assassin_696

I run on and off to try and keep fit. A few years ago I got really into it, did a lot of training at home to try and get competitive for the cross country runs at school. Traditionally i'd be happy finishing above average in those races, but I really pushed my training that year and came 6th (out of a few hundred). Since I started going to the gym though I kind of lost interest. My dad used to run and then suffered with his knees later in life, so i'll probably go the same way if I keep running seriously. I quite enjoy it when I do it though, did an 8 miler a few weeks ago with my sister (who's doing a half-marathon).

Why not? The 9th and 10th Amendments. I'm not saying they should ban it at all, that would be as invalid as mandating it should be legal. It should just be left to state legislatures. That's a little bit emotive, comparing abortion with the holocaust. It's also an invalid comparison since it really is up for debate as to when human life with all the rights afforded to an adult begins. The holocaust was an obvious de-humanisation, this isn't.

The chance of it creating a black hole has been estimated to be 1 in 50 million, and even if it did create one it would immediately evaporate through Hawking Radiation, or indeed just be so small that it would never come into contact with anything at all. It would just sit in the vacuum's inside atoms and never be heard from again. Cosmic rays bombard the upper atmosphere with far higher energies than anything the LHC can create. If a small black hole was going to have been created by energetic particle collisions, it would have done by now. This is a very exciting time for science, for a long time the theory behind the mass mechanism for the standard model (the Higgs field) hasn't been possible to check, so scientists have been flying blind as to whether or not it's correct. Now it's guaranteed to be proved either right or wrong, plus there's the promise of all the extra stuff they might discover, supersymmetry, extra-dimensions, the origins of dark matter... The implications will be huge.

Because the difference in masses is so great. The entire mass of the Earth is pulling down on us right now and we can still easily lift our hands and overcome it. Compared with us vs. the Earth the difference beteween us an an ant isn't that much, only a few orders of magnitude. For the hell of it, I did the calculations to work out the strength of the gravitational force between me and the Earth, then used that to work out how close the ant would need to be to feel the same force. A very conservative estimate comes out at 2.6 x 10^(-8)m away, which is tiny. Or to put it another way, the force between me and the Earth is (very roughly) 700N, versus 4.7 x 10^(-11)N between me and an ant placed just 10cm away from my centre of mass. Gravity is an exceptionally weak force.

Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun - Pink Floyd

I don't think the ant would orbit you. Surely according to that logic if you headed out into deep space (where external gravity is negligible) all manner of small objects would start orbiting you? The force between you and the ant isn't suddenly overpowered by the Earth, it's just far too weak for the ant to ever orbit you.

Regardless of your opinion on the ethics of abortion, it's not a matter for the federal government to rule on.

1983 (A Merman I Should Turn To Be) - Jimi Hendrix

In response to EdgedThesis and mmmcannibalism: Your ideas are interesting, but I suspect slightly speculative. Like I said I really need to read more about the cyclid model before I can form more of an opinion. My gut instinct is that for it to work now with the evidence of accelerated expansion would be a little deux es machina, but I suppose it's still possible. Oh and gravity's sphere of influence is infinite (as far as we know). It's almost like an asymptotic line, it gets very very close to zero at very large distances, just never quite reaches it.

Rehab - Down

just a thought on this assuming that to be true, that would strongly support the rubber band theory along with the thought that the universe has/will undergo an infinite series of big bangs forming expanding universes that eventually slow down retract into a single point which causes the next big bang and so on? Would it? How so? I'm not so hot on the cyclic big bang model ever since I heard that the the Universe is expanding at an accelerating rate, i.e. it doesn't look like it's going to retract into any kind of crunch. I need to read more about it though.

Gravity exerts itself through a field, just like a magnetic force or electric force (actually both the same). However as with all fields there are hypothesised "charge" carriers, gravitons, which have yet to be discovered partly due to gravity being so weak. Mass warps the fabric of space-time to create a gravitational field around it. This analogy has many limits but it's not bad, so imagine a bowling ball sat in the middle of a trampoline. The bowling ball (Sun) warps the spacetime fabric (trampoline) so that when you roll a marble towards it (the Earth) it orbits around it. Of course spacetime is three-dimensional, not two, and in this analogy gravity itself explains why the trampoline warps but you get the idea. Just a little extra fact, gravitational energy is "negative" versus the "positive" mass and other forms of energy. It's been calculated that the total energy sum for the Universe comes to zero, since the positive mass energy cancels out with the negative gravitational energy. Overall, there is no energy in the Universe.

Locked at author's request.

You have to admit though, she is strangely interesting. I might almost like her, if she wasn't such an evangelic creationist nut.

Sly_Wizard, before I start. Maybe you can't help it, but arguing every point in a facetious patronising tone of voice really doesn't help your case. Try and have a little more humility and maybe you won't have people giving up on you quite so quickly. That would be fine, except when those laws were handed down from a God who surely isn't bounded by the same cultural rules? It seems absolutely absurd to say that God gave those tribes ethics that were okay back then but not acceptable nowadays, but insists that the laws are eternal. Why couldn't God just be ahead of his time and argue for equality of all sexes etc. etc. Why wait for the cultural zeitgeist to do his work for him? It's what all these arguments essentially boil down to at some point or another, I thought I might jump the gun. I don't need to if you've ever read the Old Testament. Nearly all scholarly evidence points to the fact that the God of the Old Testament was a vindictive one, the burden of proof is on you to show me how he isn't. He doesn't. You say God has a good nature. Yet God repeatedly commits heinous and awful crimes in the Old Testatment. Hence contradictory. Ah, so now we're engaging in metaphysical speculation? Excellent. Your philosophy states that nature is independent of actions, a kind of dualism I suppose. But that's your philosophy. I find no compelling whatsoever why I should simply accept that fact, and no amount of figurative arm-waving on your behalf will help me to understand that point. Point me towards some famous philosophers who've put forward some compelling arguments as to why nature is independent of actions and i'll do my best. But until we get past this stick in the mud I can't see this going anywhere. As to your question, maybe I did evade it. However I didn't think man's nature and actions had much to do with God's. Does it make him selfish? It depends, if he repeatedly acted in his self-interest then i would declare that all evidence showed that he seemed to have a selfish nature. I think this is where we differ. Quite why man should have any inherent nature I can't quite see, and would simply declare man's nature to be whatever actions he is most likely to take. You seem to be more of a rationalist.

Right. And that's exactly the problem. You ignore the biggest and most pertinent of facts; culture. It's a different culture, so of course the laws are going to be different. To judge laws from another culture as idiotic because they don't conform to whatever view you hold (3,400 years later, mind you) is, as you would say, idiotic. I'd like to call that Western snobbery at it's finest. I'm fairly sure I can go to some Middle Eastern, African or even Asian countries, show them some of the laws you abide by and they'd consider them idiotic. Moral/cultural relativism doesn't excuse Bible ethics. Contrary to popular opinion, you don't need a God to make judgements about morals or ethics that hold absolutely because trying to argue the necessity of God from morality simply doesn't work. The Greek philosophers realised that thousands of years ago, I wish people were more aware of it nowadays. No, God is not whatever you judge him to be. You're still not understanding anything I wrote out. You can say whatever you want to about God's actions-- Right or wrong. Fair or unfair-- But it doesn't change his nature (Being good and all-loving). It's really not that hard to understand, ya' know? It is when your (good and all loving) God explicity lays down immoral laws. How can God apparently repeatedly contradict his own nature? You seem to be arguing that God's nature is independent of his actions/words, and if you think that's the case then this is a pointless exercise since you're just changing the rules to protect your God. I said once before that I shouldn't argue with non-philosphy majors, and this is the reason why. The nature of a being-- Any being-- Is not affected by his or her actions. Here, let's take the phrase "humans are selfless". This does not mean that humans will not occassionally do things to benefit themselves (Because they do, and we know they do), but rather that-- At the core-- They are altruistic and care moreso for the well-being of others than they do themselves. Here... Let me break this down Runescape style. Zammy is evil. Zammy does something which can be considered good. Does that make Zammy good? Sara is good. Sara does something which can be considered evil. Does that make Zammy evil? To answer both of these question, no, it doesn't. It merely means that Zammy's an evil being who happened to do something good while Sara is a good being who happened to do something evil. Your objections seems to be something along the lines of "You are what you do", but this is incorrect. I wouldn't get patronising about "non-philosophy majors", your arguments are as leaky as anyone's. You have not provided any compelling evidence whatsoever that you can detach someone's character from their actions, especially Yahweh's. Human beings are fallible, you can't compare their "intrinsic character" (if they even have one) to that of an omnipotent, all loving God. It's frankly absurd to admit all the bizarre ethics of the God of the Old Testament then continue to insist that his nature is good. Why is it good?

Moved this to the Art Bazaar

I don't think a single person in this thread has taken it seriously so there's not much point cleaning it, so i'll just lock it due to spamming. Locked.

Time To Pretend - MGMT

This is just turning into a flame-fest but to be honest i'm not surprised. Judging people by what they call themselves is hardly a good way to start a discussion. Locked.

This has just turned into a flame-fest so i'm locking it. To the OP, post in legible english if you want people to take you a little more seriously in future. Locked

Please don't post spam like this. Locked

:( Can't believe it, trailers definitely won't be the same.

The Man Comes Around - Johnny Cash

And no offence, but since you're not even spelling his name correctly i'm less inclined to take you on your word. I could give you a mini-lecture about how just because Stephen Hawking is a visible scientist doesn't make his theories infalliable (indeed, his major theory about information loss in black holes has conclusively been disproven) but i'll spare it. I know Hawking's work reasonably well at least in the abstract, so if you could put me towards your source for that claim i'd appreciate it. If books are published with facts in them, then after it's published, the facts are prooven wrong, the book can't automatically change the mistakes. No, but that wasn't my point. I've read nearly all of Hawking's books so I looked up which book he mentioned white holes in. I believe it was Black Holes and Baby Universes (an essay collection)? When you read the book in context, he was rightly being very clear in saying that his discussion about white holes was speculative, not scientific consensus. A white hole is the time reverse of a black hole, he was talking about the possibility for space travel and how these might provide an opportunity for it. But it's simply a mathematically possible solution of Einstein's General Relativity, and until there's empirical evidence bears little relation to the physical reality. Even within the mathematics white holes are very special cases, and collapse immediately when put into conditions like those of our own universe. The inner workings of black holes would be governed by the (as yet undiscovered) laws of quantum gravity, and until these laws are discovered any discussion about what goes on inside them is just speculation. Hawking made the comments in a popular science book with no mathematical framework or justification, it wasn't a peer-reviewed science paper. Besides, black holes don't collapse anyway, they evaporate.