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Comment Re:I never have understood (Score 5, Informative) 265

Japan/Germany - they couldn't REACH us to do much damage, even if they'd wanted to.

That's just not true. The German u-boats in particular were very much able to reach us, and cause significant damage. Operation Drumbeat in particular was able to do a surprising amount of damage. With only 5 u-boats, they were able to sink 25 American ships, many of them within sight of major US cities such as New York and Boston, all in the span of a single month.

Over the next few months, they managed to sink 22% of our tanker capacity, and well more than 2 million tons of cargo shiping.

It got to the point where the u-boat commanders were calling the time from January to August in 1942 the "American Shooting Season," and east coast cities and towns had to be blacked out after dark for most of the remainder of the war.

They couldn't invade, but Germans could certainly reach us all right.

Comment Re:Copenhagen interpretation != less complicated (Score 1) 197

I agree completely that determinism is a terrible philosophy to have. But any view of the world based entirely on the premise of "matter in motion" is necessarily purely deterministic due to this little pesky thing we call logic(which the copenhagen interpretation was content to largely disregard). Matter in motion is logical. People are not logical due to the fact that we have free will. Therefore, people have this thing called consciousness, which is not matter in motion.

To illustrate this, assume that a neurobiologist is able to perfectly map out a model of the human brain, and generates a set of rules for each node(neuron). Under a given set of conditions, it sends a signal(in our brain it is electrical, but so long as it is a signal, it doesn't matter. Likewise with the neurons. In our brains, they are cells, but so long as they are a node that can perform I/O, it doesn't matter what it materially is) to the next node. Suppose the neurobiologist sets a few trillion or so people in a vast field, and gives each of them a set of rules corresponding to a specific neuron, and when a certain condition is fulfilled, they send a signal to another person in the form of a thrown ball.

This gives us a seemingly perfect model of the human brain. It is obvious that the model is purely deterministic. Yet all the observable data we have is in favor of our free will. Therefore, this thought experiment must be missing something, not accounting for some unknown factor. Yet it accounts for all the materialistic factors. We can only conclude that there is necessarily a nonmaterial consciousness involved somewhere in the process. Material determinism in no way infringes upon our free will.

Comment Re:Copenhagen interpretation != less complicated (Score 1) 197

Nonlocality is one of the premises of pilot wave theory. And Bell himself, who discovered those inequalities that you are so misinterpreting, was a supporter of pilot wave theory: “Is it not clear from the smallness of the scintillation on the screen that we have to do with a particle? And is it not clear, from the diffraction and interference patterns, that the motion of the particle is directed by a wave? De Broglie showed in detail how the motion of a particle, passing through just one of two holes in screen, could be influenced by waves propagating through both holes. And so influenced that the particle does not go where the waves cancel out, but is attracted to where they cooperate. This idea seems to me so natural and simple, to resolve the wave-particle dilemma in such a clear and ordinary way, that it is a great mystery to me that it was so generally ignored."

Comment Re:Creating a Mars magnetosphere (Score 1) 549

Melting the core would require far too much effort, as it not only requires gathering enough energy to liquefy a sphere of iron 2200-4000km in diameter, but also transporting it to that core, which is underneath another few thousand kilometers of solid rock, then releasing it in sch a way that it liquefies the core. Much easier to use induction to create the magnetic field. Turn Mars into a giant electromagnet with an orbiting artificial conductive ring covered in solar panels.

Submission + - Space Station's 'Cubesat Cannon' has Gone Rogue (discovery.com)

astroengine writes: Last night (Thursday), two more of Planet Lab’s shoebox-sized Earth imaging satellites launched themselves from aboard the International Space Station, the latest in a series of technical mysteries involving a commercially owned CubeSat deployer located outside Japan’s Kibo laboratory module. Station commander Steve Swanson was storing some blood samples in one of the station’s freezers Friday morning when he noticed that the doors on NanoRack’s cubesat deployer were open, said NASA mission commentator Pat Ryan. Flight controllers at the Johnson Space Center in Houston determined that two CubeSats had been inadvertently released. “No crew members or ground controllers saw the deployment. They reviewed all the camera footage and there was no views of it there either,” Ryan said.

Comment Re:Doesn't solve anything, pure politics (Score 1) 649

Politicians interjecting themselves into what subjects teachers are allowed to introduce in the classroom and how such subjects must be discussed does _nothing_ to produce an educated population. It is nothing more than blowing at windmills to gain votes on whatever educational topic is popular for the day. The farther education decisions get removed from the parent, the more students become trained to become regurgitators of approved politically correct information rather than becoming adults with adapative minds capable of of grasping subtle connections and knowing truth from falsehood.

The entire purpose of the public school system is to systematically pump out batches of "good citizens" who don't question anything, particularly not the government. Did you actually think that the government running these schools was acting out of benevolence and desire for rational people instead of only looking out for its own power and self-interest?

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