Yeah, that's smart. Looking at what they say and not what they do.

http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2006/11/09/sweden-violated-torture-ban-cia-rendition

Actually it makes perfect sense if you know physics and understand binding energy. Binding energy is how much energy you have to use to separate nucleons. So high binding energy actually means it is a lower energy state for Ni-62 than Cu-63, thus this reaction needs energy to work, not give off it.

Think it as how deep a well is. The deeper, the higher the binding energy.

What about Sweden? We've freed ourselves from religion, and we are doing just fine.

That is soooo easy man. Take 2.5 of everything and add a dash more (to get close to 2.67). Or just multiply by 3 and make bigger portions.

And if you are the kind of person that thinks that recipes need to be followed down to 1% tolerance, and not judge the amounts by taste you shouldn't be allowed near a kitchen!

And if you work in a profession that needs recipes be followed exactly, like in chemistry for instance, then you should really be using SI units, or be prepared to be fired.

You are erroneously assume that believing in something holds an equal truthvalue compared to simply not believing in something, and that not believing necessitates a belief. And is it is very commonly coached among religious to perpetuate this false dichotomy.

Also, not telling you children once a week to believe in X, is not the same thing as telling your children not to believe in X, nor telling your children to believe in X.

Get it? It is even logically consistent.

To reiterate my point, anyone who believes and then doesn't respect the wishes of someone else who believes, (and it doesn't matter if the belief is made up, or if the person i crazy and thinks he's Napoleon) deserves no freedom of religion, and is just a lame hypocrite.

...doesn't make it any less real.

Or actually, that is exactly what every religion thinks; that their made up stories, rules, hats and dietary needs are somehow special and real. Well you can't have it both ways. Either concede that your own religion is made up, or respect the nutty wishes of every nut job out there who believes in anything, or else you deserve no freedom of religion.

Oh, I meant parallel to the sun, not perpendicular. I.e. show no surface area to the sun while going away from the sun.

Of course you can slow down. Remember Kepler, the guy who figured out that orbits are ellipses? Angle the sail perpendicular to the orbit on the half of the orbit when the sail is moving towards the sun, this will give you a net braking thrust. On the other half of the orbit, when the sail is moving away from the sun, angle the sail perpendicular to the sun so you get zero thrust. I.e. slow down when going towards the sun and just coast while moving away.

full disclosure: I'm a physicist and a wind surfer.

You obviously don't understand either Markov chains or neural nets.

It is trivial to prove that a single layer neural net can't even implement the function XOR, but here is the difference between a neural net and a Markov chain, a neural net can have more than than one level, and then it is a totally different ballgame.

Now, I will admit that there exists Hidden Markov Models, but that was not part of the original question; can an alien create a machine with a Markov model of human speech that acts intelligent?

No.

Given that there is say roughly 300000 legal words in the english language (the real number is less than one order from it at least) the big markov matrix would be 30000^100^2. You could probably store it in a sparse matrix but the number above is just so insanely much larger than the amount of atoms in the in observable universe that the original hypothesis just becomes moot.

Yes, it is the most pedantic way; cause you are wrong.

The javelin takes a 1-dimensional trajectory through 4-dimensional space-time.

So to be pedantic, you know nothing about a trajectory at all is seems.