assassin_696

Probably better in Help & Advice. :)

Pah, my dad has to take that in liquid form everyday anyway. Yuck. If you're really my friend you'll let me blindfold you, and you'll karate chop anything I lead you to as hard as you can. It could be a cushion, it could be an iron bar :D Somebody has a toe [specialInterest] :wink: Well i'll be damned... :P Since when is that censored anyway?

Find a cure. :uhh:

Both viewpoints are equally valid, since there is no fixed ether or normal with which everything moves respective to you can't say that I'm the one moving and you're standing still or vice versa, they're both equally valid. Same applies to time. I'll try and expand on this a little later, that wasn't particularly clear. That's exactly what I'm saying. What I'm really trying to get at is, how long would your travel actually take to an outside observer? On what speed would it be based? You are traveling for a certain amount of time in your ship or whatever, but how does the outside world perceive that time in relation? There has to be some speed to compare it too, or you wouldn't go anywhere. But there is no constant that you can contrast it with, because we travel at different speeds all the time. Would we see see it as taking as long as a jet would, or a car, or a rocket? To an outside observer you might appear to go say, 50m in 5s, so your speed is 10m/s. But you might measure your time to be 50m in 6s, so your speed is 50/6 m/s (differences exaggerated). Both speeds are equally valid, they measure yours with respect to their surroundings and their local time, and you measure your speed with respect to your (slightly slower) local time and your surroundings. You're right, you need a point of reference to measure everything to, but you don't need a fixed point of reference for everyone to measure everything to. Hence, relativity.

All that shows is that maturity has nothing to do with age :P As a lot of people have said, it's entirely circumstantial. Kids in places like France or Spain are brought up eating at the dinner table with their parents drinking a glass or two of wine. France also has one of the smallest teen-drinking cultures in Europe (trust me, took me ages to find it). Whether or not this is related, i'm not sure, but I think being brought up in a society where alcohol is around and used lets you get to know it gradually is more beneficial than keeping the kids away from a drop of beer until they're 21 and suddenly saying "go for it". That seems a little crazy. A gradual introduction is far better in the long run. As for going out and getting smashed, fine, as long as there's someone around to look after you. It gets a bit risky when no one's sober. Drugs and smoking? Whatever, i'm not going to impinge on someone's personal liberty because of my personal choices, kids should be made 100% aware of the risks and benefits of both, and then if they are of an age where they can make an educated choice about doing either one then that's fine. They're not for me, but that doesn't mean they're not for everybody.

Reb's addressed some of these points well enough, i'll respond to others if I feel like I can Not quite, speed is a measurement of time with respect to distance, i'm sure you know the formula (s = d/t), so speed isn't a measurement of time. But they are related. Brian Greene explains the relation nicely with this little idea (forgive my shoddy adaptation, it's how I sometimes think of it intuitively). Speed is dependent on two things, time and distance. Suppose you have a certain amount of energy, call it 100 units, which you can either spend on "time" or "distance". If you spend all 100 units of your energy on time, you won't go anywhere (distance is zero) but time will flow optimally quickly. If you want to go somewhere you have to spend more energy on distance, so you increase your speed at the expense of the rate of flow of time. So your units of energy are spread equally though all 4 dimensions (time included), with most of your energy going into travelling through the time dimension. The faster you go in the spatial dimensions (distance) the slower you go through the time dimension. Because you have a limited amount of energy when you expend all your energy travelling in one spatial motion you'll reach the speed of light, but no time will pass. Hence photons are ageless, they do not experience time. So Einstein took this idea and said that everything is moving at the speed of light all the time, it just depends in which dimension the movement is happening. I don't know if time would speed up, we'd just see events occurring on that star faster relative to someone left back on Earth. Both viewpoints are equally valid, since there is no fixed ether or normal with which everything moves respective to you can't say that I'm the one moving and you're standing still or vice versa, they're both equally valid. Same applies to time. I'll try and expand on this a little later, that wasn't particularly clear. @Reb, if you want to get really technical, travel backwards in time is theoretically perfectly possible (for waves/particles mind you, we couldn't do it, probably) and in fact is happening all the time according to an interpretation of quantum mechanics called the transactional interpretation link. :wink: It explains the whole EPR paradox thing without requiring anything to travel faster than light, it works quite nicely really.

Thanks a lot, but I really don't think you need to make a public thread essentially apologising to one person. As for your attitude to everyone else, don't worry about it, honestly. It doesn't matter that much. Locked.

I do those two anyway :D Especially the yoghurt one, I can't stand seeing food wasted. Yeah but i've just got out of bed after 2-3 days of food poisoning after a tasty, but out of date Mr. Kipling's cherry pie. I'm never touching anything remotely out of date again. :|

How is that not sexual? :P If you're really my friend you'll tackle that big hairy looking second row for me. If you're really my friend you'll test whether or not that yoghurt is really past it's use by date or not.

If you think that will, or intent or whatever has any bearing on the laws of physics then i'm sorry but you're sorely mistaken. Our own personal wishes are totally contingent to the outcome of a roll of a dice. But if you're talking about the health benefits that a positive outlook on life can have, then yes, I agree with you, it can help. It's not the cure though. You can't just say to a cancer patient "cheer up!" and suddenly the tumour disappears.

Yeah, thats why in the original post i said i couldn't do any better. I'm just pointing out concepts to think about. I mean honestly, here in America, we have a [somewhat] decent legal system, and I don't feel like drawing from the depths of my knowledge (3 inches deep?) what exactly i feel needs to be changed. I think it is fair to say that there ARE parts which each individual doesn't agree with. From examples of Lopez vs. United States, to being able to appeal to a higher court system if the verdict you want doesn't go your way. I am not suggesting change, i am merely promoting a different way to think critically of our standards in our societies. I've no problem with that, I don't think the legal system (UK) is perfect either, but aside from a few minor changes I can't really think of many ways to improve it. Luckily, because we live in a democratic society if there was a really good suggestion of how to improve it you'd hope it would be imposed. Not always the case, but that's the idea. To give you an idea of perhaps where it gets confusing, morally, for me, consider the two truck drivers you mentioned earlier, and imagine they both had gone to the pub and had a couple of drinks. Not enough to make them dangerously, but just enough to make their reactions reasonably impaired. Both drive home different ways, one gets home fine but one hits a child who steps out into the road (assume he would have been able to stop had he been sober). Clearly neither driver intended to hit a child, but both did intend to have a few drinks before driving home, knowing the potential consequences. The fact that one will face several years in prison for drink driving and the other goes off scott-free is, as you say, purely down to luck. If the second driver had been caught above driving above the legal limit, should he punished the same as the one who committed manslaughter? After all, it's just a matter of luck. But if you punish them equally purely because of the potential consequences of their actions aren't you getting into very murky water?

Interesting points, but considering the personal instinct to live that most people have, i'm pretty sure most of the artists would say that they did die too young. I don't know what level an artist has to reach before they can say "I want to die young for the sake of my art". Retrospectively, whether or not it's a good thing or not for the art in question, considering the emotional loss for many people, to me an artist dying young is nearly always a tragedy. I think most artists (if possible) would prefer to see their workd recognised before they die, rather than posthumously. If you're talking about the potential of an artist though that was curtailed by them dying young, to me Jeff Buckley and Eva Cassidy epitomise this tragedy. Both artists with fantastic potential, otherwordly voices and both died before they're potential or acclaim was truly revealed.

So how would you improve it?

Attempted murder is a punishable crime in nearly all legal systems, so intent really is considered in crimes, it's not purely based on success. I see your point though, and I do think people shouldn't necessarily be punished for bad luck, but should be punished equally for any intention which leads to a horrific consequence in which luck merely plays a part.

I'm sure it looked like a carve up at the beginning of that race. Sad to see Hamilton didn't win it, he was astonishingly consistent thoughout the rest of the year. He'll get it next year though.

Flamecaller, stop turning this into a fairly baseless generalised religion debate. I appreciate it's related but we've had enough of those, let's just stick on topic. @Necro: You raise some very interesting points, i'll give them a little more consideration before I reply, i'm not really sure what my views are on this.

I see another interesting but unsatisfying lesbian scene coming up again... Oh well, keeps me reading.

I really don't think this is necessary, or a particularly um, productive thread? Basically, we have enough sub-forums as it is, and they tend to be implemented only as a last resort when it's clear that a particular area of discussion needs it's own defined area where people can talk it out. Just because a particular area of discussion is popular though doesn't mean it warrants it's own subforum, otherwise the whole forum system becomes regimented to the point of boredom, and the subforums quickly stagnate and people lost interest in visiting them. In order to continue healthy discussions it's important wherever possible to keep topics together so that casual browsers will read through topics they might not if they were in a subforum. Locked

I'm not really convinced SA deserved that match. I mean, an iffy call from the guy with the computer and a few lucky penalties for SA gave them it. Overall though, they dominated the tournament.

Oh, damn.

Pour moi, the only thing that can save us tonight is that left foot. Otherwise we'll put up a brave fight but South Africa would probably still trounce us. But we do have Johnny...

That's pretty cool actually, props to her for saying that, knowing it might cause controversy. I wish she'd made it clear earlier though.

I don't think as a career scientist he's just going to make leap of faith judgements like this. But at the end of the day, we can't really know what his exact science and hypotheses are about this, he's been grossly misrepresented in the media which has lead to all the controversy. He's clearly not out and out racist, as that article I copied showed he's actively recruiting black people for his lab. I stand by him, not because I necessarily agree with his sentiments, I trust his knowledge as one of the world's most experienced geneticists with regard to the science, but more because I don't believe any area of scientific inquiry should be out of bounds to discussion and freedom of inquiry simply because it threatens the idea of absolute human equality.

I pmed you, got a reply and everything... :-s I meant the actual article/post you want me to submit :wink:

Exactly, which is why people who try and justify their religion with facts or flaws in scientific logic or reasoning annoy me, or try and prove their God. When someone just says "look, I know I can't prove it, it's just a matter of faith for me" then that's fine. It's when you enter into the realms of empircal evidence and scientific reasoning to prove something inherently supernatural that you start to get confused.