So does that make the new name the undead name, and therefore like a zombie name?

All of these options are still better than spending full price for a pair of jeans that were lovingly crafted to start with holes in them!

The difference is that aether unraveled pretty quickly when we started seriously looking for it because experiments kept being outright inconsistent with what it was predicted we would see if it were there, whereas there are lots of independent lines of evidence that all point to the dark matter existing in the same page, so it really is not the same situation at all. The only problem with dark matter is that it doesn’t show up in our particle detectors (so far, at least), but there is no law of the universe that says that everything that exists has to.

It helps to realize that mass is just a bookkeeping label that we assign to the “internal” energy of a system, where the choice of what counts as being “internal” is somewhat arbitrary and depends on the level we are studying.

For example, if you measure the mass of the nucleus of some atom, and then compare your measurement to the sums of the masses of the protons and neutrons inside of it, then you will see that the numbers do not agree. The reason for this is that much of the mass of a nucleus is actually the energy of the strong force bonds holding the nucleons together.

But you can actually drop down another level. It turns out that the vast (~ 99%) majority of the mass in the proton in turn does not come from the quarks but from the energy of the gluon field holding them together.

And if you drop down yet another level, the quarks get their mass through their interactions with the Highs field.

So in short, it is energy all the way down.

No, it will be too busy making paperclips to even notice us, except as a nuisance getting in the way of it making paperclips that needs to be eliminated.

Yeah, I miss living in Australia where you didn’t have your own waiter but on the other hand that meant that it wasn’t rude to flag down any of the wait staff if you need anything rather than being restricted to having to go through a single person.

I’m not sure why anyone would think I meant ‘restrain’, but oh well.

The Bhagavad Gita spends a lot of time extolling the importance to spiritual life of controlling the senses with the goal of restraining them, and in particular this is a precept of the Krishna Consciousness cult.

Try reading before you down vote.

Speaking only for myself, what really threw me off was the following:

Apologies if you’ve already tried this or something similar, it doesn’t work for everyone, but I got mine back by using essential oils to restrain [emphasis mine] my olfactory system.

I think that if I’d realized that you meant to say “retrain” here instead of “restrain”, I would not have been so quick to initially dismiss it as obviously nonsense.

Horribly incompetent? No. Flawless, or even particularly prescient? No. They got a lot of big stuff right; they got a whole lot wrong.

So just to be clear: you think that this particular language was badly written because it is so easily bypassed?

If, as you say,

I’m unconcerned with how it was intended since that’s totally irrelevant to what it actually is.

Then why did you waste time describing what you believed was the intention behind it earlier when you said,

I think of it as a rhetorical flourish to emphasize the importance they placed on representing states rather than people.

Regardless, the other point that I made that you haven’t addressed still stands: they put that prohibition against banning the slave trade in there for a reason, and that reason was presumably not “as a rhetorical flourish”, so either the people who insisted that it be present were horribly incompetent at writing legal language that would preserve their own interests, or your personal opinion as to how Constitutional law works in this case is missing something important.

Indeed, the limitation in what can be amended is in practice totally powerless. I think of it as a rhetorical flourish to emphasize the importance they placed on representing states rather than people.

It isn’t worded as a “rhetorical flourish”; it is worded incredibly clearly and explicitly as a prohibition:

Provided that no Amendment which may be made prior to the Year One thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any Manner affect the first and fourth Clauses in the Ninth Section of the first Article; and that no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.

In fact, taking your reasoning a step further: are you likewise arguing that when the prohibition against banning the slave trade prior to 1808 was included here, that it was also understood to be a “rhetorical flourish” with no teeth behind it? If so, then why did they go to so much trouble to put it in? It seems like a lot of wasted effort in that case.

This ensures that the Senate can never re-make itself to be anything other than the body with equal representation among states, unless the affected states also agree.

Yes, that is exactly my point: if this restriction could itself be eliminated through the amendment process, then it effectively does not exist.

Sure, but once there is enough determination to deprive a state of equal representation in the Senate that there are sufficient votes to amend the Constitution once in order to do this–which, as you have pointed out, is a very high bar–then it is no harder to go through the amendment process twice in order to first drop that sentence.

Sure, but obviously in that case it would no longer matter whether that state had Senators or not because it would no longer be subject to the laws of the U.S. government.

If it were really so easy to bypass that restriction, then what was the point of putting that sentence in in the first place?

Except for denying a state equal representation on the Senate without its consent; the Constitution explicitlyforbids that.

Ow, would you all stop screaming already? It is hurting my ears. 🙁

I already knew that–it’s why I use Thunderbird instead!

Fun fact: even when using an absolute scale like Kelvin, it’s theoretically possible to have a negative temperature!

The reason for this is that temperature measures how much energy you have to pay in order to increase the number of possible microscopic states accessible to the system by a certain amount. In really weird systems it is possible that the amount of energy you can put into the system has a cap, so if you keep pouring energy into the system then eventually it will be forced into the unique microscopic state where every part of the system contains as much energy as it possible can. When this happens, the only way to increase the number of microstates that the system can be in is by removing some of the energy from the system–which you can visualize as creating the possibility of there being holes in the system where there is an absence of energy–and so the temperature is negative.

This kind of system is so weird, though, that is existence is primarily theoretical. Last time I checked, such a system has not yet been demonstrated to exist in a lab. Still, it is fun to think about!

The resolution preferred by God himself.