This is kindof the definition of trivialize - make it seem as if there's no debate, because to you, there isn't. There is a debate (and has been for hundreds of years...) and so, you're trivializing it.
And while responses are found in philosophy texts, they all use logic on objects that can't support them - as you can find in any introductory mathematics text.
No, it doesn't. Perhaps if you IMPROPERLY define them...
That depends. Define omniscience, omnipotence, and omnibenevolence. If the definition you use is one that contains a contradiction, and the one I use does not, and they produce exactly the same results in all other contexts, how is mine incorrect and yours correct?
If you had some other "reason" why evil must exist, you'd have to show that; you can't just say, "There might be one, so we're going to assume God is anyway for some reason we don't know."
It's not an assumption. It's a definition of what good and evil are. None of the terms are well-defined. What you're looking for is a set of definitions that 1: are as close to the common definitions as possible, and 2: support logical statements. It's exactly the same as in physics - you have a common concept ("force") that when you exert force on something, it moves. What you're looking for is a rigorous definition of that concept that can exist inside a logical framework.
And we can easily imagine universes less evil, as you yourself suggested before. You can't say, "Well, they may be impossible, so we'll just assume they are." You have to demonstrate that.
Imagining doesn't make something plausible. I can imagine that I can breathe water. That doesn't make it plausible. Determining whether or not "less evil" Universes exist isn't the point. If a situation exists where omniscience, omnibenevolence, and omnipotence, and free will can all be satisfied, then there isn't a contradiction. All the contradiction shows is that the naive definitions of the above can't support a God.
However, they can't support anything at all. You can't have a naively omnipotent being, because he can't create what he can't create. You can't have a naively omniscient being, because he doesn't know what he doesn't know. Clearly the problem lies not with the definition of God, but with the definition of the 'omni' terms!
This is unsurprising, because, as I stated, the naive definitions of the above violate the fundamental set construction theorems, so using basic logic on them (unsurprisingly) fails. If you go look up the argument for why "the set of all sets is not a set", it's the exact same wording. Russell's paradox says "can there exist a set M such that A is in M if A does not contain A"? If M exists, then it is not a member of M. But if M is not a member of M, then it has to be a member of M, by the definition above. The exact same argument as above.
That's why the previous answer does work, and the arguments that people give against it are completely fallacious. They say "you're assuming things, you have to prove them" when the problem is that originally you assumed a definition of 'omni' that isn't workable. It's not an assumption. It's a redefinition to correct limitations of the original terms.
(at least, not unless you define them down to such an extent that they mean something else entirely).
This doesn't make any sense. The problem lies in the definition, because there's no extant rigorous logical definition. It's not like a bird. I can't define the sky to be red, and a blue bird to be blue, because there's an extant definition of blue which defines the two to be common. There's no such preexisting logical definition of the above.
Take omnipotence - the naive definition is "all-powerful" or, equivalently, "capable of anything." In set theory, you'd describe it as "the set of all actions."
How can the market be ripe for revival when it's not even dead?
The Japanese videogame market has been in decline since 1999. The US videogame market slowed (it might've actually declined, I can't remember) in 2005. Yes, a large portion of this is due to the fact that it was a transitional year, but they've had transitional years before that weren't nearly that bad.
This isn't the first (or second) time Nintendo's seen this trend.
It is bait and switch. They're told the "console-only" packages have sold out, but the bundles are available. They bait with the console-only, and attempt to switch to a higher-priced package when the consumer comes in.
And yes, it is illegal (at least in most states... I don't know if it's federal). The FTC has guides against it, and Best Buy violated a good number of them.
However, there are "CYA" wordings that most places use, although Best Buy might not have. Usually they'll say "stock limited to quantity on hand" or "limited quantity available". However, some of those memos specifically say "keep 3 or 4 on hand" which is definitely illegal in most states, as it clearly does not have enough to satisfy demand.
But I feel it necessary to point out the conflict between God's omnipotence, Free Will, and the Existance of Evil.
Oh, jeez, I nearly missed this one.
You've just trivialized a really, really difficult problem in philosophy: the problem of evil. It doesn't have a satisfactory answer, unlike what you're trying to say.
The problem arises from the fact that you've got three poorly-defined terms - omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent. Unsurprisingly, when you've got 3 poorly defined terms, you can get a contradiction.
If you properly define them, however, the contradiction can easily go away.
One easy answer to your above statement is this: you're assuming that it is possible to construct a Universe without evil. While you can imagine one, that doesn't mean that it's possible. (I can imagine myself travelling faster than light. That doesn't mean it's possible).
In fact, it's easy to reconcile the three if you believe that our Universe is the one of least evil. Given the lack of handy alternative Universes, it's difficult to disprove this statement (or support it, but it's a belief, not a hypothesis).
The other easy answers to your statement involve proper definitions of the other two terms.
Easier contradictions along the same line involve the question "can God create a rock that he cannot lift?" The answer there along the same lines as before is "there is no such thing as a rock that God cannot lift."
The problems all arise in poor semantics, and are all extraordinarily similar to problems in set theory (unsurprisingly) where the creation of an all-inclusive set fails the Zermelo-Frankel set construction axioms (specifically, the axiom of separation), leading to the wonderful statement "the set of all sets is not a set". The wording of the question above is almost entirely equivalent to Russell's paradox.
Unfortuantely, this idea of a "hidden determinism" is simply logically impossible, given what we currently know about quantum mechanics. Hidden variables simply don't work.
That's not what Bell's theorem says. Bell's theorem says that local hidden variables don't work. Global hidden variables still would. In fact, it's relatively easy to construct a global hidden variable theory that's indistinguishable from quantum mechanics. Occam's razor disfavors that hypothesis, but it certainly doesn't make it impossible.
Of course, at that point, you're arguing metaphysics - at which point, it's unsurprising that you've just justified a religious standpoint.
Either every single thing in it is literal (and the earth has four corners) or everything must be interpreted.
All language must be interpreted. Period.
The fact that allegory, metaphor, and simile exist at all is testament to that. To claim anything else is just silly. If I say "it rained today", you can take that literally. If I say "it rained cats and dogs today" you can't.
The Bible is full of allegory, metaphor, and simile. It must be interpreted. But claiming that you have to abandon all non-relativism (that is, that there's something fundamental there) is ludicrous. Just as with physics, just because relativity exists doesn't mean you can't construct invariant truths. You just have to know how to interpret the data you're given. That is, in fact, what theologians do - is try to understand the point of view of the people at the time to understand what they meant.
If ten thousand years from now, someone unearths this comment and sees "It rained cats and dogs," it's not like you can say "either you read it literally, or everything must be interpreted! Either it literally rained cats and dogs from the sky, or he could've been talking about the latest American Idol, and you'll never know!" To claim something like that completely trivializes the work that cultural anthropologists and theologians do. It's insulting.
I think the real question is "more 'fit' for what?"
A similar question is "are we really more fit?"
I don't think there's a proper answer to that. From a standpoint of society, we certainly are - we're easily able to adapt to situations that other animals can't as a society. But individually? If you dropped 1000 random humans into the African jungle one at a time, how many would survive? Repeat the experiment with 1000 African apes, and how many would survive? Does anyone really think the percentage for humans would be higher?
This raises an interesting question - is it possible for evolution to produce an "average" solution in one environment that's ridiculously good in other ones? Well, yes - it happens all the time. Kudzu. C. taxifolia. Rabbits (in Australia).
So, as you insinuated, the answer might be that we aren't more fit. It's quite possible (and has been suggested) that humanity was very near to extinction several times in Africa. It's only chance that humans left Africa, and found an environment that they could rapidly take over. Once in that easy-to-survive-in environment, we then developed the capability to deal with any environment as a society.
In addition, it's also difficult to say what would happen if humans weren't already here. Certainly we now prevent species from uncontrolled migration into non-native areas. See the above examples, where very, very aggressive stances are being taken to control those populations. It's tough to claim that we're "more fit" when we don't really know how fit other species are, given that we may be actively curtailing them doing the same actions that led to our own society.
By "object", I mean "astrophysical object." Heck, you can have relativistic dust grains in the vicinity of black holes, but I'm pretty sure that nowhere in the known Universe are you going to find a star passing by another star at near the speed of light.
Given that the experiment I work on is the Pierre Auger Observatory, I'm quite familiar with the 320 EeV particle.
Not that you have to go to 320 EeV to get a 0.577 c speed. For a proton, that's a Lorentz factor of ~1.15, which is an energy in the GeV range. That's nothing.
Here's a question (and it is a question): What's to say Sol isn't moving at.577c?
To an observer that's moving at.577c relative to us, it is.
do we really know what its absolute speed is?
There is no absolute speed. However, there are several useful frames of reference - heliocentric, where the Sun is at rest, galactic, where the Galaxy is at rest, supergalactic, where the Local Group is at rest, etc.
In all of those rest frames, there aren't any astrophysical objects which have a velocity of 0.577 c - the fastest is likely in the 1000 km/s range, which is 0.3% of the speed of light.
Note that there will be objects that have a relative velocity of 0.577c with respect to us. The expansion of the Universe means that objects very, very far away from us move very, very fast. So eventually, really, really far objects will be moving that fast. The thing to realize here is that that flow (Hubble flow) is away from us. Objects coming towards us will never be going that fast.
it is quite possible that attempting to implement an antigravity device
You're not building an antigravity device. The star acts as an 'antigravity' device, which is a crappy name for it anyway. Just think of it as "forward frame dragging". If a massive object travelling close to c moves close to you, it drags your frame of reference violently along with it. You're "riding its wake."
Now even when Dr. Felbers calculations are true, you'd first have to find a star speeding at a speed of 57%+ of lights speed(or accelerate one yourself:-P)
That, of course, is the key. Which... you won't find, as I don't think there's any astrophysical object travelling at 0.57c towards any other object. That'd be a ridiculously high peculiar velocity.
and in order to avoid the star smacking right into your spaceship, you'd have to have a speed of 0.57c already
Nonono - it's a cone in front of the star. So off-axis of the star's path, it'll still push objects. Directly on-axis to the object, they'll collide. They have to. We already collide objects at greater than 0.57c relative velocity.
This should be easy to check, as the article does say. Your immediate reaction might be "wait, we should know this, then, from particle accelerators."
Curiously enough, that's not true - we don't look at the forward region of particle collisions, because, well, it's not interesting to particle physics. Only the extreme off-axis particles have a ton of available energy to produce particles, and so we basically don't look at the forward particles at all.
There's an experiment (LHCf) planned for the LHC to look at this. Why? Because, curiously, there's another area of physics that seems to say "hey, we might not understand the extreme forward physics very well...": cosmic ray air shower simulations, which currently don't agree that well with actual experiments.
One wonders if this effect might actually be the cause of that disagreement...
because, of course, no physical phenomenon can operate only for masses travelling above a fixed speed like that because such a phenomenon would violate Lorentz invariance.
No. (For one thing, Cerenkov radiation is a physical phenomenon that operates only for masses travelling above a fixed speed.)
All this is saying is that if you've got an object (say object A) at rest, and another object (say object B) approaching object A at more than 0.577c in object A's reference frame, object A will be pushed forward (away from object B). Obviously if object A and object B are aligned exactly, they'll collide - but if object A is off-axis from object B, it will be "pushed along" with object B.
Since the relative velocity is measured in one object's rest frame, it's Lorentz invariant. (Object B sees object A approaching it at 0.577c, and sees object A pushing object B backwards).
It's very similar to frame dragging, actually. With frame dragging, there is likely a "critical rotational velocity" above which an object near the rotating object will be forced into an orbit. There's probably a "critical rotational velocity" above which an object deflects every incident object away from it.
And as with frame dragging, it likely exists for lower velocities - but the "push" is probably not along the axis of object A's direction, which means it won't "push" the object along.
This guy seems to be saying that if you have an anti-gravity machine, you could counteract that.
Nonono: he's saying that a mass travelling near the speed of light creates an "antigravity beam" in front of it. This sounds hokey, but it's not unprecedented - frame dragging is a similar situation where general relativity basically says that a moving body can "push" others nearby. So in this case the near-light-speed object is "dragging" its frame forward. Calling it an "antigravity beam" sounds wacko, but it's probably quite straightforward. It's almost like the objects would be riding the "wake" of the NLS object, caused by the fact that the object is moving faster than space can respond.
He's essentially saying that you can pretty much effortlessly accelerate something to really high velocities with little effort by hitching a ride on a bigger object.
(Where to find a star moving at greater than.577c is another question.)
Microwaves don't really litter the band anyway (they have to abide by the regulations as well) because the whole thing's a Faraday cage - hence the metal grill on the door.
They're cheap - in the US, they're about $20. You'll make that back in one winter month.
Also, it's not like you can't replace the old thermostat when you leave, and even if you didn't - what, the landlord is going to complain that you improved the place?
Older manual thermostats typically have a decent hysteresis time - they maintain temperature within 3 degrees. Electronic thermostats are much, much more accurate, and typically maintain temperature within a degree, or even half a degree. This alone can save quite a bit of money, and the house will be more comfortable as well.
The programmable ones that can lower and raise the temperature automatically are incredible money savers as well, but even if you have some weird objection to that, replace the old thermostats anyway.
1) Cell phones are the wrong frequency. They are 800, 900, 1800, or 1900 MHz depending on the service. To make water heat up, you need to be at the frequency water resonates which is 2.4GHz.
Why does this myth persist? I have no idea. Whenever it pops up, someone points out that it's not true. But it still persists. It doesn't even make sense, after all - microwaves heat dry things (like... plates) as well as wet things.
Microwaves work via dielectric heating, which is just the vibration of any electric dipole due to any electromagnetic radiation. Radiation in the gigahertz band is typical, but it's a wide band. Microwave ovens use 2450 MHz because it's in the ISM band.
Water does heat best, but that's because it's one of the strongest dipoles known to exist.
Water vapor has a resonant frequency at 22.235 GHz and 183 GHz. You can see the 22 GHz line in the graph on the linked page. Also of interest is the fact that clouds don't have that absorption feature because liquid water droplets are small compared to microwave wavelengths.
Note that if water's resonant frequency was 2450 MHz, absolutely no one would use that band, as you couldn't transmit anything on it, because water vapor in the air would be opaque to it.
Maintenance: 3 oil changes per year at $60 at Jiffy Lube plus misc. maintenance averaging $300 per year = $480/yr = $1.30 per day.
Car maintenance does not average $300/year. The typical amount that most suggest budgeting for car maintenance is $50/month, or $600/year. That's for a recent car. Double it for an older car.
Your other problem was that you treated the $15,000 initial cost as a recurring cost. It isn't, so you need to account for inflation, which is about 2% per year. So that's about $6.20 rather than $5.50.
But, of course, your biggest problem is this:
Car: 35 minutes per day transit time Public transit: 98 minutes per day
You pretty much can't do anything while you're in the car. That time is almost totally lost.
In public transportation, almost one hour a day is on the train. That time is not lost. You can do things during that time.
Treating your free time as profitable hours is also a mistake anyway (since you don't work 24 hours) because you can't earn money when you're not at work.
Unless your wheels are very badly lubricated, you're going to get a lot less friction from wheels than from skis.
You're assuming that the wheels can stay (mostly) above the surface. If they're digging and displacing a lot of ground (i.e. slipping constantly), you might as well use skis, as there's no reason to waste the energy in rolling resistance if you're going to slip no matter what.
Of course, the lunar rovers didn't seem to actually slip that much, so for most of the Moon, they're probably fine.
Er? Most computers have a slew of power-saving features on each chip. Unfortunately ACPI can be a bit buggy due to lack of information available on the chips themselves.
At the very least, users concerned about power management should make sure that the idle loop uses HLT (if that works, which it should on most modern PCs), and a little poking around like here for old Athlons and you can usually find ways to kick your computer into a much lower-power state.
And I cannot understand why people think Sleep mode is wasteful. Plenty of people leave their computers on all the time. I'd rather have them put them in Sleep when they're not used than leave them on. Sure, I'd rather them turn them off, but I'd like a million dollars, too.
The problem with this is that while it seems simple, we don't understand ecology nearly well enough to guarantee that this would be safe.
It's not that I don't agree there are scientific solutions. Of course there are. But any biological solution is going to have side effects. For one, can the ocean ecosystem handle the excess injection of nutrients? Can it handle the additional dead material when the nutrients stop? Are the risks worth the savings in cost from more direct, controlled measures?
It wouldn't be the first time we tried to fix an ecological disaster with ecology, only to have it backfire (violently) in our faces.
And of course, it's all completely pointless unless the carbon emissions are curtailed - trying to maintain an artificial equilibrium like that is completely untenable. Plus the issue that we're not sure where 40% of the carbon is going, so it's a little dangerous to assume that since it doesn't go into the atmosphere, nothing bad is happening.
That's what I saw at my local Home Depot (Energizer). I couldn't believe it. I'm just happy that I was wrong and other better batteries exists.
There are high-capacity and low-capacity cells available of all types. The low-capacity ones are nice if you have something like, say a remote control or a clock where it draws virtually nothing (though low-capacity C/D cells are a little silly...). You were probably comparing a low-capacity C to a high-capacity AA.
You could've also just slipped a decimal place.
Anyway, comparing battery capacity based on one number is really, really (really really) bad. Battery runtime is dependent on a lot of things - temperature, current draw, load type, etc.
If you're comparing NiMH cells to alkaline, you should additionally multiply the mAH rating times the voltage to get milliwatt-hours, as NiMH batteries run at 1.2V and alkaline at 1.5V.
Actually, you can't even do that: you're assuming that it has a constant voltage for its current draw over its lifespan. That is, an alkaline battery at half-charge probably has 1.2V across its terminals. An alkaline battery at 10% charge might only have 0.9V across its terminals. Whereas a NiMH battery at half charge may have 1.15V, and at 10% charge might have 1.10V.
Then again, it's even worse than that - alkalines and NiMHs have different internal resistances and behaviors, and so they've got different charge capacity based on discharge rates. Alkalines have ridiculous charge capacity (greater than 3000 mAh) for low discharge current, but it drops off very fast at high current draw. This is why a NiMH has such a higher apparent capacity for high-draw devices compared to an alkaline.
Simple answer: weigh the batteries inside a given type (alkaline/lithium ion/NiMH). A lot of the material is the electrolyte, and so a higher weight means a higher stored charge. It's not perfect, but it's simple and easy. You can buy C/D batteries that have higher capacity than AA, and lower capacity than a high-capacity AA.
There have been times in the planet's past (within the last 100,000) years where the climate was MUCH warmer with much higher concentrations of C02.
Carbon dioxide levels are at their highest from the last twenty million years. That's 20,000,000 years. You know, 200 times longer than your 100,000 number.
Here's a chart for the last 400,000 years. See the gigantic spike on the left? That's us.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a perfectly satisfactory answer to me!
This is kindof the definition of trivialize - make it seem as if there's no debate, because to you, there isn't. There is a debate (and has been for hundreds of years...) and so, you're trivializing it.
And while responses are found in philosophy texts, they all use logic on objects that can't support them - as you can find in any introductory mathematics text.
No, it doesn't. Perhaps if you IMPROPERLY define them...
That depends. Define omniscience, omnipotence, and omnibenevolence. If the definition you use is one that contains a contradiction, and the one I use does not, and they produce exactly the same results in all other contexts, how is mine incorrect and yours correct?
If you had some other "reason" why evil must exist, you'd have to show that; you can't just say, "There might be one, so we're going to assume God is anyway for some reason we don't know."
It's not an assumption. It's a definition of what good and evil are. None of the terms are well-defined. What you're looking for is a set of definitions that 1: are as close to the common definitions as possible, and 2: support logical statements. It's exactly the same as in physics - you have a common concept ("force") that when you exert force on something, it moves. What you're looking for is a rigorous definition of that concept that can exist inside a logical framework.
And we can easily imagine universes less evil, as you yourself suggested before. You can't say, "Well, they may be impossible, so we'll just assume they are." You have to demonstrate that.
Imagining doesn't make something plausible. I can imagine that I can breathe water. That doesn't make it plausible. Determining whether or not "less evil" Universes exist isn't the point. If a situation exists where omniscience, omnibenevolence, and omnipotence, and free will can all be satisfied, then there isn't a contradiction. All the contradiction shows is that the naive definitions of the above can't support a God.
However, they can't support anything at all. You can't have a naively omnipotent being, because he can't create what he can't create. You can't have a naively omniscient being, because he doesn't know what he doesn't know. Clearly the problem lies not with the definition of God, but with the definition of the 'omni' terms!
This is unsurprising, because, as I stated, the naive definitions of the above violate the fundamental set construction theorems, so using basic logic on them (unsurprisingly) fails. If you go look up the argument for why "the set of all sets is not a set", it's the exact same wording . Russell's paradox says "can there exist a set M such that A is in M if A does not contain A"? If M exists, then it is not a member of M. But if M is not a member of M, then it has to be a member of M, by the definition above. The exact same argument as above.
That's why the previous answer does work, and the arguments that people give against it are completely fallacious. They say "you're assuming things, you have to prove them" when the problem is that originally you assumed a definition of 'omni' that isn't workable. It's not an assumption. It's a redefinition to correct limitations of the original terms.
(at least, not unless you define them down to such an extent that they mean something else entirely).
This doesn't make any sense. The problem lies in the definition, because there's no extant rigorous logical definition. It's not like a bird. I can't define the sky to be red, and a blue bird to be blue, because there's an extant definition of blue which defines the two to be common. There's no such preexisting logical definition of the above.
Take omnipotence - the naive definition is "all-powerful" or, equivalently, "capable of anything." In set theory, you'd describe it as "the set of all actions."
How can the market be ripe for revival when it's not even dead?
The Japanese videogame market has been in decline since 1999. The US videogame market slowed (it might've actually declined, I can't remember) in 2005. Yes, a large portion of this is due to the fact that it was a transitional year, but they've had transitional years before that weren't nearly that bad.
This isn't the first (or second) time Nintendo's seen this trend.
It is bait and switch. They're told the "console-only" packages have sold out, but the bundles are available. They bait with the console-only, and attempt to switch to a higher-priced package when the consumer comes in.
And yes, it is illegal (at least in most states... I don't know if it's federal). The FTC has guides against it, and Best Buy violated a good number of them.
However, there are "CYA" wordings that most places use, although Best Buy might not have. Usually they'll say "stock limited to quantity on hand" or "limited quantity available". However, some of those memos specifically say "keep 3 or 4 on hand" which is definitely illegal in most states, as it clearly does not have enough to satisfy demand.
But I feel it necessary to point out the conflict between God's omnipotence, Free Will, and the Existance of Evil.
Oh, jeez, I nearly missed this one.
You've just trivialized a really, really difficult problem in philosophy: the problem of evil. It doesn't have a satisfactory answer, unlike what you're trying to say.
The problem arises from the fact that you've got three poorly-defined terms - omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent. Unsurprisingly, when you've got 3 poorly defined terms, you can get a contradiction.
If you properly define them, however, the contradiction can easily go away.
One easy answer to your above statement is this: you're assuming that it is possible to construct a Universe without evil. While you can imagine one, that doesn't mean that it's possible. (I can imagine myself travelling faster than light. That doesn't mean it's possible).
In fact, it's easy to reconcile the three if you believe that our Universe is the one of least evil. Given the lack of handy alternative Universes, it's difficult to disprove this statement (or support it, but it's a belief, not a hypothesis).
The other easy answers to your statement involve proper definitions of the other two terms.
Easier contradictions along the same line involve the question "can God create a rock that he cannot lift?" The answer there along the same lines as before is "there is no such thing as a rock that God cannot lift."
The problems all arise in poor semantics, and are all extraordinarily similar to problems in set theory (unsurprisingly) where the creation of an all-inclusive set fails the Zermelo-Frankel set construction axioms (specifically, the axiom of separation), leading to the wonderful statement "the set of all sets is not a set". The wording of the question above is almost entirely equivalent to Russell's paradox.
Unfortuantely, this idea of a "hidden determinism" is simply logically impossible, given what we currently know about quantum mechanics. Hidden variables simply don't work.
That's not what Bell's theorem says. Bell's theorem says that local hidden variables don't work. Global hidden variables still would. In fact, it's relatively easy to construct a global hidden variable theory that's indistinguishable from quantum mechanics. Occam's razor disfavors that hypothesis, but it certainly doesn't make it impossible.
Of course, at that point, you're arguing metaphysics - at which point, it's unsurprising that you've just justified a religious standpoint.
Either every single thing in it is literal (and the earth has four corners) or everything must be interpreted.
All language must be interpreted. Period.
The fact that allegory, metaphor, and simile exist at all is testament to that. To claim anything else is just silly. If I say "it rained today", you can take that literally. If I say "it rained cats and dogs today" you can't.
The Bible is full of allegory, metaphor, and simile. It must be interpreted. But claiming that you have to abandon all non-relativism (that is, that there's something fundamental there) is ludicrous. Just as with physics, just because relativity exists doesn't mean you can't construct invariant truths. You just have to know how to interpret the data you're given. That is, in fact, what theologians do - is try to understand the point of view of the people at the time to understand what they meant.
If ten thousand years from now, someone unearths this comment and sees "It rained cats and dogs," it's not like you can say "either you read it literally, or everything must be interpreted! Either it literally rained cats and dogs from the sky, or he could've been talking about the latest American Idol, and you'll never know!" To claim something like that completely trivializes the work that cultural anthropologists and theologians do. It's insulting.
I think the real question is "more 'fit' for what?"
A similar question is "are we really more fit?"
I don't think there's a proper answer to that. From a standpoint of society, we certainly are - we're easily able to adapt to situations that other animals can't as a society. But individually? If you dropped 1000 random humans into the African jungle one at a time, how many would survive? Repeat the experiment with 1000 African apes, and how many would survive? Does anyone really think the percentage for humans would be higher?
This raises an interesting question - is it possible for evolution to produce an "average" solution in one environment that's ridiculously good in other ones? Well, yes - it happens all the time. Kudzu. C. taxifolia. Rabbits (in Australia).
So, as you insinuated, the answer might be that we aren't more fit. It's quite possible (and has been suggested) that humanity was very near to extinction several times in Africa. It's only chance that humans left Africa, and found an environment that they could rapidly take over. Once in that easy-to-survive-in environment, we then developed the capability to deal with any environment as a society.
In addition, it's also difficult to say what would happen if humans weren't already here. Certainly we now prevent species from uncontrolled migration into non-native areas. See the above examples, where very, very aggressive stances are being taken to control those populations. It's tough to claim that we're "more fit" when we don't really know how fit other species are, given that we may be actively curtailing them doing the same actions that led to our own society.
By "object", I mean "astrophysical object." Heck, you can have relativistic dust grains in the vicinity of black holes, but I'm pretty sure that nowhere in the known Universe are you going to find a star passing by another star at near the speed of light.
Given that the experiment I work on is the Pierre Auger Observatory, I'm quite familiar with the 320 EeV particle.
Not that you have to go to 320 EeV to get a 0.577 c speed. For a proton, that's a Lorentz factor of ~1.15, which is an energy in the GeV range. That's nothing.
Here's a question (and it is a question): What's to say Sol isn't moving at .577c?
.577c relative to us, it is.
To an observer that's moving at
do we really know what its absolute speed is?
There is no absolute speed. However, there are several useful frames of reference - heliocentric, where the Sun is at rest, galactic, where the Galaxy is at rest, supergalactic, where the Local Group is at rest, etc.
In all of those rest frames, there aren't any astrophysical objects which have a velocity of 0.577 c - the fastest is likely in the 1000 km/s range, which is 0.3% of the speed of light.
Note that there will be objects that have a relative velocity of 0.577c with respect to us. The expansion of the Universe means that objects very, very far away from us move very, very fast. So eventually, really, really far objects will be moving that fast. The thing to realize here is that that flow (Hubble flow) is away from us. Objects coming towards us will never be going that fast.
it is quite possible that attempting to implement an antigravity device
:-P)
You're not building an antigravity device. The star acts as an 'antigravity' device, which is a crappy name for it anyway. Just think of it as "forward frame dragging". If a massive object travelling close to c moves close to you, it drags your frame of reference violently along with it. You're "riding its wake."
Now even when Dr. Felbers calculations are true, you'd first have to find a star speeding at a speed of 57%+ of lights speed(or accelerate one yourself
That, of course, is the key. Which... you won't find, as I don't think there's any astrophysical object travelling at 0.57c towards any other object. That'd be a ridiculously high peculiar velocity.
and in order to avoid the star smacking right into your spaceship, you'd have to have a speed of 0.57c already
Nonono - it's a cone in front of the star. So off-axis of the star's path, it'll still push objects. Directly on-axis to the object, they'll collide. They have to. We already collide objects at greater than 0.57c relative velocity.
This should be easy to check, as the article does say. Your immediate reaction might be "wait, we should know this, then, from particle accelerators."
Curiously enough, that's not true - we don't look at the forward region of particle collisions, because, well, it's not interesting to particle physics. Only the extreme off-axis particles have a ton of available energy to produce particles, and so we basically don't look at the forward particles at all.
There's an experiment (LHCf) planned for the LHC to look at this. Why? Because, curiously, there's another area of physics that seems to say "hey, we might not understand the extreme forward physics very well...": cosmic ray air shower simulations, which currently don't agree that well with actual experiments.
One wonders if this effect might actually be the cause of that disagreement...
If you see that objects in front of you are being repulsed you must be travelling at c/sqrt(3).
You won't see an object being repulsed. You'll see you being repulsed and you'll see an object travelling faster than c/sqrt(3) coming towards you.
No violation of special relativity. You see the same thing from both reference frames.
because, of course, no physical phenomenon can operate only for masses travelling above a fixed speed like that because such a phenomenon would violate Lorentz invariance.
No. (For one thing, Cerenkov radiation is a physical phenomenon that operates only for masses travelling above a fixed speed.)
All this is saying is that if you've got an object (say object A) at rest, and another object (say object B) approaching object A at more than 0.577c in object A's reference frame, object A will be pushed forward (away from object B). Obviously if object A and object B are aligned exactly, they'll collide - but if object A is off-axis from object B, it will be "pushed along" with object B.
Since the relative velocity is measured in one object's rest frame, it's Lorentz invariant. (Object B sees object A approaching it at 0.577c, and sees object A pushing object B backwards).
It's very similar to frame dragging, actually. With frame dragging, there is likely a "critical rotational velocity" above which an object near the rotating object will be forced into an orbit. There's probably a "critical rotational velocity" above which an object deflects every incident object away from it.
And as with frame dragging, it likely exists for lower velocities - but the "push" is probably not along the axis of object A's direction, which means it won't "push" the object along.
This guy seems to be saying that if you have an anti-gravity machine, you could counteract that.
.577c is another question.)
Nonono: he's saying that a mass travelling near the speed of light creates an "antigravity beam" in front of it. This sounds hokey, but it's not unprecedented - frame dragging is a similar situation where general relativity basically says that a moving body can "push" others nearby. So in this case the near-light-speed object is "dragging" its frame forward. Calling it an "antigravity beam" sounds wacko, but it's probably quite straightforward. It's almost like the objects would be riding the "wake" of the NLS object, caused by the fact that the object is moving faster than space can respond.
He's essentially saying that you can pretty much effortlessly accelerate something to really high velocities with little effort by hitching a ride on a bigger object.
(Where to find a star moving at greater than
Are you sure? When were the ISM bands defined?
Microwaves don't really litter the band anyway (they have to abide by the regulations as well) because the whole thing's a Faraday cage - hence the metal grill on the door.
get an electonic thermostat if you can
Get an electronic thermostat, period.
They're cheap - in the US, they're about $20. You'll make that back in one winter month.
Also, it's not like you can't replace the old thermostat when you leave, and even if you didn't - what, the landlord is going to complain that you improved the place?
Older manual thermostats typically have a decent hysteresis time - they maintain temperature within 3 degrees. Electronic thermostats are much, much more accurate, and typically maintain temperature within a degree, or even half a degree. This alone can save quite a bit of money, and the house will be more comfortable as well.
The programmable ones that can lower and raise the temperature automatically are incredible money savers as well, but even if you have some weird objection to that, replace the old thermostats anyway.
Then people will stop calling it BitTorrent ... end of story.
Yes, I think that's kindof the idea.
Liability, and all that.
Unfortunately, luck is not really predictable. You shouldn't budget on past performance, but expected future performance.
1) Cell phones are the wrong frequency. They are 800, 900, 1800, or 1900 MHz depending on the service. To make water heat up, you need to be at the frequency water resonates which is 2.4GHz.
Why does this myth persist? I have no idea. Whenever it pops up, someone points out that it's not true. But it still persists. It doesn't even make sense, after all - microwaves heat dry things (like... plates) as well as wet things.
Microwaves work via dielectric heating, which is just the vibration of any electric dipole due to any electromagnetic radiation. Radiation in the gigahertz band is typical, but it's a wide band. Microwave ovens use 2450 MHz because it's in the ISM band.
Water does heat best, but that's because it's one of the strongest dipoles known to exist.
Water vapor has a resonant frequency at 22.235 GHz and 183 GHz. You can see the 22 GHz line in the graph on the linked page. Also of interest is the fact that clouds don't have that absorption feature because liquid water droplets are small compared to microwave wavelengths.
Note that if water's resonant frequency was 2450 MHz, absolutely no one would use that band, as you couldn't transmit anything on it, because water vapor in the air would be opaque to it.
Maintenance: 3 oil changes per year at $60 at Jiffy Lube plus misc. maintenance averaging $300 per year = $480/yr = $1.30 per day.
Car maintenance does not average $300/year. The typical amount that most suggest budgeting for car maintenance is $50/month, or $600/year. That's for a recent car. Double it for an older car.
Your other problem was that you treated the $15,000 initial cost as a recurring cost. It isn't, so you need to account for inflation, which is about 2% per year. So that's about $6.20 rather than $5.50.
But, of course, your biggest problem is this:
Car: 35 minutes per day transit time
Public transit: 98 minutes per day
You pretty much can't do anything while you're in the car. That time is almost totally lost.
In public transportation, almost one hour a day is on the train. That time is not lost. You can do things during that time.
Treating your free time as profitable hours is also a mistake anyway (since you don't work 24 hours) because you can't earn money when you're not at work.
Unless your wheels are very badly lubricated, you're going to get a lot less friction from wheels than from skis.
You're assuming that the wheels can stay (mostly) above the surface. If they're digging and displacing a lot of ground (i.e. slipping constantly), you might as well use skis, as there's no reason to waste the energy in rolling resistance if you're going to slip no matter what.
Of course, the lunar rovers didn't seem to actually slip that much, so for most of the Moon, they're probably fine.
Er? Most computers have a slew of power-saving features on each chip. Unfortunately ACPI can be a bit buggy due to lack of information available on the chips themselves.
At the very least, users concerned about power management should make sure that the idle loop uses HLT (if that works, which it should on most modern PCs), and a little poking around like here for old Athlons and you can usually find ways to kick your computer into a much lower-power state.
And I cannot understand why people think Sleep mode is wasteful. Plenty of people leave their computers on all the time. I'd rather have them put them in Sleep when they're not used than leave them on. Sure, I'd rather them turn them off, but I'd like a million dollars, too.
The problem with this is that while it seems simple, we don't understand ecology nearly well enough to guarantee that this would be safe.
It's not that I don't agree there are scientific solutions. Of course there are. But any biological solution is going to have side effects. For one, can the ocean ecosystem handle the excess injection of nutrients? Can it handle the additional dead material when the nutrients stop? Are the risks worth the savings in cost from more direct, controlled measures?
It wouldn't be the first time we tried to fix an ecological disaster with ecology, only to have it backfire (violently) in our faces.
And of course, it's all completely pointless unless the carbon emissions are curtailed - trying to maintain an artificial equilibrium like that is completely untenable. Plus the issue that we're not sure where 40% of the carbon is going, so it's a little dangerous to assume that since it doesn't go into the atmosphere, nothing bad is happening.
That's what I saw at my local Home Depot (Energizer). I couldn't believe it.
I'm just happy that I was wrong and other better batteries exists.
There are high-capacity and low-capacity cells available of all types. The low-capacity ones are nice if you have something like, say a remote control or a clock where it draws virtually nothing (though low-capacity C/D cells are a little silly...). You were probably comparing a low-capacity C to a high-capacity AA.
You could've also just slipped a decimal place.
Anyway, comparing battery capacity based on one number is really, really (really really) bad. Battery runtime is dependent on a lot of things - temperature, current draw, load type, etc.
If you're comparing NiMH cells to alkaline, you should additionally multiply the mAH rating times the voltage to get milliwatt-hours, as NiMH batteries run at 1.2V and alkaline at 1.5V.
Actually, you can't even do that: you're assuming that it has a constant voltage for its current draw over its lifespan. That is, an alkaline battery at half-charge probably has 1.2V across its terminals. An alkaline battery at 10% charge might only have 0.9V across its terminals. Whereas a NiMH battery at half charge may have 1.15V, and at 10% charge might have 1.10V.
Then again, it's even worse than that - alkalines and NiMHs have different internal resistances and behaviors, and so they've got different charge capacity based on discharge rates. Alkalines have ridiculous charge capacity (greater than 3000 mAh) for low discharge current, but it drops off very fast at high current draw. This is why a NiMH has such a higher apparent capacity for high-draw devices compared to an alkaline.
Simple answer: weigh the batteries inside a given type (alkaline/lithium ion/NiMH). A lot of the material is the electrolyte, and so a higher weight means a higher stored charge. It's not perfect, but it's simple and easy. You can buy C/D batteries that have higher capacity than AA, and lower capacity than a high-capacity AA.
There have been times in the planet's past (within the last 100,000) years where the climate was MUCH warmer with much higher concentrations of C02.
Carbon dioxide levels are at their highest from the last twenty million years. That's 20,000,000 years. You know, 200 times longer than your 100,000 number.
Here's a chart for the last 400,000 years. See the gigantic spike on the left? That's us.
The IPCC relevant quote for the 20 Myr number.
but to attribute current climate conditions over the last 20 years or even 40 with human activity
Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are absolutely from human activity. That's proven - really, proven - by isotopic abundances.
Why is it politics to assume that if we can change - significantly - the atmospheric composition of the planet, we can change the climate?