In all seriousness, I do not think they will end the world, but am I supposed to take your 'word' for it, or the word of whatever think tank even? Nope. Just study physics for the last decade or so as I have. I suggest Weinberg's Gravitation and Cosmology: Principles and Applications of the General Theory of Relativity (1972), although Misner's, Thorne's, and Wheeler's Gravitation (1973) is accessible enough.
Last I heard, there was still great debate among top scientists as to the nature of existing black holes. You must not have heard too recently, then. Very few physicists (here I'm taking physicists as proxies for your "scientists") doubt General Relativity (its competing theories give much the same predictions) to any degree, and one of GR's beautiful predictions is that of the existence of black holes. We've witnessed gravitational lensing, time dilation effects, and many of the other predictions of GR; galactic jets and galactic dynamics point rather conclusively to the existence of black holes.
Call me a bit skeptical, but I think I'll wait to see what happens instead of predicting. Good! You're following the precise credo of science, which is that experimental results trump all hypothesizing. However, don't carry empirical skepticism to the extreme of philosophical skepticism. Otherwise, you'll stop breathing for an hour to see whether, just because it's seemed necessary thus far, it might not be from now on. Besides, if the LHC doesn't produce black holes, or we can't detect them, or whatever, will in no way invalidate the possibility of their existence.
Big black holes suck up stuff because their gravity overcomes all other forces, but here that can't be the case. Semantics, pff. Get close enough to that tiny particle, and 1/r^2 is going to win every time.
To argue your main point, though, I think that is one of the reasons (in addition to the Hawking radiation argument) that those microgram 'holes aren't dangerous: to feed in enough mass to make the thing grow would take an incredible density of mass very close to the b'hole's location, and you can't get much of that density on Earth anyway. (Here I'm talking about a sort of "macroscopic" density, not that of nearly-pointlike particles like electrons or neutrons.)
Remember, too, that *energy* has mass -- massive objects have tremendous amounts of energy in the gravitational fields surrounding them, and these fields contribute mass to the "whole hole". It can be shown that when an object reaches such a state that the field energy starts to attract itself more rapidly than it's radiated, _that's_ when an event horizon will form. This can happen at any size. Just because the black hole can't sustain its own growth due to environmental constraints doesn't mean it's not a black hole.
The microscopic black hole thing is passably plausible, although any such tiny black holes are far more likely to evaporate almost instantly than launch into a positive feedback state.
The magnetic monopole creation is almost surely complete bunk, as (so far as I know) no one has ever detected signs of such a thing (nor is anyone certain that such a beast can exist). On the other hand, Dirac showed that the existence of even a single magnetic monopole, somewhere in the universe might explain charge quantization. The converse, however, may not hold.
Do you have a trite list of what the average you thinks of westerners? Yes, but it's tattooed on my massive penis. Hold on, while I sort through these things... Complete works of William Shakespeare, no... Pics of Paris Hilton getting out of a limo, no... . Oh! Here we are: An Outsider's View of Western Civilization, Vol. I: "(1) Supersize Me!"; (2)...
So my question is, other than saying "we hosted the olympics in 2009", what benefit is it to them to do so? They could say "We hosted the Olympics in 2008!".
Instead, it makes a great case for doing the research on the front end to eliminate lengthy repetition of useless iterations to shorten the overall time. My gf: "Why are you staring at my breasts?"
Me: "I'm doing research on the front end to eliminate lengthy repetition of useless iterations to shorten the overall time."
My gf: "Fuck that. Bring me the Magic Wand and some scotch. And go hiking or something."
I guess my thought on "cost/benefit" was that they think there's some huge benefit (guaranteed virgins in the everlasting afterlife, or whatever) to the action, no matter the cost. If they thought there was something less interesting in the afterlife, no afterlife, or something nasty, their motivations would very likely change. Hopefully, that's where the education part comes in.
How do you ensure that nobody cheats on their taxes? How can you ensure that people don't discriminate against you based on your gender, race or age? How can you possibly deter someone so kooky that he/she is willing to blow him/herself up? All good questions, and ones that a sociologist or -- gasp! -- lawyer, anthropologist, or historian would probably be able to answer better than I. I guess the only way to stop these kind of "bad" things is to make the cost/benefit ratio of the acts as high as possible. (Not an answer to your question because you already know this.)
Either one 1) makes the cost extremely high: fines, jail, or worse; or
2) makes the benefit extremely small; or
3) both.
As for avoiding gettin' blown up, you keep the explosive people as far away as possible, while trying to change their minds about the correctness of their beliefs. I suppose that's what religions have been trying to do since time immemorial.
Since the dynamite-strappers are willing to believe that exploding themselves will get them something fancy in the afterlife (or something fancy for their families in the here-and-now), their notion of cost/benefit is a little different than that of the people they want to harm. My feeling (backed by nothing more than a little intuition and a few arguments I've heard here and there) is that only education (in the secular sense) is going to do anything to change their minds.
[...] the fact of the matter is that people are gonna do whatever they're gonna do in this life, and no amount of vehemently Islamophobic documentaries is going to change that. Documentaries may not, but will anything? The bolded part of the statement seems to -- if not forgive -- explain away just about any action.
The Jewish and Gregorian calendars are different, so the date wanders around the Gregorian Calendar to a small extent while remaining fixed in the Jewish one. We definitely need to have an episode of Celebrity Death Match with Calendars.
And you quit being ignorant... just because you can google a few outspoken muslims who are sensible, it doesn't mean the vast majority don't get pleasure every time an American or Dane is killed. It also doesn't mean the vast majority -- or even a majority -- or even a large minority -- do get that pleasure.
This, BTW, is from a long-time Mac user and recovering "rabid" fanboy who converted from Microsoft way back in DOS days who now uses OS X, Kubuntu and Windows XP interchangeably as necessary. Anywhere else, that would be called "pragmatic" and "even-handed". Here, about 98% of the people who read your post will have to sit very still so they can hate you with their entire bodies.
I've read *only* the first link in that post (that was several years ago, when it was known as Scientific Elites and Scientific Illiterates), which was quite depressing, but also quite eye-opening.
I understand modding this "Informative" if you really want him to get good karma, but I'm a bit afraid that the moderator was just being dumb. Try "Funny" instead.
A flashlight may have no moving parts, but it does spend energy. That energy cannot be described in terms of force times distance. Actually, to quibble a bit, the classical model of conductivity describes the energy as exactly a force (due to the electrostatic energy gradient in -- say -- the light filament times the electron charge) times a distance describable by the electrons' mean drift velocity. Of course, a quantitatively correct picture requires the quantum interactions to correctly account for experimental measurements.
I didn't say it took energy to maintain a pressure. Neither does it take energy to maintain a temperature difference. That's what thermal insulators are for (just like solid metal or glass is a pressure insulator). It's when there's a breach in your pressure container that it takes energy to maintain pressure, just the same as when there's a breach in your thermal container.
Because you can maintain a given pressure without the continual input of energy. Temperature (in either direction) has the annoying habit of doing its best to match that of the ambient environment. Pressure has that annoying habit, too. After all, nature always likes to smooth out gradients of any sort. We just know how to deal with gradients of pressure a little more reliably than with those of temperature.
Yeah, but all of those "processor intensive" things you just mentioned can -- and are, all at the same time -- done in machines with much less processing power and much less RAM than what Vista needs to run. That was the point.
Nice. I didn't believe the link should be considered a "troll" (love the asshole mods on here), but in this case, it really is. Link contains a trojan. Don't go clicky-clicky.
I don't know that the usage of "quotes" is correct in that submission (I am seriously wondering if someone with access to a more comprehensive dictionary could find out for me).
Certainly, "Quoth" would be correct in its place -- but archaic -- or just "Said".
The idea that oil is going to dry up in 5 years is just nonsense. I hear crap like this all the time (i work in the resources industry) and i just shake my head and laugh. However, the idea that oil is going to sharply decline in net production (because of the "easy" oil being tapped out), while becoming quite a bit more expensive as a consequence, is not nonsense.
I have done research (serious, major oil-company-funded research, so you know where the money lies) on some new ways to find, extract, and process oil. The oil companies are VERY interested, mainly because the future looks pretty bleak. The very fact that Shell is considering as "promising" their MASSIVE in-ground processing, sandwiched between two groundwater reservoirs in the lamosite Green River formation in Colorado and Utah should tell you something about desperation.
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Last I heard, there was still great debate among top scientists as to the nature of existing black holes. You must not have heard too recently, then. Very few physicists (here I'm taking physicists as proxies for your "scientists") doubt General Relativity (its competing theories give much the same predictions) to any degree, and one of GR's beautiful predictions is that of the existence of black holes. We've witnessed gravitational lensing, time dilation effects, and many of the other predictions of GR; galactic jets and galactic dynamics point rather conclusively to the existence of black holes. Call me a bit skeptical, but I think I'll wait to see what happens instead of predicting. Good! You're following the precise credo of science, which is that experimental results trump all hypothesizing. However, don't carry empirical skepticism to the extreme of philosophical skepticism. Otherwise, you'll stop breathing for an hour to see whether, just because it's seemed necessary thus far, it might not be from now on. Besides, if the LHC doesn't produce black holes, or we can't detect them, or whatever, will in no way invalidate the possibility of their existence.
To argue your main point, though, I think that is one of the reasons (in addition to the Hawking radiation argument) that those microgram 'holes aren't dangerous: to feed in enough mass to make the thing grow would take an incredible density of mass very close to the b'hole's location, and you can't get much of that density on Earth anyway. (Here I'm talking about a sort of "macroscopic" density, not that of nearly-pointlike particles like electrons or neutrons.)
Remember, too, that *energy* has mass -- massive objects have tremendous amounts of energy in the gravitational fields surrounding them, and these fields contribute mass to the "whole hole". It can be shown that when an object reaches such a state that the field energy starts to attract itself more rapidly than it's radiated, _that's_ when an event horizon will form. This can happen at any size. Just because the black hole can't sustain its own growth due to environmental constraints doesn't mean it's not a black hole.
The microscopic black hole thing is passably plausible, although any such tiny black holes are far more likely to evaporate almost instantly than launch into a positive feedback state.
The magnetic monopole creation is almost surely complete bunk, as (so far as I know) no one has ever detected signs of such a thing (nor is anyone certain that such a beast can exist). On the other hand, Dirac showed that the existence of even a single magnetic monopole, somewhere in the universe might explain charge quantization. The converse, however, may not hold.
Me: "I'm doing research on the front end to eliminate lengthy repetition of useless iterations to shorten the overall time."
My gf: "Fuck that. Bring me the Magic Wand and some scotch. And go hiking or something."
I guess my thought on "cost/benefit" was that they think there's some huge benefit (guaranteed virgins in the everlasting afterlife, or whatever) to the action, no matter the cost. If they thought there was something less interesting in the afterlife, no afterlife, or something nasty, their motivations would very likely change. Hopefully, that's where the education part comes in.
Either one 1) makes the cost extremely high: fines, jail, or worse; or
2) makes the benefit extremely small; or
3) both.
As for avoiding gettin' blown up, you keep the explosive people as far away as possible, while trying to change their minds about the correctness of their beliefs. I suppose that's what religions have been trying to do since time immemorial.
Since the dynamite-strappers are willing to believe that exploding themselves will get them something fancy in the afterlife (or something fancy for their families in the here-and-now), their notion of cost/benefit is a little different than that of the people they want to harm. My feeling (backed by nothing more than a little intuition and a few arguments I've heard here and there) is that only education (in the secular sense) is going to do anything to change their minds.
I think the point is to show a correlation (or not) between intake and quality of work. It's not to make people sick!
I've read *only* the first link in that post (that was several years ago, when it was known as Scientific Elites and Scientific Illiterates), which was quite depressing, but also quite eye-opening.
For rather less depressing reads, but still ones which pull no punches, try some of the Essays of Paul Graham. Especially, for high schoolers, try http://www.paulgraham.com/college.html and http://www.paulgraham.com/hs.html.
I understand modding this "Informative" if you really want him to get good karma, but I'm a bit afraid that the moderator was just being dumb. Try "Funny" instead.
I didn't say it took energy to maintain a pressure. Neither does it take energy to maintain a temperature difference. That's what thermal insulators are for (just like solid metal or glass is a pressure insulator). It's when there's a breach in your pressure container that it takes energy to maintain pressure, just the same as when there's a breach in your thermal container.
Yeah, but all of those "processor intensive" things you just mentioned can -- and are, all at the same time -- done in machines with much less processing power and much less RAM than what Vista needs to run. That was the point.
Feynman claimed that he always thought of photons as particles. His QED managed to get wavelike properties out of them, too.
Nice. I didn't believe the link should be considered a "troll" (love the asshole mods on here), but in this case, it really is. Link contains a trojan. Don't go clicky-clicky.
Yeah, but your parent post had "offtopic" included right in it, so quitcher whining.
I don't know that the usage of "quotes" is correct in that submission (I am seriously wondering if someone with access to a more comprehensive dictionary could find out for me).
Certainly, "Quoth" would be correct in its place -- but archaic -- or just "Said".
I have done research (serious, major oil-company-funded research, so you know where the money lies) on some new ways to find, extract, and process oil. The oil companies are VERY interested, mainly because the future looks pretty bleak. The very fact that Shell is considering as "promising" their MASSIVE in-ground processing, sandwiched between two groundwater reservoirs in the lamosite Green River formation in Colorado and Utah should tell you something about desperation.
"Cronk! Sqwee... richardgererichardgererichardgere...."