eroticohio

Can you list some movies or TV shows that portray open relationships (swinging or polyamory) in a positive light? I'm thinking especially about people who want to discuss the possibility of an open relationship with their partner, but want to ease into the conversation in a natural way - test the waters, so to speak, before jumping into the question directly.

Any other suggestions you might have about introducing the open relationship idea with one's partner would also be appreciated. What are some good ways to find out your partner's views on open relationships BEFORE actually asking?

I would also love to hear some personal stories about how people came to be in open relationships.

I'd like to hear - firsthand, if possible - what it is like for children who are raised in polyfamilies. If you were raised in a polyfamily, or if you have any inside knowledge about this, please let me know. If you are polyparents, please tell me what your children think of the situation, and let me know your thoughts on the benefits and problems associated with being raised in a polyfamily.

While offering a version of the decoherence interpretation of quantum mechanics, Gregory Mulhauser says:

"The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics is explicitly inconsistent because it treats the (apparently nonvanishing!) off-diagonal terms as if they did not exist." [Mulhauser, G. (1998) Mind Out of Matter: Topics in the Physical Foundations of Consciousness and Cognition, p.160]

I believe the "off-diagonal" terms refer to Heisenberg's matrix formulation, but what would a supporter of the Copenhagen interpretation say about the off-diagonal terms? What are they? and why can't we treat them as if the don't exist? Can anyone here explain what Mulhauser is getting at?

I picked Pi as a specific example, but my question is really about irrational numbers in general. How do we know for sure that irrational numbers actually exist? How do we know that they don't eventually have a last decimal place, or turn into a repeating decimal sequence? How do we know that they can't be expressed as a fraction?

And if you happen to know of any philosophical ideas concerning the meaning of irrational numbers, I would like to hear ideas about this as well. What does the existence of irrational numbers tell us about the nature of reality? Why should there be such numbers?

In other words, do particular birds typically play certain roles based on characteristic preferences or "personalities"? (e.g., are some birds just "natural leaders"/"followers", etc?) Or instead is it the case that, at any given time, the flight position of any particular bird is just a random thing?

I can see the HTML that creates the layout. I've tried tinkering with it (for example, change "blacktext12" to "whitetext12") but nothing changes. Below I have pasted the part of the HTML codes that seem relevant. Can you help me interpret it?

table, tr, td, li, p, div { font-family:helvetica; color:rgb(0,0,0); font-size:12px;}

.btext { font-family:helvetica; color:rgb(18,37,27); font-size:12px;}

.blacktext10 { font-family:helvetica; color:rgb(18,37,27); font-size:12px;}

.blacktext12 { font-family:helvetica; color:rgb(179,130,89); font-size:12px;}

.lightbluetext8 { font-family:helvetica; color:rgb(0,0,0); font-size:12px;}

.orangetext15 { font-family:helvetica; color:rgb(18,37,27); font-size:12px;}

.redtext { font-family:helvetica; color:rgb(18,37,27); font-size:12px;}

Is this a good advertising slogan for Mountain Dew? And, supposing it is, could I make any money by selling the idea? How would I do this? Could I just send the suggestion in an email to someone in the company's advertising department? Would the fact that I posted it here count as a copyright and proof that I thought of it first? (October 10, 2007), in case they took my idea and actually started using it? Suppose they started using a slight variation, like, "Some bodies got to Dew it"? Would I then be SOL?

A few decades ago, companies used to give prizes to housewives who come up with clever advertising slogans. It is even possible for an average person to make any money this way any more?

And if so, who are some of the people (Answerers and/or YA team members) you would be most interested in meeting in real life? If you would not want to go to the party, then why not?

On the Yahoo homepage there is an article (Called "Giving up on love") about a woman who never gets asked out. I'm curious to know how many women find themselves in this situation? It is not unusual for men, of course, because men are typically expected to do the asking, so if they are too shy to ask, then they're out of luck. I was a shy man for the first 30 years of my life, so I know what it's like to be socially invisible. But I have the impression that for women the problem tends to be somewhat different. That "finding a guy" is not such a problem, but "finding a GOOD guy" – someone you would really want to spend much time with, can be an seemingly impossible task. I appreciate any enlightenment that anyone can offer on this. Am I just way off base? Also, women, how would you like men to express interest in you? Any tips on how a man can avoid being annoying, while still somehow letting you know that he is attracted to you and would like to spend time with you?

And if so, who are some of the people (Answerers and/or YA team members) you would be most interested in meeting in real life? If you would not want to go to the party, then why not?

(PS: I also postsed a question about the effects of the internet on real-life relationships, but hardly anyone responded, so I would appreciate if you would go take a look at that question as well. Thanks!)

Please answer first in terms of your own life, then give your impression of the overall social trends.

Quantity: Do you think you meet more people (in person) because of the internet, or do you think you would meet more people if you just avoided the internet? You might want to consider the balance between opposing effects. On one hand, the time you spend on-line might reduce the time you spend in real-life social settings, but on the other hand, the internet might prompt you to get out and meet people that you might otherwise have never met (cuz they seem so cool in cyberspace).

Quality: Does the internet increase your chances of meeting those really special people who can became your best friends, lovers, soulmates…? Or do you think that, overall, the internet sends you on more wild-goose chases – making you think that maybe you would be socially better off to just forget about meeting people from on-line communities?

Presumably they did not know the difference between good and evil prior to eating the apple (the whole point was that they ate from the tree of knowledge of good and evil). Prior to eating the apple they were still in the grace of God, but by eating the apple, they "fell from grace" and thus all of humanity suffers death, disease, etc. Is this an appropriate punishment for an innocent being? How can any person who does not yet know the difference between good and evil be given such a severe punishment when, by definition of their innocence, they did not yet know the difference between good and evil? God clearly told them not to eat the apple, but since they did not yet know the difference between good and evil, how could they have known that disobeying God was wrong? The severity of the punishment suggests that they must have already known that disobedience was wrong, but how could they know this prior to eating the apple? So were they innocent prior to eating the apple, or not?

We have 3 grape vines in our back yard. Both last year and this year the vines where heavy with lots of grapes. Last year, Japanese beetles ate most of the leaves and the fruit just died without ever ripening. This year we put out a bunch of beetle traps. We had 15 pounds of dead beetles, but this was not enough, so we started spraying. The spay protected the leaves, but I'm afraid it was too late. About 20 percent of our leaves are damaged. Is there anything we can do at this point to save our grape harvest this year? Should we prune off bunches that start to die? Would this help other bunches survive?

I just read the article about "Brain wave-reading toys" on the Yahoo homepage. I've been wanting a bio-feedback system for the past 20 years but have never seriously looked into buying one because they seemed expensive and I didn't really have the money. I'm not so much interested in the toy/game aspect (although I suppose it could be fun and I wouldn't mind if my system came with some game/play options), I'm more interested in quality and versatility of the device so that maybe it can aid in learning to focus, relax, meditate, control muscle tension, etc. So my question is this: Have you had any experience using bio-feedback and/or have you ever purchased one? What did you think of it? Would you recommend it? Have you done some research on purchasing a system? What are some good brand names? Basically looking for some suggestions about what to get, where to get it, and how much I should expect to pay.

On a brief scan of the first 100,000 digits, the longest string I could find as a string of 5 one's, which occurred about a third of the way down (nestled in this string of digits … 24658411111577583…). Does anyone know of a longer string somewhere in the first trillion, or so, digits? Is there any mathematical reason why strings of, say, hundreds or thousands couldn't occur somewhere in all of Pi?

I used the "find on this page" function on a web page to confirm that there are no strings longer that five in the first 100,000.

There are several movies about the life of Jesus, but I don't know of any about the life of the Siddhārtha (except for a documentary). Perhaps there is a foreign film I have overlooked? India has a major film production industry ("Bollywood"), so it seems odd to me that there wouldn't be some dramatic feature film portraying the Buddha's life.

By the way, I think the Buddha's story could appeal to a large Western audience. He was the son of a king and as a child was raised in a life of total luxury. (For example, he several palaces and had innumerable beautiful women attending to his every need.) He married a beautiful girl and they had a son together. But at age 29 he kissed his wife and kid goodbye then wandered off into the forest to seek enlightenment. It seems to me that this has the basic elements for a great dramatic story.

It appears that mass is not an intrinsic property of a thing, but rather, depends on all other matter in the universe. I would like further explanation. Here is a quote from Mendal Sach in an article in Physics Today (Feb, 1969) entitled "Space, Time and Elementary Interaction in Relativity"…

"The derived mass field depends upon the curvature of space-time. The latter geometrical property is, in turn, a manifestation of the mutual coupling of all the matter within the closed system. Thus, if the rest of the universe should be depleted of all matter, the mass of the remaining electron, say, should correspondingly go to zero. The derived field relationship is then a quantitative expression of the Mach principle because here the inertial mass of any amount of matter is indeed a well defined function of its dynamic coupling with all of the other matter within the entire closed system."

I've been looking for a simple explanation, but all I find is stuff like this:

What is a Loeb space? In applications one usually only needs

to work with hyperfinite Loeb probability spaces in a nonstandard universe

which is a countably indexed ultrapower. In that case, a hyperfinite set has the

external cardinality of the continuum (the cardinality of the continuum will be

denoted by c), so there is a bijection between the hyperfinite set and the unit

interval [0, 1]. Using this bijection, one can impose the Loeb measure structure

on [0, 1]. Thus, a Loeb measure can simply be viewed as a measure on the unit

interval. In this setting, the special measure-theoretic properties of Loeb spaces

can be restated as properties of some measure on the most familiar underlying

space [0, 1].

I got into this by trying to understand Edward Nelson's "Internal set theory" (IST). I previously asked a question about that, but so far no responses.

I've already read the Wikipedia post, but I'm looking for more perspectives on it. What does it really mean in plain language? Do you understand it well enough to talk about it in intuitive/philosophical terms?

In a book by Lama Surya Das called "Awakening the Buddha Within" I came across this statement on page 26:

"To date, approximately fifteen Western children have been sought out and recognized as lama reincarnations – known as tulkus."

I'm wondering if there are any news articles, stories, biographies, or whatever, about any of these people. What ever became of them? Did they grow up to be lamas? I'm curious if anyone knows some information about them.

And just to be clear: A llama is a furry camel-like creature that you sometimes see on farms, but that's NOT what I'm talking about. A lama is a Tibetan or Mongolian Buddhist monk. Also, I know a lot of you are just itching to tell me how stupid the whole idea of reincarnation is. Don't bother. I don't really believe in reincarnation (but I do keep an open mind on the subject). I'm just curious about the lives of kids who have been identified in this way. What happens to them?