46% of the general public said true and, at first, I was thinking that for more than half of the general public to not understand about atoms and electrons was a pretty poor showing.
But then I got to thinking about whether an electron is, in fact, smaller than an atom. Sure, the rest mass of an electron is much smaller than the rest mass of an atom. Maybe that's what the question was trying to ask. But the way the question is worded seems to imply a spatial size. When you're dealing with objects as light as electrons, the whole notion of size is non-intuitive (probability distributions described by wave functions).
Maybe they had their reasons for not simply asking whether an electron was more massive than an atom - or maybe whoever put the survey together some gaps in their own science education.
I'm no physicist either but what you say sounds right at a practical level.
At a theoretical level, I strongly suspect that everything would cancel out. That is, as long as the magnetization is spherically symmetric, there will be no magnetic field outside the sphere.
I'm sure I'm ascribing an incorrect visualization to the phenomena, but my image of a magnetic pole is that of a motion in liquid - like a propeller in water -...
Just to add my two cents, I visualize a magnetic field as three superimposed scalar fields of potential energy.
Classically, potential energy is the integral of force with respect to distance or, equivalently, force is the derivative of potential energy with respect to distance. To use slightly more sophisticated language, force is the gradient of the potential. In three dimensions, imagine a room with hot spots and cold spots. The temperature would correspond to the (scalar) potential energy (field) and arrows indicating changes from hot to cold would correspond to the (vector) force field.
Anyway, an electric field is a force field (rather than a potential (energy) field). The vectors of an electric field give the force on a test charge.
In contrast, a magnetic field is (the superposition of) three potential (energy) fields. Essentially, the orientation of the test magnetic dipole selects which of the three potential energy fields the dipole is interacting with. Further, to rotate the magnetic dipole requires exactly as much energy as the difference between the potential energy fields that are selected.
So, anyway once the orientation of the magnetic dipole has selected a particular combination of the three potential fields to interact with, the translational (as opposed to rotational) force on the dipole will actually be a combination of the gradients of those three potential fields.
To summarize, electric fields give the force on a test particle while a magnetic fields give the (potential) energy of a test particle.
Sure, the equations would be symmetrical, but since the field is not necessarily continuous,...
I was wondering similar things myself but then I got to thinking that the field would only be discontinuous in the classical approximation of a point "charge" and that you'd have to mess with quantum and wave functions to really understand what was going on.
... you could get energy for nothing (imagine that monopole following the field lines around a current carrying wire, getting faster and faster because of the infinite potential in the wire.)
The question of how a magnetic monopole would interact with an external magnetic field is quite interesting but also rather tricky. I assume that there are physicists who have worked it all out precisely but, just off the top of my head, it's not obvious to me what would happen.
Whereas an electric field can be thought of as the force on a test (electric) charge, the meaning of a magnetic field is quite a bit more complicated. For one thing, the force depends on the orientation of the test dipole but, more fundamentally, in a certain informal sense, it is actually the gradient of the magnetic field that determines the force on the dipole.
That is, the magnetic field vectors themselves don't actually indicate the direction of force on a test dipole. In particular, a spatially uniform field (for example, inside a solenoid) will not actually exert any force on a test dipole.
So, what happens to a magnetic monopole in an external magnetic field? The more I think about it the more I realize that I have no idea.
Bigger than that... A real magnetic monopole means real over-unity generators (aka "perpetual motion", aka "free energy").
I had actually been wondering about that myself. Do you have a reference? I did some google searches and looked over the Wikipedia page on magnetic monopoles but didn't see anything about magnetic monopoles violating the laws of thermodynamics.
There's a chance that a magnetic monopole might allow static magnetic levitation (Earnshaw's Theorem) but I haven't actually seen anything definitive on that either so it's pure speculation on my part.
All Biology is today is memorizing where a heart is in a cat, pig, frog, etc. And memorizing muscles, bones, and classifying animals.
One definition of science is that it is the matching of logical models (theories) to patterns of observations (facts). Some scientists focus on the logical models (the theorists) and some scientists focus on the patterns of observations (the experimentalists).
Any competent instructor (even at the high school level) will discuss both the models and the observations. A competent biology instructor will not only discuss that anatomy of various organisms but will also discuss the models the explain the similarities (generally, common ancestry and similar living environment; that is, evolution). Further more, a competent biology instructor will present classification schemes in the context of evolution: "this organism is classified with these other organisms because they have common ancestry."
Maybe Palin doesn't care if high biology instructors are even halfway competent - but I sure do and I'm going to taken that into account when I decide who to support politically.
A good government is a boring government. A good government gets the basics rights and makes decisions on the basis of impartial analysis of factual observation (not gut feelings and radical ideology).
The basics:
Don't violate human rights or civil rights.
Abide by the basic tenets of international law.
Balance the budget (and pay down the debt).
The details:
Use technology to enable (informed) input from general population to establish (and maintain) collective goals.
Enact policies to achieve the collective goals based of impartial analysis of factual observations.
If sufficient factual observations are not available then implement policies on an experimental basis in order collect sufficient information to decide on more permanent policies.
The bottom line is that, if I was president, it wouldn't be about what I wanted - it would be about what the people wanted. It wouldn't be about what I (and my "gut") thought would work to achieve - it would be about what an impartial analysis of factual observations thought would work.
If everyone participated and kept to the 2 or 3 second rule, it wouldn't make more congestion
Actually, it would.
Imagine that there are enough people wanting to get from point A to point B on road X that the flow rate on road X has to be 5 cars/second. That means that the traffic density (say cars/mile) times the traffic speed (say miles/second) has to be 5 cars/second. In our current example of requiring a flow rate of 5 cars/second, a speed of 60 mph (1/60 mile/second) would require a density of 300 cars/mile (one car every 17 feet, on average).
If we doubled the speed to 120 mph then we could achieve the desired flow rate with a density of one car every 34 feet of, if we could somehow achieve a density of one car every 8 feet, then we could reduce the speed to 30 mph and still achieve the desired flow rate. Obviously, a better solution is to increase the number of lanes.
Anyway, back to the original question, increasing following distance does increase congestion - but, in my opinion, the added safety more than makes up for the increased travel times.
I don't think you realize how unstable these things are. Have you seen a kite surfer?
I haven't tried kite surfing myself but, years ago, my dad experimented with using a steerable kite to pull the family canoe. The maximum pull was achieved when the kite was steered back and forth just above the water - but, naturally, that increased the risk of crashing the kite.
From what I've seen of kite boarders, it's the same kind of thing. If they just let go of the controls and allow the kite to level out overhead then the kite is quite stable - but when they want maximum pull they skim the kite along the surface of the water dramatically increasing the risk of crashing the kite.
I suspect that the reason the sky sails are flown so high is stability rather than maximizing the pull.
Like communism and anarchy, it relies on the flawed axiom that humans are, at their core, good.
Is it any less of a flawed axiom to assume that elected leaders are, at their core, good?
An idea that seems to be popular with conservatives is that society needs a strong authority hierarchy where the good people at the top of the hierarchy control the bad people at the bottom of the hierarchy. This allows them to justify advancement though obedience because in their view the obedience to ones superior represents obedience to a higher moral authority.
The alternate view is that some people are good in some ways some of the time and that when one person is put in control of other people their needs to be a system in place to prevent the person with authority from abusing those under them.
Certainly, the modern representative democracies (what some would call "republics") do have substantial systems in place to prevent abuse of authority. It is not clear to me though that these systems would be any less effective at preventing abuses in a direct democracy than in a representative democracy. For example, it would be just as unconstitutional to pass a law limiting free speech in a direct democracy as in a representative democracy.
If all it takes is a mouseclick to "agree" with a position that's been slickly presented to you in a nice Flash-based web site that you just visited while reading your e-mail at home and having your fourth beer, then this makes matters worse, not better.
As you allude to indirectly, most people simply don't have time to make fully informed decisions on most issues. If a direct democracy system did become widespread, I would expect to see a "free market" of organizations that would issue a series of "vote recommendations". That is, a particular constituent would sign up with an organization that matched his/her preferences and then that organization would vote on his/her behalf.
So expect public floggings, the execution of homosexuals, explusion of darkies, enforced christianity, etc. to make a big come back down under, then?
If these things were really supported by the majority of the population in Australia then one would expect Australians to elect senators who held these positions. That is, there is no general reason to think that indirect democracy is less susceptible to tyranny of the majority than direct democracy.
In theory, the rights of minorities are guaranteed by the concepts of "rights" - such as equal protection under law. As the practice of slavery in the USA demonstrated, even having constitutionally guaranteed rights does not prevent tyranny of the majority.
There's a good reason why civilised countries don't dance to the tune of the lowest common denominator.
The only situation where the least common denominator would be disproportionally represented would be on obscure issues that most people didn't have time to understand or care about.
For that reason, I would propose a modified system where the default is that the senator makes the choice but where there is a mechanism for people to override the senator on issues that they cared about. In the ideal system, a senator would have as many votes as the number of his constituents. For the issues that a constituent cared about the constituent would be able to specify his vote directly but for other issues the constituent would simply let the senator decide on his behalf.
Let 50.1% say "We want to tax tall black men to pay for education of short asian women." Let the legislation be unless 10% of the population votes VETO.
The 10% number sounds kind of arbitrary to me but there's a more general way to achieve something similar to what you're proposing.
Require that the law treat everyone equally unless each of the unequal parties separately approve of the law. In your example, tall black men would only have to pay for the education of short Asian women if the majority of tall black men, the majority of short Asian women and the majority of everyone else each separately approved of the law.
A more realistic example would be the general population providing assistance to a disabled segment of the population.
If some employee decided that he knows what's right for the customers and chooses to enforce his views on how the world should work, I would hope that he be fired.
Your attitude highlights an important difference between the kinds of people who are labeled conservatives and the kinds of people who are labeled liberals.
The people I know who are the most fervent supporters of the Bush administration are all closely associated with organizations that have a strong authority hierarchy (e.g. the military and the kinds of churches where the minister tells you what is right and wrong).
Modern conservatives believe that a properly functioning society requires a strong authority hierarchy where the good people at the top of the hierarchy control the bad people at the bottom of the hierarchy. In order to move up the hierarchy and gain authority you have to demonstrate that you are a good person. In order to demonstrate that you are a good person you have to obey your superiors who are above you in the hierarchy because they are better than you.
In contrast, modern liberals believe that sometimes authority is necessary but that everyone is human and flawed - "power corrupts". The liberals believe that the important thing is to make sure that those who have power are not abusing those who do not have power (they look at relationships going down the hierarchy).
Conservatives believe that the important thing is to make sure that those who do not have power are obedient to those who do have power (they look at relationships going up the hierarchy). This is illustrated by Monica Lewinsky scandal. Conservatives were not outraged due to their concern that Bill Clinton had hurt Monica Lewinsky. They were not outraged because of their deep compassion and sympathy for Bill's wife Hillary. Instead, they were outraged that Bill Clinton had failed to obey a standard of conduct laid down by a higher authority (whether that higher authority was the church or the implied wishes of the founding fathers depended on the particular conservative).
Anyway, in the conservative analysis what matters is that you had a manager at GameStop who was not obeying the proper authority. In the liberal analysis, though, things get complicated. The manager had a position of authority over the children so the question is whether he was using that authority to hurt the children. You could argue it either way. While he was taking away the children's freedom which is generally bad, it is also recognized that children may sometimes need their freedoms restricted.
"CVS pharmacist fired for refusing to sell birth control pills to unmarried women."
Well, sure. We can find even more extreme examples than that. How about the gun store manager who refuses to sell a gun to someone who says he intends to use it to kill his wife? How about the hospital employee who refuses to treat a patient who's dying of a heart attack because the patient is Jewish? Sometimes it's good to refuse service and sometimes it's bad.
With this GameStop thing, the conservative analysis looks up the hierarchy (how did it affect the corporate profits) and the liberal analysis looks down the hierarchy (how did it affect the children).
Allowing an undeveloped person -- both in mind and body -- to control their life is not parenting, it's the abdication thereof.
I think what you mean here is "full control" and I'd actually agree with you that children should not have full control. On the other hand, it would also be a huge mistake to give them "no control".
The way I see it, you set boundaries but you allow them freedom within those boundaries. Maybe you let them play outside - but you don't let them play in traffic. Maybe you let them choose what they want to have for breakfast but you don't let them have a beer and a smoke for breakfast - they can do that when they're 30.
The religion question is tricky. Should a child be forced to go to church? Should a child be forced to "believe in Jesus"? It's not like the child is going to be irreparably harmed by not going to church (or not "believing in Jesus") so there's no practical need to force the child to go to church. On the other hand, there are plenty of people who were forced to go to church as children who more or less turned out OK - though there may be a tendency, later in life to imitate the authoritarian streak of their parents.
My answer if that if a child has extremely strong feelings about not wanting to go to church then it's probably not a good idea to force it. If it's a young child then most young children want to do things with their parents so serious resistance could indicate that the child is being abused by the priest. If it's a teenage child then it's probably time for the child to be making some of their own decisions about religion.
It's often better to lead someone confidently off a cliff than meandering and starving through a jungle.
But before you confidently lead everyone off the cliff you better be really sure that your confidence hasn't dissuaded your followers from telling you that there's actually another way, that you haven't thought of, that will get everyone home safely.
Perhaps the most important aspect of posing the question is to inform the viewers who watch the debate that this is really not a matter of opinion, but of science.
I think you have to be careful what you mean by evolution.
At one extreme you have the idea that organisms adapt to their environment over the course of many generations. To disagree with this kind of evolution is to disagree with factual observation.
At the other extreme you have evolution as an explanation for the origin of life on the earth with the further inference that there is no god, life has no purpose and free will is an illusion. Even a great many serious scientists are hesitant to claim that life has no purpose and that free will is an illusion - despite the fact that an evolutionary origin of life makes that likely.
Now, I know that some people will say the the purpose of life is to be evolutionarily successful but that's like saying that the purpose of a ball is to fall under the influence of gravity. Evolution isn't a purpose, it's just something that happens.
Personally, I'd suggest going for more interesting questions:
"Would you live your life any differently if you knew for certain that there was no god?"
"What goals (if any) would you set for yourself if you knew for certain that life had no fundamental purpose?"
"What if it turns out that free will is an illusion? How would that change your views on concepts of heaven and hell?"
Judge Batchelder was appointed by President George Bush, Judge Gibbons by President George W. Bush and Judge Gilman by President Bill Clinton. Judge Taylor, the district court judge, was appointed by President Jimmy Carter.
Judge Batchelder (George Bush) wrote the majority opinion, Judge Gibbons (George W. Bush) concurred with the majority, and Judge Gilman (Bill Clinton) dissented. Judge Taylor (Jimmy Carter) was the district court judge who was over-ruled.
Ok, assuming the federal should be funding this sort of research*,... *I don't see why it should be. The energy market is so large, there seems like more than enough incentive for innovation.
Well, in practice it can be quite difficult to reward innovation in a meaningful way. The current practice is for the government to impose artificial monopolies (patents, copyrights, etc.) but it's difficult to determine in a natural way how severe the monopoly should be.
Should the monopoly last 10 years or 100 years? Should the monopoly prevent anyone else from solving the problem at all or should the monopoly allow anyone else to solve the problem as long as the solution is not exactly the same? Does it matter if the solution is so novel that no one else would have thought of it in 100 years or if the solution is so obvious that there were dozens of other organizations that would have developed exactly the same solution within a few months of each other?
You can try to have a free market for "intellectual property" but, in the end, it's some government bureaucrat who (more or less arbitrarily) decides the essential features of that market.
More broadly, there are many examples of services that become extremely cumbersome when forced into a "free market" framework. An obvious example is the fire department. You don't really want to be shopping shop around the free market on the rare occasions that your house is burning down. Scientific research is not as immediate as a house fire so it's easier to "let the free market deal with it". In the end, though, if you want the benefits of scientific research then you're going to have to pay for it - and there are compelling reasons to think that some sort of government funding is the least cumbersome method of funding scientific research.
That's not to say that the current model of government funding for scientific research could not be substantially improved - just that the "free market" isn't some magical solution for funding scientific research efficiently.
...why pay out grants? We should take advantage of the natural benefits of competition; pay $X to the organization that reaches a specific milestone.
Grants are already quite competitive but let's try some numbers.
Let's say that it take $1 million to achieve a particular milestone and that there are 10 organizations that each have a roughly equal chance of achieving the milestone first. In order to provide adequate incentive, the payout for the prize will have to be $10 million (plus a risk premium - but we'll ignore that). That is, an organization that has a 1 in 10 chance of winning the prize for an outlay of $1 million will only compete if the prize exceeds $10 million. So, essentially, the government ends up paying $10 million for $1 million worth of research.
On the other hand, let's say the government holds a competition for grant funding. In that case, the government chooses the organization with the best chance of reaching the milestone efficiently and pays that organization $1 million to complete the research. In this case, the government is paying $1 million for $1 million worth of research.
Not only that, but if the government plays it's cards right, in the grants case the government can get the research released into the public domain. Strictly speaking, the government could also get the research released into the public domain in the prize case but in practice the organization is going to fight harder to lock the research away as it's own "intellectual property".
Speaking of intellectual property, that's really the key to understanding why the "free market" breaks down for scientific research. For physical property (e.g. an apple pie), there is a need to manufacture multiple apple pies. For intellectual property, once the first "apple pie" is "manufactured" then all the other pies become worthless. That is, you only need to make a scientific discovery once.
If Eta Car is in our frame of reference then the explosion happens more or less when we see it, by definition.
Well, we would still take into account the speed of light and the distance to Eta Car (relative to our reference frame). If Eta Car is 7,000 light years away (relative to our reference frame) and we observe the explosion now then, in our reference frame, the explosion happened 7,000 years ago.
There are standard definitions of the passage of time on earth so the time is not a problem, specifically. The tricky bit is that our notions of the distance to Eta Car may fluctuate a bit as we accelerate toward and away from Eta Car on our orbit around the sun. With a bit of care, though, we could probably average these fluctuations out - although that may not be strictly kosher from a relativistic point of view.
That's definitely an interesting point. Without knowing Eta Carinae's relative velocity and acceleration, it's possible that from Eta Carinae's perspective (frame of reference), the earth will observe the supernova 6,000 years after it happens but from the earth's perspective (frame of reference), the earth will observe the supernova 7,000 years after it happens.
I suppose that from a scientific perspective, there is a certain appeal to choosing a frame of reference relative to the event (Eta Carinae) rather than the observer (earth). On the other hand, I still think that, given the intended audience of the article (people on earth), the times are clearly being expressed relative to the earth reference frame.
An expression like "it happened 7,500 years ago there" is very poorly defined. We travel on a number of acceleration vectors, our own spin, orbit around the sun, orbit around the galactic core,...
And yet, somehow "we" (people on earth) manage to define the passage of time down to a very very small fraction of a second. While it is interesting to consider other perspectives, the summary in question was clearly referring to the frame of reference used to define the standard passage of time on earth (accelerations and all).
Apparently da4 discovered some new non-relative timescale that's consistent throughout the universe without respect to position or velocity.
It's an interesting point that an entity in a different frame of reference would not have quite the same ideas about space-time coordinates of this supernova happen but when you're reading an article written on earth for an entirely earth-based audience then it's pretty clear that the article is using space-time coordinates relative to the earth's frame of reference.
Also, aside from gravitational effects, how is space-time dependent on position?
Of course the fact that the budget deficit is shrinking as revenues go up doesn't fit very well with people's argument that the tax cuts should be rescinded,
No. The fact that there is a deficit at all fits perfectly well with the argument that tax cuts should be rescinded.
If the national debt was zero then that would fit with the argument that taxes overall could be kept at the same level (although it might still be good to shift the tax burden to the very wealthy to deal with the increasing wealth inequality) but you're talking about the deficit here not even the national debt.
If we were talking about the national debt then I would agree that the national debt is so large that it is impossible to pay off the national debt in a single budget year. In that case, it would make sense to talk about the rate at which the national debt was growing or shrinking. On the other hand, when it comes to the deficit, there should be very little inertia. In fact, the average deficit should be negative (i.e. running a surplus on average) with some years running a slight surplus and other years running a slight deficit - we need the surplus to pay off the national debt.
The Federal government is making more money than it's ever made before.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by this. The fact that the government is running a deficit means that the government is going further into debt. Going further into debt hardly seems like "making money". You may mean that the raw revenues have increased but the raw expenditures have increased even more (or there wouldn't be a deficit).
Anyway, under Clinton the deficit was (depending on your accounting) actually eliminated so, over the long term, the fact that there's a deficit at all makes it hard to claim that the deficit is less now than it was under Clinton. If the deficit had been decreasing ever since Clinton left office then we'd be running a sizable yearly surplus - which would be a good thing because then we'd actually be paying down the national debt.
This is demonstrably false. Beating Carnot's theorem does not imply 100 percent (or greater) efficiency. The 2nd law would still be preserved.
Let's say you have a heat reservoir (e.g. a coal fire) and a cold reservoir (e.g. a cooling tower). You could just let the heat from the hot reservoir flow to the cold reservoir with nothing else happening. You could also set up a steam engine so that the flow of heat from the hot reservoir to the cold reservoir caused some of the heat to be "converted" to mechanical energy (or electrical energy or something equivalent). Now, ideally you would want as little heat as possible to flow between the reservoirs with as much heat as possible being converted to mechanical energy. Carnot's Theorem places an upper limit on how "efficient" this process can be. Basically, the smaller the difference in temperature between the two reservoirs the more
heat will flow between the reservoirs and the less heat will be converted to mechanical energy.
Let's now consider a different scenario. Suppose you have some mechnical energy (e.g. some electricity) and you want to create a temperature difference between two heat reservoirs (e.g. you want to air condition your apartment). In this case, you want to do as little work as possible (keep the electric bill low) while moving as much heat from the cooler reservoir up to the hotter reservoir (moving the heat out of your apartment). Basically, you want to minimize the "conversion" of mechanical work to heat while maximizing the flow of heat between the reservoirs. Carnot's Theorem also applies here. You have to do less work to move heat between reservoirs that are at almost the same temperature and you have to do more work to move heat between reservoirs that are at very different temperatures.
For the second part of Carnot's Theorem, imagine that you found one (reversible) process where there was a lot of heat flow between the reservoirs for a given amount heat-work conversion and another (reversible) process where there was very little heat flow for a given amount of heat-work conversion - assuming the same temperature difference between heat reservoirs for both processes. You could hook these two processes together and have a perpetual motion machine of the second kind.
To put it another way, if you could find either an air conditioner or a power plant that was not limited by the Carnot Theorem then you could use your air conditioner to generate the temperature difference to run your power plant and you could use the electricity from your power plant to run your air conditioner all while having electricity left over to power your television (i.e. you'd get free energy from your power plant - no more having to burn coal).
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Given the poor quality of the questions in that poll, almost any results are possible.
On the subject of poor quality questions, one of the the questions to test the public's knowledge of science was
Electrons are smaller than atoms. (True/False)
46% of the general public said true and, at first, I was thinking that for more than half of the general public to not understand about atoms and electrons was a pretty poor showing.
But then I got to thinking about whether an electron is, in fact, smaller than an atom. Sure, the rest mass of an electron is much smaller than the rest mass of an atom. Maybe that's what the question was trying to ask. But the way the question is worded seems to imply a spatial size. When you're dealing with objects as light as electrons, the whole notion of size is non-intuitive (probability distributions described by wave functions).
Maybe they had their reasons for not simply asking whether an electron was more massive than an atom - or maybe whoever put the survey together some gaps in their own science education.
I'm no physicist either but what you say sounds right at a practical level.
At a theoretical level, I strongly suspect that everything would cancel out. That is, as long as the magnetization is spherically symmetric, there will be no magnetic field outside the sphere.
I'm sure I'm ascribing an incorrect visualization to the phenomena, but my image of a magnetic pole is that of a motion in liquid - like a propeller in water - ...
Just to add my two cents, I visualize a magnetic field as three superimposed scalar fields of potential energy.
Classically, potential energy is the integral of force with respect to distance or, equivalently, force is the derivative of potential energy with respect to distance. To use slightly more sophisticated language, force is the gradient of the potential. In three dimensions, imagine a room with hot spots and cold spots. The temperature would correspond to the (scalar) potential energy (field) and arrows indicating changes from hot to cold would correspond to the (vector) force field.
Anyway, an electric field is a force field (rather than a potential (energy) field). The vectors of an electric field give the force on a test charge.
In contrast, a magnetic field is (the superposition of) three potential (energy) fields. Essentially, the orientation of the test magnetic dipole selects which of the three potential energy fields the dipole is interacting with. Further, to rotate the magnetic dipole requires exactly as much energy as the difference between the potential energy fields that are selected.
So, anyway once the orientation of the magnetic dipole has selected a particular combination of the three potential fields to interact with, the translational (as opposed to rotational) force on the dipole will actually be a combination of the gradients of those three potential fields.
To summarize, electric fields give the force on a test particle while a magnetic fields give the (potential) energy of a test particle.
Sure, the equations would be symmetrical, but since the field is not necessarily continuous,...
I was wondering similar things myself but then I got to thinking that the field would only be discontinuous in the classical approximation of a point "charge" and that you'd have to mess with quantum and wave functions to really understand what was going on.
... you could get energy for nothing (imagine that monopole following the field lines around a current carrying wire, getting faster and faster because of the infinite potential in the wire.)
The question of how a magnetic monopole would interact with an external magnetic field is quite interesting but also rather tricky. I assume that there are physicists who have worked it all out precisely but, just off the top of my head, it's not obvious to me what would happen.
Whereas an electric field can be thought of as the force on a test (electric) charge, the meaning of a magnetic field is quite a bit more complicated. For one thing, the force depends on the orientation of the test dipole but, more fundamentally, in a certain informal sense, it is actually the gradient of the magnetic field that determines the force on the dipole.
That is, the magnetic field vectors themselves don't actually indicate the direction of force on a test dipole. In particular, a spatially uniform field (for example, inside a solenoid) will not actually exert any force on a test dipole.
So, what happens to a magnetic monopole in an external magnetic field? The more I think about it the more I realize that I have no idea.
Bigger than that... A real magnetic monopole means real over-unity generators (aka "perpetual motion", aka "free energy").
I had actually been wondering about that myself. Do you have a reference? I did some google searches and looked over the Wikipedia page on magnetic monopoles but didn't see anything about magnetic monopoles violating the laws of thermodynamics.
There's a chance that a magnetic monopole might allow static magnetic levitation (Earnshaw's Theorem) but I haven't actually seen anything definitive on that either so it's pure speculation on my part.
All Biology is today is memorizing where a heart is in a cat, pig, frog, etc. And memorizing muscles, bones, and classifying animals.
One definition of science is that it is the matching of logical models (theories) to patterns of observations (facts). Some scientists focus on the logical models (the theorists) and some scientists focus on the patterns of observations (the experimentalists).
Any competent instructor (even at the high school level) will discuss both the models and the observations. A competent biology instructor will not only discuss that anatomy of various organisms but will also discuss the models the explain the similarities (generally, common ancestry and similar living environment; that is, evolution). Further more, a competent biology instructor will present classification schemes in the context of evolution: "this organism is classified with these other organisms because they have common ancestry."
Maybe Palin doesn't care if high biology instructors are even halfway competent - but I sure do and I'm going to taken that into account when I decide who to support politically.
A good government is a boring government. A good government gets the basics rights and makes decisions on the basis of impartial analysis of factual observation (not gut feelings and radical ideology).
The basics:
The details:
The bottom line is that, if I was president, it wouldn't be about what I wanted - it would be about what the people wanted. It wouldn't be about what I (and my "gut") thought would work to achieve - it would be about what an impartial analysis of factual observations thought would work.
Actually, it would.
Imagine that there are enough people wanting to get from point A to point B on road X that the flow rate on road X has to be 5 cars/second. That means that the traffic density (say cars/mile) times the traffic speed (say miles/second) has to be 5 cars/second. In our current example of requiring a flow rate of 5 cars/second, a speed of 60 mph (1/60 mile/second) would require a density of 300 cars/mile (one car every 17 feet, on average).
If we doubled the speed to 120 mph then we could achieve the desired flow rate with a density of one car every 34 feet of, if we could somehow achieve a density of one car every 8 feet, then we could reduce the speed to 30 mph and still achieve the desired flow rate. Obviously, a better solution is to increase the number of lanes.
Anyway, back to the original question, increasing following distance does increase congestion - but, in my opinion, the added safety more than makes up for the increased travel times.
I haven't tried kite surfing myself but, years ago, my dad experimented with using a steerable kite to pull the family canoe. The maximum pull was achieved when the kite was steered back and forth just above the water - but, naturally, that increased the risk of crashing the kite.
From what I've seen of kite boarders, it's the same kind of thing. If they just let go of the controls and allow the kite to level out overhead then the kite is quite stable - but when they want maximum pull they skim the kite along the surface of the water dramatically increasing the risk of crashing the kite.
I suspect that the reason the sky sails are flown so high is stability rather than maximizing the pull.
Is it any less of a flawed axiom to assume that elected leaders are, at their core, good?
An idea that seems to be popular with conservatives is that society needs a strong authority hierarchy where the good people at the top of the hierarchy control the bad people at the bottom of the hierarchy. This allows them to justify advancement though obedience because in their view the obedience to ones superior represents obedience to a higher moral authority.
The alternate view is that some people are good in some ways some of the time and that when one person is put in control of other people their needs to be a system in place to prevent the person with authority from abusing those under them.
Certainly, the modern representative democracies (what some would call "republics") do have substantial systems in place to prevent abuse of authority. It is not clear to me though that these systems would be any less effective at preventing abuses in a direct democracy than in a representative democracy. For example, it would be just as unconstitutional to pass a law limiting free speech in a direct democracy as in a representative democracy.
As you allude to indirectly, most people simply don't have time to make fully informed decisions on most issues. If a direct democracy system did become widespread, I would expect to see a "free market" of organizations that would issue a series of "vote recommendations". That is, a particular constituent would sign up with an organization that matched his/her preferences and then that organization would vote on his/her behalf.
If these things were really supported by the majority of the population in Australia then one would expect Australians to elect senators who held these positions. That is, there is no general reason to think that indirect democracy is less susceptible to tyranny of the majority than direct democracy.
In theory, the rights of minorities are guaranteed by the concepts of "rights" - such as equal protection under law. As the practice of slavery in the USA demonstrated, even having constitutionally guaranteed rights does not prevent tyranny of the majority.
The only situation where the least common denominator would be disproportionally represented would be on obscure issues that most people didn't have time to understand or care about.
For that reason, I would propose a modified system where the default is that the senator makes the choice but where there is a mechanism for people to override the senator on issues that they cared about. In the ideal system, a senator would have as many votes as the number of his constituents. For the issues that a constituent cared about the constituent would be able to specify his vote directly but for other issues the constituent would simply let the senator decide on his behalf.
The 10% number sounds kind of arbitrary to me but there's a more general way to achieve something similar to what you're proposing.
Require that the law treat everyone equally unless each of the unequal parties separately approve of the law. In your example, tall black men would only have to pay for the education of short Asian women if the majority of tall black men, the majority of short Asian women and the majority of everyone else each separately approved of the law.
A more realistic example would be the general population providing assistance to a disabled segment of the population.
Your attitude highlights an important difference between the kinds of people who are labeled conservatives and the kinds of people who are labeled liberals.
The people I know who are the most fervent supporters of the Bush administration are all closely associated with organizations that have a strong authority hierarchy (e.g. the military and the kinds of churches where the minister tells you what is right and wrong).
Modern conservatives believe that a properly functioning society requires a strong authority hierarchy where the good people at the top of the hierarchy control the bad people at the bottom of the hierarchy. In order to move up the hierarchy and gain authority you have to demonstrate that you are a good person. In order to demonstrate that you are a good person you have to obey your superiors who are above you in the hierarchy because they are better than you.
In contrast, modern liberals believe that sometimes authority is necessary but that everyone is human and flawed - "power corrupts". The liberals believe that the important thing is to make sure that those who have power are not abusing those who do not have power (they look at relationships going down the hierarchy).
Conservatives believe that the important thing is to make sure that those who do not have power are obedient to those who do have power (they look at relationships going up the hierarchy). This is illustrated by Monica Lewinsky scandal. Conservatives were not outraged due to their concern that Bill Clinton had hurt Monica Lewinsky. They were not outraged because of their deep compassion and sympathy for Bill's wife Hillary. Instead, they were outraged that Bill Clinton had failed to obey a standard of conduct laid down by a higher authority (whether that higher authority was the church or the implied wishes of the founding fathers depended on the particular conservative).
Anyway, in the conservative analysis what matters is that you had a manager at GameStop who was not obeying the proper authority. In the liberal analysis, though, things get complicated. The manager had a position of authority over the children so the question is whether he was using that authority to hurt the children. You could argue it either way. While he was taking away the children's freedom which is generally bad, it is also recognized that children may sometimes need their freedoms restricted.
Well, sure. We can find even more extreme examples than that. How about the gun store manager who refuses to sell a gun to someone who says he intends to use it to kill his wife? How about the hospital employee who refuses to treat a patient who's dying of a heart attack because the patient is Jewish? Sometimes it's good to refuse service and sometimes it's bad.
With this GameStop thing, the conservative analysis looks up the hierarchy (how did it affect the corporate profits) and the liberal analysis looks down the hierarchy (how did it affect the children).
I think what you mean here is "full control" and I'd actually agree with you that children should not have full control. On the other hand, it would also be a huge mistake to give them "no control".
The way I see it, you set boundaries but you allow them freedom within those boundaries. Maybe you let them play outside - but you don't let them play in traffic. Maybe you let them choose what they want to have for breakfast but you don't let them have a beer and a smoke for breakfast - they can do that when they're 30.
The religion question is tricky. Should a child be forced to go to church? Should a child be forced to "believe in Jesus"? It's not like the child is going to be irreparably harmed by not going to church (or not "believing in Jesus") so there's no practical need to force the child to go to church. On the other hand, there are plenty of people who were forced to go to church as children who more or less turned out OK - though there may be a tendency, later in life to imitate the authoritarian streak of their parents.
My answer if that if a child has extremely strong feelings about not wanting to go to church then it's probably not a good idea to force it. If it's a young child then most young children want to do things with their parents so serious resistance could indicate that the child is being abused by the priest. If it's a teenage child then it's probably time for the child to be making some of their own decisions about religion.
But before you confidently lead everyone off the cliff you better be really sure that your confidence hasn't dissuaded your followers from telling you that there's actually another way, that you haven't thought of, that will get everyone home safely.
I think you have to be careful what you mean by evolution.
At one extreme you have the idea that organisms adapt to their environment over the course of many generations. To disagree with this kind of evolution is to disagree with factual observation.
At the other extreme you have evolution as an explanation for the origin of life on the earth with the further inference that there is no god, life has no purpose and free will is an illusion. Even a great many serious scientists are hesitant to claim that life has no purpose and that free will is an illusion - despite the fact that an evolutionary origin of life makes that likely.
Now, I know that some people will say the the purpose of life is to be evolutionarily successful but that's like saying that the purpose of a ball is to fall under the influence of gravity. Evolution isn't a purpose, it's just something that happens.
Personally, I'd suggest going for more interesting questions:
"Would you live your life any differently if you knew for certain that there was no god?"
"What goals (if any) would you set for yourself if you knew for certain that life had no fundamental purpose?"
"What if it turns out that free will is an illusion? How would that change your views on concepts of heaven and hell?"
From an article in the New York Times:
Judge Batchelder was appointed by President George Bush, Judge Gibbons by President George W. Bush and Judge Gilman by President Bill Clinton. Judge Taylor, the district court judge, was appointed by President Jimmy Carter.
Judge Batchelder (George Bush) wrote the majority opinion, Judge Gibbons (George W. Bush) concurred with the majority, and Judge Gilman (Bill Clinton) dissented. Judge Taylor (Jimmy Carter) was the district court judge who was over-ruled.
Well, in practice it can be quite difficult to reward innovation in a meaningful way. The current practice is for the government to impose artificial monopolies (patents, copyrights, etc.) but it's difficult to determine in a natural way how severe the monopoly should be.
Should the monopoly last 10 years or 100 years? Should the monopoly prevent anyone else from solving the problem at all or should the monopoly allow anyone else to solve the problem as long as the solution is not exactly the same? Does it matter if the solution is so novel that no one else would have thought of it in 100 years or if the solution is so obvious that there were dozens of other organizations that would have developed exactly the same solution within a few months of each other?
You can try to have a free market for "intellectual property" but, in the end, it's some government bureaucrat who (more or less arbitrarily) decides the essential features of that market.
More broadly, there are many examples of services that become extremely cumbersome when forced into a "free market" framework. An obvious example is the fire department. You don't really want to be shopping shop around the free market on the rare occasions that your house is burning down. Scientific research is not as immediate as a house fire so it's easier to "let the free market deal with it". In the end, though, if you want the benefits of scientific research then you're going to have to pay for it - and there are compelling reasons to think that some sort of government funding is the least cumbersome method of funding scientific research.
That's not to say that the current model of government funding for scientific research could not be substantially improved - just that the "free market" isn't some magical solution for funding scientific research efficiently.
Grants are already quite competitive but let's try some numbers.
Let's say that it take $1 million to achieve a particular milestone and that there are 10 organizations that each have a roughly equal chance of achieving the milestone first. In order to provide adequate incentive, the payout for the prize will have to be $10 million (plus a risk premium - but we'll ignore that). That is, an organization that has a 1 in 10 chance of winning the prize for an outlay of $1 million will only compete if the prize exceeds $10 million. So, essentially, the government ends up paying $10 million for $1 million worth of research.
On the other hand, let's say the government holds a competition for grant funding. In that case, the government chooses the organization with the best chance of reaching the milestone efficiently and pays that organization $1 million to complete the research. In this case, the government is paying $1 million for $1 million worth of research.
Not only that, but if the government plays it's cards right, in the grants case the government can get the research released into the public domain. Strictly speaking, the government could also get the research released into the public domain in the prize case but in practice the organization is going to fight harder to lock the research away as it's own "intellectual property".
Speaking of intellectual property, that's really the key to understanding why the "free market" breaks down for scientific research. For physical property (e.g. an apple pie), there is a need to manufacture multiple apple pies. For intellectual property, once the first "apple pie" is "manufactured" then all the other pies become worthless. That is, you only need to make a scientific discovery once.
Well, we would still take into account the speed of light and the distance to Eta Car (relative to our reference frame). If Eta Car is 7,000 light years away (relative to our reference frame) and we observe the explosion now then, in our reference frame, the explosion happened 7,000 years ago.
There are standard definitions of the passage of time on earth so the time is not a problem, specifically. The tricky bit is that our notions of the distance to Eta Car may fluctuate a bit as we accelerate toward and away from Eta Car on our orbit around the sun. With a bit of care, though, we could probably average these fluctuations out - although that may not be strictly kosher from a relativistic point of view.
That's definitely an interesting point. Without knowing Eta Carinae's relative velocity and acceleration, it's possible that from Eta Carinae's perspective (frame of reference), the earth will observe the supernova 6,000 years after it happens but from the earth's perspective (frame of reference), the earth will observe the supernova 7,000 years after it happens.
I suppose that from a scientific perspective, there is a certain appeal to choosing a frame of reference relative to the event (Eta Carinae) rather than the observer (earth). On the other hand, I still think that, given the intended audience of the article (people on earth), the times are clearly being expressed relative to the earth reference frame.
And yet, somehow "we" (people on earth) manage to define the passage of time down to a very very small fraction of a second. While it is interesting to consider other perspectives, the summary in question was clearly referring to the frame of reference used to define the standard passage of time on earth (accelerations and all).It's an interesting point that an entity in a different frame of reference would not have quite the same ideas about space-time coordinates of this supernova happen but when you're reading an article written on earth for an entirely earth-based audience then it's pretty clear that the article is using space-time coordinates relative to the earth's frame of reference.
Also, aside from gravitational effects, how is space-time dependent on position?
No. The fact that there is a deficit at all fits perfectly well with the argument that tax cuts should be rescinded.
If the national debt was zero then that would fit with the argument that taxes overall could be kept at the same level (although it might still be good to shift the tax burden to the very wealthy to deal with the increasing wealth inequality) but you're talking about the deficit here not even the national debt.
If we were talking about the national debt then I would agree that the national debt is so large that it is impossible to pay off the national debt in a single budget year. In that case, it would make sense to talk about the rate at which the national debt was growing or shrinking. On the other hand, when it comes to the deficit, there should be very little inertia. In fact, the average deficit should be negative (i.e. running a surplus on average) with some years running a slight surplus and other years running a slight deficit - we need the surplus to pay off the national debt.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by this. The fact that the government is running a deficit means that the government is going further into debt. Going further into debt hardly seems like "making money". You may mean that the raw revenues have increased but the raw expenditures have increased even more (or there wouldn't be a deficit).
Anyway, under Clinton the deficit was (depending on your accounting) actually eliminated so, over the long term, the fact that there's a deficit at all makes it hard to claim that the deficit is less now than it was under Clinton. If the deficit had been decreasing ever since Clinton left office then we'd be running a sizable yearly surplus - which would be a good thing because then we'd actually be paying down the national debt.
Let's say you have a heat reservoir (e.g. a coal fire) and a cold reservoir (e.g. a cooling tower). You could just let the heat from the hot reservoir flow to the cold reservoir with nothing else happening. You could also set up a steam engine so that the flow of heat from the hot reservoir to the cold reservoir caused some of the heat to be "converted" to mechanical energy (or electrical energy or something equivalent). Now, ideally you would want as little heat as possible to flow between the reservoirs with as much heat as possible being converted to mechanical energy. Carnot's Theorem places an upper limit on how "efficient" this process can be. Basically, the smaller the difference in temperature between the two reservoirs the more heat will flow between the reservoirs and the less heat will be converted to mechanical energy.
Let's now consider a different scenario. Suppose you have some mechnical energy (e.g. some electricity) and you want to create a temperature difference between two heat reservoirs (e.g. you want to air condition your apartment). In this case, you want to do as little work as possible (keep the electric bill low) while moving as much heat from the cooler reservoir up to the hotter reservoir (moving the heat out of your apartment). Basically, you want to minimize the "conversion" of mechanical work to heat while maximizing the flow of heat between the reservoirs. Carnot's Theorem also applies here. You have to do less work to move heat between reservoirs that are at almost the same temperature and you have to do more work to move heat between reservoirs that are at very different temperatures.
For the second part of Carnot's Theorem, imagine that you found one (reversible) process where there was a lot of heat flow between the reservoirs for a given amount heat-work conversion and another (reversible) process where there was very little heat flow for a given amount of heat-work conversion - assuming the same temperature difference between heat reservoirs for both processes. You could hook these two processes together and have a perpetual motion machine of the second kind.
To put it another way, if you could find either an air conditioner or a power plant that was not limited by the Carnot Theorem then you could use your air conditioner to generate the temperature difference to run your power plant and you could use the electricity from your power plant to run your air conditioner all while having electricity left over to power your television (i.e. you'd get free energy from your power plant - no more having to burn coal).