I never realized that solar tides are so strong, and of course they would be stronger on Venus than Earth. And it does make sense that the tidal effects on liquid water are going to have a much more dynamic effect on a planet than those that just affect solid rock. Thank you for helping educate me.

What the hell happened to Venus? It's about 80 percent of the earth's mass. Why on Venus wouldn't it have a plate tectonics? Just because you can't see it happen doesn't mean it's not there.

Because it does not have tidal forces from a large nearby moon tugging on it like Earth does.

I'm no expert in this, but I dont think you understand whats going on here at all. Flipping one doesn't instantly flip the other. You cant communicate information via entanglement.

This is correct.

Please, someone correct me if im wrong, but my understanding is its like having a red, and blue ball in seperate bags. You throw one ball (in its bag) across the room, then open the other bag. The open bag is blue, you now know the red one is across the room.

This is not correct. What you are describing is classical information: the ball in each bag is either red or blue, you just don't know which ball is in which bag until you look.

To try to extend your analogy to how it really works, the balls would both be purple until you opened a bag and took the ball out. At that point, the ball would decide to be either red or blue, and the other ball would decide to be the opposite. But up until the bag is opened, each ball MUST be able to become red or blue when it is opened.

The reason has to do with how quantum observations are done. I'll use polarization of photons as an example. You cannot measure the exact angle of a photon's polarization. All you can do is pass that photon through a polarizing filter and see whether the photon passes through or not. If you don't know the state of the photon, then it passes through 50% of the time.

Once the photon passes through a polarizer set at a particular angle, it will thereafter always pass through a polarizer set at that exact angle. Its chance of passing through a polarizer at a different angle is the square of the cosine of the difference in angles. Suppose you have a stream of photons polarized at 0 degrees, then those photons have a 50% chance of passing through a filter set at 45 degrees and a 0% chance of passing through a filter set at 90 degrees. So far, this is all classical stuff that can be observed easily if you have a flashlight and a pair of polarized glass discs.

Now, at the quantum level, entanglement arises out of conservation laws. Each quantum interaction has to conserve energy and momentum and information and certain quantum properties of the objects that interacted like spin. So if you hit an atom with a photon, and that atom absorbs the photon, then releases the energy as two photons to return to its ground state, those two photons will be entangled. Each will carry away half of the energy (because each action must have an equal and opposite reaction)

Photons have spin. Spin is a conserved property. This means that when one quantum event creates two photons, those photons' spins must cancel each other out. Spin determines a photon's angle of polarization. So, the two newly created photons will have orthogonal polarizations. At the same time, it is not possible to know anything about the spin of the newly-emitted photons at the time of their creation. So, you've now got a pair of polarization-entangled photons. They have spin and their spins add to zero and you know nothing about their spins. (If you did something to generate photons with known spin values, those photons would not be spin-entangled. Entanglement and information are two sides of the same coin.)

One of the consequences of measuring pairs of polarization-entangled photons is that in order to conserve spin, the results of measuring their polarizations correlate. If photon A passes through a 0-degree filter, then photon B must never pass a 0-degree filter, because that would mean that their spins did not cancel. If A passes through a 0-degree filter, then B will pass through a 90-degree filter. This relationship holds true for any pair of angles you choose: if the angles are the same, then only one photon from each pair will pass the filter. If the angles are 90 degrees apart, then either both of them or neither of them will pass the filter (with an even chance of each outcome). They correlate, even though they are distant from each other.

And the rate of correlation depends on the difference between the angles of the detectors , which also are distant from each other.

So that is why finding a classical analogy is so difficult. To go back to the balls in the bags, when you open your bag you must first ask a question like "what color are you at 35 degrees?" then the balls in both bags must conspire to come up with a set of answers that follow the expected correlations no matter what question is asked before opening the other bag. Depending on the question you ask, both balls might be blue or both balls might be red, and the act of asking the question requires you to put some amount of red and blue paint into the bag so that the balls can change color while still making sure the total amount of red and blue in the universe does not change.

Nowadays when a senior citizen pays with a check at the grocery store, the cash register just scans the routing and account numbers and runs the transaction electronically just like as if it were a debit card. It will even print the amount on the check for you. When done, the cashier will hand the check back along with a receipt that looks much like a debit card receipt.

All that said, I still pay a few of my bills by writing and mailing checks, because the organization I'm making the payment to insists on adding a surcharge if I want to pay online.

You know, that song has a pretty mean hook. The chorus is probably gonna keep me earwormed for a few hours today. I'M A SOFTWARE DEVELOPER AND I'M DEVELOPING 4 THE REST OF MY LIFE.

I doubt the number is 99%. Otherwise, auto parts stores wouldn't stay in business and Car Talk wouldn't have an audience.

The tire pressure monitors (my vehicle has them) are an interesting thing, though, because they don't tell you anything you can't see just by walking around your car and giving it a quick inspection before jumping in and driving it in the morning. If you're paying even the slightest attention, you can see that a tire is losing pressure well before it's dangerously flat...

I listen to NPR during my daily work commute, and that has definitely made me much more well-informed about world news.

I've caught snippets of Car Talk on the occasional Saturday morning where I'm out driving early, and it's always been entertaining. I'm no expert in cars, but I've replaced my own brake pads, changed my own oil, and recently even worked through a do-it-yourself oxygen sensor replacement. The show is both entertaining and informative; the hosts are witty and the subject matter is at the right level for someone who realizes that you don't have to get screwed over by a repair shop for a burnt-out headlamp.

On a recent road trip, I found myself in a weird no-man's land somewhere in North Carolina where I could only pick up talk radio and country music. I ended up actually listening to Rush Limbaugh for a short stretch. I was absolutely amazed at the complete lack of substance in his show. It was nothing but taking a random fact and then spewing heavily slanted personal opinion about it.

For those who choose to listen to that kind of crap over something like Diane Rhem or All Things Considered or Kojo Nnamdi, all I can do is just beg: Give it one hour. Any of those three shows. You will get twenty times the information and one twentieth the spoon-fed opinion from it than you will get from Rush.

Listening to conservative talk radio is for those who can't be bothered to learn the truth or think for themselves. If you won't listen to NPR because you think it's "liberal" then you are doing yourself and your species a huge disservice, and you are worth nothing but contempt.

And they say that gravity is the weakest of the fundamental forces. Gravity can trap unbelievable amounts of matter until the the heat death of the universe; it can shape the orbits of galaxies that are millions of light-years in diameter; it can create conditions that we simply don't have the math to explain. Gravity is the one force that we don't have a good theory to explain yet.

Pshaw. Gravity sees your Strong Force and raises you a Theory of Everything. :)

We assume that people wearing them are busy or oblivious, so now people wear them to appear busy or oblivious â" even without music.

I work in a software development environment that embraces Agile principles. We wear multiple hats. We operate transparently. We communicate with each other, frequently.

But sometimes, when I need to go into the Code Zone and focus on getting shit done, I need to operate without the possibility of my train of thought being derailed. When that happens, I put on my headphones and I queue up a playlist I've listened to a dozen times before.

The headphones and the music drown out the background distractions. Since I'm overly familiar with the music, I don't listen to it with my conscious mind. But the yammering little goblin in the back of my brain eats that shit up. And while he's pacified, I can build immense structures of pure logic in the forefront of my consciousness and go about the business of translating those glorious edifices into executable symbolic logic.

And while my subconscious is busy doing karaoke with the Barenaked Ladies or Neil Diamond or whatever else I chose to "listen" to, other people know (or at least can pretend) that if I don't respond to whatever they're yammering on about at any given moment, it's because I just didn't hear them.

I'm just guessing here, but I'd expect the "science" was testing with auditory stimuli designed to engage the conscious mind, whereas those of us who use headphones and music as an important shield specifically choose to use music that we don't actually have to listen to.

I didn't read TFA. Often I do, but for this one I don't think I have to. I know that if I need to focus on getting certain types of work done, you can either give me a private quiet space to do it in and leave me the fuck alone, or you can respect the headphones and leave me the fuck alone. The actual headphones and whatever may or may not be piped through them is irrelevant.

I think the thing you're missing is that the event horizon forms from a point and expands outward. The matter doesn't transition the event horizon; the even horizon engulfs it!

The point is this guy's friend would never consider using a piece of tin can on his bike, and would always buy the expensive part every time because he's the kind of guy that associates paying for something with quality.

Recently I had to take care of a bad oxygen sensor in my truck. I had these options:

1> Take it to a shop and pay $100 for diagnostics, $250 for the part, and another $150 for the labor

2> Buy an OEM replacement part for $135 and install it myself

3> Buy a third-party "universal" part for $60, cut the plug off my original part, splice the wires to the replacement part, hope I got the wiring right, install it myself, and hope the whole thing doesn't come apart when the engine heats up or I drive too fast over a speed bump.

Taking it to the shop is buying Windows pre-installed and paying for annual support. Buying the OEM replacement part and installing it myself is buying Windows and installing it myself. Buying the universal part etc. is installing and using Linux.

Someone who doesn't want to worry about anything takes Option 1. Someone who knows a few things and can research problems takes Option 2. Someone who lives and breathes computers takes Option 3.

Me, I've been using Linux on hobby machines since the mid-nineties, when I had to download Slackware as a series of floppy disk images, but I just flat can't make it work as a full-time machine. As for my truck -- well, it's my sole means of transportation and I'd have had to take Option 1 if the particular bad oxygen sensor didn't happen to be one of the easier ones to access.

I'm guessing that the bike part replacement you mention is more complex than just cutting up a tin can and jamming a piece of metal into the bike.

as long as the recorder stores everything

I don't see how it could be a violation of copyright to fail to copy certain portions of a work, or even to only selectively play back portions of a work. Never mind that the program and the commercials are separate works.

At best, this could be a violation of the contract between Dish and its content providers and advertisers. Moot to the point of this thread: it is a civil matter that has jack to do with copyright.

No, because if this were true, then risk would not be risk.

It IS true, and here's why: As an investor, if you put all your eggs in one basket and that basket falls off a cliff, you are left with NOTHING and it's game over. But if your bet pays off then all you have is more money.

So, failure is crippling while success just enables you to make bigger bets. That means, if you're smart, that you diversify. Some of your money goes into low-variance bets that are all but guaranteed to pay off with a small return. And some of your money goes into high-variance bets; these have a much higher chance of going bust but will also pay off much bigger when they hit.

Money isn't divided up equally. Most investors have small bankrolls and can't stand any risk. These are people saving for retirement, etc.. Failure means they live out their days miserable and dependent on the state; success means they travel the world and have great end-of-life medical care. The only ones who can make the riskier bets are those who have their future taken care of and can gamble with the rest.

All of that means simply that there is much more competition for the low-variance bets. The riskier investments have less interest from investors, allowing investors to demand more return. It's as simple as that.

Because they lack the money to emigrate from the States.

A few months back I got a TracFone specifically for use as a pay-as-you-go phone. After an initial outlay of $70, I buy time for slightly less than a nickel per minute. It costs me 0.3 minutes to send or receive a text message, and time spent browsing the Web costs me one minute per minute of bandwidth use.

My average usage is coming in at just a hair over $16 per month. Next month, my outlay for usage will finally exceed my outlay for the phone itself.

There are reasonably priced pay-as-you-go options in the U.S. Also, you can use GMail / Google Voice and a pretty cheap Bluetooth headset to make free calls to any U.S. phone number while at home, through your computer and the Internet.

You're right about the photon's frame of reference, but causality is alive and well in relativity.

This is part of the problem with the math we try to use to describe the universe. We don't handle zeroes and infinities very well.

For example, something goes all batshit at the speed of light. If you try to apply the math of Relativity to something traveling at c, then you get a meaningless answer that there is no time. When you try to figure out what's beyond the event horizon of a black hole (where gravity's acceleration is greater than the speed of light), the answer comes up that there is no space, that the entire mass of thousands of stars would be contained in a single point that is infinitely smaller than the Planck length: a singularity. When you try to figure out the transition across the event horizon of a black hole, it seems that something falling into one will take forever to get there, while on the inside of the black hole everything that's in it was always in it.

Is anybody working on some math that take the weird out of it all?