Both of which are relatively small populations, . I certainly wouldn't call 33 million "totally enormous".

Did you stop reading right there? I don't know how else you could come to the conclusion that "size" refers to area and not population.

I'm Canadian (west coast) and I'd never heard of this until I met a guy from Ontario. I think it's an eastern thing. I wonder if any of the north eastern states have bagged milk.

Well, most people have a general idea of how much pizza they can eat in one sitting, and it doesn't involve getting out the protractor.

Not to mention that pizza is so calorie-dense most people eat way more than they actually need - smaller pieces forces them to slow down a bit. :)

This thread is going nowhere.

It doesn't really scale that way - you also have to take the density into account. The planet would likely have a larger radius, meaning you're higher up in the gravitational field when you stand on the surface.

Consider that Mars has a mass around 10% of Earth's, but a surface gravity of nearly 0.4g.

Hell, Uranus has a mass 14.5 times Earth's but surface gravity is still less than 1g. (As much as Uranus can be considered to have a "surface" as opposed to just a really thick atmosphere)

Oh, to be young and naive again...

That's tautologous. There are two common definitions of a body's North Pole. The first (and the International Astronomical Union's) is the pole of rotation that lies on the same side of the ecliptic plane as the Earth's north pole. This implies that Venus rotates "backwards".

The second definition is more local - it defines the North Pole as the pole around which the body rotates counterclockwise.

I do call my friends. At least the ones that I hang out with regularly. However, it's just not possible to maintain friendships with the hundreds of people I've met over the years - though I would still like to stay in touch. Traditionally these were the people who you'd get a Christmas card from with a quick update on what they've been up to once a year. Facebook allows you to stay in closer contact without having to devote hours a day to calling everyone you know.

For example, I was going skiing a couple weeks ago. I noticed on facebook that one of my elementary school friends was going to the same mountain the same day. I suggested we meet there for lunch - we did and spent an hour catching up.

That's the benefit of facebook.

Well there's enough depth in that question to write a book. I'll give you one idea I've been tossing around though you might think I'm crazy.

I think it has to do with the growth of the internet.

And not because people are now getting their news online, though that might be part of it. It's because the internet brings so many people so closely together that everyone is able to form a complete social circle out of people who only share their very narrow viewpoint. For any political position you might have, there's a forum with thousands of people who all share it. One where you can all reinforce each other's views and share in disdain for those who don't believe what you believe.

I've experienced this myself, with a well-known skeptics forum I won't name. (Though if you know the area you probably know which one I mean). It's a great place, full of wonderful people and I don't mean to denigrate them in any way. However, I found it's very easy to succumb to a form of groupthink. Once you've agreed with people on most topics, it becomes rather difficult to disagree on other topics without becoming somewhat of an outcast. Even on a forum dedicated to rational inquiry this was a problem, and it's even more of one elsewhere.

This fragmentation of social groups leads to strongly-held extreme viewpoints since people have little to no contact with opposing opinions. People, after all, naturally modulate their views towards the approximate center of their social groups.

Anyway, getting back to my point, this in turn drives the media. Journalists are responsible because they care about their reputation. Nobody wants to get a reputation for being too sensationalist.

However, these sensationalist journalists aren't getting a reputation for being sensationalist, at least one that they care about - because their audience is made up of a bunch of people who are all set to buy what they're selling. Glenn Beck doesn't care what the left thinks of him because he's got his audience eating off his plate. Ditto with Keith Olbermann.

Wow, I didn't mean to write that much and like I said I'm probably off base. Thoughts anyone?

It means that they may be useful models of reality in certain aspects, but that both GR and QM are at best incomplete. Yes, we use different models at different scales (we use aerodynamics rather than particle physics for airplane wing design, for example), but don't confuse the model with the reality.

The universe plays only by the rules of the very lowest level (quarks, or amplitude distributions over configuration space, or whatever else is the lowest level that we haven't discovered yet). The models we have at different levels of abstraction only serve to make the math easier for us - they have no correlation to what's actually going on.

As they say, the map may be just an imperfect guide to the territory, but the territory doesn't fold up and fit in your glove compartment.

You're right. I also used to think that programming was so complex and hard to understand that you had to use some kind of special language, and that only enlighted "programmers" were capable of writing the "correct" words to make the holy computer do the right thing. I looked at some code once and it had lots of english words in it! I'm going to do all my own programming from now on, just writing down what I want my computer to do.

But seriously, this data is more complicated than something you can cook up in 10 minutes with Excel and some regression software. To get you started thinking, say you have about 10 million records from 1,000 different recording stations over a period of 100 years. The older ones aren't very accurate, and none of them cover the whole 100 year period, and they don't always agree when they overlap. Some of them have moved, and some of them have had the surrounding area change over the years (think adding black asphalt). Your job is to produce a graph that shows whether the temperature has changed over that period. And it better be right because trillions of dollars depend on your answer.

Oh and there are large groups of people on both sides who are motivated by this trillion-dollar question and who are not above lying to discredit you if you pick the wrong answer.

You're right that most people aren't going to read the emails, and that's a problem. This is a good story for the media: "HACKED EMAILS REVEAL SCIENTIFIC MISCONDUCT!!" Everyone loves a good juicy witchhunt - rooting out the evildoers hiding under the mask of normalcy. "HACKED EMAILS REVEAL SCIENTISTS ENGAGED IN SCIENCE AND DEBATE" doesn't quite have the same ring to it.

So the media blows it out of proportion because it draws eyeballs they can sell to advertisers, and rational people who don't have time to read the emails start to have doubts about this whole global warming thing. I mean, it wouldn't be all over the news unless there was something to it, right?

It's not a pre-existing bias, it's a bias developed as a result of decades of careful study. They are ridiculing the opposing side in the same way we all like to ridicule creationists - from a solid position of scientific certainty. Creationists like to cry foul when we deride the "journals" they publish in, but that doesn't mean they're right or that we're stifling debate. The science is settled and has been for nearly a decade, perhaps more (I'm not a climatologist). What's left is political debate over the policy implications. The contrarians are trying desperately to throw up smoke and mirrors to convince the public that nothing is awry.

Handing all the data to anyone who asks, while a noble idea in a perfect world, puts them in a vulnerable position when the people asking are going to torture it and feed it to the media's noise machine. You have to understand that this data is not something you can plug into Excel and reproduce their graphs. It takes years of study to understand the intricacies of how to properly interpret it.

This whole "scandal" is blown out of proportion and based on smoke and mirrors. It's as if someone who barely knows how to turn on a computer subpoenaed all the source code you've written in the last 20 years, then pointed to that properly commented god-awful hack you wrote 5 years ago to get a product out the door (god knows we've all done it) as evidence that you're secretly part of a hacking ring.

That's a good question. It would make sense that obviously inflated salaries raise a red flag at tax time, but I don't know the details on how that works.

I'm just speaking from experience as a past employee of a small non-profit. We always had roughly one year's operating expenses in the bank.