We worked out how to cultivate crops in the past couple of thousand years. We've gotten really good at it. If global warming happens, it would probably screw up our current agricultural methods and be really quite painful. Not overall fatal, but painful and expensive. The poor and hungry will be poorer and hungrier (and some deader).
> It certainly allows for information to be transmitted faster then 'c'. See what Einstein called "Spooky Action at a Distance."
Einstein, so far as I know, didn't like the idea of quantum entanglement (hence the SPOOKY part), and thought it was probably impossible. He proposed the EPR paradox to try and show that quantum theory was inconsistent. He hated the idea of quantum information traveling faster than light. It turns out that he was wrong- entanglement happens- but you can't transmit classical information via entanglement.
>Your confusion is assuming Fate and Free Will are mutually exclusive.
I didn't say anything about that; how does this follow from saying "nothing travels faster than light"?
> a) You are assuming that Causality is some sort of "Law", and
Well, yes. Sort of. If you can travel faster than light, you can travel back in time (or send information back in time). If you can do that, you can break causality. Eg: the grandfather paradox. This is the paradox generated with the Tachyon pistol thought experiment I referenced earlier. If I can send a signal faster then light, then it will arrive before it was sent. What if I fire a deadly tachyon pistol at my own head? I'll be dead before I pulled the trigger! That makes no sense- if I'm dead, who pulled the trigger? There's no "law" saying nonsensical things can't happen, but life would sure get interesting if we worked out FTL communication.
> b) You and/or the author doesn't seem to be aware of, or understand the concept of time lines,
Furthermore, Time is not absolute, it is relative. FTL doesn't break causality.
A time line? I could tell you what a "world-line" is (in the context of special relativity), it's the path of an object, describing every time and space coordinate where it's present. Time indeed isn't absolute, you can (for example) dilate time if you move faster. But this is special relativity again, which requires nothing to travel faster than c... so it's not much help to your case.
Here's what I mean by a paradox. If I can measure someone's intuitive reaction to a stimulus before it happens, what happens if I set up the following test protocol?
1. If subject appears to be intuiting stimulus A, computer shows stimulus B.
2. If subject appears to be intuiting stimulus B, computer shows stimulus A.
Subject intuits stimulus A. What does the computer show? If it shows B, then the subject's intuition was wrong. If it shows A, then the subject must have intuited stimulus B, which (s)he didn't.
As to the Einstein quote: I find it odd that you're using "intuition" to mean knowing things before they happen. Wiktionary defines it a Immediate cognition without the use of conscious rational processes. It's immediate cognition, not "precognition". So I find it hard to believe that Einstein took intuition to mean uncanny pre-knowledge of future events.
Here's the problem: you're fundamentally wrong about quantum entanglement. It doesn't allow for instantaneous communication, even in the laboratory (let alone in our brains, but I'll leave that be). Even if our brains are utilizing vast amounts of entanglement that we just haven't noticed yet, they cannot possibly use entanglement for instantaneous communication. If they could, causality would be violated. See: Tachyon Pistols Thought Experiment. Talk to a physicist who knows a bit of relativity (better yet, one who teaches Special Relativity in an introductory course) and I'm sure they'll be happy to explain it in a bit more detail.
How, out of curiosity, do you propose that the brains have become entangled?
I signed up without a credit card... it was a small link somewhere on the sign-up page to bypass entering one. This was a couple of years ago though, it might have changed.
Ahh, gotcha.
Things that most people do need:
Geography. If we're going to invade someone, we ought to know where the hell the country is. Not "oooh, it's THE MIDDLE EAST. Somewhere east. In the middle."
History. Eg: Hey look, there have been huge economic booms and busts in the past. Hmm, I wonder if housing prices will climb forever?
Politics & Government : What does the Constitution say? What does it not say? How is it interpreted? What does "federalism" mean? How much does the US government spend on what?
Religion: What do people of other religions actually believe? Where do those beliefs come from? Eg: What exactly is the difference between Sunni and Shi'a Islam?
All of these seem practical to me. If you can't understand what's happening in the world, you don't know how to react to it.
The infinity of all real numbers is larger than the infinity of all natural numbers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleph_number
(this probably isn't very helpful, but it's how mathematicians quantify the "bigness" of an infinity)
Regardless,
No. Infinity doesn't surpass the "bounds" of mathematics. For god's sake, we construct infinities mathematically! The universe we see isn't infinitely large; infinity only EXISTS inside mathematics, but that doesn't make it any less powerful and "real" of a concept.
At no point do the "laws of mathematics" have to "round up". Unlike physics, mathematics has no "planck length"- it can deal with arbitrarily large infinities. It may seem really freaking weird, but there you go.
It depends on the infinity you're talking about. You can use something like mathematical induction to demonstrate 9.999... -
9 - 0. = 9
9.9 -
9.99 -
9.999 -
etc. Is there any finite number of 9s you can tack on to make this not true? No- and there's no reason an infinite number of them will make any difference to it.
9.99999...
-0.99999...
=9.000000...
Or,
9 + (
Algebraically rearranged- you CAN do this:
9 + (.9 -
How can you multiply pi by anything at all? After all, not only does it have an infinite number of digits, we don't even know what they all are!
How can you multiply 1/3 by anything at all? 1/3 =
How can you multiply 1 by anything at all? After all, 1 = 1.000000... which is an infinite number of 0s.
.999... is not an infinite number. It's finite in the same way pi is finite, and 10*pi - pi = 9*pi. It's a decimal expression of an infinite series, though.
9 + 9/10 + 9/100 + 9/1000 +
Everything after 9 cancels out (9/10 - 9/10, 9/100-9/100...) so you get 9 exactly.
Yes. Soviet-era Russia, Iran, and Iraq were/are all as bad as this. Detaining a dissident and his family is hardly the worst thing any of them did.
It's not stupid- it can be pretty damn effective (see: Aung San Suu Kyi).
No, that's not what they're saying. It's not about breaking RSA or whatever- strong cryptography is a requirement of, but not sufficient for, an unhackable voting system.
As long as you're right handed, anyway. I looked into fountain pens and they're very difficult to use with your left hand- the ink smears unless you write in bizarre orientations.
I read about a study where they hooked a guy up to sleep monitors, and whenever he looked like he was going into REM sleep they'd poke him or play a noise or something, just enough to get him out of REM sleep. He'd wake up in the morning feeling well-rested, but exhibited a lot of the same symptoms as someone seriously sleep deprived.
"The identical is equal to itself, since it is different." -- Franco Spisani
