No, the cat isn't dead. It is in the state |\psi_c> = 1/\sqrt{2} e^i\phi/2 |live> + 1/\sqrt{2} e^-i/phi/2|dead> (where for the sake of simplicity we will assume that = 0, = = 1, that is, the cat has no probability of "dying" if the cat is completely isolated instead of being coupled to an infernal quantum device). I have no idea what phase we should assign to the cat, of course. Is it polarized in the direction of real mortality, or is its polarization strictly imaginary? I'm inclined towards imaginary.
Assuming, of course, that your box is completely isolated from the physical Universe inside an adiabatic box with walls at T = 0. In the event that you don't possess such a box, I assure you, the damn cat is alive or it is dead, not ever in between, whether or not you look inside the box. If it isn't adiabatically isolated, the entire Universe is always "looking inside the box" with its entropy-laden fields.
Perhaps this is how Tesla's "death ray" worked. He constructed a linear phased array of boxes filled with live cats, which were thus in a state of inversion relative to the "ground state of cats" (dead). By triggering the death of the cat in the first box (perhaps with his Tesla coil?) and trapping the resultant death field, he was able to stimulate radiation and produce an intense burst of coherent death from the simultaneous death of all of the cats. Indeed, the device might have been properly named a DASER-Cat (Death Amplification by Stimulated Emission of death-Radiation of Cats), but Tesla was soft-hearted and liked cats, so after using it one time and destroying the Russian Taiga at Tunguska in a way that looked strangely like an air-burst of the nuclear plant aboard an alien spaceship he dismantled it and destroyed the plans (and freed all of the cats he had collected to use for future shots). Schrodinger merely rediscovered it, but was careful to avoid expressing the correct cat wavefunction lest the possibility of coherent death be rediscovered and used for Evil.
No, no, no. Phase velocity versus group velocity. You cannot transmit information faster than the speed of light in either quantum mechanics or classical mechanics. Phase velocity can be anything you like, but it is irrelevant. Group velocity carries information that can be decoded, and propagates at c (or slower) in both classical and quantum field theory.
No soup for you!
rgb
p.s. -- "affect" is what you put on like a social cloak when entering a room in a social situation, as in "he is so affected, he's totally bogus". "effect" is what causes produce. Effects propagating faster than the speed of light actual threaten the consistency of physics in a variety of ways. This, of course, isn't unthinkable -- all cards are on the table when formulating physical theories -- but so far there is no evidence that effects that carry information precede causes. OTOH, the propagators of physics generally can be formulated in advanced, retarded, stationary, and mixed expressions, and no physical results depend on which one is used -- the actual solution to the equations of motion involved is stationary in both quantum and classical mechanics and hence the dynamical solution is itself invariant, causality in the sense of past causing the future is an entropy-based illusion.
I wish everybody taught the Generalized Master Equation in quantum mechanics before they taught the EPR paradox. It would make life ever so much simpler if one learned that "wavefunction collapse" is an artifact of the thermodynamics of the measurement apparatus.
I have students that build tesla coils for extra credit projects every year or two, and have built one myself just for the fun of the big sparks. They generate ballpark of 150 kV at the top, and putting a CD on top so that you could watch the lightning arc out of it and craze the plastic and underlying metal was great fun. Naturally, at that voltage the plastic isn't exactly an insulator, so you get fractal lightning patterns almost instantly through the metal.
However, I wouldn't think of this as a way of technically erasing all of the data -- not erasing as in not all of the king's horses nor all of the kings men using NSA's resources can put it together again erasing. Erasing as in nobody is going to be able to put it in a stock player and scan any data off of it perhaps, but removing all of the actual physical encoding of the medium so that people cannot read off local patterns of information and apply information theoretic analysis to POSSIBLY reconstruct chunks of it? I don't think so. I'm not even sure that I'd trust scrambling or oxidizing all of the metal for that -- the plastic alone might contain enough structural alteration that a very sensitive molecular-level scan could pick up patterns, if you have a few tens of millions of dollars to use trying (NSA money, in other words).
But simply breaking a CD or DVD in two is probably enough to stop all but the most dedicated and well-equipped would-be data thief. There would have to be a strong incentive to spend real money to reconstruct even that.
With that said, I agree with the individual above who said fire. Fire takes care of all of the information, whether it is cooking in a microwave or conventional oven or in a real fire with real wood outdoors. Because of the toxins given off by burning plastic, I like outdoors. Not even the NSA could reconstruct information from DVD ash, or even (realistically) from the blob of molten plastic you'd get even before you turned the DVD to ash and then blew the ash into the air as a fine powder or washed it into the dirt. Fire is raw entropy.
rgb
Re:This is not the logic you are looking for
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Is Sugar Toxic?
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They also serve, who only stand and wait. Serve beer, that is! Such a bi-winning idea.
rgb
Re:This is not the logic you are looking for
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Is Sugar Toxic?
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· Score: 1
Fortunately, beer is made primarily from dextrose and dextrins extracted from crushed malted barley grain in a wet bath at a carefully regulated temperature (in order to promote the proper conversion of starches in the grain into sugar via the action of alpha and beta amylase in the grain). The dextrose is almost completely converted by yeast into alcohol, leaving only a finish of infermentable dextrins to slightly sweeten the final product and complement the bitterness of the hops. Fructose, sucrose, dextrose, all gone.
Clearly the only solution to this public health dilemma is to drink only beer. We need legislation requiring the replacement of all high-fructose soda machines throughout the world with been machines. We need to ensure that our schools have keggerators, not soda machines -- our children's health and future depend on it. Our babies need to be put to bed not with bottle filled with tooth-decay producing pulp-free apple or orange juice but with a bottle filled with beer.
This public health measure will save money and save lives. Homemade beer costs approximately $4.00 a gallon to make and bottle. That makes it about the same price as gasoline (and soon to be cheaper than gasoline) and much cheaper than bottled water. Beer in the bottle is generally safe to drink -- few disease-causing organisms or non-metallic toxins can survive the boiling process, the hops are a natural disinfectant, and alcohol kills germs as well. Finally, if we needed any more of a reason to drink natural unfiltered beer refermented in the bottle to produce good carbonation, yeast is an excellent source of naicin, and naicin may be one of the few vitamins capable of actually reversing atherosclerosis -- yes, drinking real beer (not the mass-produced CO_2 pressure carbonated, double filtered, corn-syrup corrupted crap that goes by the name "beer" in most stores) may actually prevent heart attacks.
Oh, you mean like the "careful analysis" done by Mann et. al that erased the medieval climate optimum and little ice age because they were an "inconvenient truth" in the way of worldwide panic over carbon?
Even RealClimate acknowledges the lag. They just explain it differently. But you can see the data from one of the several studies that all arrive at this conclusion here: http://www.sciencebits.com/IceCoreTruth. Of course this article has a little bit more to say about the ice core data and CO_2 itself, partly because Al Gore in his bullcrap movie put a picture of ice core data and temperature data up on the screen and then claimed that it showed that CO_2 drove the temperature increases at the end of the ice ages. Only in a Universe where time and entropy run backwards do effects precede causes, but then, Al isn't much of a scientist is he? Any more than Mann is a competent statistician.
"Then there are the refugees that no one realizes. In the small coastal town where I live in North Carolina, houses have been falling into the swamp one by one for decades, but the residents blame it on people building their homes in flood zones, not realizing that sea levels in their state have risen three times the rate of rise on the rest of the Atlantic coast [sciencedaily.com]. People didn't build their homes in the water, the water rose 1.5 meters over the 50 years since they were built..."
Only if BP is actually writing in a language that strangely resembles English, but isn't, was he referring to a rising water table. His comment here is factually incorrect, as well. If one reads even the headline only of the article he cites, one sees that the correct quote would be that sea levels over the last 100 years rose at 3x the rate from the previous 500 years, and that the rise is on the order of 3 millimeters per year instead of 1 millimeter per year. That means that in the entire fifty years he is referring to, the differential rise in sea level is 10 cm, or around four inches -- if the assertions of the actual science being made, which are multiply dubious in and of themselves, are correct. Any assertion that the actual sea level in North Carolina specifically has risen at a differential rate relative to the rest of the Atlantic coast is already so enormously unlikely that one's bullshit detectors should be out in full force, demanding a truly detailed explanation instead of attributing it in some vague way to "global warming" or "melting of the Greenland ice sheet".
10 cm is roughly 8% of 1.5 meters. I attribute the falling of houses into the water with building in both a flood plain and in wetlands. The first is stupid, especially in NC which regularly gets hit with Atlantic hurricanes because our coast literally sticks out into the Gulf Stream like a big, fat target -- Fran and Floyd, in particular, illustrated both rather graphically in recent years -- houses didn't exactly fall into the sea, they were just flooded out, and the water surge coming downstream has all sorts of effect on the plasticity of swamp soil, sure, on top of that. The second is just wrong -- people actually dug channels to drain the wetlands to build houses there back in the first big surge of recreational building on the coast, something that has had a profound impact on the coastal ecology. So in a way, it is good that this is reversing itself, hard as it is on people who bought and built on a wetlands flood plain. If I had my druthers, NC would pass a law that banned both building or rebuilding, within a mile of the actual coastline (exceptions for established cities and designated build zones, perhaps, at their own risk and with it clearly established that there would be NO groins and beach nourishment provided or permitted to preserve real estate in the designated exceptions) and would reopen the coast proper to "the people", instead of "the people who buy condos that block off beach access to the people" but that's just me.
Next, we can consider the 500 year record. 500 years is a particularly interesting period, since 500 years ago it was 1511, right before the beginning of the Little Ice Age! Solar actively, already low in the 1500's, entered a grand solar minimum (the Maunder minimum) at the beginning of the 1600s, a period of approximately 100 years where the Sun had almost no sunspots for what would be some ten eleven year cycles. Global temperatures plummeted, the glaciers advanced, the Thames regularly froze (people held winter fairs out on the ice in London) and there were active historic droughts in NC that (among other things) killed off "the Lost Colony" and nearly wiped out the Jamestown settlement, all recorded both in written documentary and in the proxy tree-ring record for the area. The 1700's saw a rise in temperature, but then in the 1800s the Dalton minimum caused a brief dip in global temperatures (altho
And a careful analysis of CO_2 levels and temperature from examining ice cores shows that more or less without exception CO_2 levels lag temperature rises by hundreds of years. The actual evidence shows almost no climate sensitivity to CO_2 forcing. This actually makes very good sense, given the orders of magnitude involved. The earth's climate and its fluctuations are dominated by solar state first, gross geographical changes and long-lifetime oscillations in the chaotic pattern of circulation (e.g. PDO) second, and things like CO_2 levels a distant and almost irrelevant third. A fact that is already starting to be quite apparent as we enter solar cycle 24 heading towards a probable 200 year low peak level of solar activity. Get used to nasty winters -- if we actually start a Dalton, or worse Maunder, style solar minimum we'll all need our woolies and there will indeed be a climate-based human catastrophe. It will be the exact opposite of the one the hysteria of the last 20 years has focused on, of course, but so be it. I bet they still won't make Al Gore give back his "Nobel Prize".
If you think sea levels in NC have risen 1.5 meters then I really, really, want some of what you are smoking. I'll be sure to let them know when I go to teach at the Duke Marine Lab this summer that their island is under water.
What your reply clearly demonstrates is that the hysteria associated with Anthropogenic Global Warming is pervasive and in some sense, quite insane. I am guessing that you are somehow conflating beach erosion -- an issue that does indeed dominate NC local politics on the coast and which in some cases does indeed have human causes -- with sea-level rise. Here's a hint. You cannot have a 1.5 meter rise in sea level only in North Carolina. There are these silly laws of physics and hydrodynamics, you see...
rgb (alive and well in NC the day after many tornadoes that were not, actually, caused by "global warming" either -- they were and often are caused by cold fronts overrunning warm air, something that happens every spring, some years worse than others. This has been a very cold year to the north of us, and our fairly normal warm spring weather got hit by a fast moving cold front.)
Great marketing for alternative operating systems. If they want to update all of my WinXP VMs to Win7 for free (that's free as in "they do the work", too, since the biggest expense is the human time required), that's peachy. In the meantime a) I don't buy Windows of any flavor when I have a choice, and I almost always have a choice; b) I run linux on everything anyway, just as I have for the last fifteen or sixteen years. That way ALL I spend is my time to upgrade, and updates and software "shopping" are free (and automatic in the case of updates).
I know, I know. I'm missing out on all of the great features of Windows 7. You know, multiple desktops, that sort of thing. I'm sure I'm missing out on some really great features in IE10, too. After all, IE has been at the forefront of browser development for so long with its great security features, its history of reliability, its cross-compatibility, its longstanding support for plugins and tabbed browsing.
Oh, wait, sorry, I forgot. Windows 7 still doesn't have multiple desktops even though it requires enough CPU and memory to have qualified as an export controlled munition a decade ago just to actually boot (and at that is better than the Vista-up-your-assa of Doom). Explorer has historically been an open, suppurating wound security-wise. And while yes, the version number of IE has been bouncing right along in the last year or two, they didn't actually have tabbed browsing as an actual standard feature until IE 7 (unless you installed it as a semi-supported add-on in 6 in sheer desperation). That was only what, four years ago? How time flies. Clearly Microsoft is a technology leader known for cutting edge enhancements of GUI functionality and its excellent CLI interface.
Oh wait, just kidding -- again. Excellent terminal/console environment and CLI for a meaning of "excellent" that might have stretched the truth a bit back in the early-to-mid 80's, and GUI functionality that is perfectly represented by dancing paper clips and mini-windows that constantly pop open and offer to do things that I don't want done, like remove rarely used icons from my desktop. Damn skippy they're rarely used. The whole damn VM is rarely used, so please just STFU, the icons are precisely where I want them.
So the real issue isn't their decision not to support XP or Vista versions of IE 10. The real issue is: Why would I care? Why would anyone? Except the poor web developers who have to now purchase and install still more Windows systems in order to be able to ensure that their products actually continue to work while Microsoft continues to edge its browsers towards enough nonstandard function that they can keep their dream alive of a proprietary Internet belonging just to them alive. They have my deepest sympathy.
The article is IMO incorrect because it concentrates only on chemical reaction motors. There, of course, their answer is correct. But that isn't the only way to move around in the solar system. One question I ask my intro physics students is to contemplate the light sail as a means of propulsion. To do this, one simply works out the balance between solar gravity and radiation pressure to determine how thin a sail has to be in order to directly support its own weight (and the answer, of course, is "very, very thin":-).
However, this isn't the end of the problem. I then ask them how much force is required to remain in orbit. The answer (neglecting the tiny amount of atmospheric drag in near earth orbits and e.g. tides) is "none" -- orbit is free fall where the centripetal force required to bend the trajectory into a circle is provided by gravity. A feasible light sail can be built that can exert enough force via reflected sunlight to provide an acceleration of (say) a millimeter per second squared for it and its payload in a scalable way, or even more (with sub-micron sail designs). Not much, but given 86400 seconds per day, that is as much as 86 m/sec (or nearly 200 mph) delta-vee per day, for free, every day. One can add a kilometer per second every two weeks, and that's enough to reach anywhere in the solar system in time, especially if you amplify it with a gravitational slingshot off of (say) the moon.
Sure, it would take too long to move humans around, but that isn't the challenge -- we can move humans around now at large but not impossibly large expense, at least as far as Mars or Jupiter or Venus, even using chemical rockets although there are probably better solutions than chemistry in the long run. The only really hard part is getting things into low Earth orbit -- once there you are "halfway to anywhere" as Heinlein liked to put it (virial theorem) and light sails mean getting the rest of the way is scalably/reusably "free" if you don't care about taking order of years to get there. Light sails would let us move everything that isn't a human to e.g. the Moon or Mars to set up a more or less permanent base and maintain a long-term line of supply. Who cares if your food and water take years to get there, as long as they get there cheaply enough?
A second thing that would change the economics (aside from either new physics or radically new ideas, e.g. a fusion-driven relativistic ion drive that again uses free or abundant energy to eke the maximum possible reaction thrust out of reaction mass by accelerating it to close to c where it has a lot of momentum per particle) would be to build light-sail driven robots to mine the asteroid belt for raw materials so that we wouldn't have to lift e.g. steel, nickel, and possibly even water up to Earth orbit. Those robots could equally well deliver mass back to Earth at e.g. the Earth-Moon Lagrange points and allow extended permanent habitats to be constructed there that are a light sail away from anywhere.
The only thing preventing us from settling the solar system is time and the will to do it -- we could do it now for a tiny fraction of what our military forces cost us every year. Sure, it would be good to find solutions to the time problem -- it's easy and cheap if we don't mind transit times of decades, so perhaps working on various forms of suspended animation would permit humans to take the light sail route as well as their food, clothing, water, air, and construction materials. A Lagrange point colony with a decades-long, robot-filled pipeline of raw materials could create a steady flow of humans moving out to permanent colonies throughout the solar system on a timescale of centuries.
Or, as some clever human posted yesterday, perhaps a flying saucer really did crash at Roswell. If so, then interstellar travel is indeed feasible somehow, which means that there is likely a solution waiting in new physics. If the federal government would just 'fess up
The obsession with Classics (both languages and history) is period-typical, but really only served as a cultural unifier and something of an intelligence filter. The test didn't assess at all whether or not one could actually communicate in English either verbally or via the written word. Nor did it assess knowledge of actual real world contemporary history, government, literature or above all, science. It is rather a shadow of Oxford, and given the rather odd question involving pounds, shillings, and pence at interest, one wonders if Harvard wasn't just plagiarizing its older British cousins' exams so that they could claim to stand up to Cambridge as it were.
I'll take a parachute, thanks -- 5 meter poles are a bit cumbersome, and trying to hold on to one to cushion a 45 m/sec impact would either rip one's hands off, or set them on fire, or do nothing. I personally, with my convenient 100 kilogram mass (ahem:-) would have a mere 10^5 Joules of energy to dissipate. Dissipating any signficant fraction of that via the skin of my hands sounds really, really painful in the bye-bye hands sense of things.
It would be good for breaking the surface of the water beneath you right before you entered it, but so would a handful of lead shot (assuming you could get a handful of lead shot onto a plane...:-)
Sure, see comments in the linked articles. There are two possible entry positions, both of them probably but not certainly fatal -- feet first or head first with your hands overhead tightly clasped to protect your skull.
Another survival enhancer (if you have anything on you that is denser than you are) is to drop/throw something straight down so that it enters the water a short time before you do, breaking up the surface tension and mixing at least some air into it. But all of this is a lot to think about in the few minutes it takes to fall from great heights, so it pays to plan ahead. Or take the train. After all, you get a significant radiation dose flying, you're more likely to have a stroke, and all they serve you nowadays is teensy packets of pretzels or peanuts and a half can of coke as a sad, sad echo of flying service twenty or thirty years ago, when you weren't jammed into the tiniest seat that could possibly hold you, when flight attendants rarely had visible tattoos, when kids got to visit the pilot mid-flight and get a nifty pair of wings, when flying was actually fun.
Nowadays there are times when you can actually long for the plane to explode if only to get you out of your jammed, cramped seat in between two three hundred pound humans and in front of the crying baby.
Um, you're confusing cause and effect, here. If they use sharks with frickin' laser cannons to kill the Somali pirates, the world's total number of pirates will likely decrease. This in turn will reduce the average global temperature. Pirates cause warming, not the other way around.
In fact, there is some evidence that this is already happening. Qaddafi is hiring Somalian mercenaries for $1000/day to fight in Libya, which is doubtless attracting some fine young men away from the life of piracy at sea. If one examines the current UAH Global Temperature Anomaly for March, it is at -0.1 C (compared to the running mean since 1979 when the measure began). Global Warming is already Global Cooling, at least on a 30 year running average basis. Coincidence? I don't think so.
There are a lot of records of people who have fallen at terminal velocity and survived, and even walked away from it, if by a lot you mean one in a thousand or so. I enjoy telling all of this to my students when I teach them about drag forces and terminal velocity in intro physics which is why I have a good patter for it. If you look up "g force" and "terminal velocity" on wikipedia they have cross references of some of the people who have survived, by name, but during WW II there were a lot more that didn't get recorded -- people who fell or were shot out of planes at 10,000 to 16,000 feet without a chute but managed to walk away.
There is also a section in the Survival Guide (humor) book that you'll see in bookstores from time to time on this, and articles such as http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/aviation/safety/4344036 that again cross-reference previous occurrences. Documented no-airplane instances of survival are pretty rare, but there are a few that stand up to investigative test, and even a website devoted to this one subject (of course): http://www.greenharbor.com/fffolder/ffresearch.html
Anyway, Enjoy. These sites between them give you most of what is known about what is after all a very unlikely thing. Don't forget your trench coat and "Prove You're No Terrorist -- Fly Naked!" tank-top tee shirt and g-string for your next flight! Just remember that the g-string does not, in the end, help much with the terminal g-force (and what that final pa-da-pam, I'll stop:-).
You can always pick me out -- I'm the one wearing the big, flasher grade trench coat tastefully tied to my ankles to get that little extra bit of lift. And of course I fly naked. The department of Homeland Security prefers it that way, as it is easier to perform all of their entertaining "searches".
It does seem to bother the flight attendants and the people who happen to be in the seat next to me, but hey, when they move I have the entire row to myself, right?
But as soon as you got to low altitudes, opening up your arms a la skydivers would very rapidly take you back to terminal velocity for that position, which can range from 38 to 54 km/sec. I like HELP (the posture) until you get down to ten thousand feet or so, facing flat down splayed and with your jackets and clothing as spread out as possible to try to get your speed down to the better side of 40 m/sec and for the rest of the way down looking for a place that might cushion the impact, and steering for it to the extent you can manage. A fair number of people have survived free falls from airplanes high enough that it doesn't matter, terminal velocity was easily reached, a very few of them so lightly injured that they can even "walk away", although more commonly they barely survive and that only if medical help is immediately at hand.
Surviving here is like winning a game of egg-toss where you are the egg. You need to spread your de-acceleration out over the longest distance possible in impact. The equation involved (assuming uniform acceleration) is v^2 = 2 a H where H is the stopping distance and a is the acceleration experienced while stopping. Humans have survived a \approx 100 g, or a stopping distance of roughly one meter for an initial velocity of 45 m/sec (100 mph). They do better, of course, if the stopping distance is 2-3 meters, or if one is travelling more slowly -- the square means that a comes down rapidly with v so that stopping from 38 km/sec (roughly 80 mph, terminal velocity if you have e.g. a large overcoat and "parachute" it to slow your rate of fall) over 2 meters is only 37 g's of acceleration. a > 50 g makes it pretty unlikely to survive.
So what are good targets? Hay rolls out in fields -- good for a bullseye although you need a pretty big one in a soft, plowed field to be carried away with a ruptured spleen and subdural hematoma but alive. Tightly packed pine forest -- acually better, if you avoid skewering directly onto a tree and your head and kidneys take the punching from the branches as they break, because you might slow down over 5 to 10 meters, where the latter reduces a to 20g, easily survivable and you could even walk away from it . Big bushes of any sort better than hard ground, the bigger (taller) and denser the better. Spongy loam better than concrete (maybe a peat bog?). Deep water better than normal ground, but...
Water carries its own risks. It is an incompressible fluid and quite dense and you can't breathe it when unconscious, so hitting it in, say, a belly-flopper will just cause you to pop. Hitting water that is foamy on top (so that the water contains a lot of air bubbles that can act as a shock absorber) is better than hitting still water. Hitting water that has any sort of "splash" underway on the surface is good, as it might let you get a foot into the water on your way down and start to push the water sideways out of the way in some sort of turbulent flow instead of having to just push it all aside in front of you. The usual prescription for survival here is to fall splayed until quite close, then go straight up vertical, feet first, toes pointed (streamline), arms over head, and clench that sphincter for the 100 mph enema! You'll probably break your legs on the impact, but the rest of the shock will be transmitted up your spine, which is actually quite strong, and if your head is at the right angle your spine may not be jammed up into your brain or your head may not whip down so hard that it snaps your neck. In that case, if you aren't knocked out and don't mind dog paddling with possibly splintered leg bones and broken ankles, hey, you might survive long enough for a nearby boat to get you out.
So what are the odds? Miniscule, of course. Teensy. Small indeed. Perhaps not much better than if you do nothing at all and let luck determine if you hit that perfect pine forest or the trash pile at the foam rubber factory. But hey, it's something to do on the way down besides just going "Oooooh shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiitttttt....." and watching the ground reach up to swat you into oblivion.
But IIRC you do not want to drink tritiated water both because tritium has the wrong chemistry and because you get 4\pi radiation from the decay so the energy will be dissipated in your cells and soft tissue. Not getting through a sheet of paper or your skin from the outside is one thing, but if it starts out inside of you the "skin" that stops it can be your DNA, fired from a water molecule inside the same cell. Lessee... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritium, yup, that's right.
Science doesn't just pretend to be logically consistent -- it actually has logical consistency as an essential criterion for acceptance as plausible truth. It has to deal with Godel's theorems, sure, as does all of mathematics at this point, and -- like mathematics -- its logical systems are axiom based where its axioms (or premises, or postulates, or physical laws as you prefer) are all unprovable assumptions that are ultimately judged according to the twin criterion of remaining mutually consistent with the entire Bayesian network of related unprovable assumptions that "work" and how well they contribute to that "working", where working means "produce an acceptably good correspondence with observational evidence from the past plus an acceptably good predictive correspondence with observational evidence from the future, as it unfolds". In other words, the axioms have to explain what we have seen so far and predict what we see in the future without egregiously contradicting other plausible truths that do the same in other overlapping domains before they are added to the network that constitutes "knowledge".
Contrast that if you will with religion -- any religion, including and especially Catholicism. All scripture-based religions without exception have a written or unwritten axiom that I like to refer to as "the Prime Axiom of Scriptural Religion" that states more or less the following:
Axiom of Certainty: Everything stated in this divinely inspired scripture is true.
Note the importance of this axiom. Without it, we could do things like doubt the truth of the contents of scripture and compare what it says to both the real world, to our knowledge derived from other sources, we could expose it to the withering gaze of mathematical and logical analysis and we could reject it as being almost certainly false when it failed to meet the simple test of satisfying our common sense. Note well that the axiom also does two things a priori. It creates a Godellian loop -- it is self-referential, an axiom about a set of axioms, and hence creates the logical equivalent of the twilight zone where the logical truth of propositions cannot any longer be consistently assessed internally because Godel's theorems apply. It also creates a situation where even a cursory analysis using higher order logic, perhaps using Godel's theorems or identifying the fallacies thus enabled permits us to state with almost complete certainty that this axiom is not, in fact, true. After all, not only does it beg the question (for example), it is as pure an example of creating an entire logical structure that begs all questions as one could imagine! By contradicting itself, it enables anything to be "logically proven" as it is easy to show that any proposition at all can be proven from a contradiction.
Or, we could apply Godel to it directly. Godel tells us that any axiom-based logical system with sufficient complexity to be able to express arithmetic can be complete or consistent but not both. He further tells us that if one can prove the consistency of your theory within your theory, it must be inconsistent and hence incorrect, untrue, not logically sound. Well, the Axiom of Certainty is a one line proof of internal consistency is it not? Consequently we know that it is untrue, at least in the context of a religion, which isn't presenting a narrow set of axioms in some closed area of mathematics, but is rather presenting a grand, sweeping set of axioms intended to provide a complete worldview that includes things like arithmetic and science and general knowledge. Never is the conflict more apparent than when pronouncements in the axiomatically true body of scriptural dogma directly conflict with knowledge derived from other realms, such as when the Bible presents pi as equal to three, or claims that God made humans out of clay on day six of creation, or
That isn't exactly saying that if he is right they would have to change their doctrine, it's more like saying "We're right no matter what, so even if you're right and we're wrong, we're still right." In fact, Galileo's greatest contribution to the church is that, by showing the Book of Genesis to be systematically false (and hence by implication casting doubt on the entire "infallible" Bible, written by the holy fathers and hence -- as Bellarmine's letter clearly states -- true ad litteram) he forced them to invent whole new fields of literary endeavor, particularly hermeneutics -- the art of inventing bullshit exegesis to try to make a passage that is perfectly contradicted by simple matters of fact and observation somehow less, um, contradictory.
As for the metaphysical assumptions underlying science -- you can't be serious, can you, trying to put science and religion on the same footing! The only possible excuse you might have for this is a profound ignorance of the mathematical and philosophical underpinnings of science. But I will reduce them to a sound bite for you. The fundamental premise of science is that it is best to believe the most that which you can doubt the least, given your experience and the evidence and the entire network of other strong evidence-based beliefs that we call "knowledge" when -- and get this, as it is the important part -- we try very hard to doubt!
Religion, exposed to this simple standard for knowledge that embraces both verification and falsification and the process of forming and asserting hypotheses and is little more than quantified common sense, withers instantly and dies. If Bellarmine had applied the Cox axioms to Galileo's result, instead of seeking to reinterpret the made-up nonsense in the Bible in some way that he could pretend that it is still true, he would have reduced his belief in its truth! But alas, he didn't try to doubt very hard, did he? Rather he was eager to hold on to his belief even though at that point he knew perfectly well that it was false!
Besides, Cardinal Saint Bellarmine, who prosecuted Galileo at his infamous trial, made his real position -- and that of the Church, quite clear with actions that speak far louder over the ages than these empty words. They threatened him with being burned alive to force him to recant and then they muzzled him under house arrest for the rest of his life rather than actually look for themselves at the motions of the planets and use their own reason to conclude that yes, the Bible is in fact wrong in many places. When presented with a stark choice -- truth or power -- Bellarmine chose power. The Catholic Church chose power. It chooses it today -- with a total accumulated wealth that makes it wealthier than all but the top 18 or so nations on Earth (all administered by a tiny group of non-elected officials) it is one of the most powerful and influential political organizations on the planet. People die every day in Africa because its leader has unilaterally decreed that they should.
Not that it did them any good, of course. Now everybody knows that the book of Genesis is false -- lies, myths, fables, stories without one single word of truth in it, not even particularly good poetry -- except of course the brainless fanatic orthodox Christians that persist even today in trying to pretend that flowering plants were created before the sun, that the moon glows with its own light, and that the Universe is some 7000 years old.
Any reasonable person capable of using Bayesian reasoning at all, when confronted with the irrefutable evidence that the fundamental book of four religions is false from beginning to end would doubt the rest of the unbelievable assertions made in the later text built upon
Manson isn't the most interesting one (and of course there is quite a selection to choose from). Wayne Bent is a lot more interesting. If you Google them up, you can find the whole of his NatGeo interviews right before his arrest for taking indecent liberties with minors, including the hilarity of his predicted "end of the world" which, of course, failed to happen.
I'd like to think that if Jesus (a Roman corruption of the name Yeshua, that basically means Deliverer, as does Christ in Greek, so that Jesus Christ is basically "Deliverer Deliverer" in two languages) ever actually existed, that he was remarkably similar to Bent. After all, even in the Gospels we have accounts of naked apostles fishing and running drunkenly through the streets, we have clear evidence that young women were part of the crowd that followed him around, and his claims (as reported) were more or less identical. True, Wayne is copying Yeshua so this isn't surprising, but he is a fairly honest copy.
Manson is just batshit crazy. Wayne isn't so dangerous, except to women and children. For example, one of the greatest hoots in the NGeo cuts is where his son's wife decides to join his sexual harem. Without actually getting divorced or anything -- she just moves in with Wayne and his other two glassy eyed concubines. For one brief second there it looks like his son is going to come unglued on the show and storm away, dumping the whole pile of crap (and leaving his father with all sorts of problems) but then he masters himself and actually acquiesces in his wife moving in with and screwing his father.
More than a bit scary, actually. But if you wanted further proof that hackers and messianic christians are not particularly alike, well, when was the last time you saw a geekoid hacker with not one, not two, but three concubines following him around, not to mention the barely fertile teens who want to get naked with him and have him bless their pert little perl variables...
Oh, now you're going to go and insist on that pesky old thing called "evidence", aren't you? And here I just went over a perfectly lovely piece of gibberish advanced as YAOAFG (yet another ontological argument for god) on a philosophy website that was just chock full of gems of logic such as the assertion that "God exists in possible worlds". OMFG.
"The scandal of Protestantism"? Wow, I guess you don't even want to think about the soulless hackers (see, on topic oh mod-god!) who created "the scandal of secular humanistic scientific atheism" in this discussion. Also, you are aware that histories of Christianity now exist that aren't written by Catholics, right? Or even Christians? Just checking...
Slashdot Mirror
No, the cat isn't dead. It is in the state |\psi_c> = 1/\sqrt{2} e^i\phi/2 |live> + 1/\sqrt{2} e^-i/phi/2|dead> (where for the sake of simplicity we will assume that = 0, = = 1, that is, the cat has no probability of "dying" if the cat is completely isolated instead of being coupled to an infernal quantum device). I have no idea what phase we should assign to the cat, of course. Is it polarized in the direction of real mortality, or is its polarization strictly imaginary? I'm inclined towards imaginary.
Assuming, of course, that your box is completely isolated from the physical Universe inside an adiabatic box with walls at T = 0. In the event that you don't possess such a box, I assure you, the damn cat is alive or it is dead, not ever in between, whether or not you look inside the box. If it isn't adiabatically isolated, the entire Universe is always "looking inside the box" with its entropy-laden fields.
Perhaps this is how Tesla's "death ray" worked. He constructed a linear phased array of boxes filled with live cats, which were thus in a state of inversion relative to the "ground state of cats" (dead). By triggering the death of the cat in the first box (perhaps with his Tesla coil?) and trapping the resultant death field, he was able to stimulate radiation and produce an intense burst of coherent death from the simultaneous death of all of the cats. Indeed, the device might have been properly named a DASER-Cat (Death Amplification by Stimulated Emission of death-Radiation of Cats), but Tesla was soft-hearted and liked cats, so after using it one time and destroying the Russian Taiga at Tunguska in a way that looked strangely like an air-burst of the nuclear plant aboard an alien spaceship he dismantled it and destroyed the plans (and freed all of the cats he had collected to use for future shots). Schrodinger merely rediscovered it, but was careful to avoid expressing the correct cat wavefunction lest the possibility of coherent death be rediscovered and used for Evil.
rgb
No, no, no. Phase velocity versus group velocity. You cannot transmit information faster than the speed of light in either quantum mechanics or classical mechanics. Phase velocity can be anything you like, but it is irrelevant. Group velocity carries information that can be decoded, and propagates at c (or slower) in both classical and quantum field theory.
No soup for you!
rgb
p.s. -- "affect" is what you put on like a social cloak when entering a room in a social situation, as in "he is so affected, he's totally bogus". "effect" is what causes produce. Effects propagating faster than the speed of light actual threaten the consistency of physics in a variety of ways. This, of course, isn't unthinkable -- all cards are on the table when formulating physical theories -- but so far there is no evidence that effects that carry information precede causes. OTOH, the propagators of physics generally can be formulated in advanced, retarded, stationary, and mixed expressions, and no physical results depend on which one is used -- the actual solution to the equations of motion involved is stationary in both quantum and classical mechanics and hence the dynamical solution is itself invariant, causality in the sense of past causing the future is an entropy-based illusion.
I wish everybody taught the Generalized Master Equation in quantum mechanics before they taught the EPR paradox. It would make life ever so much simpler if one learned that "wavefunction collapse" is an artifact of the thermodynamics of the measurement apparatus.
I have students that build tesla coils for extra credit projects every year or two, and have built one myself just for the fun of the big sparks. They generate ballpark of 150 kV at the top, and putting a CD on top so that you could watch the lightning arc out of it and craze the plastic and underlying metal was great fun. Naturally, at that voltage the plastic isn't exactly an insulator, so you get fractal lightning patterns almost instantly through the metal.
However, I wouldn't think of this as a way of technically erasing all of the data -- not erasing as in not all of the king's horses nor all of the kings men using NSA's resources can put it together again erasing. Erasing as in nobody is going to be able to put it in a stock player and scan any data off of it perhaps, but removing all of the actual physical encoding of the medium so that people cannot read off local patterns of information and apply information theoretic analysis to POSSIBLY reconstruct chunks of it? I don't think so. I'm not even sure that I'd trust scrambling or oxidizing all of the metal for that -- the plastic alone might contain enough structural alteration that a very sensitive molecular-level scan could pick up patterns, if you have a few tens of millions of dollars to use trying (NSA money, in other words).
But simply breaking a CD or DVD in two is probably enough to stop all but the most dedicated and well-equipped would-be data thief. There would have to be a strong incentive to spend real money to reconstruct even that.
With that said, I agree with the individual above who said fire. Fire takes care of all of the information, whether it is cooking in a microwave or conventional oven or in a real fire with real wood outdoors. Because of the toxins given off by burning plastic, I like outdoors. Not even the NSA could reconstruct information from DVD ash, or even (realistically) from the blob of molten plastic you'd get even before you turned the DVD to ash and then blew the ash into the air as a fine powder or washed it into the dirt. Fire is raw entropy.
rgb
They also serve, who only stand and wait. Serve beer, that is! Such a bi-winning idea.
rgb
Fortunately, beer is made primarily from dextrose and dextrins extracted from crushed malted barley grain in a wet bath at a carefully regulated temperature (in order to promote the proper conversion of starches in the grain into sugar via the action of alpha and beta amylase in the grain). The dextrose is almost completely converted by yeast into alcohol, leaving only a finish of infermentable dextrins to slightly sweeten the final product and complement the bitterness of the hops. Fructose, sucrose, dextrose, all gone.
Clearly the only solution to this public health dilemma is to drink only beer. We need legislation requiring the replacement of all high-fructose soda machines throughout the world with been machines. We need to ensure that our schools have keggerators, not soda machines -- our children's health and future depend on it. Our babies need to be put to bed not with bottle filled with tooth-decay producing pulp-free apple or orange juice but with a bottle filled with beer.
This public health measure will save money and save lives. Homemade beer costs approximately $4.00 a gallon to make and bottle. That makes it about the same price as gasoline (and soon to be cheaper than gasoline) and much cheaper than bottled water. Beer in the bottle is generally safe to drink -- few disease-causing organisms or non-metallic toxins can survive the boiling process, the hops are a natural disinfectant, and alcohol kills germs as well. Finally, if we needed any more of a reason to drink natural unfiltered beer refermented in the bottle to produce good carbonation, yeast is an excellent source of naicin, and naicin may be one of the few vitamins capable of actually reversing atherosclerosis -- yes, drinking real beer (not the mass-produced CO_2 pressure carbonated, double filtered, corn-syrup corrupted crap that goes by the name "beer" in most stores) may actually prevent heart attacks.
rgb
Oh, you mean like the "careful analysis" done by Mann et. al that erased the medieval climate optimum and little ice age because they were an "inconvenient truth" in the way of worldwide panic over carbon?
Even RealClimate acknowledges the lag. They just explain it differently. But you can see the data from one of the several studies that all arrive at this conclusion here: http://www.sciencebits.com/IceCoreTruth. Of course this article has a little bit more to say about the ice core data and CO_2 itself, partly because Al Gore in his bullcrap movie put a picture of ice core data and temperature data up on the screen and then claimed that it showed that CO_2 drove the temperature increases at the end of the ice ages. Only in a Universe where time and entropy run backwards do effects precede causes, but then, Al isn't much of a scientist is he? Any more than Mann is a competent statistician.
rgb
"Then there are the refugees that no one realizes. In the small coastal town where I live in North Carolina, houses have been falling into the swamp one by one for decades, but the residents blame it on people building their homes in flood zones, not realizing that sea levels in their state have risen three times the rate of rise on the rest of the Atlantic coast [sciencedaily.com]. People didn't build their homes in the water, the water rose 1.5 meters over the 50 years since they were built..."
Only if BP is actually writing in a language that strangely resembles English, but isn't, was he referring to a rising water table. His comment here is factually incorrect, as well. If one reads even the headline only of the article he cites, one sees that the correct quote would be that sea levels over the last 100 years rose at 3x the rate from the previous 500 years, and that the rise is on the order of 3 millimeters per year instead of 1 millimeter per year. That means that in the entire fifty years he is referring to, the differential rise in sea level is 10 cm, or around four inches -- if the assertions of the actual science being made, which are multiply dubious in and of themselves, are correct. Any assertion that the actual sea level in North Carolina specifically has risen at a differential rate relative to the rest of the Atlantic coast is already so enormously unlikely that one's bullshit detectors should be out in full force, demanding a truly detailed explanation instead of attributing it in some vague way to "global warming" or "melting of the Greenland ice sheet".
10 cm is roughly 8% of 1.5 meters. I attribute the falling of houses into the water with building in both a flood plain and in wetlands. The first is stupid, especially in NC which regularly gets hit with Atlantic hurricanes because our coast literally sticks out into the Gulf Stream like a big, fat target -- Fran and Floyd, in particular, illustrated both rather graphically in recent years -- houses didn't exactly fall into the sea, they were just flooded out, and the water surge coming downstream has all sorts of effect on the plasticity of swamp soil, sure, on top of that. The second is just wrong -- people actually dug channels to drain the wetlands to build houses there back in the first big surge of recreational building on the coast, something that has had a profound impact on the coastal ecology. So in a way, it is good that this is reversing itself, hard as it is on people who bought and built on a wetlands flood plain. If I had my druthers, NC would pass a law that banned both building or rebuilding, within a mile of the actual coastline (exceptions for established cities and designated build zones, perhaps, at their own risk and with it clearly established that there would be NO groins and beach nourishment provided or permitted to preserve real estate in the designated exceptions) and would reopen the coast proper to "the people", instead of "the people who buy condos that block off beach access to the people" but that's just me.
Next, we can consider the 500 year record. 500 years is a particularly interesting period, since 500 years ago it was 1511, right before the beginning of the Little Ice Age! Solar actively, already low in the 1500's, entered a grand solar minimum (the Maunder minimum) at the beginning of the 1600s, a period of approximately 100 years where the Sun had almost no sunspots for what would be some ten eleven year cycles. Global temperatures plummeted, the glaciers advanced, the Thames regularly froze (people held winter fairs out on the ice in London) and there were active historic droughts in NC that (among other things) killed off "the Lost Colony" and nearly wiped out the Jamestown settlement, all recorded both in written documentary and in the proxy tree-ring record for the area. The 1700's saw a rise in temperature, but then in the 1800s the Dalton minimum caused a brief dip in global temperatures (altho
And a careful analysis of CO_2 levels and temperature from examining ice cores shows that more or less without exception CO_2 levels lag temperature rises by hundreds of years. The actual evidence shows almost no climate sensitivity to CO_2 forcing. This actually makes very good sense, given the orders of magnitude involved. The earth's climate and its fluctuations are dominated by solar state first, gross geographical changes and long-lifetime oscillations in the chaotic pattern of circulation (e.g. PDO) second, and things like CO_2 levels a distant and almost irrelevant third. A fact that is already starting to be quite apparent as we enter solar cycle 24 heading towards a probable 200 year low peak level of solar activity. Get used to nasty winters -- if we actually start a Dalton, or worse Maunder, style solar minimum we'll all need our woolies and there will indeed be a climate-based human catastrophe. It will be the exact opposite of the one the hysteria of the last 20 years has focused on, of course, but so be it. I bet they still won't make Al Gore give back his "Nobel Prize".
rgb
If you think sea levels in NC have risen 1.5 meters then I really, really, want some of what you are smoking. I'll be sure to let them know when I go to teach at the Duke Marine Lab this summer that their island is under water.
What your reply clearly demonstrates is that the hysteria associated with Anthropogenic Global Warming is pervasive and in some sense, quite insane. I am guessing that you are somehow conflating beach erosion -- an issue that does indeed dominate NC local politics on the coast and which in some cases does indeed have human causes -- with sea-level rise. Here's a hint. You cannot have a 1.5 meter rise in sea level only in North Carolina. There are these silly laws of physics and hydrodynamics, you see...
rgb (alive and well in NC the day after many tornadoes that were not, actually, caused by "global warming" either -- they were and often are caused by cold fronts overrunning warm air, something that happens every spring, some years worse than others. This has been a very cold year to the north of us, and our fairly normal warm spring weather got hit by a fast moving cold front.)
Great marketing for alternative operating systems. If they want to update all of my WinXP VMs to Win7 for free (that's free as in "they do the work", too, since the biggest expense is the human time required), that's peachy. In the meantime a) I don't buy Windows of any flavor when I have a choice, and I almost always have a choice; b) I run linux on everything anyway, just as I have for the last fifteen or sixteen years. That way ALL I spend is my time to upgrade, and updates and software "shopping" are free (and automatic in the case of updates).
I know, I know. I'm missing out on all of the great features of Windows 7. You know, multiple desktops, that sort of thing. I'm sure I'm missing out on some really great features in IE10, too. After all, IE has been at the forefront of browser development for so long with its great security features, its history of reliability, its cross-compatibility, its longstanding support for plugins and tabbed browsing.
Oh, wait, sorry, I forgot. Windows 7 still doesn't have multiple desktops even though it requires enough CPU and memory to have qualified as an export controlled munition a decade ago just to actually boot (and at that is better than the Vista-up-your-assa of Doom). Explorer has historically been an open, suppurating wound security-wise. And while yes, the version number of IE has been bouncing right along in the last year or two, they didn't actually have tabbed browsing as an actual standard feature until IE 7 (unless you installed it as a semi-supported add-on in 6 in sheer desperation). That was only what, four years ago? How time flies. Clearly Microsoft is a technology leader known for cutting edge enhancements of GUI functionality and its excellent CLI interface.
Oh wait, just kidding -- again. Excellent terminal/console environment and CLI for a meaning of "excellent" that might have stretched the truth a bit back in the early-to-mid 80's, and GUI functionality that is perfectly represented by dancing paper clips and mini-windows that constantly pop open and offer to do things that I don't want done, like remove rarely used icons from my desktop. Damn skippy they're rarely used. The whole damn VM is rarely used, so please just STFU, the icons are precisely where I want them.
So the real issue isn't their decision not to support XP or Vista versions of IE 10. The real issue is: Why would I care? Why would anyone? Except the poor web developers who have to now purchase and install still more Windows systems in order to be able to ensure that their products actually continue to work while Microsoft continues to edge its browsers towards enough nonstandard function that they can keep their dream alive of a proprietary Internet belonging just to them alive. They have my deepest sympathy.
rgb
The article is IMO incorrect because it concentrates only on chemical reaction motors. There, of course, their answer is correct. But that isn't the only way to move around in the solar system. One question I ask my intro physics students is to contemplate the light sail as a means of propulsion. To do this, one simply works out the balance between solar gravity and radiation pressure to determine how thin a sail has to be in order to directly support its own weight (and the answer, of course, is "very, very thin":-).
However, this isn't the end of the problem. I then ask them how much force is required to remain in orbit. The answer (neglecting the tiny amount of atmospheric drag in near earth orbits and e.g. tides) is "none" -- orbit is free fall where the centripetal force required to bend the trajectory into a circle is provided by gravity. A feasible light sail can be built that can exert enough force via reflected sunlight to provide an acceleration of (say) a millimeter per second squared for it and its payload in a scalable way, or even more (with sub-micron sail designs). Not much, but given 86400 seconds per day, that is as much as 86 m/sec (or nearly 200 mph) delta-vee per day, for free, every day. One can add a kilometer per second every two weeks, and that's enough to reach anywhere in the solar system in time, especially if you amplify it with a gravitational slingshot off of (say) the moon.
Sure, it would take too long to move humans around, but that isn't the challenge -- we can move humans around now at large but not impossibly large expense, at least as far as Mars or Jupiter or Venus, even using chemical rockets although there are probably better solutions than chemistry in the long run. The only really hard part is getting things into low Earth orbit -- once there you are "halfway to anywhere" as Heinlein liked to put it (virial theorem) and light sails mean getting the rest of the way is scalably/reusably "free" if you don't care about taking order of years to get there. Light sails would let us move everything that isn't a human to e.g. the Moon or Mars to set up a more or less permanent base and maintain a long-term line of supply. Who cares if your food and water take years to get there, as long as they get there cheaply enough?
A second thing that would change the economics (aside from either new physics or radically new ideas, e.g. a fusion-driven relativistic ion drive that again uses free or abundant energy to eke the maximum possible reaction thrust out of reaction mass by accelerating it to close to c where it has a lot of momentum per particle) would be to build light-sail driven robots to mine the asteroid belt for raw materials so that we wouldn't have to lift e.g. steel, nickel, and possibly even water up to Earth orbit. Those robots could equally well deliver mass back to Earth at e.g. the Earth-Moon Lagrange points and allow extended permanent habitats to be constructed there that are a light sail away from anywhere.
The only thing preventing us from settling the solar system is time and the will to do it -- we could do it now for a tiny fraction of what our military forces cost us every year. Sure, it would be good to find solutions to the time problem -- it's easy and cheap if we don't mind transit times of decades, so perhaps working on various forms of suspended animation would permit humans to take the light sail route as well as their food, clothing, water, air, and construction materials. A Lagrange point colony with a decades-long, robot-filled pipeline of raw materials could create a steady flow of humans moving out to permanent colonies throughout the solar system on a timescale of centuries.
Or, as some clever human posted yesterday, perhaps a flying saucer really did crash at Roswell. If so, then interstellar travel is indeed feasible somehow, which means that there is likely a solution waiting in new physics. If the federal government would just 'fess up
Plane Geometry? Kiddie algebra? Arithmetic?
C'mon, even in 1869 they had calculus.
The obsession with Classics (both languages and history) is period-typical, but really only served as a cultural unifier and something of an intelligence filter. The test didn't assess at all whether or not one could actually communicate in English either verbally or via the written word. Nor did it assess knowledge of actual real world contemporary history, government, literature or above all, science. It is rather a shadow of Oxford, and given the rather odd question involving pounds, shillings, and pence at interest, one wonders if Harvard wasn't just plagiarizing its older British cousins' exams so that they could claim to stand up to Cambridge as it were.
rgb
I'll take a parachute, thanks -- 5 meter poles are a bit cumbersome, and trying to hold on to one to cushion a 45 m/sec impact would either rip one's hands off, or set them on fire, or do nothing. I personally, with my convenient 100 kilogram mass (ahem:-) would have a mere 10^5 Joules of energy to dissipate. Dissipating any signficant fraction of that via the skin of my hands sounds really, really painful in the bye-bye hands sense of things.
It would be good for breaking the surface of the water beneath you right before you entered it, but so would a handful of lead shot (assuming you could get a handful of lead shot onto a plane...:-)
rgb
Sure, see comments in the linked articles. There are two possible entry positions, both of them probably but not certainly fatal -- feet first or head first with your hands overhead tightly clasped to protect your skull.
Another survival enhancer (if you have anything on you that is denser than you are) is to drop/throw something straight down so that it enters the water a short time before you do, breaking up the surface tension and mixing at least some air into it. But all of this is a lot to think about in the few minutes it takes to fall from great heights, so it pays to plan ahead. Or take the train. After all, you get a significant radiation dose flying, you're more likely to have a stroke, and all they serve you nowadays is teensy packets of pretzels or peanuts and a half can of coke as a sad, sad echo of flying service twenty or thirty years ago, when you weren't jammed into the tiniest seat that could possibly hold you, when flight attendants rarely had visible tattoos, when kids got to visit the pilot mid-flight and get a nifty pair of wings, when flying was actually fun.
Nowadays there are times when you can actually long for the plane to explode if only to get you out of your jammed, cramped seat in between two three hundred pound humans and in front of the crying baby.
rgb
Um, you're confusing cause and effect, here. If they use sharks with frickin' laser cannons to kill the Somali pirates, the world's total number of pirates will likely decrease. This in turn will reduce the average global temperature. Pirates cause warming, not the other way around.
In fact, there is some evidence that this is already happening. Qaddafi is hiring Somalian mercenaries for $1000/day to fight in Libya, which is doubtless attracting some fine young men away from the life of piracy at sea. If one examines the current UAH Global Temperature Anomaly for March, it is at -0.1 C (compared to the running mean since 1979 when the measure began). Global Warming is already Global Cooling, at least on a 30 year running average basis. Coincidence? I don't think so.
rgb
There are a lot of records of people who have fallen at terminal velocity and survived, and even walked away from it, if by a lot you mean one in a thousand or so. I enjoy telling all of this to my students when I teach them about drag forces and terminal velocity in intro physics which is why I have a good patter for it. If you look up "g force" and "terminal velocity" on wikipedia they have cross references of some of the people who have survived, by name, but during WW II there were a lot more that didn't get recorded -- people who fell or were shot out of planes at 10,000 to 16,000 feet without a chute but managed to walk away.
There is also a section in the Survival Guide (humor) book that you'll see in bookstores from time to time on this, and articles such as http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/aviation/safety/4344036 that again cross-reference previous occurrences. Documented no-airplane instances of survival are pretty rare, but there are a few that stand up to investigative test, and even a website devoted to this one subject (of course): http://www.greenharbor.com/fffolder/ffresearch.html
Anyway, Enjoy. These sites between them give you most of what is known about what is after all a very unlikely thing. Don't forget your trench coat and "Prove You're No Terrorist -- Fly Naked!" tank-top tee shirt and g-string for your next flight! Just remember that the g-string does not, in the end, help much with the terminal g-force (and what that final pa-da-pam, I'll stop:-).
rgb
You can always pick me out -- I'm the one wearing the big, flasher grade trench coat tastefully tied to my ankles to get that little extra bit of lift. And of course I fly naked. The department of Homeland Security prefers it that way, as it is easier to perform all of their entertaining "searches".
It does seem to bother the flight attendants and the people who happen to be in the seat next to me, but hey, when they move I have the entire row to myself, right?
rgb
Oops. Pesky "k" key...;-) Pesky "k" brain. Shall we try -- meters per second?
rgb
But as soon as you got to low altitudes, opening up your arms a la skydivers would very rapidly take you back to terminal velocity for that position, which can range from 38 to 54 km/sec. I like HELP (the posture) until you get down to ten thousand feet or so, facing flat down splayed and with your jackets and clothing as spread out as possible to try to get your speed down to the better side of 40 m/sec and for the rest of the way down looking for a place that might cushion the impact, and steering for it to the extent you can manage. A fair number of people have survived free falls from airplanes high enough that it doesn't matter, terminal velocity was easily reached, a very few of them so lightly injured that they can even "walk away", although more commonly they barely survive and that only if medical help is immediately at hand.
Surviving here is like winning a game of egg-toss where you are the egg. You need to spread your de-acceleration out over the longest distance possible in impact. The equation involved (assuming uniform acceleration) is v^2 = 2 a H where H is the stopping distance and a is the acceleration experienced while stopping. Humans have survived a \approx 100 g, or a stopping distance of roughly one meter for an initial velocity of 45 m/sec (100 mph). They do better, of course, if the stopping distance is 2-3 meters, or if one is travelling more slowly -- the square means that a comes down rapidly with v so that stopping from 38 km/sec (roughly 80 mph, terminal velocity if you have e.g. a large overcoat and "parachute" it to slow your rate of fall) over 2 meters is only 37 g's of acceleration. a > 50 g makes it pretty unlikely to survive.
So what are good targets? Hay rolls out in fields -- good for a bullseye although you need a pretty big one in a soft, plowed field to be carried away with a ruptured spleen and subdural hematoma but alive. Tightly packed pine forest -- acually better, if you avoid skewering directly onto a tree and your head and kidneys take the punching from the branches as they break, because you might slow down over 5 to 10 meters, where the latter reduces a to 20g, easily survivable and you could even walk away from it . Big bushes of any sort better than hard ground, the bigger (taller) and denser the better. Spongy loam better than concrete (maybe a peat bog?). Deep water better than normal ground, but...
Water carries its own risks. It is an incompressible fluid and quite dense and you can't breathe it when unconscious, so hitting it in, say, a belly-flopper will just cause you to pop. Hitting water that is foamy on top (so that the water contains a lot of air bubbles that can act as a shock absorber) is better than hitting still water. Hitting water that has any sort of "splash" underway on the surface is good, as it might let you get a foot into the water on your way down and start to push the water sideways out of the way in some sort of turbulent flow instead of having to just push it all aside in front of you. The usual prescription for survival here is to fall splayed until quite close, then go straight up vertical, feet first, toes pointed (streamline), arms over head, and clench that sphincter for the 100 mph enema! You'll probably break your legs on the impact, but the rest of the shock will be transmitted up your spine, which is actually quite strong, and if your head is at the right angle your spine may not be jammed up into your brain or your head may not whip down so hard that it snaps your neck. In that case, if you aren't knocked out and don't mind dog paddling with possibly splintered leg bones and broken ankles, hey, you might survive long enough for a nearby boat to get you out.
So what are the odds? Miniscule, of course. Teensy. Small indeed. Perhaps not much better than if you do nothing at all and let luck determine if you hit that perfect pine forest or the trash pile at the foam rubber factory. But hey, it's something to do on the way down besides just going "Oooooh shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiitttttt....." and watching the ground reach up to swat you into oblivion.
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But IIRC you do not want to drink tritiated water both because tritium has the wrong chemistry and because you get 4\pi radiation from the decay so the energy will be dissipated in your cells and soft tissue. Not getting through a sheet of paper or your skin from the outside is one thing, but if it starts out inside of you the "skin" that stops it can be your DNA, fired from a water molecule inside the same cell. Lessee... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritium, yup, that's right.
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Science doesn't just pretend to be logically consistent -- it actually has logical consistency as an essential criterion for acceptance as plausible truth. It has to deal with Godel's theorems, sure, as does all of mathematics at this point, and -- like mathematics -- its logical systems are axiom based where its axioms (or premises, or postulates, or physical laws as you prefer) are all unprovable assumptions that are ultimately judged according to the twin criterion of remaining mutually consistent with the entire Bayesian network of related unprovable assumptions that "work" and how well they contribute to that "working", where working means "produce an acceptably good correspondence with observational evidence from the past plus an acceptably good predictive correspondence with observational evidence from the future, as it unfolds". In other words, the axioms have to explain what we have seen so far and predict what we see in the future without egregiously contradicting other plausible truths that do the same in other overlapping domains before they are added to the network that constitutes "knowledge".
Contrast that if you will with religion -- any religion, including and especially Catholicism. All scripture-based religions without exception have a written or unwritten axiom that I like to refer to as "the Prime Axiom of Scriptural Religion" that states more or less the following:
Axiom of Certainty: Everything stated in this divinely inspired scripture is true.
Note the importance of this axiom. Without it, we could do things like doubt the truth of the contents of scripture and compare what it says to both the real world, to our knowledge derived from other sources, we could expose it to the withering gaze of mathematical and logical analysis and we could reject it as being almost certainly false when it failed to meet the simple test of satisfying our common sense. Note well that the axiom also does two things a priori. It creates a Godellian loop -- it is self-referential, an axiom about a set of axioms, and hence creates the logical equivalent of the twilight zone where the logical truth of propositions cannot any longer be consistently assessed internally because Godel's theorems apply. It also creates a situation where even a cursory analysis using higher order logic, perhaps using Godel's theorems or identifying the fallacies thus enabled permits us to state with almost complete certainty that this axiom is not, in fact, true. After all, not only does it beg the question (for example), it is as pure an example of creating an entire logical structure that begs all questions as one could imagine! By contradicting itself, it enables anything to be "logically proven" as it is easy to show that any proposition at all can be proven from a contradiction.
Or, we could apply Godel to it directly. Godel tells us that any axiom-based logical system with sufficient complexity to be able to express arithmetic can be complete or consistent but not both. He further tells us that if one can prove the consistency of your theory within your theory, it must be inconsistent and hence incorrect, untrue, not logically sound. Well, the Axiom of Certainty is a one line proof of internal consistency is it not? Consequently we know that it is untrue, at least in the context of a religion, which isn't presenting a narrow set of axioms in some closed area of mathematics, but is rather presenting a grand, sweeping set of axioms intended to provide a complete worldview that includes things like arithmetic and science and general knowledge. Never is the conflict more apparent than when pronouncements in the axiomatically true body of scriptural dogma directly conflict with knowledge derived from other realms, such as when the Bible presents pi as equal to three, or claims that God made humans out of clay on day six of creation, or
Are you referring to this:
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1615bellarmine-letter.html
That isn't exactly saying that if he is right they would have to change their doctrine, it's more like saying "We're right no matter what, so even if you're right and we're wrong, we're still right." In fact, Galileo's greatest contribution to the church is that, by showing the Book of Genesis to be systematically false (and hence by implication casting doubt on the entire "infallible" Bible, written by the holy fathers and hence -- as Bellarmine's letter clearly states -- true ad litteram) he forced them to invent whole new fields of literary endeavor, particularly hermeneutics -- the art of inventing bullshit exegesis to try to make a passage that is perfectly contradicted by simple matters of fact and observation somehow less, um, contradictory.
As for the metaphysical assumptions underlying science -- you can't be serious, can you, trying to put science and religion on the same footing! The only possible excuse you might have for this is a profound ignorance of the mathematical and philosophical underpinnings of science. But I will reduce them to a sound bite for you. The fundamental premise of science is that it is best to believe the most that which you can doubt the least, given your experience and the evidence and the entire network of other strong evidence-based beliefs that we call "knowledge" when -- and get this, as it is the important part -- we try very hard to doubt!
Religion, exposed to this simple standard for knowledge that embraces both verification and falsification and the process of forming and asserting hypotheses and is little more than quantified common sense, withers instantly and dies. If Bellarmine had applied the Cox axioms to Galileo's result, instead of seeking to reinterpret the made-up nonsense in the Bible in some way that he could pretend that it is still true, he would have reduced his belief in its truth! But alas, he didn't try to doubt very hard, did he? Rather he was eager to hold on to his belief even though at that point he knew perfectly well that it was false!
Besides, Cardinal Saint Bellarmine, who prosecuted Galileo at his infamous trial, made his real position -- and that of the Church, quite clear with actions that speak far louder over the ages than these empty words. They threatened him with being burned alive to force him to recant and then they muzzled him under house arrest for the rest of his life rather than actually look for themselves at the motions of the planets and use their own reason to conclude that yes, the Bible is in fact wrong in many places. When presented with a stark choice -- truth or power -- Bellarmine chose power. The Catholic Church chose power. It chooses it today -- with a total accumulated wealth that makes it wealthier than all but the top 18 or so nations on Earth (all administered by a tiny group of non-elected officials) it is one of the most powerful and influential political organizations on the planet. People die every day in Africa because its leader has unilaterally decreed that they should.
Not that it did them any good, of course. Now everybody knows that the book of Genesis is false -- lies, myths, fables, stories without one single word of truth in it, not even particularly good poetry -- except of course the brainless fanatic orthodox Christians that persist even today in trying to pretend that flowering plants were created before the sun, that the moon glows with its own light, and that the Universe is some 7000 years old.
Any reasonable person capable of using Bayesian reasoning at all, when confronted with the irrefutable evidence that the fundamental book of four religions is false from beginning to end would doubt the rest of the unbelievable assertions made in the later text built upon
Manson isn't the most interesting one (and of course there is quite a selection to choose from). Wayne Bent is a lot more interesting. If you Google them up, you can find the whole of his NatGeo interviews right before his arrest for taking indecent liberties with minors, including the hilarity of his predicted "end of the world" which, of course, failed to happen.
I'd like to think that if Jesus (a Roman corruption of the name Yeshua, that basically means Deliverer, as does Christ in Greek, so that Jesus Christ is basically "Deliverer Deliverer" in two languages) ever actually existed, that he was remarkably similar to Bent. After all, even in the Gospels we have accounts of naked apostles fishing and running drunkenly through the streets, we have clear evidence that young women were part of the crowd that followed him around, and his claims (as reported) were more or less identical. True, Wayne is copying Yeshua so this isn't surprising, but he is a fairly honest copy.
Manson is just batshit crazy. Wayne isn't so dangerous, except to women and children. For example, one of the greatest hoots in the NGeo cuts is where his son's wife decides to join his sexual harem. Without actually getting divorced or anything -- she just moves in with Wayne and his other two glassy eyed concubines. For one brief second there it looks like his son is going to come unglued on the show and storm away, dumping the whole pile of crap (and leaving his father with all sorts of problems) but then he masters himself and actually acquiesces in his wife moving in with and screwing his father.
More than a bit scary, actually. But if you wanted further proof that hackers and messianic christians are not particularly alike, well, when was the last time you saw a geekoid hacker with not one, not two, but three concubines following him around, not to mention the barely fertile teens who want to get naked with him and have him bless their pert little perl variables...
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Oh, now you're going to go and insist on that pesky old thing called "evidence", aren't you? And here I just went over a perfectly lovely piece of gibberish advanced as YAOAFG (yet another ontological argument for god) on a philosophy website that was just chock full of gems of logic such as the assertion that "God exists in possible worlds". OMFG.
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"The scandal of Protestantism"? Wow, I guess you don't even want to think about the soulless hackers (see, on topic oh mod-god!) who created "the scandal of secular humanistic scientific atheism" in this discussion. Also, you are aware that histories of Christianity now exist that aren't written by Catholics, right? Or even Christians? Just checking...
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