The problem with rebellion is that whoever takes over afterwards is likely to be at least as bad as whoever was thrown out, but more dangerous. I've known a lot of people who bitch about the government, but nobody that is willing to be honest about their own part in making it the way it is. Almost nobody wants true personal responsibility. What people want is to be able to live in a system which is stacked against another class of people, so that they themselves can live better than they would be able to by the fruits of their own efforts. So-called conservatives want to use ill-gotten economic power to fuck over other people. Liberals want to use the government for that. Increasingly, people want to use both. But as corrupt as congress is, its no worse than how most people would be in the same situation. Use violence to tear it down, and you'll wind up with at best the same thing, but with a greater propensity to use violence.
Yeah, I'd kill and risk being killed to fix the system, without hesitation, if I thought it had a chance of making things better instead of worse.
Of my EE classmates at an American state university, I only know of two who got into Intel. One got in as an IT tech and eventually worked his way into an engineering position. Another got a job from his dad. I had nearly perfect grades, and later I had additional education, a successful work record, and good references, but despite dozens of attempts I've never even gotten an interview. I had 7 years of engineering experience before I reached $65K. A lot of that is just me of course, but the system and some of the claims made about it still pisses me off a little.
By your argument, r=1000 in the complex plane is as close to the origin as r=0.001. But there's a lot of significant stuff that only goes on inside the unit circle. So I would consider r=0.001 close, and r=1000 far away.
If the Gettysburg address were digitally encoded, and its first appearance in 'pi' started at digit 28, I would call that 'close'.
Thanks for the thought. I still have to digest that further. You obviously know a lot more about this than I do.
If you have time to kill and feel like it....Can you say anything about whether its mathematically possible for our 'world' to jump around between different 'world' states? In other words, can the present change to a state that would have occurred had something taken a different path in the past? I don't see how we would be able to tell experimentally, since the history we have evidence of would always be consistent with whatever we see at the moment. Conceptually, history would be somewhat like a big squirming snake. Although it must maintain causal consistency, meaning the body isn't broken, the whole causal chain events would have some freedom to move 'laterally' through worlds as one piece.
The condition that I was somewhat ineptly trying to posit earlier would be similar, but instead of our world jumping in its entirely, only part of it would change, in which case we would be able to tell that something happened.
To try to illustrate using the classic double slit setup: Crudely, I think of there being a wavelike distribution of 'possible' particle locations. You get the interference pattern because these 'possible' particles interact with each other. When you put the inductive loops around the slits, you limit each collection of possible particles to one slit, so the two-slit interference pattern disappears and you get hits on the screen consistent with particles going through one slit or the other. If you could individually detect particles hitting the screen, they would of course always hit in a spot consistent with whatever slit you measured them passing through.
What I posited earlier, is that it might be possible to measure a particle going through one slit, then see it actually hit the screen as if it went through the other slit. Obviously, you would get all kinds of contradictions if this were to happen, and our cosmos would become a chaos. Its like introducing a contradiction in a chain of logic: from there on you can create all kinds of absurdities. Can this condition be ruled out mathematically, and if so, can you think of anything else that might produce some of the same symptoms?
Going back to my first thought again, about the 'snake' history that moves with no apparent contradictions. Suppose a particle decays, in isolation, so that nothing in its future depends on it having decayed at a particular time. Might there be something analogous to a loss of tension, that allows the decay to 'slip' backwards in time, since it doesn't matter to anything else if it does? Can you rule this out? If not, what other types of destruction are there besides particle decay where this same principle would apply?
I realize that the metaphors I'm using might be almost totally inappropriate or misleading. But I don't have the specialized knowledge, or the right type of intelligence, to deal with these things in a more rigorous manner.
If (and I grant it is a big "if") the gravitational constant is a value that is determined by pure logic and by logic alone, then it cannot vary.
Right. Maybe you remember a discussion on this site some months back about whether G could be derived from plancks constant. I don't know enough about that one to have an opinion. It would not surprise me if changing the value of one of those constants would be analogous to a units change, and would leave you with essentially the same universe. But its also at least as plausible to me that there are universes that are quite a bit different than what we know about the one we're in.
If pi has the value it has because of some specific property in geometry such that other geometries would have different values for pi AND those geometries are not inconsistent with what could physically exist
This gets closer to the crux of what I was trying to say. The mathematical pi does not depend on how well a particular theoretical geometry models the 'space' we live in. Pi depends only on certain very simple rules of logic, and those rules don't have to be 'true' in the sense that they accurately model some aspect of nature. We just state them, which we are able to do in our world, and within the context of what we stated, that is what we are talking about. Somebody could show that the theoretical geometries we work with completely break down at some point as models for our universe (actually we know that they do), but that has no bearing on pi. The radius of a circular object in our world might not be exactly pi times the diameter. But even if we knew that, we would still deal with planes and 'flat' 3-d abstractions as useful and relatively easy to deal with models, and so the digits of pi that we compute in that context would be what they are now. Maybe a brief way to imagine this is to consider e^(-pi)=-1. The value of e follows from the idea of exponential growth, in which rate of change is equal to magnitude, and pi follows from e. There's no geometry in that. Maybe there's intelligent aliens somewhere that don't conceive of 'equality' or complex numbers or cycles or exponential growth. And maybe they can't, in their reality. But if they can, then their e is the same as ours.
I should have been more polite about Carl Sagan - he was great at what he did.
In 'Pushing Ice', a very good science fiction book by Alastair Reynolds, an entire interstellar civilization called the 'slashers', one of two primary human civilizations, is descended from slashdot. Imagine that, compared to the trainwreck of arguments based on misleading summaries that slashdot is in reality!
On the subject of alternative universes....In physics, there is the assumption that once a wave function 'collapses', it stays that way. In other words, you can not make a measurement, then afterwards make another measurement which is inconsistent with the first one. Or in other words, at each instant we live in a single, unified, logically coherent, quantum mechanical 'world', and if there are other worlds they aren't mixed up with ours. This assumption is consistent with our experience, because if it were not true all kinds of weird and disturbing consequences follow. Certainly the assumption is true at least almost all the time, or an awful lot of our gadgets wouldn't work. But I don't know of any theoretical reason that it has to be true all the time. And a world where it was true merely most the time, but not as often as it seems to be for us, would be really different from what we experience. Maybe most physicists take it somewhat on faith - it must be fundamentally true, because its never been demonstrated otherwise. But of course, our science consists of all the things we've found it easy to demonstrate by conducting repeatable experiments, and that might leave quite a lot of reality outside of it.
Yeah, e is e also, independent of any 'constants' of physics.
As a side note, e springs out of the concept of logarithms, and from logarithms its also easy to show why there are 12 notes in a musical octave. Twelve is the scheme that minimizes disharmony, with relatively few notes, with five being the next best choice. But I've had this same argument with supposed experts in brain function that claim that 12 is arbitrary and cultural. It seems as if a lot of highly educated people know a lot of stuff but aren't aware that its possible to understand anything.
(Years ago I read a book by that title by the way, the farmer-in-the-dell allusion. I can't say I liked the book very much, but I was young then.)
You may understand a lot about many things. But how does it make sense to say that someone else can't understand something just because you don't? You admit that you have no clue about where pi comes from, so how then can you presume to know that I don't? Who is this "we" who has no clue about where pi came from? I'm not claiming special knowledge here, I'm sure there are at least thousands and probably tens of thousands of people who understand pi as well as I do.
Pi has a very precise definition, which is completely independent of measurements of circles, and which is the definition we use when we calculate digits of pi. Of course you can redefine 'pi' as being something else, and then say the truth or falsehood of any statement about it is just semantics. But that's a silly trick that can be played with anything. I could say 'the moon is not made of cheese', and you could redefine 'cheese' as 'rock' and disagree. But the original discussion is about calculating pi, and there's no ambiguity in what that means. Its not as if the definition was arbitrary, and could have been made to be 3.14 or 3.13. And the definition does not at all depend on any constants of physics.
Good point, I didn't think of that. Though I suppose that even though pi has infinite digits, it does have a start. So the existence of a message near the beginning would not have the same implications as being able to find one anywhere.
Similarly, if I found a fabulously detailed image of Mary on my toast, and had several other related and equally unlikely experiences, and if I had it recorded and corroborated to be certain I wasn't simply insane....I still wouldn't consider it adequate evidence of Mary. But certainly it would be evidence of demons or something on that order.
You speak of 'fundamental constants' as if the gravitational constant or planck's length are in the same class as pi.
They might be unchangeable like pi. Or maybe not. But in either case pi isn't affected by our understanding of those other constants, because unlike them, pi has been understood more deeply than that for a very long time.
But of course Carl Sagan was a physicist and generalist, not an expert in arithmetic, and it was just a science fiction book anyway.
But maybe that just demonstrates the limits of our thinking. We re used to the parameters of our universe and have trouble imagining how things could be different.
Of course there are many, many, marvelous things that are beyond our imagination. But the abstraction pi can be understood to be what it is, within the framework that defines it. This isn't affected by those other unknown things. If there were a 'different' pi that could be conceived of in some other realm, it would have other properties and relationships, and could be given a different name to distinguish it from the one we work with. It is not physical, is not measured, is not a 'parameter of our universe', or affected by those parameters. The digits are not arbitrary or subject to change, which is why people have cooked up so many different ways to calculate them that are well understood and all yield the same result. Perhaps there are universes where it is impossible to conceive of pi, but pi is still pi.
I always found that concept, encoding a message in pi, to be staggeringly stupid. The value of pi doesn't depend on physics, which is why we are able to determine it algorithmically rather than experimentally. (Some people argue 'but pi is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, and that depends on physics'. Yes, that ratio depends on physics, for physical circles, provided that some other physical geometry besides 'flat' is possible. But a non-flat geometry would just mean that the circumference of a circle in that geometry would not be pi. Our pi, the one that we use and calculate, is for flat geometries, and it is the same in every theoretically flat geometry, irrespective of whatever geometry the minds thinking of such a thing happen to live in.) God can not change the value of pi.
Perhaps NASA already knows that this life exists, but they need to get the public ready for acceptance of it by slowly introducing more and more evidence so that society doesn't lose its marbles.
NASA is not a wise older brother protecting humanity from difficult information. NASA is a few decent scientists working diligently, on outdated equipment, in an environment of political maneuvering, red tape, and bureaucrats dreaming of retirement. I would be shocked if there are any conspiracies at NASA that don't involve how to pitch its vision of manned space exploration for the sake of next year's funding.
I think that anything that significantly expands people's horizons, and shows the world to be bigger than what they thought it was, threatens many people's faith. The things you believe in seem plausible in the context of what you know. Change that, and they may not appear plausible any more.
Once as a teenager I heard someone say that knowledge of plate techtonics had destroyed his faith. I thought WTF? How is plate techtonics incompatible with God? But then later other things that I learned undermined what I believed. Everyone's faith depends on something, survives in some vulnerable context of assumptions and perceptions.
Knowledge of aliens, visiting the earth from other planets in spaceships, would in my opinion threaten many people's faith. I don't think that is the problem with UFO phenomena though, because I don't think that's what that stuff is.
Incidentally, I happen to work in a building which is rumored on the internet to house alien artifacts. To anyone who has any familiarity with this place, its an utterly ridiculous rumor, there's nothing the least bit exotic going on there. Likewise, 99% of all paranormal claims appear to me to be bullshit. But suppose the remaining 1% were not bullshit, that there was actually something to it. Why are people fascinated with this stuff? Why try to pick that scab open? UFO phenomena are mostly very weird, with the sneaking around, rumors of abductions, and implausibly large eyes. (Which could not possibly function as lenses and still fit inside the alien head.) Part of the draw is a tinge of fear. Would we really be better off if our world were a little more magical, more like a 'rosetta stoned' acid trip or a Tolkein novel? I think the dark ages sucked. Better turn our hope and attention elsewhere, in my opinion.
"True faith is based on evidence, not opposed to evidence...
Incorrect. Hebrews 11.1 says, "Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." Therefore faith is complete hogwash.
Do you believe in magnitism? You can't see it, but you can know something of it by studying its effects. Have you studied fate in such a manner, sufficiently to know that its unreal? Part of the scientific method is to form a hypothesis. If you had no confidence at all that your hypothesis could possibly be true, how far would you get? Particularly if you were studying a difficult problem that took many years to crack?
Can you see mental illness? The possibility of sincerity? Would you have believed that the moon had a back side before a spacecraft was sent around it? How can an engineer ever create anything without a vision of things that don't yet exist? A person needs at least a little faith, however provisional, to pull themselves out of ignorance. Otherwise you can never discover or create anything that you did not already know.
I agree that faith isn't based on evidence. And I have a hard time respecting people who just make shit up and pretend they know it. And I have no respect for the Bible as a source of authority. But to say that faith is complete hogwash is quite a stretch.
I think its about money. Lots of people are getting wealthy cooking up stuff to sell for security. And government people buy it because buying stuff is how they justify their positions and expand their fiefdoms. Whether or not the stuff they buy is actually helping anybody is almost completely irrelevant to the process.
I've gotten a lot of mileage out of Naxos. Their quality isn't the absolute best, but its pretty good, and their prices are great.
A bigger issue for me is finding new music. If there's any still being written that I would find compelling, I'm not aware of it. The Sibelius violin concerto is the most modern piece that I really like. Mostly I listen to Bach, but even though I've got about 10 hours of his stuff, I've heard it so many times I've become bored with it. Same with Beethoven. Same scene with rock music also. Tool is the only contemporary band that does anything for me at all, and I'm thoroughly sick of the 'classics'. I guess I should have practiced more so that I could write my own.
Does anyone know of any pre-1923 (i.e. out of copyright) series of educational books for early education that could serve as the foundation for some "open source" textbooks?
Surely for basic education technology won't have made much of a significant difference in content (I'm a big fan of old-school education at basic levels - calculators are to be used AFTER you learn the basics, not instead of)
I would think that the presentation would be too outdated. While in theory the content hasn't changed, the way things are described has changed enough to make it hard to follow. Though I suppose if you're just talking arithmetic, with no word descriptions, that hasn't changed much.
I'm happy for you. I didn't mean to suggest that scientists can't love and do good work. Look at Euler for example. Personally I find it hard to focus while 'in love' or 'in lust', but I suppose not everyone is wired the same. What you describe for yourself isn't quite the same as the sex-centric mentality that I had in mind when I wrote though.
Washington was doing a general investigation of similar cases. I don't recall specifically what made them aware of ours.
Ohio we contacted. Our case was quite clear cut: Paypal was simply trying to steal our money, without any kind of plausible pretext. This was back before eBay bought them. It appears that whenever there was any kind of confusion in relation to a large transaction, Paypal policy was to grab the funds and stonewall, with their reps incentivized their to tell the buyer and seller any truth or lie that minimizes the chances of Paypal losing money. I found it quite shocking. We fought them for months, and collected extensive documentation of this. We sued them in Ohio, but the judge claimed that the user agreement (since reworded) precluded lawsuits for any reason. Then when Ohio attourneys general contacted them, Paypal immediately folded without an explanation. It wasn't entirely satisfying, but at least the regulatory system sort of worked.
The major goal in any living being's life is to ensure the survival of his genes.
Nothing personal, but no.
It is true that natural selection requires you to compete successfully in order to continue to exist, and that includes reproduction. But, natural selection is not the only principle governing nature, it is merely a very important one. A lot of behavior is effectively orthogonal to survival: you can do something, or not it, and your survival chances are the same. Furthermore, life is not entirely a zero sum game. Certain things, like cultivation of intelligence increase your chances of survival to the point where you have freedom for a lot more besides that. You can say that its instinct for propagation of genes that compels us to learn. And there's truth in that. But satisfying the instinct is just one condition that has to be met. Its not everything.
You're free to pick any 'major goal' in life that you find compelling. Of course, if your goal isn't conducive to the survival of your bloodline, then nature will kill you off. But that doesn't mean its impossible to make that choice.
If more nerds got some, maybe we'd have the Higgs Boson on lock already.
Historically, how common is it for scientists to get serious work done when they're in love or chasing hot women? The degree of concentration and dedication required for groundbreaking work would seem to me to usually preclude that. Sure, lots of famous scientists fooled around or had lots of kids. But I have a hard time believing very many of them were doing their best work in those periods, or that it occupied a very high part of their attention.
There are huge externalities with fossil-fuel vehicles—air pollution, climate change,oil spills, etc. These are effectively subsidized by everyone, lowering their price far below what it should be.
You can add "national defense" to that, since most of our troubles are connected somehow to our oil supply.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with rebellion is that whoever takes over afterwards is likely to be at least as bad as whoever was thrown out, but more dangerous. I've known a lot of people who bitch about the government, but nobody that is willing to be honest about their own part in making it the way it is. Almost nobody wants true personal responsibility. What people want is to be able to live in a system which is stacked against another class of people, so that they themselves can live better than they would be able to by the fruits of their own efforts. So-called conservatives want to use ill-gotten economic power to fuck over other people. Liberals want to use the government for that. Increasingly, people want to use both. But as corrupt as congress is, its no worse than how most people would be in the same situation. Use violence to tear it down, and you'll wind up with at best the same thing, but with a greater propensity to use violence.
Yeah, I'd kill and risk being killed to fix the system, without hesitation, if I thought it had a chance of making things better instead of worse.
And he has a funny name in the proud tradition of Lipschitz.
Of my EE classmates at an American state university, I only know of two who got into Intel. One got in as an IT tech and eventually worked his way into an engineering position. Another got a job from his dad. I had nearly perfect grades, and later I had additional education, a successful work record, and good references, but despite dozens of attempts I've never even gotten an interview. I had 7 years of engineering experience before I reached $65K. A lot of that is just me of course, but the system and some of the claims made about it still pisses me off a little.
e^(-pi) should read e^(ipi)
That depends on what you mean by near.
By your argument, r=1000 in the complex plane is as close to the origin as r=0.001. But there's a lot of significant stuff that only goes on inside the unit circle. So I would consider r=0.001 close, and r=1000 far away.
If the Gettysburg address were digitally encoded, and its first appearance in 'pi' started at digit 28, I would call that 'close'.
Thanks for the thought. I still have to digest that further. You obviously know a lot more about this than I do.
If you have time to kill and feel like it....Can you say anything about whether its mathematically possible for our 'world' to jump around between different 'world' states? In other words, can the present change to a state that would have occurred had something taken a different path in the past? I don't see how we would be able to tell experimentally, since the history we have evidence of would always be consistent with whatever we see at the moment. Conceptually, history would be somewhat like a big squirming snake. Although it must maintain causal consistency, meaning the body isn't broken, the whole causal chain events would have some freedom to move 'laterally' through worlds as one piece.
The condition that I was somewhat ineptly trying to posit earlier would be similar, but instead of our world jumping in its entirely, only part of it would change, in which case we would be able to tell that something happened.
To try to illustrate using the classic double slit setup: Crudely, I think of there being a wavelike distribution of 'possible' particle locations. You get the interference pattern because these 'possible' particles interact with each other. When you put the inductive loops around the slits, you limit each collection of possible particles to one slit, so the two-slit interference pattern disappears and you get hits on the screen consistent with particles going through one slit or the other. If you could individually detect particles hitting the screen, they would of course always hit in a spot consistent with whatever slit you measured them passing through.
What I posited earlier, is that it might be possible to measure a particle going through one slit, then see it actually hit the screen as if it went through the other slit. Obviously, you would get all kinds of contradictions if this were to happen, and our cosmos would become a chaos. Its like introducing a contradiction in a chain of logic: from there on you can create all kinds of absurdities. Can this condition be ruled out mathematically, and if so, can you think of anything else that might produce some of the same symptoms?
Going back to my first thought again, about the 'snake' history that moves with no apparent contradictions. Suppose a particle decays, in isolation, so that nothing in its future depends on it having decayed at a particular time. Might there be something analogous to a loss of tension, that allows the decay to 'slip' backwards in time, since it doesn't matter to anything else if it does? Can you rule this out? If not, what other types of destruction are there besides particle decay where this same principle would apply?
I realize that the metaphors I'm using might be almost totally inappropriate or misleading. But I don't have the specialized knowledge, or the right type of intelligence, to deal with these things in a more rigorous manner.
If (and I grant it is a big "if") the gravitational constant is a value that is determined by pure logic and by logic alone, then it cannot vary.
Right. Maybe you remember a discussion on this site some months back about whether G could be derived from plancks constant. I don't know enough about that one to have an opinion. It would not surprise me if changing the value of one of those constants would be analogous to a units change, and would leave you with essentially the same universe. But its also at least as plausible to me that there are universes that are quite a bit different than what we know about the one we're in.
If pi has the value it has because of some specific property in geometry such that other geometries would have different values for pi AND those geometries are not inconsistent with what could physically exist
This gets closer to the crux of what I was trying to say. The mathematical pi does not depend on how well a particular theoretical geometry models the 'space' we live in. Pi depends only on certain very simple rules of logic, and those rules don't have to be 'true' in the sense that they accurately model some aspect of nature. We just state them, which we are able to do in our world, and within the context of what we stated, that is what we are talking about. Somebody could show that the theoretical geometries we work with completely break down at some point as models for our universe (actually we know that they do), but that has no bearing on pi. The radius of a circular object in our world might not be exactly pi times the diameter. But even if we knew that, we would still deal with planes and 'flat' 3-d abstractions as useful and relatively easy to deal with models, and so the digits of pi that we compute in that context would be what they are now. Maybe a brief way to imagine this is to consider e^(-pi)=-1. The value of e follows from the idea of exponential growth, in which rate of change is equal to magnitude, and pi follows from e. There's no geometry in that. Maybe there's intelligent aliens somewhere that don't conceive of 'equality' or complex numbers or cycles or exponential growth. And maybe they can't, in their reality. But if they can, then their e is the same as ours.
I should have been more polite about Carl Sagan - he was great at what he did.
In 'Pushing Ice', a very good science fiction book by Alastair Reynolds, an entire interstellar civilization called the 'slashers', one of two primary human civilizations, is descended from slashdot. Imagine that, compared to the trainwreck of arguments based on misleading summaries that slashdot is in reality!
On the subject of alternative universes....In physics, there is the assumption that once a wave function 'collapses', it stays that way. In other words, you can not make a measurement, then afterwards make another measurement which is inconsistent with the first one. Or in other words, at each instant we live in a single, unified, logically coherent, quantum mechanical 'world', and if there are other worlds they aren't mixed up with ours. This assumption is consistent with our experience, because if it were not true all kinds of weird and disturbing consequences follow. Certainly the assumption is true at least almost all the time, or an awful lot of our gadgets wouldn't work. But I don't know of any theoretical reason that it has to be true all the time. And a world where it was true merely most the time, but not as often as it seems to be for us, would be really different from what we experience. Maybe most physicists take it somewhat on faith - it must be fundamentally true, because its never been demonstrated otherwise. But of course, our science consists of all the things we've found it easy to demonstrate by conducting repeatable experiments, and that might leave quite a lot of reality outside of it.
Yeah, e is e also, independent of any 'constants' of physics.
As a side note, e springs out of the concept of logarithms, and from logarithms its also easy to show why there are 12 notes in a musical octave. Twelve is the scheme that minimizes disharmony, with relatively few notes, with five being the next best choice. But I've had this same argument with supposed experts in brain function that claim that 12 is arbitrary and cultural. It seems as if a lot of highly educated people know a lot of stuff but aren't aware that its possible to understand anything.
(Years ago I read a book by that title by the way, the farmer-in-the-dell allusion. I can't say I liked the book very much, but I was young then.)
You may understand a lot about many things. But how does it make sense to say that someone else can't understand something just because you don't? You admit that you have no clue about where pi comes from, so how then can you presume to know that I don't? Who is this "we" who has no clue about where pi came from? I'm not claiming special knowledge here, I'm sure there are at least thousands and probably tens of thousands of people who understand pi as well as I do.
Pi has a very precise definition, which is completely independent of measurements of circles, and which is the definition we use when we calculate digits of pi. Of course you can redefine 'pi' as being something else, and then say the truth or falsehood of any statement about it is just semantics. But that's a silly trick that can be played with anything. I could say 'the moon is not made of cheese', and you could redefine 'cheese' as 'rock' and disagree. But the original discussion is about calculating pi, and there's no ambiguity in what that means. Its not as if the definition was arbitrary, and could have been made to be 3.14 or 3.13. And the definition does not at all depend on any constants of physics.
Good point, I didn't think of that. Though I suppose that even though pi has infinite digits, it does have a start. So the existence of a message near the beginning would not have the same implications as being able to find one anywhere.
Similarly, if I found a fabulously detailed image of Mary on my toast, and had several other related and equally unlikely experiences, and if I had it recorded and corroborated to be certain I wasn't simply insane....I still wouldn't consider it adequate evidence of Mary. But certainly it would be evidence of demons or something on that order.
You speak of 'fundamental constants' as if the gravitational constant or planck's length are in the same class as pi.
They might be unchangeable like pi. Or maybe not. But in either case pi isn't affected by our understanding of those other constants, because unlike them, pi has been understood more deeply than that for a very long time.
But of course Carl Sagan was a physicist and generalist, not an expert in arithmetic, and it was just a science fiction book anyway.
I think that it's one of those big things that we just don't quite can wrap our minds around.
OK. Speak for yourself.
But maybe that just demonstrates the limits of our thinking. We re used to the parameters of our universe and have trouble imagining how things could be different.
Of course there are many, many, marvelous things that are beyond our imagination. But the abstraction pi can be understood to be what it is, within the framework that defines it. This isn't affected by those other unknown things. If there were a 'different' pi that could be conceived of in some other realm, it would have other properties and relationships, and could be given a different name to distinguish it from the one we work with. It is not physical, is not measured, is not a 'parameter of our universe', or affected by those parameters. The digits are not arbitrary or subject to change, which is why people have cooked up so many different ways to calculate them that are well understood and all yield the same result. Perhaps there are universes where it is impossible to conceive of pi, but pi is still pi.
I always found that concept, encoding a message in pi, to be staggeringly stupid. The value of pi doesn't depend on physics, which is why we are able to determine it algorithmically rather than experimentally. (Some people argue 'but pi is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, and that depends on physics'. Yes, that ratio depends on physics, for physical circles, provided that some other physical geometry besides 'flat' is possible. But a non-flat geometry would just mean that the circumference of a circle in that geometry would not be pi. Our pi, the one that we use and calculate, is for flat geometries, and it is the same in every theoretically flat geometry, irrespective of whatever geometry the minds thinking of such a thing happen to live in.) God can not change the value of pi.
Perhaps NASA already knows that this life exists, but they need to get the public ready for acceptance of it by slowly introducing more and more evidence so that society doesn't lose its marbles.
NASA is not a wise older brother protecting humanity from difficult information. NASA is a few decent scientists working diligently, on outdated equipment, in an environment of political maneuvering, red tape, and bureaucrats dreaming of retirement. I would be shocked if there are any conspiracies at NASA that don't involve how to pitch its vision of manned space exploration for the sake of next year's funding.
I think that anything that significantly expands people's horizons, and shows the world to be bigger than what they thought it was, threatens many people's faith. The things you believe in seem plausible in the context of what you know. Change that, and they may not appear plausible any more.
Once as a teenager I heard someone say that knowledge of plate techtonics had destroyed his faith. I thought WTF? How is plate techtonics incompatible with God? But then later other things that I learned undermined what I believed. Everyone's faith depends on something, survives in some vulnerable context of assumptions and perceptions.
Knowledge of aliens, visiting the earth from other planets in spaceships, would in my opinion threaten many people's faith. I don't think that is the problem with UFO phenomena though, because I don't think that's what that stuff is.
Incidentally, I happen to work in a building which is rumored on the internet to house alien artifacts. To anyone who has any familiarity with this place, its an utterly ridiculous rumor, there's nothing the least bit exotic going on there. Likewise, 99% of all paranormal claims appear to me to be bullshit. But suppose the remaining 1% were not bullshit, that there was actually something to it. Why are people fascinated with this stuff? Why try to pick that scab open? UFO phenomena are mostly very weird, with the sneaking around, rumors of abductions, and implausibly large eyes. (Which could not possibly function as lenses and still fit inside the alien head.) Part of the draw is a tinge of fear. Would we really be better off if our world were a little more magical, more like a 'rosetta stoned' acid trip or a Tolkein novel? I think the dark ages sucked. Better turn our hope and attention elsewhere, in my opinion.
Incorrect. Hebrews 11.1 says, "Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." Therefore faith is complete hogwash.
Do you believe in magnitism? You can't see it, but you can know something of it by studying its effects. Have you studied fate in such a manner, sufficiently to know that its unreal? Part of the scientific method is to form a hypothesis. If you had no confidence at all that your hypothesis could possibly be true, how far would you get? Particularly if you were studying a difficult problem that took many years to crack?
Can you see mental illness? The possibility of sincerity? Would you have believed that the moon had a back side before a spacecraft was sent around it? How can an engineer ever create anything without a vision of things that don't yet exist? A person needs at least a little faith, however provisional, to pull themselves out of ignorance. Otherwise you can never discover or create anything that you did not already know.
I agree that faith isn't based on evidence. And I have a hard time respecting people who just make shit up and pretend they know it. And I have no respect for the Bible as a source of authority. But to say that faith is complete hogwash is quite a stretch.
I think its about money. Lots of people are getting wealthy cooking up stuff to sell for security. And government people buy it because buying stuff is how they justify their positions and expand their fiefdoms. Whether or not the stuff they buy is actually helping anybody is almost completely irrelevant to the process.
A last resort would be the Naxos Music Library.
I've gotten a lot of mileage out of Naxos. Their quality isn't the absolute best, but its pretty good, and their prices are great.
A bigger issue for me is finding new music. If there's any still being written that I would find compelling, I'm not aware of it. The Sibelius violin concerto is the most modern piece that I really like. Mostly I listen to Bach, but even though I've got about 10 hours of his stuff, I've heard it so many times I've become bored with it. Same with Beethoven. Same scene with rock music also. Tool is the only contemporary band that does anything for me at all, and I'm thoroughly sick of the 'classics'. I guess I should have practiced more so that I could write my own.
Does anyone know of any pre-1923 (i.e. out of copyright) series of educational books for early education that could serve as the foundation for some "open source" textbooks?
Surely for basic education technology won't have made much of a significant difference in content (I'm a big fan of old-school education at basic levels - calculators are to be used AFTER you learn the basics, not instead of)
I would think that the presentation would be too outdated. While in theory the content hasn't changed, the way things are described has changed enough to make it hard to follow. Though I suppose if you're just talking arithmetic, with no word descriptions, that hasn't changed much.
I'm happy for you. I didn't mean to suggest that scientists can't love and do good work. Look at Euler for example. Personally I find it hard to focus while 'in love' or 'in lust', but I suppose not everyone is wired the same. What you describe for yourself isn't quite the same as the sex-centric mentality that I had in mind when I wrote though.
Washington was doing a general investigation of similar cases. I don't recall specifically what made them aware of ours.
Ohio we contacted. Our case was quite clear cut: Paypal was simply trying to steal our money, without any kind of plausible pretext. This was back before eBay bought them. It appears that whenever there was any kind of confusion in relation to a large transaction, Paypal policy was to grab the funds and stonewall, with their reps incentivized their to tell the buyer and seller any truth or lie that minimizes the chances of Paypal losing money. I found it quite shocking. We fought them for months, and collected extensive documentation of this. We sued them in Ohio, but the judge claimed that the user agreement (since reworded) precluded lawsuits for any reason. Then when Ohio attourneys general contacted them, Paypal immediately folded without an explanation. It wasn't entirely satisfying, but at least the regulatory system sort of worked.
The major goal in any living being's life is to ensure the survival of his genes.
Nothing personal, but no.
It is true that natural selection requires you to compete successfully in order to continue to exist, and that includes reproduction. But, natural selection is not the only principle governing nature, it is merely a very important one. A lot of behavior is effectively orthogonal to survival: you can do something, or not it, and your survival chances are the same. Furthermore, life is not entirely a zero sum game. Certain things, like cultivation of intelligence increase your chances of survival to the point where you have freedom for a lot more besides that. You can say that its instinct for propagation of genes that compels us to learn. And there's truth in that. But satisfying the instinct is just one condition that has to be met. Its not everything.
You're free to pick any 'major goal' in life that you find compelling. Of course, if your goal isn't conducive to the survival of your bloodline, then nature will kill you off. But that doesn't mean its impossible to make that choice.
If more nerds got some, maybe we'd have the Higgs Boson on lock already.
Historically, how common is it for scientists to get serious work done when they're in love or chasing hot women? The degree of concentration and dedication required for groundbreaking work would seem to me to usually preclude that. Sure, lots of famous scientists fooled around or had lots of kids. But I have a hard time believing very many of them were doing their best work in those periods, or that it occupied a very high part of their attention.
There are huge externalities with fossil-fuel vehicles—air pollution, climate change,oil spills, etc. These are effectively subsidized by everyone, lowering their price far below what it should be.
You can add "national defense" to that, since most of our troubles are connected somehow to our oil supply.
Exactly which liberals told anyone except the very rich to make any sacrifices?
Al Gore. Living in a mansion while jetting around telling us that society needs to make sarcrifices amounts to that.
Not that I support the other side of this fight either. Big vehicles look to me like a collosal waste of resources, the way most people use them.