He has recited pi to the last decimal digit. Twice.

He doesn't even need a Mossberg 500. He just tells a circle to fucking square itself.

What will people not do to get an IgNobel Prize?

The original statement from rubycodez was as follows:

That's not a fabrication. That's just wrong. Calling it a fabrication bestows too much grace on it.

Sadly, the anti-science (and particularly anti-AGW) crowd has no shortage of wrong statements, because unlike scientists, they are not tethered to facts.

This. Claiming that indirect evidence does not count is a desperate, sophomoric attempt by the anti-science crowd.

Recall the recent debate between Bill Nye and Ken Ham on the theory of evolution. One of Ken Ham's favourite strategies was an attempt to make a distiction between "observational" science and "historical" science, with the latter being invalid in his opinion. How often did we hear him say "you don't know, you weren't there" in response to indirect evidence?

What if, after the debate, Ken Ham had walked to the parking lot of his museum and discovered that the driver-side front fender of his car was damaged, with debris from his front driver-side headlight strewn on the ground? He would no doubt conclude that someone hit his car while he was parked there. But not so fast, Mr. Ham. Let's apply your own standards of evidence: You don't know. You weren't there.

A Faraday Cage built around the rail-gun might help with shielding. I'm not sure how chaff would help in that regard, unless the pieces of chaff are comparable to or larger than the majority of the wavelengths in the EMP's power-spectrum.

Excellent point. We've been bouncing radio waves off ionized gases (aka plasmas) since the time of Marconi.

IAAP, although not an expert in rail guns or radar.

I would guess that the projectiles would be hard to detect on radar because they're small. However, it would seem to me that the rail gun itself would send out one hell of a large EMP that would reveal the location of the gun and the time of firing.

FTFY.

[And yes, you're right. Oxygen doesn't burn; other stuff burns by combining with it.]

Mod parent informative. Oxygen doesn't burn. Rather, other stuff burns by combining rapidly with oxygen.

I confess I have conflicting opinions about Penn and Teller (just as they have conflicting opinions about many things.) And I have no desire to defend their libertarian views.

However, it is clear that Pen and Teller do not support pseudoscience. In fact, they go out of their way to debunk it. This is even mentioned in the very wikipedia link you supply.

I assume you are trying to claim that libertarianism itself is a kind of pseudoscience. I'm not a libertarian, but even I must disagree with that. It is a philosophy.

Anyone who reads those links can see that Tenebrousedge is right and you are not.

I wouldn't go so far as to say that truth "doesn't matter" in those fields. Rather, they pursue truth through different forms of expression, kind of in the sense of Plato's forms. There's "truth" in a Picasso painting, a Frost poem or a Beethoven piano sonata. It's just not the kind of objective, rational truth that science pursues.

This, exactly. And I'd go further: in general, adherents to pseudo-science are either deceived about the truth, or have bought into the deception despite the refutation of pseudo-scientific claims. Art, on the other hand, doesn't try to "claim" anything about the truth, it just endeavors to express examples of it.

For some reason, slashdot insisted on mangling the href. Here's the correct url without html parsing:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...

No, it is not an assumption. Hubble (and others) confirmed it by comparing redshifts with distances measured independently.

Most of us route the packets to our computer. Why do you listen to them on your hi-fi system?

I just had a mental image of a pimped-out Tesla with massive heatsink fins sticking out of the hood. Brings the concept of a "hot rod" to a whole new level...

Yes! Thank you! Redundant superlatives are a bugaboo of mine too. Our struggle against them never ends.

It's a shame. People like us are really unique.

Wait...