Yes, I've already made that point. My question isn't about discomfort; it's about how the onset could be so fast. The only explanation I've seen so far is that your body actively expels O2 from your bloodstream while breathing an inert gas (vs. simply exhaling the contents of your lungs and then not inhaling), but I still have an extremely hard time seeing how this could lead to 10 seconds of consciousness *maximum* as TFS says.
That's still limited by the amount of blood in contact with your lung tissues. 10 seconds (given as a maxmium!) is a really short amount of time. How can all of your blood deoxygenate so quickly?
I know from experience that it takes at least 4-5 seconds or so to choke someone out (this has nothing to do with breathing--this means cutting off the blood flow to the head by applying pressure to the sides of the neck.) Hell, supposedly it takes 5+ seconds for a guillotined head to lose consciousness. In the absence of hard and detailed data, I have a very hard time believing anoxia from inert gas would be only twice as long as near-instantaneous hypovolemic anoxia. I don't think our cardiopulmonary system is so efficient at expelling O2.
Still, we used to hold our breath for sport as kids, sometimes mixing up it by requiring a complete exhalation first. Try it yourself; you should be able to hit 30 seconds even if you're out of shape. I'm not understanding how "less than ten seconds" (i.e. ten seconds as a maximum time, not a minimum) is realistic, especially given a convict who is consciously trying to conserve his oxygen supply.
It's weird how many people bring up the guillotine as the gold standard, given we're pretty sure that the head will remain conscious for some seconds afterwards.
Shooting in the head with a shotgun would be much more humane, but as others have noted there has always been an intentional conflation of "humane" and "comfort level of the spectators."
A helium leak is almost as dangerous as a nitrogen leak in an enclosed space. The only benefit is that it is lighter than air and thus will be at the ceiling instead of on floor where you breath it.
As the parent noted, it's not as dangerous (in the sense of being undetectable) if people in the room are talking. Argon would be just as dangerous.
noting that the nitrogen would render inmates unconscious within ten seconds and kill them in minutes.
Um, what? How the hell does that work? When I was a kid I tried to sing an entire song while doing multiple helium inhales in a row, not stopping for air. It was over a minute before the room suddenly went a little dark and spin-y.
It wasn't at all painful. I didn't notice anything different at all until seconds before I was (presumably) going to pass out. If it were deemed uncomfortable, the condemned could be given an oral or gaseous anesthetic first.
The death penalty is wrong and stupid in many ways, but I hope we can at least put aside the quibbling over method now. It has been a ridiculous distraction from the real issues.
I will donate $1000 to the first Super PAC willing to make federal gyrocopter subsidy a top priority.
(Seriously those things are awesome, but we still don't have a good tipjet solution.)
I mean this is what...15 years after Napster? We've had Pandora, Spotify, Grooveshark, Slacker, etc. for years now. Plus iTunes, Google Play and Amazon MP3. And the exceptionally lazy/cheap can use Youtube for all their music needs.
But no, now is the moment that we will make those motherfuckers in radio pay.
Not that I've any love of Clear Channel, but still. Terrestrial radio is already an almost unbearable promotional and self-promotional machine (I know this because I have an old car without an audio line in or even CD player.) Satellite radio, while having some nice content, is more expensive than all of their internet competitors while being much less flexible and having a much smaller selection.
This isn't going to give the artists a significant amount of money, but it is going to waste a significant amount of time.
There is already a known method of creating cheap, clean hydrogen using thermal electrolysis powered by a large breeder nuclear reactor. This is tragically doomed because of the hysterical nuclear taboo, but geothermal and thermal solar might be doable.
Storage and transport might be bigger issues, as hydrogen doesn't always sit still and behave itself when pressurized and stored in an ordinary metal tank. If battery tech ever improves, high voltage D/C is going to be a much method of transport vs. screwing around with hydrogen. But the cheap and/or durable batteries have yet to materialize, so hydrogen remains worth thinking about.
Either way, batteries or hydrogen, it's intellectually dishonest to claim it ties us to fossil fuels in the same manner as gasoline. Hydrogen can be made from electricity and there are many, many different ways to make electricity.
As mentioned in another reply, the main issue here are identification of porn sites and enforcement of age verification, particularly re: non-UK sites. Either the solution is going to be completely ineffective, or it snowballs very quickly into a heavily bureaucratic Great Firewall of China situation.
Also worth noting: the UK has already banned porn involving soft bondage, watersports, female ejaculation (which I can attest is a real thing despite the widespread conflation with peeing), face sitting, and more. For everyone, including adults.
I don't know, that strikes me as quite a conspiracy theory in itself, particularly given how easy it would be to trace back the bomb (my understanding is they can trace back to the specific reactor).
I'm no expert, but I'd be extremely interested to see how tracing would work with a higher yield Teller-Ulam bomb. A fully realized thermonuclear bomb is by far the most potent source of neutron radiation on Earth, and I think this would obliterate any possibility of nuclear forensics. The plutonium or uranium from the "primary charge" might indeed be traceable, but the neutrons from the much larger Uranium-238 stage (which is very common and untraceable) would transmute the remnants of the U-235 (or Pu) stage to god knows what.
Granted, there would have to be an incredible commit and motivation to carry out this sort of thing, and they would have to figure out how to conceal the tractor-trailer or superheavy aircraft needed to deliver it. Iran probably wouldn't have the balls to do it tomorrow (even if they had the ability), but if ISIS defies the naysayers and grows to the point where it poses a real threat, and/or if Bibi grows some balls and actually carries out a airstrike on Iranian soil, and/or if Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Wahhabi world begins to show their true colors... things may change. Or Pakistan might beat them to it and the resulting political (and literal) fallout might force Iran to disarm. Hard to say.
Without knowing more about their definition of "addicted" we can't be sure, but introspection is socially accepted for things like "being offended" and whatnot, so I see no reason not to take their concern at face value.
They're 10-12 year olds. At best, they have a dim understanding of whatever definition for "addiction" the anti-drug crusaders are using these days but that hardly qualifies them to correctly analyze their behavior... particularly when Abraham sexual shame is still far from eradicated in the UK. The very fact that they're "worried" that they're addicted (if indeed that is the word they used) is telling. I'm sure none of them are "worried" about being addicted to TV or Facebook or their smartphones, yet they probably spend far more time on these things than they do watching porn.
Mind you, this doesn't address the "disturbing images" bit. Can't really quibble about that one. There are certainly lots of things (although I'm probably a bit more worried about text than images) that kids definitely shouldn't be seeing.
No, they're not redundant. R/M+ are intended for adults, and children with parental consent. NC-17/AO are intended for adults only and not children, even with parental consent. It's not legally enforceable in most jurisdictions,
I was aware of that, but let's meditate for a moment on that distinction you just pointed out. It is a not-at-all subtle implication that if a 17 year old shouldn't see a movie even with parental permission, neither should an 18 year old and neither should anyone else. It is a very, very lightly veiled statement along the lines of "this thing is obscene and we condemn it, but we can't legally do any more than try to prevent all minors from seeing it."
Yeah, non-UK sites were specifically mentioned. So, there is going to have to either be an examination of every single site on the web to determine if it's porn (impossible and stupid), or requiring every single website to send the UK a certification that they don't have porn or else they're blocked (not impossible, but extremely stupid.)
nearly one in 10 12-13 year olds were worried they were addicted
I would say this is more likely to be a problem with their social / religious upbringing making them think that it's messed up to want to look at porn more than a couple times per week.
Also, feel free to make as many kid-friendly whitelists as you want but proposals to rate/blacklist the entire thing are horribly insidious. Why are we still falling for this old scam? In addition to being insanely hard to do effectively, this sort of censorship is ALWAYS stealthily aimed at adults, not children. Case in point: NC-17 ratings for movies and AO ratings for videogames. Both are on their face completely redundant (R rating and M+ rating), but their real use is to prevent certain content from being produced through self-censorship pressure by retailers/theaters refusing to carry the highest rating. The analogue here is going to be ISPs first offering opt-out for censored internet, then opt-in for uncensored internet, and then "hey, why should the government being subsidizing the with-porn ISP plans?" and boycotts and cheap political grandstanding and endless tedious arguments about what constitutes porn vs. art vs. education.
A genuine and forthright proposal would be "Here, if you're worried use whitelist XYZ and keep your kids off of the real the internet. " If we don't want kids driving cars then the solution is to stop them from doing so, not to pass legislation to install giant Nerf bumpers on everything and enact a new nationwide speed limit of 20 mph. Proposals to examine and decide whether to blacklist every goddamn page on the internet should be instantly recognized as a very clumsy attempt to control adults.
Iran has been at war with Israel for a long time now through well-funded and very closely monitored proxies. I'm not sure how you can possibly deny this. Israel recently bombed a Hezbollah convoy and accidentally killed an Iranian general they didn't realize was present. Iran didn't make any attempt at all to deny it. Israel actually had to shrug their shoulders and insist it was an accident so as to avoid needlessly pissing off Iran.
That said, any deal at all to slow down their nuke acquisition is of course much preferable to no deal (I have no idea what the pro-sanction people are babbling about, and I suspect they don't either.) And the younger generations of Iranians seem to be much more reasonable than those currently in power. And of course, Iran and the other Shias aren't as bad as ISIS (do I need to point out what a ridiculously low bar this is to clear?)
But you cannot gloss over the Israel thing. It is already a war. It doesn't matter what your feelings are on Israel and/or Palestine; Iran does not recognize the two-state solution and it is even conceivable they would attempt to deniably nuke an Israeli target through one of their proxies.
Or, if they are feeling especially clever, nuke a Sunni target and frame Israel for it. Given the depressingly widespread beliefs of absurd Israel/Jewish conspiracy theories in the Middle East, this would be very easy to pull off.
As I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, a key thing to realize is that many internally consistent and mathematically correct models have been built in physics, only to be discarded because they don't match reality. There are an infinite number of universes that don't exist, but math lets us describe then perfectly.
Einstein himself identified the need for a cosmological constant quite early on.
But he quickly realized that this "need" (as it was originally conceived) was entirely psychological/emotional in nature--the effect it was supposed to explain didn't exist and so the term became useless. Einstein himself called it a mistake.
Some people are now disagreeing and saying that he was so brilliant that he solved a problem no one knew existed, but I am highly skeptical of this sort of freewheeling approach. Even if the Cosmological Constant can be made to worth mathematically to describe Dark Energy, you're on very shaky ground trying to re-purpose it to describe a totally different phenomenon from the thing Einstein was originally envisioning when he created that term.
Tying together the above two points results in the key thesis I was dancing around in my original post: "Explaining" an unexpected observation by shoehorning it into a term in an existing equation--taking a superfluous term and making it important again by flipping the sign and allowing it to refer to a different phenomenon--is a very weak and queasy "win". This kind of re-purposing strikes me as a very shady way of recycling a bit of trash that should have been tossed out many decades ago.
Let me put it another way: the cosmological constant term should have never been in there to begin with. These aren't my words; they are (more or less) Einstein's words. If Hubble had made his discoveries sooner, Einstein would not have put the constant in there. So, in a universe where the cosmological constant term doesn't exist, what do we do when we see dark energy? Do we create the cosmological constant exactly as it is now? Would it make intuitive sense to create that term out of whole cloth and add it to alternate-universe Einstein's equations?
Anyhow, it's as you've said: GR has serious unresolved issues at universal scales, but also at galactic scales (rotational issues, Dark Matter.) Additionally, it has issues at the QM level, which makes it the primary thing standing in the way of a GUT. Just consider for a moment how gravity stands alone, unconnected to the rest of physics... and it has significant mysteries (dark energy, dark matter, galactic rotational behavior, closed timelike curves, singularities), and it also has important questions that we think we already know the answer to but we haven't verified (gravity waves, gravitational behavior of antimatter and other uncommonly seen particles, the existence and properties of negative mass / negative energy)
Conclusion via Occam's razor: GR is wrong. Not toss-it-in-the-garbage wrong, but wrong in the way that Newton's equations predicting the orbit of Mercury were wrong.
Well correct me if I'm wrong, but GR primarily aims to explain the laws and effects of gravity. It does this rather well in our solar system. But for the reasons I've outlined, it fails on several counts to predict the movement at larger distances (on the scale of galaxies.) You could claim "well, that's just another hidden force at work--GR is flawless!" And that might indeed be true. But I don't think it's absolutely, self-evidently true.
1. If I recall correctly they were very popular in South Africa as a self defense weapon at one point. So, not quite uniquely American
2. The "clearing snow" thing might be a reasonable usage case. Depends on the efficacy.
3. Regarding deadliness, there are flamethrowers and then there are flamethrowers. Glancing at the pics and vids, I'm not seeing any burning fuel on the ground. If this thing spews a fireball that burns itself out instantly without coating anything with the still-burning fuel, it's probably not something you can accidentally maim someone with. Singe their hair off and give them second degree burns, sure, but it's not napalm. Barring fuel tank rupture, I'd say this thing appears to be significantly safer than a gun.
4. I appreciate the desire to stop bad ideas before they snowball, but having a society based liberty (and generally averse to the idea of a nanny state) means asking "why not?", not "why?" Europe is safer in a lot of ways, but there's a reason why it's not the main driver of innovation despite having a higher GDP and a population 50% higher than the USA. The side effect of letting people innovate is that sometimes someone goes and starts selling flamethrowers. Oh well.
It depends what you mean by "contradiction". If you look at a list of lingering questions in physics, a lot of them have to do with gravity: quantum gravity is the last remaining force needed for a GUT, the causal mechanics of closed timelike curves, the physics of singularities, the gravitational pull of antimatter (we assume it works like regular matter, but does it? If it had repulsive gravity, that would be interesting), no solid proof of gravitational waves, bizarre galactic rotational speeds, etc.
Newton's equations are strictly speaking "wrong" for predicting orbital mechanics. But they are good enough in most cases. Given the outstanding mysteries, I think it's very possible that we'll discover that Einstein's equations are even more "good enough", yet still incomplete.
Unless and until that changes, there is no good reason to believe to believe that we do not live in a de Sitter space.
Unless and until we have quantum gravity and a whole slew of gravity-related mysteries are conclusively resolved (dark matter, weird galactic rotational speed synchronization, dark energy overwhelming gravitational attraction, etc), there is no good reason to believe Einstein's equations are complete.
You've got that backwards, I'm afraid. Science isn't in the business of proof; proof is the realm of mathematics and formal logic.
Except there are a vast number of physics equations describing universes that do not exist--Higgs-less models, for example, can probably be tossed in the trash at this point. They are mathematically sound. There is no formal logical flaw with them. But they do not match reality.
Math proofs are meaningless without physical observations to back them up.
I need to figure out what all of that subscript means and meditate on it sometime. To me, "constant" is just some fiddly fucking detail utterly lacking in profoundness. Like the thing you forget to tack on at the end of an indefinite integration. But that one doesn't look easily separable. So... hm.
My gut still says that if the constant was predicted to be a negative value and turned out to be a specific positive value, that is in no way a slam-dunk. I've also heard some talk about it not remaining constant at all.
Einstein deserves every bit of his reputation, but the armchair physicist in me still says the most likely explanation is going to be a total overhaul that pushes his equations firmly into 'wrong' territory (or rather, 'right' for only certain non-generalized circumstances). We have a bunch of messed-up things going on with gravity here: dark matter, dark energy, a lack of quantum gravity / GUT, contradictory theories about what happens with singularities (black holes, big bang), still no confirmation of gravitational waves, no clear refutation or explanation of time travel / closed time-like curves, curious galactic rotational anomalies (supposedly explained by dark matter, but I'm unconvinced), no experimental confirmation that antimatter has exhibits/exerts gravitational pull in the same way as normal matter, etc. Very easy (or at least very tempting) to imagine the next daydreaming Swiss patent clerk suddenly coming up with something that wraps up all of these issues in a tidy package.
Do you bother locking the door to your house? EVEN THOUGH YOU HAVE BREAKABLE WINDOWS???!!!
By this, I mean to say it's entirely possible that the guy would've said "eh, fuck it" instead of trying to stab the flight attendant. Just because he's capable of ignoring 149 people in a sealed cabin behind him doesn't mean he'll jump at the chance to get actual blood on his hands.
Also, unless he was very efficient indeed it would probably take more than 5 seconds for the flight attendant to die (noisily), which is more than enough time for someone else to rush in.
Security theater really sucks, but this isn't exactly Euro-Patriot Act we're talking about here. The proposal is simply that one of the flight crew has to come up and sit in the seat whenever the pilot or copilot get up to the bathroom. Zero cost, zero freedoms lost other than a very minor inconvenience to the crew. Is this really worth getting your blood pressure up over?
And it's not "one freak occurrence". Someone else posted at least half a dozen instances of this shit happening, all that ended with at least some fatalities. Apparently if you're a pilot and you want to die, it's not such a far-fetched option.
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Yes, I've already made that point. My question isn't about discomfort; it's about how the onset could be so fast. The only explanation I've seen so far is that your body actively expels O2 from your bloodstream while breathing an inert gas (vs. simply exhaling the contents of your lungs and then not inhaling), but I still have an extremely hard time seeing how this could lead to 10 seconds of consciousness *maximum* as TFS says.
That's still limited by the amount of blood in contact with your lung tissues. 10 seconds (given as a maxmium!) is a really short amount of time. How can all of your blood deoxygenate so quickly?
I know from experience that it takes at least 4-5 seconds or so to choke someone out (this has nothing to do with breathing--this means cutting off the blood flow to the head by applying pressure to the sides of the neck.) Hell, supposedly it takes 5+ seconds for a guillotined head to lose consciousness. In the absence of hard and detailed data, I have a very hard time believing anoxia from inert gas would be only twice as long as near-instantaneous hypovolemic anoxia. I don't think our cardiopulmonary system is so efficient at expelling O2.
Still, we used to hold our breath for sport as kids, sometimes mixing up it by requiring a complete exhalation first. Try it yourself; you should be able to hit 30 seconds even if you're out of shape. I'm not understanding how "less than ten seconds" (i.e. ten seconds as a maximum time, not a minimum) is realistic, especially given a convict who is consciously trying to conserve his oxygen supply.
It's weird how many people bring up the guillotine as the gold standard, given we're pretty sure that the head will remain conscious for some seconds afterwards.
Shooting in the head with a shotgun would be much more humane, but as others have noted there has always been an intentional conflation of "humane" and "comfort level of the spectators."
A helium leak is almost as dangerous as a nitrogen leak in an enclosed space. The only benefit is that it is lighter than air and thus will be at the ceiling instead of on floor where you breath it.
As the parent noted, it's not as dangerous (in the sense of being undetectable) if people in the room are talking. Argon would be just as dangerous.
noting that the nitrogen would render inmates unconscious within ten seconds and kill them in minutes.
Um, what? How the hell does that work? When I was a kid I tried to sing an entire song while doing multiple helium inhales in a row, not stopping for air. It was over a minute before the room suddenly went a little dark and spin-y.
It wasn't at all painful. I didn't notice anything different at all until seconds before I was (presumably) going to pass out. If it were deemed uncomfortable, the condemned could be given an oral or gaseous anesthetic first.
The death penalty is wrong and stupid in many ways, but I hope we can at least put aside the quibbling over method now. It has been a ridiculous distraction from the real issues.
I will donate $1000 to the first Super PAC willing to make federal gyrocopter subsidy a top priority. (Seriously those things are awesome, but we still don't have a good tipjet solution.)
I mean this is what...15 years after Napster? We've had Pandora, Spotify, Grooveshark, Slacker, etc. for years now. Plus iTunes, Google Play and Amazon MP3. And the exceptionally lazy/cheap can use Youtube for all their music needs.
But no, now is the moment that we will make those motherfuckers in radio pay.
Not that I've any love of Clear Channel, but still. Terrestrial radio is already an almost unbearable promotional and self-promotional machine (I know this because I have an old car without an audio line in or even CD player.) Satellite radio, while having some nice content, is more expensive than all of their internet competitors while being much less flexible and having a much smaller selection.
This isn't going to give the artists a significant amount of money, but it is going to waste a significant amount of time.
There is already a known method of creating cheap, clean hydrogen using thermal electrolysis powered by a large breeder nuclear reactor. This is tragically doomed because of the hysterical nuclear taboo, but geothermal and thermal solar might be doable.
Storage and transport might be bigger issues, as hydrogen doesn't always sit still and behave itself when pressurized and stored in an ordinary metal tank. If battery tech ever improves, high voltage D/C is going to be a much method of transport vs. screwing around with hydrogen. But the cheap and/or durable batteries have yet to materialize, so hydrogen remains worth thinking about.
Either way, batteries or hydrogen, it's intellectually dishonest to claim it ties us to fossil fuels in the same manner as gasoline. Hydrogen can be made from electricity and there are many, many different ways to make electricity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lover_Come_Back_%281961_film%29
Alcoholic candy. (Spoiler alert?) And their version was going to be banned as well.
It's pretty good if you like screwball comedies.
As mentioned in another reply, the main issue here are identification of porn sites and enforcement of age verification, particularly re: non-UK sites. Either the solution is going to be completely ineffective, or it snowballs very quickly into a heavily bureaucratic Great Firewall of China situation.
Also worth noting: the UK has already banned porn involving soft bondage, watersports, female ejaculation (which I can attest is a real thing despite the widespread conflation with peeing), face sitting, and more. For everyone, including adults.
I don't know, that strikes me as quite a conspiracy theory in itself, particularly given how easy it would be to trace back the bomb (my understanding is they can trace back to the specific reactor).
I'm no expert, but I'd be extremely interested to see how tracing would work with a higher yield Teller-Ulam bomb. A fully realized thermonuclear bomb is by far the most potent source of neutron radiation on Earth, and I think this would obliterate any possibility of nuclear forensics. The plutonium or uranium from the "primary charge" might indeed be traceable, but the neutrons from the much larger Uranium-238 stage (which is very common and untraceable) would transmute the remnants of the U-235 (or Pu) stage to god knows what.
Granted, there would have to be an incredible commit and motivation to carry out this sort of thing, and they would have to figure out how to conceal the tractor-trailer or superheavy aircraft needed to deliver it. Iran probably wouldn't have the balls to do it tomorrow (even if they had the ability), but if ISIS defies the naysayers and grows to the point where it poses a real threat, and/or if Bibi grows some balls and actually carries out a airstrike on Iranian soil, and/or if Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Wahhabi world begins to show their true colors... things may change. Or Pakistan might beat them to it and the resulting political (and literal) fallout might force Iran to disarm. Hard to say.
err, *Abrahamic. And 12-13 year olds.
Without knowing more about their definition of "addicted" we can't be sure, but introspection is socially accepted for things like "being offended" and whatnot, so I see no reason not to take their concern at face value.
They're 10-12 year olds. At best, they have a dim understanding of whatever definition for "addiction" the anti-drug crusaders are using these days but that hardly qualifies them to correctly analyze their behavior... particularly when Abraham sexual shame is still far from eradicated in the UK. The very fact that they're "worried" that they're addicted (if indeed that is the word they used) is telling. I'm sure none of them are "worried" about being addicted to TV or Facebook or their smartphones, yet they probably spend far more time on these things than they do watching porn.
Mind you, this doesn't address the "disturbing images" bit. Can't really quibble about that one. There are certainly lots of things (although I'm probably a bit more worried about text than images) that kids definitely shouldn't be seeing.
No, they're not redundant. R/M+ are intended for adults, and children with parental consent. NC-17/AO are intended for adults only and not children, even with parental consent. It's not legally enforceable in most jurisdictions,
I was aware of that, but let's meditate for a moment on that distinction you just pointed out. It is a not-at-all subtle implication that if a 17 year old shouldn't see a movie even with parental permission, neither should an 18 year old and neither should anyone else. It is a very, very lightly veiled statement along the lines of "this thing is obscene and we condemn it, but we can't legally do any more than try to prevent all minors from seeing it."
Yeah, non-UK sites were specifically mentioned. So, there is going to have to either be an examination of every single site on the web to determine if it's porn (impossible and stupid), or requiring every single website to send the UK a certification that they don't have porn or else they're blocked (not impossible, but extremely stupid.)
nearly one in 10 12-13 year olds were worried they were addicted
I would say this is more likely to be a problem with their social / religious upbringing making them think that it's messed up to want to look at porn more than a couple times per week.
Also, feel free to make as many kid-friendly whitelists as you want but proposals to rate/blacklist the entire thing are horribly insidious. Why are we still falling for this old scam? In addition to being insanely hard to do effectively, this sort of censorship is ALWAYS stealthily aimed at adults, not children. Case in point: NC-17 ratings for movies and AO ratings for videogames. Both are on their face completely redundant (R rating and M+ rating), but their real use is to prevent certain content from being produced through self-censorship pressure by retailers/theaters refusing to carry the highest rating. The analogue here is going to be ISPs first offering opt-out for censored internet, then opt-in for uncensored internet, and then "hey, why should the government being subsidizing the with-porn ISP plans?" and boycotts and cheap political grandstanding and endless tedious arguments about what constitutes porn vs. art vs. education.
A genuine and forthright proposal would be "Here, if you're worried use whitelist XYZ and keep your kids off of the real the internet. " If we don't want kids driving cars then the solution is to stop them from doing so, not to pass legislation to install giant Nerf bumpers on everything and enact a new nationwide speed limit of 20 mph. Proposals to examine and decide whether to blacklist every goddamn page on the internet should be instantly recognized as a very clumsy attempt to control adults.
Iran has been at war with Israel for a long time now through well-funded and very closely monitored proxies. I'm not sure how you can possibly deny this. Israel recently bombed a Hezbollah convoy and accidentally killed an Iranian general they didn't realize was present. Iran didn't make any attempt at all to deny it. Israel actually had to shrug their shoulders and insist it was an accident so as to avoid needlessly pissing off Iran.
That said, any deal at all to slow down their nuke acquisition is of course much preferable to no deal (I have no idea what the pro-sanction people are babbling about, and I suspect they don't either.) And the younger generations of Iranians seem to be much more reasonable than those currently in power. And of course, Iran and the other Shias aren't as bad as ISIS (do I need to point out what a ridiculously low bar this is to clear?)
But you cannot gloss over the Israel thing. It is already a war. It doesn't matter what your feelings are on Israel and/or Palestine; Iran does not recognize the two-state solution and it is even conceivable they would attempt to deniably nuke an Israeli target through one of their proxies.
Or, if they are feeling especially clever, nuke a Sunni target and frame Israel for it. Given the depressingly widespread beliefs of absurd Israel/Jewish conspiracy theories in the Middle East, this would be very easy to pull off.
Einstein himself identified the need for a cosmological constant quite early on.
But he quickly realized that this "need" (as it was originally conceived) was entirely psychological/emotional in nature--the effect it was supposed to explain didn't exist and so the term became useless. Einstein himself called it a mistake.
Some people are now disagreeing and saying that he was so brilliant that he solved a problem no one knew existed, but I am highly skeptical of this sort of freewheeling approach. Even if the Cosmological Constant can be made to worth mathematically to describe Dark Energy, you're on very shaky ground trying to re-purpose it to describe a totally different phenomenon from the thing Einstein was originally envisioning when he created that term.
Tying together the above two points results in the key thesis I was dancing around in my original post: "Explaining" an unexpected observation by shoehorning it into a term in an existing equation--taking a superfluous term and making it important again by flipping the sign and allowing it to refer to a different phenomenon--is a very weak and queasy "win". This kind of re-purposing strikes me as a very shady way of recycling a bit of trash that should have been tossed out many decades ago. Let me put it another way: the cosmological constant term should have never been in there to begin with. These aren't my words; they are (more or less) Einstein's words. If Hubble had made his discoveries sooner, Einstein would not have put the constant in there. So, in a universe where the cosmological constant term doesn't exist, what do we do when we see dark energy? Do we create the cosmological constant exactly as it is now? Would it make intuitive sense to create that term out of whole cloth and add it to alternate-universe Einstein's equations?
Anyhow, it's as you've said: GR has serious unresolved issues at universal scales, but also at galactic scales (rotational issues, Dark Matter.) Additionally, it has issues at the QM level, which makes it the primary thing standing in the way of a GUT. Just consider for a moment how gravity stands alone, unconnected to the rest of physics... and it has significant mysteries (dark energy, dark matter, galactic rotational behavior, closed timelike curves, singularities), and it also has important questions that we think we already know the answer to but we haven't verified (gravity waves, gravitational behavior of antimatter and other uncommonly seen particles, the existence and properties of negative mass / negative energy)
Conclusion via Occam's razor: GR is wrong. Not toss-it-in-the-garbage wrong, but wrong in the way that Newton's equations predicting the orbit of Mercury were wrong.
Well correct me if I'm wrong, but GR primarily aims to explain the laws and effects of gravity. It does this rather well in our solar system. But for the reasons I've outlined, it fails on several counts to predict the movement at larger distances (on the scale of galaxies.) You could claim "well, that's just another hidden force at work--GR is flawless!" And that might indeed be true. But I don't think it's absolutely, self-evidently true.
1. If I recall correctly they were very popular in South Africa as a self defense weapon at one point. So, not quite uniquely American
2. The "clearing snow" thing might be a reasonable usage case. Depends on the efficacy.
3. Regarding deadliness, there are flamethrowers and then there are flamethrowers. Glancing at the pics and vids, I'm not seeing any burning fuel on the ground. If this thing spews a fireball that burns itself out instantly without coating anything with the still-burning fuel, it's probably not something you can accidentally maim someone with. Singe their hair off and give them second degree burns, sure, but it's not napalm. Barring fuel tank rupture, I'd say this thing appears to be significantly safer than a gun.
4. I appreciate the desire to stop bad ideas before they snowball, but having a society based liberty (and generally averse to the idea of a nanny state) means asking "why not?", not "why?" Europe is safer in a lot of ways, but there's a reason why it's not the main driver of innovation despite having a higher GDP and a population 50% higher than the USA. The side effect of letting people innovate is that sometimes someone goes and starts selling flamethrowers. Oh well.
It depends what you mean by "contradiction". If you look at a list of lingering questions in physics, a lot of them have to do with gravity: quantum gravity is the last remaining force needed for a GUT, the causal mechanics of closed timelike curves, the physics of singularities, the gravitational pull of antimatter (we assume it works like regular matter, but does it? If it had repulsive gravity, that would be interesting), no solid proof of gravitational waves, bizarre galactic rotational speeds, etc.
Newton's equations are strictly speaking "wrong" for predicting orbital mechanics. But they are good enough in most cases. Given the outstanding mysteries, I think it's very possible that we'll discover that Einstein's equations are even more "good enough", yet still incomplete.
Unless and until that changes, there is no good reason to believe to believe that we do not live in a de Sitter space.
Unless and until we have quantum gravity and a whole slew of gravity-related mysteries are conclusively resolved (dark matter, weird galactic rotational speed synchronization, dark energy overwhelming gravitational attraction, etc), there is no good reason to believe Einstein's equations are complete.
You've got that backwards, I'm afraid. Science isn't in the business of proof; proof is the realm of mathematics and formal logic.
Except there are a vast number of physics equations describing universes that do not exist--Higgs-less models, for example, can probably be tossed in the trash at this point. They are mathematically sound. There is no formal logical flaw with them. But they do not match reality.
Math proofs are meaningless without physical observations to back them up.
I need to figure out what all of that subscript means and meditate on it sometime. To me, "constant" is just some fiddly fucking detail utterly lacking in profoundness. Like the thing you forget to tack on at the end of an indefinite integration. But that one doesn't look easily separable. So... hm.
My gut still says that if the constant was predicted to be a negative value and turned out to be a specific positive value, that is in no way a slam-dunk. I've also heard some talk about it not remaining constant at all.
Einstein deserves every bit of his reputation, but the armchair physicist in me still says the most likely explanation is going to be a total overhaul that pushes his equations firmly into 'wrong' territory (or rather, 'right' for only certain non-generalized circumstances). We have a bunch of messed-up things going on with gravity here: dark matter, dark energy, a lack of quantum gravity / GUT, contradictory theories about what happens with singularities (black holes, big bang), still no confirmation of gravitational waves, no clear refutation or explanation of time travel / closed time-like curves, curious galactic rotational anomalies (supposedly explained by dark matter, but I'm unconvinced), no experimental confirmation that antimatter has exhibits/exerts gravitational pull in the same way as normal matter, etc. Very easy (or at least very tempting) to imagine the next daydreaming Swiss patent clerk suddenly coming up with something that wraps up all of these issues in a tidy package.
Do you bother locking the door to your house? EVEN THOUGH YOU HAVE BREAKABLE WINDOWS???!!!
By this, I mean to say it's entirely possible that the guy would've said "eh, fuck it" instead of trying to stab the flight attendant. Just because he's capable of ignoring 149 people in a sealed cabin behind him doesn't mean he'll jump at the chance to get actual blood on his hands.
Also, unless he was very efficient indeed it would probably take more than 5 seconds for the flight attendant to die (noisily), which is more than enough time for someone else to rush in.
Security theater really sucks, but this isn't exactly Euro-Patriot Act we're talking about here. The proposal is simply that one of the flight crew has to come up and sit in the seat whenever the pilot or copilot get up to the bathroom. Zero cost, zero freedoms lost other than a very minor inconvenience to the crew. Is this really worth getting your blood pressure up over?
And it's not "one freak occurrence". Someone else posted at least half a dozen instances of this shit happening, all that ended with at least some fatalities. Apparently if you're a pilot and you want to die, it's not such a far-fetched option.