xkcd

Glass Fractal

Health care, food, shelter, etc. are goods and services, not rights. There's a whole thread here discussing what rights are, but essentially, I don't see any reason for the government to provide these things, least of all giving them the same status as freedoms of speech, press, assembly, etc. I wo...

Glass Fractal

Some people don't like the way I write. Yeah, it makes you sound brain damaged. That was way over the line. Don't do it again. -- Zamfir When they banned the trolls I said nothing. When they banned the assholes I said nothing. When they banned the rude I said nothing. When they came for me ther...

Glass Fractal

All words are made up words. To insist that people use your personally accepted versions is childish, anyway. It's like people having a hissy fit over McDonald's "drive-thru" making it into the lexicon. Except that " irregardless " would literally mean the opposite of what the p...

Glass Fractal

This post had objectionable content.
That was way over the line. Don't do it again. -- Zamfir

Glass Fractal

Generally it can be summarized as "It's not a big deal, but technically everything you've read about this bill is true, but civil liberties aren't that big of a deal, so shut up you whiners." Generally it can be summarized as: "It doesn’t significantly expand the government’s detenti...

Glass Fractal

Jave D wrote:So has Higgs been glimpsed yet?

The results don't meet the (very high) standards of evidence used by particle physicists but they're still enough to get them interested.

Glass Fractal

If you want a place to permanently have clean water, you have to keep cleaning their water. If you want people to not have cancer, you only have to invent the cure once. That comparison is so idiotic I can't believe your computer didn't explode while you typed it to prevent it from escaping out int...

Glass Fractal

I honestly don't see what's wrong with comic sans in this case. It doesn't make it hard to read -- in fact, when there's little text it's one of the easier fonts to read. This is what's wrong with Comic Sans. When they blurred the Helvetica and the CS to show how Helvetic gets some kind of complete...

Glass Fractal

As a tangent, where does this weird "The US is not a democracy, it's a republic" notion come from? I've heard it several times before on this forum, and I've also seen it in other places. It's always trotted out by the same people who like to talk about how "democracy is two wolves a...

Glass Fractal

We can take the magic out of this fairly easily and still have a plausible scenario to work with. Suppose we create a society where every crime (or every crime that is sufficiently severe--eg. all felonies) carries an automatic death sentence. What do you believe the effect on crime rates would be?...

Glass Fractal

The most bizarre thing is that the POTUS has said he will veto the bill, but only because it errodes the power of the executive to find terrorists...wtf? I thought that too. That explanation has to just be a stunt to avoid the "HEEZ WEEK ON TRRRSTS!" debate that would spring up if he shot...

Glass Fractal

Even if it doesn't stop the bullet, would it at least slow the bullet down so that it doesn't penetrate as deep into the flesh? If so, that still increases a person's survival chances. Handgun bullets are usually designed to penetrate a minimum of 12 inches of flesh (supposedly the longest possible...

Glass Fractal

It still increases your chances of survival. Not this stuff. They had to handload a .22lr with less powder in order to get no penetration. The least powerful round you can easily purchase is too powerful to be stopped by this spider skin. It more bulletproof than skin, sure, but not to any practica...

Glass Fractal

Adam Preston wrote:wow, some cutting edge stuff, it would sure help many important and influential people feel a bit more safe if their message is threatening to some people, specifically people holding a barret 50cal couple of hundred meters away.

More like people holding a 10/22 a hundred meters away...

Glass Fractal

Right, I'm asking how a blackhole can expand such that it's density is... low... and maintain it's status as a black hole. Because confused terminology is being used. You can use "black hole" to refer either to area in the event horizon or to the singularity at the center. The singularity...

Glass Fractal

Consent. Marriage is a contract between two parties, and in any civilised society a contract is void unless all participants freely consented to signing it. Your cow, your toaster and your underage friend can't consent, so you can't marry them. Not so for your same-sex partner. Isn't "Marriage...

Glass Fractal

'black friday' is primarily a slow news day driven phenomenon. Or maybe it's more to do with consumerism and profit-chasing. No, the phenomenon of Black Friday is an invention of bored news media. It's barely any worse than normal shopping days in terms of violence and only recently became especial...

Glass Fractal

Requiring one to have a certain amount of wealth to be allowed to vote would solve this. The economy would become politics but that wouldn't necessarily be bad. Yes, brilliant, there's no way that could ever become a problem. Openly disenfranchising part of the population only ever has good consequ...

Glass Fractal

Didn't we develop a vaccine for the original Bird Flu anyway? More to the point, though, how easy is it really to make this stuff? I'm betting even the people publishing couldn't do it in my kitchen. It would have to take a wealthy or well connect group to put it together and if there were such a gr...

Glass Fractal

'black friday' is primarily a slow news day driven phenomenon. Or maybe it's more to do with consumerism and profit-chasing. No, the phenomenon of Black Friday is an invention of bored news media. It's barely any worse than normal shopping days in terms of violence and only recently became especial...

Glass Fractal

CorruptUser wrote:
addams wrote:Besides; The sexist thing about a man is what is between his ears not what is between his legs.

Agreed, but the sexiest thing is probably the leather thing behind the buttcheeks.

Pants?

Glass Fractal

I think the worst part is that it's also 99:1 parts air to metal . Somehow 99% air at 1.275 kg/m 3 and 1% of mystery metal has a combined density of 0.9 kg/m 3 . Perhaps it uses the same mechanic as ice, which is less dense than water because the crystalline structure creates voids in its volume? I...

Glass Fractal

Astonishingly, it is actually impossible to distinguish an original picture of nature from its mirror image if it does not contain any human traces. In other words, everyday nature is somehow left-right symmetric. I hope this is leading up to a discussion of left-right symmetry breaking, because ot...

Glass Fractal

Here's a better way to think about it: light goes at the speed of 1. The value 3*10 8 m/s is only generated by our units. It makes a lot more sense to define c as 1 and then go from there. Thus, I win the bet with WarDraft: c's value is 1 in all possible realities, and it has nothing to do with how...

Glass Fractal

All mass has gravity. Gravitational force decreases by the distance squared, so launching something halfway to the moon will decrease Earths pull on it by 1/6? Relative to the surface of the Earth? I think its more like 1/800 (at the surface your ~7000km from the center of the Earth, half way to th...

Glass Fractal

This certainly sounds like an interesting approach (although it fails to address the problem with galactic rotation which is usually solved by adding dark matter). That said, Annila constantly asserts that Maupertuis derived his principle of least action correctly without, or so it seems from this ...

Glass Fractal

If 1% of the population exhibits the symptoms of psychopathy, we treat that 1%, and afterward, 50% of them stopped exhibiting the symptoms of psychopathy, what would happen--would we determine that psychopathy is treatable 50% of the time, or that 50% of the 1% didn't actually have psychopathy? Wou...

Glass Fractal

the Martian surface offers all the natural resources and elements necessary to sustain human society

Like arable land and water and a breathable atmosphere . . . no wait that's not right.

Glass Fractal

They would require constant supplying, and wouldn't be economically beneficial. It's unlikely colonies that a haven't been carefully selected and prepared to be slightly self sufficient or economically useful will be made. When you want to colonize, aren't you just succumbing to materialism? No, yo...

Glass Fractal

I would not call it deterministic, as you cannot for example determine exactly when a particular individual radioactive atom will decay. Now, wait, what do we mean when we say determinism? If it's that you can't accurately predict the future then even a nonrandom universe could easily be so complex...

Glass Fractal

That's a dead link. Not for my computer. Also, corporations don't have death panels Sure they're just panels that decide if you live or die. Totally different. Face it you're just mindlessly sucking on Ayn Rand's rotting cock and telling yourself that the government is arbitrarily evil. But don't w...

Glass Fractal

Most, if not all. In England, if you are over 50 and have renal failure, the state refuses to pay for treatment. No dialysis unless you pay out of pocket. So, yeah, death panels deciding if a person is 'worth it' and all that. Not like it's all that different from a civic engineer determining if th...

Glass Fractal

supposedly GR ends up creating FTL stuff somehow No it doesn't. I always hear people bring up stuff about non-inertial reference frames? I assume it's some kind of illusion or virtual speed. Relativity, I was taught, was a barrier, not a universal speed limit. If something comes into existence movi...

Glass Fractal

Sheikh al-Majaneen wrote:What is the likelihood that it was just a random cosmic neutrino in the right place and time? (obviously, IANAS)

It would have to be 15,000 random neutrinos in exactly the right place and time. The odds of that are nil.

Glass Fractal

Is it maybe a general relativity thing that they didn't account for? Gravity, the rotation of the planet and all that stuff? (just throwing that out there, supposedly GR ends up creating FTL stuff somehow)

Glass Fractal

Macbi wrote:Almost certainly misreporting.

Well I can't seem to find CERN's statement on the matter but they have quotes from the scientists about it. More like easily excitable reporting.

Glass Fractal

CorruptUser wrote:Is that even a science? Maybe color theory...

You could include it in psychology. How to get certain reactions from people, how to generate illusions of depth, texture, and motion.

I doubt it's often studied as a science, though.

Glass Fractal

You're constructing a defense of the way things work by...detailing how they work. Any system of selecting leaders will always select for who plays the system best, not by who is the best leader. We can try to create a system that being a good leader is roughly aligned with playing the system, but ...

Glass Fractal

AFAIK, it's possible to create negative energy density with the Casimir effect, and possibly other things. I'm just wondering, though, why is this hardly mentioned in the context of QM or a Theory of Everything? Do we know what negative energy particles/fields exist, or is it a case of "Sort o...

Glass Fractal

You've got to wonder about the thought process behind that. It's the one day that Americans are guaranteed to be thinking about terrorism, they're going to be better prepared for it emotionally and in terms of security.

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