You made my brain hertz.

I was doing the calculations originally suggested by Colonel Korn. Presumably the Schwarzschild radius isn't completely accurate here, and the "four million suns" mass figure is of course not very precise.

Still, the answer I was replying to was off by around 33 orders of magnitude (which it got modded up for...) whereas mine was only off by a factor of 5--and I'm not sure how precise WA's figure is.

Your mass/volume ratio is way off, though the other three are correct. It should be...

mass / volume = 1.155 * 10^6 kg/m^3
1 tsp = 4.929 * 10^-6 m^3
1 tsp of Sagittarius A* = 5.693 kg

So, it's pretty heavy, but eg. neutron stars are far, far heavier. This black hole is far denser than the sun, which has about 6.94 g per tsp.

So you would suggest that you can in fact be fired or denied a job based on X if the job is for a non-profit, regardless of X? I suppose that's as good a solution as possible, though having to allow any sort of job-related discrimination is unfortunate.

Presumably sexual orientation is included here. I'm not sure how appropriate anti-sexual-orientaton discrimination education would be in elementary school--I suppose you'd have to keep the specifics out of the discussion and leave it at the level of "Jack and Jill came down the hill and found their two daddies Tim and Steve who put them to bed and each sang one to sleep. The end." In a similar vein, you said originally

Do you make an exception for religious groups that, for instance, refuse to employ/ordain/etc. gay clergy? In either case, what is your moral rationale? I find this a difficult point to be consistent on. On the one hand, surely if a religious group can refuse gay clergy another religious group can refuse white clergy. On the other hand, religions should be separate from the government and free to practice whatever beliefs they want, including discrimination.

Only if you're gay. (Seriously, the pictures look like boobs and such.)

You're talking about TNG: First Contact and DS9: Far Beyond the Stars. The DS9 one was certainly different, but I'd hardly call it bad. For instance, Memory Alpha quotes the actors who played Sisko, Quark, and Odo as calling it their favorite or one of their favorite DS9 episodes. The TNG one was certainly interesting. Maybe the writing could have been better (somehow I was never sold on the injured Riker idea; too convenient?), but the basic plot was a very good idea, and the episode is at least memorable.

But certainly "Star Trek Luminary" is pretty silly. I had never heard of him.

I should start by saying I generally agree with you.

1) This will never happen. I'm gay and I'm not going to pair off (with a woman) and have precisely two children. I haven't ruled out the possibility of a surrogate or adoption someday, but that's a separate issue and would require a woman to have 4 children, 2 of her own and 2 for me.

2) I actually don't find China's 1-child policy draconian. I wish India had implemented something similarly effective years ago. It's not as if couples can't have any children, and there are quite a number of exceptions. Certainly there are negative consequences, but the alternative of overpopulation is truly terrible.

3) It's really convenient that people in developed nations seem to want to have just enough children to replace themselves, on average.

Over 2000 years, even a 0.1% annual population growth rate still results in a 7.38 times larger population than you started with. This situation actually does require precision balance in the long term.

Minor nitpick: "fiancee" (really fiancée) indicates an engaged woman, while you used it to refer to your engaged man. "fiancé" indicates an engaged man. The extra vowel makes it feminine. For some reason extra vowels are often feminine--eg. girl's names in English often end in vowels while boy's often end in consonants.

I know this because some relatives made the same mistake you did on their wedding invitations and it got pointed out.

There was an interesting recent TED talk on world population growth. The numbers the guy presents say we're just about to reach steady-state in number of children worldwide, though as the world's population pyramid fills up the overall number of people (children plus adults of all ages) will take a few more decades to level off at around 10 billion. The number of children per woman worldwide has plummeted everywhere except sub-saharan Africa. If you don't want to watch the talk, you can at least see this animation (after it loads, click play). Watching China is particularly interesting. There's been a huge shift towards fewer children in the last 30 years, and we're just about down to the replacement rate, on the whole.