouldn't know. "Poverty of imagination" simply doesn't count as an argument.
How does science continue to be science if challenges to the prevailing theory are censored instead of discussed?
The scientific challenges to evolution should be taught in a science class, but since creationism is not science, teaching it in a science class is a lie by implication.
A man determines his own value.
I'd be willing to go along with that.
I want to live now, which means my life has value, and which means I had value while in the womb.
That's doesn't follow. A sculpture is often more valuable than the original glob of clay.
It is not my mother's or the State's business.
I'd agree about the state, but having a child did affect your mother; so it is, in some sense, her business.
A human that would have been, won't be.
Which could also be true when you post to Slashdot rather than have sex.
If she will destroy lives for her own enjoyment, she deserves no protection from society. This is an entirely secular matter.
That's one perspective. From another, she's merely not allowing a life to mature to the point that it becomes self-aware.
Oh, for a time machine to convince the mothers of all pro-"choice" fanatics to abort! Or a law to allow abortion of any helpless dependent - only then would consistency prevail.
Things with minds are protected; things that only had minds in the past, or only might have minds in the future, are not. That's perfectly consistent, it's just not what you believe.
I would say that the existence of life on Earth is quite strong evidence of the existence of life elsewhere
Well, it's not direct evidence (aliens land on the White House lawn), it isn't even indirect evidence (oxygen atmosphere on a distant planet). It's just a probabilistic argument, and one based on a single instance that had to be successful for the argument to even be thought of (if life wasn't here, there would be nobody to think of it).
life seems to find a way into almost any vaguely possible niche
But that applies only to life that already exists. Abiogenesis seems to require fairly specific conditions, otherwise it would be easy to demonstrate in a lab.
many of the 'building blocks' of life can assemble given a basic set of conditions
But that's only one part of the whole. It just means that if a bottleneck exists in the process of creating life, it's at some other stage.
the UAW is probably the only reason why we have an auto industry in the US at this point
the UAW workers don't actually make that much more than their non-union counterparts in the South
How is that not self-contradictory? And why should we keep using tax money that everyone pays to prop up the companies the use the UAW? If non-union companies compensate their employees just as much, and employ US workers, what's the point? I don't think most people have a problem with unions per se, it's the constant need for favoritism that bothers them.
Perhaps you'd like to give up your 40 hours work weeks, week ends, OSHA regulations, retirement and disability insurance.
It seems a bit overblown to give all of the credit for those to unions, and to assume that they're all unambiguously beneficial.
No scientist has ever chosen a wife or bought a house by scientific method
Solely based on the scientific method, probably not. But science can influence their decisions, like finding out what factors are likely to lead to a successful relationship. More importantly the irrational part of their decision is still explainable in scientific terms, like how the other girl had something in common with someone he had a bad relationship with, or the woman he chose is more attractive to him due to evolution's pressure to seek certain traits.
nor does he laugh or applaud a musical work on scientific grounds
Nor does he sneeze because of science. But science can explain (maybe only in a crude way right now) why he laughs and applauds and sneezes. Also, if he wants to sneeze less and laugh more, science can help him - with antihistamines and Netflix's movie suggestion tool.
What it offers--too readily--is the promise to do so in future, coupled with the command to sit and wait.
No, it regularly delivers on that promise, and you're welcome to help out as much as you want. What we don't welcome is someone tromping through our fields shouting "Well, this corn farming thing hasn't delivered this year's corn yet, and it never will! Instead, you should be reciting phrases that make you feel good but have no demonstrable practical benefit, that's how well survive the winter."
whatever you know, or think you know, about your family and friends
What?
you act on faith whenever you say with no quiver of doubt "I'll see you next Monday."
I know that I could be sick or dead on Monday, just because I don't mention it doesn't mean I don't think it's possible. If I really had no trace of doubt I wouldn't bother to drive safely.
'Do not decide but leave the question open,' is itself a passional decision and is attended with the same risk of losing the truth.
Sometimes people avoid making a choice for irrational reasons, but there are plenty of situations where we can calculate our level of certainty exactly, and others where it really is best to just admit ignorance. It's disingenuous to state that because the first situation exists, that the second and third ones can't.
Lots and lots of Slashdotters will agree that alien life, and even more improbably intelligent alien life, is out there somewhere,... How is that qualitatively different from belief in God?
Many think it's possible that alien life exists, and that's perfectly reasonable. The few that are certain of their existence are just as nutty as the strongly religious.
Neither one of them has proof, yet few say to people who believe in aliens "Okay, where are they?"
People who think it's possible start programs like SETI, so that we might get a solid answer to that question.
despite not a shred of empirical evidence.
The existence of life on earth is empirical evidence - weak evidence, I'd agree, but evidence none the less.
No. There can be no scientific disproof of the existence of God because, by definition, science is constrained to natural phenomena: theories that can be falsified using evidence.
That's not true. Science is based on evidence, but if a supernatural phenomenon left evidence, it could be investigated scientifically:
1. If ESP existed, in the form of mental text messaging, it would be easy to show evidence of its existence. You could even characterize it in some ways, like how fast people could send messages, how far they could be sent, etc.
2. If ghosts actually existed, and regularly did things like help the police solve their own murders, that would be evidence.
3. If Jesus was still wandering the earth healing the sick etc, it would be trivial to show that something unusual was going on.
I should point out that none of this proves that none of these phenomena could be shown to be supernatural (ESP is EM-based?, ghost are a natural "second body"?, Jesus is a time-traveler with advanced tech?), but I think that reinforces my point. It doesn't matter if gravity is caused by Higgs, gravitons, God's will, or space fairies - the scientific description of gravity would still hold.
Until you realize that gravity affects charged particles with mass by an order of 36 magnitude times less than an electrical field.
Which is irrelevant because gravity accumulates, while charge tends to cancel out.
The radiation produced somewhere in the supposed black hole would never make it out again.
It isn't generated "in" the black hole, it's created around it in an accretion disk and in gas jets.
Gravity, directly or indirectly is too weak a force to be in the radiation generation game.
That's only your intuition talking - if there was actual evidence to back it up you'd have shown it to me.
It is an ironclad law that electromagnetic radiation can only be produced electrically.
I'd accept that as true.
None of them, not even one, has ever been nor can be generated by gravity, no matter how much matter you pile together. The equations of gravity do not include electrical components.
Directly - yes. But there are may indirect ways that gravity can produce electrical effects.
If there is an electrical field, a difference of potential, currents will flow in a plasma to SEPARATE the charges.
Yes, the charges in the plasma separate, so they negate the electric field that comes from other sources. The net effect is that the field strength is reduced.
Cosmologists and astrophysicists who theorize that there is a gigantic black hole in the center of our galaxy are totally wrong. There is intense electromagnetic radiation issuing from the middle of our galaxy. All of that, every bit, has its origin in the electric force acting either in free space or within the atom.
That radiation is caused by many effects. One of them is that gravity accelerates charged particles with mass, and accelerating charges generate electromagnetic radiation. That's a perfect example of how gravity can produce electromagnetic radiation as a side effect.
In the high school that my children attend, there appear to be few poor families.... In the adjoining poor city, more than 90% of the families live below the poverty line. The rare children produced by the poor who find themselves raised by wealthier suburban families seem to succeed in life on par with other children raised in the suburbs.
I think that even the person who originally suggested that "classes are fixed" would agree that class is primarily an effect of culture, rather than genetics or divine will. I'm hoping that we can use that as a point of common agreement. Also, the two towns you describe seem to have very different cultures and very little overlap. But this isn't the situation everywhere - most places in first-world nations (at least over larger areas) have a fairly continuous spectrum between rich and poor.
My main problem with "the classes are fixed" isn't that it's untrue, but that it leads to undesirable attitudes about class. It can be an excuse for animosity - "lazy welfare queens" or "undeserving rich", a way or reinforcing other cruel attitudes - "if the races are equally smart, why haven't they climbed out of poverty yet", and an excuse for not trying - "it's not my fault". The last one is the most disturbing to me, because it can actually create the situation that it assumes, and becomes a very negative self-fulfilling prophecy.
You are assuming that only tiny particles, such as electrons and other atomic bits and pieces can carry charge.
No, I'm not. I'm just observing that (in comparison to their gravitational equivalents) it's difficult to generate large voltages and even harder to get large objects to maintain a charge.
Because the electric forces are so powerful, only a slight imbalance of charge, will produce immense electrical forces between such charged objects. Most of the matter in the universe is not nicely neutral like we fortunately have here on earth, but highly charged plasma.
The problem is that the plasma (which has no overall charge even though it's made of charged particles) will be the first thing to respond to that immense electrical force - and it will respond in exactly the right way to cancel that charge imbalance.
The fact that there are magnetic fields in space and on the Sun, attests to the fact that there are flowing currents. Flowing currents can only happen if there is a potential difference within that current flow.
Which is why it's silly to say that they "totally ignore the action of the electric force in the large-scale universe".
My entire point was that physicists are using simplified newtonian equation of motions instead of the known correct General relativity.
THAT was your central thesis? I'm sorry, I thought it was "astrophysicists are way stupider than me".
Did you read read ANY of that? MOND stands for Modified Newtonian Dynamics.
Did you read ANY of the context. You claim that scientists are unwilling to look at anything other than Newtonian dynamics (and now you claim it's your central point), but the #2 theory for certain effects is practically called "Not Newtonian Dynamics". I thought the glaring contrast would get the point across.
It's basically a type of laziness.
And we're back to this. Thanks for letting me get a +5 Insightful off your -1 Troll.:)
the electric force which is 36 orders of magnitude greater than gravity
But expends itself on neutralizing the charges that generate the force, gravity clumps matter together and the larger lumps generate a stronger gravitational field.
a slightly charged, that is not exactly neutral body, would move in a weak, but not zero magnetic or electric field
The largest effect this would have is attracting particles of opposite charge from the surrounding plasma, negating itself.
current cosmologists and astrophysicists totally ignore
The simple, and logical conclusion to anyone who isn't blinded by arrogance, is that the equations are wrong, or at the minimum, incomplete.
The simple, and logical conclusion to anyone who isn't blinded by arrogance, is that astrophysicists have already thought of that, and decided that it wasn't the best possible explanation.
People can agree to disagree without being sardonically arrogant.
Yes, it would have been nice if "bertok" could have made his point without accusing a large swath of scientists of being unscientific and unable to come up with ideas he found obvious.
This is more along the lines of "our equations don't explain the observed motion of galaxies, therefore, there's matter there we can't see or touch."
Wow! I never thought they would do things like that! I would have expected things to go like this:
"our equations don't explain the observed motion of galaxies, therefore, it's reasonable to hypothesize that there's matter there we can't see or touch, let's test it."
And then they'd go and look for evidence or something. Thanks for correcting me!
That's just not a logical conclusion. It leaves out the much more likely answer that our understanding of the equations of motion is wrong.
So all that stuff I heard about MOND was just in my head? Thanks for grounding me in reality!
Most galaxy motion simulations are based on either Newtonian mechanics or "modified Newtonian" mechanics, even though both are known to be wrong. Einstein showed them to be wrong over a hundred years ago!
You're right! It's quite likely that thousands and thousands of astrophysicists have spent decades researching a problem that has such an obvious solution. You're a veritable font of wisdom!
I studied physics at University, and both me and a friend of mine noted during our studies that Physics seems to overuse simplified equations... Those simple equations are the ones we learned about also. They're wrong. In many practical cases, the error can exceed 30%!
O M G ! - W T F ! Low level physics classes use lots of simplifications? That explains why I can't find massless ropes and frictionless pulleys on E-Bay!
does not mean that classes will not solidify over time
Which is a different claim that the one you made before. I still maintain that your claim about "classes being fixed" is clearly false, but I do think an argument could be made that the amount of mobility that's possible could be changing. I don't have enough information to make a good prediction, though.
In the west we have a reversing trend, more people are getting poorer.
I could see that happening in a recession (like now), but not over the long run. If you have evidence to the contrary please point me to it.
And considering the amount of underemployed unviersity educated people in the USA and Canada...
Class is relatively fixed, do not confuse some dynamic movement in income as social mobility, most people behave like atoms in gas.
Are the atoms in a gas fixed? I'm sorry, but the article you've cited does a poor job of supporting that idea. On the other hand, according to this
42 percent of those whose parents were in the bottom quintile ended up in the bottom quintile themselves, 23 percent of them ended in the second quintile, 19 percent in the middle quintile, 11 percent in the fourth quintile and 6 percent in the top quintile
Which means that children in the lowest 1/5 of households have an even shot at moving halfway across the class spectrum. It may not be a perfect meritocracy, but it's no caste system, either.
unsupported assumptions (like only a portion of the breed)
'Population' is not the same as 'breed', and the current version of small Chihuahuas are a population as much as 'the gulls currently nesting on this island' is a population. If you have a problem with the way 'ring species' or 'population' is defined, talk to the guys that write the definitions - I just read them.
I am disagreeing with most of the claims of observed speciation and how they...
Yes, they suck. We just don't have enough time to watch dogs evolve into whales the way dog-like animals did the first time, so the examples we have are things that have just barely crossed the line, and on their own wouldn't convince many people of anything evolution-related. But after you understand the journey as a whole, seeing examples of how many of the small steps were taken is very helpful, and it really does make the case as a whole more convincing.
As I previously explained, you had entire populations who wouldn't believe in the power of a god or supposed god when fractions of the same populations staked their lives on it.
Which is what I meant by "There are always skeptics and believers" - but I don't believe that there were many people in the 5th century that thought that Adam wasn't the first human being, that 'day' really meant 'age', and that actual witches didn't really exist, but still took most of the rest of the Bible as being the word of God. All of those accommodations came after outsides sources (often, but not always, science) made the original (usually more literal) interpretation seem a little too silly to take seriously. That lends support to my explanation of why there's a lack of direct conflict between science and religion: when conflicts do arise, religion reinvents itself to avoid the conflict.
Slashdot Mirror
1- ...the First Amendment is government intervention.
2-...therefore it is itself a government document.
These are not the same thing. By your reasoning, making a document stating a rule that "we will not intervene in X" would count as intervening in X. Next thing you know you'll be telling me that the phrase in the constitution letting Congress regulate "trade between the several states" lets them regulate things that aren't traded and that don't go between states. Wait a sec, the Supreme Court ruled that it does. So that's your problem - you're taking a Constitutional Law class and it's obliterated the verbal reasoning part of your brain, replacing it with politically-motivated mumbo-jumbo.
Don't worry, one semester of science/math/engineering classes, where words actually mean what the dictionary says they mean, and you'll be back to normal.
Although Americans once laughed at Europeans for favoring kinder, gentler labor policies that "hindered" economic growth, the Europeans now have the last laugh: the unemployment rate in America now exceeds the rate in several European countries.
Yep, there may be a lesson there. On the other hand, if it takes a once-in-a-century recession to get the US unemployment rate up to European levels, that suggests that most of the time it's actually lower. Maybe there's a lesson in there as well.
Er ... what part were you objecting to?
As a former president of an Abstinence organization, I can tell you that most abstinence organizations teach all about birth control methods.
Sex-ed programs all teach about abstinence and point out that it's the safest option. Abstinence-only programs suck because they don't have any more success than traditional programs at delaying the onset of sexual activity, and pregnancy and STD rates of those students are almost always significantly higher.
And creationists raise several important challenges to evolution that have not been addressed.
No, they don't. All they do is find something that they can't imagine a material explanation for, and shoehorn a god into that gap. The problem with that is that things are discovered all the time that people just couldn't have imagined before. Even worse, even if they did find something that couldn't possibly have a material explanation, that still doesn't mean that it had to be an "intelligent designer", it would just mean that we wouldn't know. "Poverty of imagination" simply doesn't count as an argument.
How does science continue to be science if challenges to the prevailing theory are censored instead of discussed?
The scientific challenges to evolution should be taught in a science class, but since creationism is not science, teaching it in a science class is a lie by implication.
A man determines his own value.
I'd be willing to go along with that.
I want to live now, which means my life has value, and which means I had value while in the womb.
That's doesn't follow. A sculpture is often more valuable than the original glob of clay.
It is not my mother's or the State's business.
I'd agree about the state, but having a child did affect your mother; so it is, in some sense, her business.
A human that would have been, won't be.
Which could also be true when you post to Slashdot rather than have sex.
If she will destroy lives for her own enjoyment, she deserves no protection from society. This is an entirely secular matter.
That's one perspective. From another, she's merely not allowing a life to mature to the point that it becomes self-aware.
Oh, for a time machine to convince the mothers of all pro-"choice" fanatics to abort! Or a law to allow abortion of any helpless dependent - only then would consistency prevail.
Things with minds are protected; things that only had minds in the past, or only might have minds in the future, are not. That's perfectly consistent, it's just not what you believe.
I would say that the existence of life on Earth is quite strong evidence of the existence of life elsewhere
Well, it's not direct evidence (aliens land on the White House lawn), it isn't even indirect evidence (oxygen atmosphere on a distant planet). It's just a probabilistic argument, and one based on a single instance that had to be successful for the argument to even be thought of (if life wasn't here, there would be nobody to think of it).
life seems to find a way into almost any vaguely possible niche
But that applies only to life that already exists. Abiogenesis seems to require fairly specific conditions, otherwise it would be easy to demonstrate in a lab.
many of the 'building blocks' of life can assemble given a basic set of conditions
But that's only one part of the whole. It just means that if a bottleneck exists in the process of creating life, it's at some other stage.
the UAW is probably the only reason why we have an auto industry in the US at this point
the UAW workers don't actually make that much more than their non-union counterparts in the South
How is that not self-contradictory? And why should we keep using tax money that everyone pays to prop up the companies the use the UAW? If non-union companies compensate their employees just as much, and employ US workers, what's the point? I don't think most people have a problem with unions per se, it's the constant need for favoritism that bothers them.
Perhaps you'd like to give up your 40 hours work weeks, week ends, OSHA regulations, retirement and disability insurance.
It seems a bit overblown to give all of the credit for those to unions, and to assume that they're all unambiguously beneficial.
No scientist has ever chosen a wife or bought a house by scientific method
Solely based on the scientific method, probably not. But science can influence their decisions, like finding out what factors are likely to lead to a successful relationship. More importantly the irrational part of their decision is still explainable in scientific terms, like how the other girl had something in common with someone he had a bad relationship with, or the woman he chose is more attractive to him due to evolution's pressure to seek certain traits.
nor does he laugh or applaud a musical work on scientific grounds
Nor does he sneeze because of science. But science can explain (maybe only in a crude way right now) why he laughs and applauds and sneezes. Also, if he wants to sneeze less and laugh more, science can help him - with antihistamines and Netflix's movie suggestion tool.
What it offers--too readily--is the promise to do so in future, coupled with the command to sit and wait.
No, it regularly delivers on that promise, and you're welcome to help out as much as you want. What we don't welcome is someone tromping through our fields shouting "Well, this corn farming thing hasn't delivered this year's corn yet, and it never will! Instead, you should be reciting phrases that make you feel good but have no demonstrable practical benefit, that's how well survive the winter."
whatever you know, or think you know, about your family and friends
What?
you act on faith whenever you say with no quiver of doubt "I'll see you next Monday."
I know that I could be sick or dead on Monday, just because I don't mention it doesn't mean I don't think it's possible. If I really had no trace of doubt I wouldn't bother to drive safely.
'Do not decide but leave the question open,' is itself a passional decision and is attended with the same risk of losing the truth.
Sometimes people avoid making a choice for irrational reasons, but there are plenty of situations where we can calculate our level of certainty exactly, and others where it really is best to just admit ignorance. It's disingenuous to state that because the first situation exists, that the second and third ones can't.
Lots and lots of Slashdotters will agree that alien life, and even more improbably intelligent alien life, is out there somewhere, ... How is that qualitatively different from belief in God?
Many think it's possible that alien life exists, and that's perfectly reasonable. The few that are certain of their existence are just as nutty as the strongly religious.
Neither one of them has proof, yet few say to people who believe in aliens "Okay, where are they?"
People who think it's possible start programs like SETI, so that we might get a solid answer to that question.
despite not a shred of empirical evidence.
The existence of life on earth is empirical evidence - weak evidence, I'd agree, but evidence none the less.
No. There can be no scientific disproof of the existence of God because, by definition, science is constrained to natural phenomena: theories that can be falsified using evidence.
That's not true. Science is based on evidence, but if a supernatural phenomenon left evidence, it could be investigated scientifically:
1. If ESP existed, in the form of mental text messaging, it would be easy to show evidence of its existence. You could even characterize it in some ways, like how fast people could send messages, how far they could be sent, etc.
2. If ghosts actually existed, and regularly did things like help the police solve their own murders, that would be evidence.
3. If Jesus was still wandering the earth healing the sick etc, it would be trivial to show that something unusual was going on.
I should point out that none of this proves that none of these phenomena could be shown to be supernatural (ESP is EM-based?, ghost are a natural "second body"?, Jesus is a time-traveler with advanced tech?), but I think that reinforces my point. It doesn't matter if gravity is caused by Higgs, gravitons, God's will, or space fairies - the scientific description of gravity would still hold.
Until you realize that gravity affects charged particles with mass by an order of 36 magnitude times less than an electrical field.
Which is irrelevant because gravity accumulates, while charge tends to cancel out.
The radiation produced somewhere in the supposed black hole would never make it out again.
It isn't generated "in" the black hole, it's created around it in an accretion disk and in gas jets.
Gravity, directly or indirectly is too weak a force to be in the radiation generation game.
That's only your intuition talking - if there was actual evidence to back it up you'd have shown it to me.
It is an ironclad law that electromagnetic radiation can only be produced electrically.
I'd accept that as true.
None of them, not even one, has ever been nor can be generated by gravity, no matter how much matter you pile together. The equations of gravity do not include electrical components.
Directly - yes. But there are may indirect ways that gravity can produce electrical effects.
If there is an electrical field, a difference of potential, currents will flow in a plasma to SEPARATE the charges.
Yes, the charges in the plasma separate, so they negate the electric field that comes from other sources. The net effect is that the field strength is reduced.
Cosmologists and astrophysicists who theorize that there is a gigantic black hole in the center of our galaxy are totally wrong. There is intense electromagnetic radiation issuing from the middle of our galaxy. All of that, every bit, has its origin in the electric force acting either in free space or within the atom.
That radiation is caused by many effects. One of them is that gravity accelerates charged particles with mass, and accelerating charges generate electromagnetic radiation. That's a perfect example of how gravity can produce electromagnetic radiation as a side effect.
In the high school that my children attend, there appear to be few poor families. ... In the adjoining poor city, more than 90% of the families live below the poverty line.
The rare children produced by the poor who find themselves raised by wealthier suburban families seem to succeed in life on par with other children raised in the suburbs.
I think that even the person who originally suggested that "classes are fixed" would agree that class is primarily an effect of culture, rather than genetics or divine will. I'm hoping that we can use that as a point of common agreement. Also, the two towns you describe seem to have very different cultures and very little overlap. But this isn't the situation everywhere - most places in first-world nations (at least over larger areas) have a fairly continuous spectrum between rich and poor.
My main problem with "the classes are fixed" isn't that it's untrue, but that it leads to undesirable attitudes about class. It can be an excuse for animosity - "lazy welfare queens" or "undeserving rich", a way or reinforcing other cruel attitudes - "if the races are equally smart, why haven't they climbed out of poverty yet", and an excuse for not trying - "it's not my fault". The last one is the most disturbing to me, because it can actually create the situation that it assumes, and becomes a very negative self-fulfilling prophecy.
You are assuming that only tiny particles, such as electrons and other atomic bits and pieces can carry charge.
No, I'm not. I'm just observing that (in comparison to their gravitational equivalents) it's difficult to generate large voltages and even harder to get large objects to maintain a charge.
Because the electric forces are so powerful, only a slight imbalance of charge, will produce immense electrical forces between such charged objects. Most of the matter in the universe is not nicely neutral like we fortunately have here on earth, but highly charged plasma.
The problem is that the plasma (which has no overall charge even though it's made of charged particles) will be the first thing to respond to that immense electrical force - and it will respond in exactly the right way to cancel that charge imbalance.
The fact that there are magnetic fields in space and on the Sun, attests to the fact that there are flowing currents. Flowing currents can only happen if there is a potential difference within that current flow.
Which is why it's silly to say that they "totally ignore the action of the electric force in the large-scale universe".
My entire point was that physicists are using simplified newtonian equation of motions instead of the known correct General relativity.
THAT was your central thesis? I'm sorry, I thought it was "astrophysicists are way stupider than me".
Did you read read ANY of that? MOND stands for Modified Newtonian Dynamics.
Did you read ANY of the context. You claim that scientists are unwilling to look at anything other than Newtonian dynamics (and now you claim it's your central point), but the #2 theory for certain effects is practically called "Not Newtonian Dynamics". I thought the glaring contrast would get the point across.
It's basically a type of laziness.
And we're back to this. Thanks for letting me get a +5 Insightful off your -1 Troll. :)
the electric force which is 36 orders of magnitude greater than gravity
But expends itself on neutralizing the charges that generate the force, gravity clumps matter together and the larger lumps generate a stronger gravitational field.
a slightly charged, that is not exactly neutral body, would move in a weak, but not zero magnetic or electric field
The largest effect this would have is attracting particles of opposite charge from the surrounding plasma, negating itself.
current cosmologists and astrophysicists totally ignore
Well, they don't ignore Io ...
The simple, and logical conclusion to anyone who isn't blinded by arrogance, is that the equations are wrong, or at the minimum, incomplete.
The simple, and logical conclusion to anyone who isn't blinded by arrogance, is that astrophysicists have already thought of that, and decided that it wasn't the best possible explanation.
Sure, I'd be happy to wake you, Mr. ... oh noes! He didn't sign his name. Oh, well.
People can agree to disagree without being sardonically arrogant.
Yes, it would have been nice if "bertok" could have made his point without accusing a large swath of scientists of being unscientific and unable to come up with ideas he found obvious.
This is more along the lines of "our equations don't explain the observed motion of galaxies, therefore, there's matter there we can't see or touch."
Wow! I never thought they would do things like that! I would have expected things to go like this:
"our equations don't explain the observed motion of galaxies, therefore, it's reasonable to hypothesize that there's matter there we can't see or touch, let's test it."
And then they'd go and look for evidence or something. Thanks for correcting me!
That's just not a logical conclusion. It leaves out the much more likely answer that our understanding of the equations of motion is wrong.
So all that stuff I heard about MOND was just in my head? Thanks for grounding me in reality!
Most galaxy motion simulations are based on either Newtonian mechanics or "modified Newtonian" mechanics, even though both are known to be wrong. Einstein showed them to be wrong over a hundred years ago!
You're right! It's quite likely that thousands and thousands of astrophysicists have spent decades researching a problem that has such an obvious solution. You're a veritable font of wisdom!
I studied physics at University, and both me and a friend of mine noted during our studies that Physics seems to overuse simplified equations ... Those simple equations are the ones we learned about also. They're wrong. In many practical cases, the error can exceed 30%!
O M G ! - W T F ! Low level physics classes use lots of simplifications? That explains why I can't find massless ropes and frictionless pulleys on E-Bay!
"Half way" means nothing when 10% of the people own 90% of the wealth.
It does mean that the classes aren't fixed - and that was the only claim I was making.
does not mean that classes will not solidify over time
Which is a different claim that the one you made before. I still maintain that your claim about "classes being fixed" is clearly false, but I do think an argument could be made that the amount of mobility that's possible could be changing. I don't have enough information to make a good prediction, though.
In the west we have a reversing trend, more people are getting poorer.
I could see that happening in a recession (like now), but not over the long run. If you have evidence to the contrary please point me to it.
And considering the amount of underemployed unviersity educated people in the USA and Canada ...
Class is relatively fixed, do not confuse some dynamic movement in income as social mobility, most people behave like atoms in gas.
Are the atoms in a gas fixed? I'm sorry, but the article you've cited does a poor job of supporting that idea. On the other hand, according to this
Which means that children in the lowest 1/5 of households have an even shot at moving halfway across the class spectrum. It may not be a perfect meritocracy, but it's no caste system, either.
Hi, Mr. Coward. I'd like you to meet Mr. HPV.
unsupported assumptions (like only a portion of the breed)
'Population' is not the same as 'breed', and the current version of small Chihuahuas are a population as much as 'the gulls currently nesting on this island' is a population. If you have a problem with the way 'ring species' or 'population' is defined, talk to the guys that write the definitions - I just read them.
I am disagreeing with most of the claims of observed speciation and how they ...
Yes, they suck. We just don't have enough time to watch dogs evolve into whales the way dog-like animals did the first time, so the examples we have are things that have just barely crossed the line, and on their own wouldn't convince many people of anything evolution-related. But after you understand the journey as a whole, seeing examples of how many of the small steps were taken is very helpful, and it really does make the case as a whole more convincing.
As I previously explained, you had entire populations who wouldn't believe in the power of a god or supposed god when fractions of the same populations staked their lives on it.
Which is what I meant by "There are always skeptics and believers" - but I don't believe that there were many people in the 5th century that thought that Adam wasn't the first human being, that 'day' really meant 'age', and that actual witches didn't really exist, but still took most of the rest of the Bible as being the word of God. All of those accommodations came after outsides sources (often, but not always, science) made the original (usually more literal) interpretation seem a little too silly to take seriously. That lends support to my explanation of why there's a lack of direct conflict between science and religion: when conflicts do arise, religion reinvents itself to avoid the conflict.