|I was amazed to see how much of the expensive stuff is left around the homes completely unsecured
That's mostly in relatively affluent suburban communities. If you so much as leave your car out in some parts of New York, it'll get stripped for parts and disappear in the black market in a matter of minutes.
|I have lost one tiny bottle of coconut oil left on the sill of an unlocked window in my hostel back in India
Again, in the opposite vein, that's because you were in a hostel, where everything from coconut oil to your underwear is fair game. I have experienced the opposite in the Indian state of Goa, where I left my expensive and unlocked samsonite suitcase full of jewelry and antiques out in the streets of Panjim for 20 minutes and nobody so much as came near it.
Louis Farrakhan (also a wealthy public figure, just google for his remarks on Jews)
Racism is unacceptable, whether it comes from whites, blacks or anyone. Radical black nationalism is just as racist in ideology as radical white nationalism.
The JILA group at UC Boulder does lots of work on laser cooling and trapping (the Weimann/Ketterle/Cornell group got the 2001 Nobel Prize for generating BEC by laser cooling). They have a neat java applet demonstrating the effect
So the consensus is that concepts like "relativistic mass" are constructs largely directed towards a popular audience that likes to "perceive" human behaviour in natural phenomena (ie anthromorphism), and comes about as a result of historical associations between mass and momentum (very historical, since the Poynting Vector was discovered in 1884, and that alone shows momentum without mass).
[quote] Whereas today we define (real, rest, invariant)mass only through energy equivalence [/quote]
There are several problems with that statement.
1.Since Energy is not a defined concept but an intuitive one, neither is mass.I have a hard time accepting that mass can be "defined" (or energy for that matter) without delving dangerously into anthropomorphic ideas. Mass and energy are like infinity, determinate but not defined.
2.(Rest) Mass-energy Equivalence follows ipso-facto from Einstein's Equation. Using it to "define" mass creates the informal fallacy of petitio principii (begging the question), since you had to determine mass to write Einstein's equation.
[quote] When bodies gain energy (through motion or otherwise) they also gain "mass" by a factor of L/c^2, and the same for energy loss
[/quote]
Sorry I forgot to add in my last post that mass-energy equivalence is not destroyed if we abandon the concept of relativistic mass. Rest mass itself can be "converted" to photons (as happens in nuclear fission and decay processes). You go to a frame when the nucleus is at rest (so p=0) and you get E=mc^2 where m is the "rest mass" and, when the nucleus breaks off into to constituents and photons then 4-momentum is still conserved.
[quote] Yes, now may I ask what the "p" in that equation represents? It is (Lorentz factored)momentum, which incorporates the concept of relativism in mass. [/quote]
I disagree. Momentum can be defined irrespective of mass. Momentum is simply the generalized velocity derivative of the Lagrangian, or the generator group of the group of all possible motions (remember that photons have momentum but no mass)
Momentum and mass are 2 different and largely unrelated ideas.
[quote] The word relativistic mass is not merely a simplification of the equation by substitution - it is a real effect of energy content on the inertial mass of the body (it's resistance to an accelerating force) [/quote]
Igor Bogdanoff is that you?/ducks
I can't say that I agree. The above seems like a concatenation of physics terms that (to shamelessly copy the words of Jacques Distler), are "syntactically correct, but semantically meaningless". "Resistance to an accelerating force"??? What does that even mean? Who's doing the "resisting", God? Such ideas are entirely anthropomorphic in nature, and are little more than bad physics. We can explain this so-called "resistance to an accelerating force" simply through causality arguments. We do not need to bring any mythical "relativistic mass" into it at all. Read Bergmann's book on relativity. It was the pedagogocal standard where I did my undergrad. As long as we stick to the idea that the only mass that has any objective meaning is the rest mass (which is Lorentz invariant) then we don't need to explain the effects of "energy" in this way at all.
Regarding the perceived increase in "inertia" (I hate that term) of the guy in the rocket frame:
Applying your methods of argument to another case, the perceived increase in inertia in accelerated frames (non-relativistic) can be "defined" a "non-inertial mass" to explain the effects there (engineers do that already, except they call it "pseudoforce", Sheesh!). We don't need pseudoforce to explain accelerated frames (technically we don't even need regular force, which, itself, is an anthropomorphic construct and doesn't really exist) and, in the same way, we don't need this "relativistic mass" either.The perceived effects of pseudoforce in an accelerated frame are as "real" as perceived increase in "relativistic mass" in relativity. We don't need either to form a complete formalism.
Physicists should be stingy with ideas. If we don't need it to get the correct results, off with it's head I say.
[quote] Finally, to quote Einstein: "Under this theory mass is not an unalterable magnitude, but a magnitude dependent on (and, indeed, identical with) the amount of energy." [/quote]
Einstein wasn't right about everything (remember his views concerning Quantum mechanics and the cosmological constant)?
I am not a particle physicist, but I have taken a large number of courses in Particle Physics (graduate requirement, can't help it), and none of my particle physics profs say or use "relativistic mass". Not once, not ever. They only use "rest mass" and they don't even call it "rest mass", just "mass". Some students objected to that based on the argument you supplied and our Prof pooh-poohed it off as a redundancy.
A few conceptual corrections. The concept of "relativistic mass" is an entirely unnecessary construct designed to make Einstein's famous "E=mc^2" look simple (actually, it's better stated as E^2=p^2c^2+m^2c^4 where m is the so called "rest mass"). If we do away with the redundant concept of "relativistic mass" altogether and only stick to the Lorentz-invariant "rest mass", then there is no need to muck about with the whole "mass depends on velocity" stuff. Relativity remains perfectly consistent without that claim. Now, all we need to say is "mass" , not "rest mass" or "relativistic mass" since there is no such thing as "relativistic mass".
Einstein's student P. Bergmann avoided the concept of relativistic mass altogether in this manner, as do most particle physicists I know.
Well then we seem to have reached an ideological impasse, since I'm what Americans would call a "neocon" ie I believe that democratic societies are inherently superior to non-democratic societies. I leave you with the words of Ambedkar:
"I feel that the Constitution is workable; it is flexible and it is strong enough to hold the country together both in peace time and in war time. Indeed, if I may say so, if things go wrong under the new Constitution the reason will not be that we had a bad Constitution. What we will have to say is that Man was vile."
|The reason I called it a pretend democracy is that (among other things) I see no attempts by the government to ensure that it does not exceed its limits
Then vote for a new one. The fact that most political parties in our country are crap speaks more about the flaws and apathy in our society than any flaws in our political system, which is the best possible under the circumstances. The mechanism exists for the implementation of change. Indians just have to care enough to implement it.
Yes. See the US Congressional reports on India, and compare them to other countries in the region.
|How do you even prove such a thing
Easily. We have checks and balances in our political system that other developing countries do not have. Democracy CAN be quantified and relativized.
|I'd sooner go live in Saudi Arabia than in a hellhole like the state of Bihar
Really? True that Bihar is rampant with Naxalite/Ranvir Sena lawlessness, but Saudi Arabia chops your hand off for stealing a loaf of bread and beheads you for watching movies.
|If you rig the polls, you're not democratic
Then no country in the world is a democracy (remember Florida?). That's a pointless argument.
|The militant muslims just have a monopoly on that at the moment
They've had a monopoly on that since the rise of the Khilafat al-Rashidun a millenium and a half ago. No other society has even come close (don't cite "the crusades" plz, the crusades were not nearly as violent as the Islamic conquest of India)
Overall, your arguments make no sense, and remind me more of anarchist absolutism than anything else. It's a question of the best that we, as a developing country can do, given our circumstances. We have done the best that we can do so far. India could easily have become like the middle east violence - wise , but hasn't. It still could, of course. If you don't like the government "doing nothing to stop the loonies" then vote for a new one. It's you people who voted for the likes of the UPA who let the "human rights" mafia led by that terrorist Arundhati Roy spare Mohammed Afzal and repeal POTA.
Nice try Mr Anonymous Coward, but I'm neither. I'm a regular Mumbaikar, born and raised, but am ethnically Bengali. Every Maharashtrian Mumbaikar I know says "Mumbai". The name has always been "Mumbai" as transliterated from Marathi. Check the markers on train stations sometime and look at the Devanagari script. It's said "Mumbai" (Ma-hrasya-u + ma-ba-yugtakshar + hrasya-i) not "Bombay". Not ever. It's only natural to make the English name correspond to the Devanagari transliteration instead of the Anglic appellation. Only mindless moonbats and/or Macauleyists pine for "Bombay". Which one are YOU?
Like I implied in an earlier post, India, like Ireland, has been a victim of English (people) linguistic imperialism (Historical pointer: Both India and Ireland had rich indigenous languages until the English squashed them, read the works of Macauley sometime and you'll see that this was part of their plan to subjugate their vassal colonies, both physically, psychologically and culturally).
However, it seems that the Irish are more in tune with their heritage than most Indians are with theirs (they renamed Dublin to Baile Atha Cliath, the original Irish Celtic name of the city), and rekindling OUR history by a proper name change causes you pinkos to get your underwear in knots. Shame!
I was using the term "prove" loosely, not in the categorical sense. My main point is that those who cherry-pick a few cases of censorship in India (there are worse examples than the ones in TFA by the way, like Taslima Nasrin's "Lajja" which got banned in some states, or the books of Sita Ram Goel all of which are banned, or banning of the Da-Vinci Code on the insistence of some Christians) to conclude that India is some sort of "fake democracy" should go visit some other developing countries and see what goes on there. India is by far the most democratic country in the developing world. Only developed countries with democratic governments are better (obviously).
You should have stayed in India longer and travelled more. You'd see a wider cross section of the population that's quite religious.
Millions of Hindus goto Varanasi for pilgrimage every year. Millions of Indian Muslims do Hajj at least once in their lifetimes. Millions of Indian Christians goto the tomb of the Apostle Thomas in Chennai for pilgrimage.
Also, you should have seen Kerala, "God's own country". They have the cleanest cities in South Asia, as does Tamil Nadu and most places down South.
Generalizing about a country of a billion people is the first step towards becoming a bigot.
Fair enough. Then it should be obvious even to a non-Indian why India is not tolerating rampant Indophobia any more than Germany or Israel does not tolerate anti-Semitism.
India is surrounded by rabidly totalitarian regimes that conducted government sponsored genocide of Hindu minorities in East Pakistan in 1971 (death toll estimates range from 1.5 million to 3 million, with 75% of the victims Hindus and 25% Bengali Muslim intellectuals), just like Nazi Germany did to Jews and Romanis and Homosexuals (the death toll was higher for the shoah/pojramos than the 1971 Bangladesh bloodbath of course, but the concept of targeted ethnic cleansing/genocide is the same in both cases) and why a rapidly developing but still struggling country like India is a little apprehensive about hate speech directed against Indians.
If you don't believe me then just drop by any Pakistani internet forum and see what they say about Indians there. The Nazi rhetoric of "Blut und Boden" or whatever pales in comparison to the rabidly genocidal streak of the more radical Pakistani Nationalists/Islamic Fundamentalists. Believe me I am not Godwinning when I say that the Jamaat-e-Islami in Pakistan and the Bangladeshi Nationalist Party in Bangladesh are no better than the Sturmabteilung or Einsatzgruppen (read about their rhetoric and violence against Pakistani/Bangladeshi Hindus , Qadiani Ahmadiyyas, Mohajirs etc.)
You obviously haven't heard of Zakir Naik (just google for him), who rails about "the prophet Muhammad being predicted in the Vedas" and demands that Islamic Sharia law be enforced in India or Ahmed Deedat (in South Africa actually, but Indian born), who denies the holocaust of Jews by Nazis, demands that "idolatrous Hindus" mass-convert to Islam under the point of gun and says that all Christians are "Bible-Thumpers".
Plus, Ted Haggard, for all his nuttery, never blew up trains like in Mumbai last July by the Students "Islamic" Movement of India (somebody should give those bastards a real Qu'ran lesson), not to mention the Samjhauta Express bombings just last month.
No, we in India have way too many crazies running around with bloodlust in their hearts to have the kind of unrestricted literalist interpretation of "Freedom of Speech" that the west enjoys. That will come only when we are developed enough to eschew all violent religious fundamentalism within our society.
However, always remember that we are by far the most democratic country in the developing world DESPITE all this censorship issues and book-bannings and what have you. Just compare the status of Free Speech in India with our neighbours to the North and West, or any other developing country.
I challenge anyone to give me the example of ONE developing country in the world that is more democratic than India (FYI, Taiwan , Korea, post-apartheid South Africa, Mexico etc. are no longer "developing" but essentially "developed" on the global HDI scale).
You mean the RSS that has 3 million members and is classified by the Economist as the largest anti-Communist organization in the world (at least some people still have the balls to combat the rampant infestation of moonbats and terror-apologists who pass for the "intelligentsia" in India these days, Hang Muhammed Afzal I say!)?
You mean the RSS that has 100,000 Sikh members (not Hindus), 30,000 Roman Catholic members (also not Hindus) and that financed militancy-hit Muslim children (i.e. hit by other Muslims) in Kashmir so as to sent them to Islamic madrassas for education?
And yes, the name is "Mumbai", and it's widely used among the actual people of the city ie the Marathis, who are the overwhelming majority, and always have been, despite what the moonbats say.
Time to see the ground realities, friend.India is shifting to the right. Live with it, or go live in North Korea.
This crap got modded up? Unbelievable, the level of ignorant racist bile that passes for "Insightful" on slashdot these days."Cows rank higher". Care to point out the clause in the Indian Constitution or the Indian Penal Code that says so? What about the 150 million Muslims in India who EAT cows? Way to go, generalization seems to be a purview in the counterculture shithole that slashdot has become. I could just as easily state that "Jeebus" ranks higher than humans in the American Deep South, which is where this fool probably hails from anyway.
You can start a religion that worships the Kiwi bird, but you have to gain a significant following before you can get support against insulting the Kiwi bird. Religion is all about following. If India winds up with enough Scientologists tomorrow then the environment will dictate that public criticism of Xenu the space warrior will be absolut verboten.
You forget that Indians are among the most deeply religious people in the world (more so than the Middle-East even:Indian Muslims especially Sufis and Chistis are more deeply religious and observant than most Arabs, Hindus are obviously deeply religious, and even Indian Christians of all major denominations ie Roman Catholic, Pentecostal, Evangelical etc are more religious than their western coreligionists), so it's impossible not to mix faith and politics in such a culture.
With regards to your remarks on censorship, in an environment where petitioning for removing the Quran from the Kolkata high court causes Muslims to amass rocket propelled grenades and Kalashnikovs and cry out for Jihad, a certain degree of censorship is not a bad idea. It's important not to take it to Orwellian levels, of course, but that will never happen in India, where democratic political checks and balances exist that act against such extreme possibilities (remember the emergency, and how Indira the great bitch got spanked by the Supreme Court over it?). We are not Pakistan or Iran, you know.
Keep in mind that the Chhatrapati retaliation thing was done by a small group of nutjobs (Sambhaji brigade), and the worst they did was raid the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in Pune. No lives were lost, although there was property damage. It was a response to that racist turd James W. Laine publishing a defamatory tirade against Chattrapati Shivaji (one that had precisely zero historical validity or credibility by the way). Also keep in mind that Chattrapati Shivaji is a vital and iconic figure to most Marathas. He was the first warrior in medeival Maratha history to unite the clans into a Confederation that rivaled and eventually exceeded the Mughal Empire in extent and glory. By all historical accounts he was learned, articulate, a brilliant military tactician, a religious pluralist (he revered both Hindu saints like Tukaram as well as Sufi Muslim pirs like Yacob Avaliya) and significantly more tolerant towards different religions than that Islamic Fundamentalist genocidal iconoclastic lunatic Aurangzeb in the Mughal Empire, the inventor of guerilla methods of warfare, an accomplished equestrian etc. All this has created a whole ethos surrounding Shivaji in Marathi culture, much like Robert Bruce in Scotland or Charlemagne in France. If somebody made fun of Robert Bruce in Edinburgh, there would be thousands of Scotsmen in kilts chasing him right off of Arthur's Seat or wherever. So while one can't approve of Sambhaji Brigade's actions, one can certainly understand it in the broad context of human behaviour over cultural icons.
And compare this little spat over Shivaji to the worldwide riots by Muslims over some otherwise insignificant cartoons of Muhammad (incl our Mujahid friends in Kashmir), and you will see that it really was not that big of a deal.
Bottom line is that it's about revitalizing our culture, to which we have every right. The original name of the region was "Mumbai" (after Mumbadevi the Sea-Goddess of the fishermen). If the Irish can call "Dublin" "Baile Átha Cliath" then we can call "Bombay" "Mumbai" for the same bloody reasons.
The fact that you can say so out loud in the middle of Colaba in Mumbai without getting arrested, strung upside down and flogged with a stick by "Secret Police" proves that it is a REAL democracy Mr "Rao".
Don't like it? Pakistan is just across the border, Balochistani/Waziristani/Taliban/Pukhtunwa terrorists, the Jamaat-e-Islami Islamic Sturmabteilung, various military dictators, warlords in NWFP, 20,000 radical madrassas and everything.Mubarak ho janaab. See ya. Won't wanna be ya.
Doesn't that still violate causality? Suppose I had two points A & B along the path of the dot on the moon. Both points had LED's connected to two computers. Point A precedes point B along the path.Computer A is programmed to log the sentence "I am sending a peice of information X to B" when the LED fires. Computer B is programmed to log the sentence "I received a peice of information X from A" when it's LED fires. Thus, the time between A logging a send and B logging a receive of X is less than the lightlike interval.
Also, when you calculated the speed of the dot, you used the formula
v=w*r
where w=angular velocity of the pointer and r = earth-moon distance.
This formula is not lorentz covariant:
dx^i/dx^0 = w x^j
x^0 is time
a boost of speed "beta" with a transformation Lambda(beta)^{mu nu} transforms both numerator and demoninator of LHS but only one term w changes in RHS (suppose boost is to the instantaneous rest frame of the rotating pointer so x^j is perpendicular to boost with no transformation thus). Thus, this formula is not Lorentz Covariant.
The formula momentum=mass*velocity is a formula for the MECHANICAL momentum, which is just ONE kind of momentum. There are many kinds of momenta.
The best way to define momentum is through the concept of "generalized momentum". Every physical system is ultimately described by a quantity called a Lagrangian or Lagrangian density that's given to you axiomatically with respect to certain generalized coordinates. The generalized momentum is defined as the rate of change of the lagrangian with respect to the generalized velocity for a particular generalized coordinate. Notice that I have not put mass anywhere into the definition.
This means that anything that has a generalized coordinate, a corresponding generalized velocity and a lagrangian has a momentum, even massless objects. The relation p = m*v (non-relativistic) can be derived as a special case from the lagrangian of massive objects. In the case of light, which is massless, the generalized coordinate is the electromagnetic vector potential, and calculations on the postulated lagrangian show that the momentum is a product of the electric and Magnetic field called the Poynting Vector. You do second quantization on this and you get massless photons of the same momenta. Notice that mo mass was needed.
Sorry if the above sounds too pedantic. Somebody else may be able to offer a less technical explanation...
Slashdot Mirror
|I was amazed to see how much of the expensive stuff is left around the homes completely unsecured
That's mostly in relatively affluent suburban communities. If you so much as leave your car out in some parts of New York, it'll get stripped for parts and disappear in the black market in a matter of minutes.
|I have lost one tiny bottle of coconut oil left on the sill of an unlocked window in my hostel back in India
Again, in the opposite vein, that's because you were in a hostel, where everything from coconut oil to your underwear is fair game. I have experienced the opposite in the Indian state of Goa, where I left my expensive and unlocked samsonite suitcase full of jewelry and antiques out in the streets of Panjim for 20 minutes and nobody so much as came near it.
|Damn straight. Now, go find me a black millionaire nationally-syndicated talk-show host who makes racist remarks.
/ 16/jackson/index.htmlc ial/clinton/frenzy/jackson.htm
How about Jesse Jackson? (Not a nationally Syndicated talk-show host, but most definitely a millionaire and a Public Figure)
http://archive.salon.com/politics/feature/2000/08
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/spe
Louis Farrakhan (also a wealthy public figure, just google for his remarks on Jews)
Racism is unacceptable, whether it comes from whites, blacks or anyone. Radical black nationalism is just as racist in ideology as radical white nationalism.
The JILA group at UC Boulder does lots of work on laser cooling and trapping (the Weimann/Ketterle/Cornell group got the 2001 Nobel Prize for generating BEC by laser cooling). They have a neat java applet demonstrating the effect
. html
http://www.colorado.edu/physics/2000/bec/lascool1
So the consensus is that concepts like "relativistic mass" are constructs largely directed towards a popular audience that likes to "perceive" human behaviour in natural phenomena (ie anthromorphism), and comes about as a result of historical associations between mass and momentum (very historical, since the Poynting Vector was discovered in 1884, and that alone shows momentum without mass).
[quote]
Whereas today we define (real, rest, invariant)mass only through energy equivalence
[/quote]
There are several problems with that statement.
1.Since Energy is not a defined concept but an intuitive one, neither is mass.I have a hard time accepting that mass can be "defined" (or energy for that matter) without delving dangerously into anthropomorphic ideas. Mass and energy are like infinity, determinate but not defined.
2.(Rest) Mass-energy Equivalence follows ipso-facto from Einstein's Equation. Using it to "define" mass creates the informal fallacy of petitio principii (begging the question), since you had to determine mass to write Einstein's equation.
[quote]
When bodies gain energy (through motion or otherwise) they also gain "mass" by a factor of L/c^2, and the same for energy loss
[/quote]
Sorry I forgot to add in my last post that mass-energy equivalence is not destroyed if we abandon the concept of relativistic mass. Rest mass itself can be "converted" to photons (as happens in nuclear fission and decay processes). You go to a frame when the nucleus is at rest (so p=0) and you get E=mc^2 where m is the "rest mass" and, when the nucleus breaks off into to constituents and photons then 4-momentum is still conserved.
[quote]
/ducks
Yes, now may I ask what the "p" in that equation represents? It is (Lorentz factored)momentum, which incorporates the concept of relativism in mass.
[/quote]
I disagree. Momentum can be defined irrespective of mass. Momentum is simply the generalized velocity derivative of the Lagrangian, or the generator group of the group of all possible motions (remember that photons have momentum but no mass)
Momentum and mass are 2 different and largely unrelated ideas.
[quote]
The word relativistic mass is not merely a simplification of the equation by substitution - it is a real effect of energy content on the inertial mass of the body (it's resistance to an accelerating force)
[/quote]
Igor Bogdanoff is that you?
I can't say that I agree. The above seems like a concatenation of physics terms that (to shamelessly copy the words of Jacques Distler), are "syntactically correct, but semantically meaningless". "Resistance to an accelerating force"??? What does that even mean? Who's doing the "resisting", God? Such ideas are entirely anthropomorphic in nature, and are little more than bad physics. We can explain this so-called "resistance to an accelerating force" simply through causality arguments. We do not need to bring any mythical "relativistic mass" into it at all. Read Bergmann's book on relativity. It was the pedagogocal standard where I did my undergrad. As long as we stick to the idea that the only mass that has any objective meaning is the rest mass (which is Lorentz invariant) then we don't need to explain the effects of "energy" in this way at all.
Regarding the perceived increase in "inertia" (I hate that term) of the guy in the rocket frame:
Applying your methods of argument to another case, the perceived increase in inertia in accelerated frames (non-relativistic) can be "defined" a "non-inertial mass" to explain the effects there (engineers do that already, except they call it "pseudoforce", Sheesh!). We don't need pseudoforce to explain accelerated frames (technically we don't even need regular force, which, itself, is an anthropomorphic construct and doesn't really exist) and, in the same way, we don't need this "relativistic mass" either.The perceived effects of pseudoforce in an accelerated frame are as "real" as perceived increase in "relativistic mass" in relativity. We don't need either to form a complete formalism.
Physicists should be stingy with ideas. If we don't need it to get the correct results, off with it's head I say.
[quote]
Finally, to quote Einstein:
"Under this theory mass is not an unalterable magnitude, but a magnitude dependent on (and, indeed, identical with) the amount of energy."
[/quote]
Einstein wasn't right about everything (remember his views concerning Quantum mechanics and the cosmological constant)?
I am not a particle physicist, but I have taken a large number of courses in Particle Physics (graduate requirement, can't help it), and none of my particle physics profs say or use "relativistic mass". Not once, not ever. They only use "rest mass" and they don't even call it "rest mass", just "mass". Some students objected to that based on the argument you supplied and our Prof pooh-poohed it off as a redundancy.
A few conceptual corrections. The concept of "relativistic mass" is an entirely unnecessary construct designed to make Einstein's famous "E=mc^2" look simple (actually, it's better stated as E^2=p^2c^2+m^2c^4 where m is the so called "rest mass"). If we do away with the redundant concept of "relativistic mass" altogether and only stick to the Lorentz-invariant "rest mass", then there is no need to muck about with the whole "mass depends on velocity" stuff. Relativity remains perfectly consistent without that claim. Now, all we need to say is "mass" , not "rest mass" or "relativistic mass" since there is no such thing as "relativistic mass".
Einstein's student P. Bergmann avoided the concept of relativistic mass altogether in this manner, as do most particle physicists I know.
Well then we seem to have reached an ideological impasse, since I'm what Americans would call a "neocon" ie I believe that democratic societies are inherently superior to non-democratic societies. I leave you with the words of Ambedkar:
"I feel that the Constitution is workable; it is flexible and it is strong enough to hold the country together both in peace time and in war time. Indeed, if I may say so, if things go wrong under the new Constitution the reason will not be that we had a bad Constitution. What we will have to say is that Man was vile."
|The reason I called it a pretend democracy is that (among other things) I see no attempts by the government to ensure that it does not exceed its limits
Then vote for a new one. The fact that most political parties in our country are crap speaks more about the flaws and apathy in our society than any flaws in our political system, which is the best possible under the circumstances. The mechanism exists for the implementation of change. Indians just have to care enough to implement it.
|People are making ranked lists now
Yes. See the US Congressional reports on India, and compare them to other countries in the region.
|How do you even prove such a thing
Easily. We have checks and balances in our political system that other developing countries do not have. Democracy CAN be quantified and relativized.
|I'd sooner go live in Saudi Arabia than in a hellhole like the state of Bihar
Really? True that Bihar is rampant with Naxalite/Ranvir Sena lawlessness, but Saudi Arabia chops your hand off for stealing a loaf of bread and beheads you for watching movies.
|If you rig the polls, you're not democratic
Then no country in the world is a democracy (remember Florida?). That's a pointless argument.
|The militant muslims just have a monopoly on that at the moment
They've had a monopoly on that since the rise of the Khilafat al-Rashidun a millenium and a half ago. No other society has even come close (don't cite "the crusades" plz, the crusades were not nearly as violent as the Islamic conquest of India)
Overall, your arguments make no sense, and remind me more of anarchist absolutism than anything else. It's a question of the best that we, as a developing country can do, given our circumstances. We have done the best that we can do so far. India could easily have become like the middle east violence - wise , but hasn't. It still could, of course. If you don't like the government "doing nothing to stop the loonies" then vote for a new one. It's you people who voted for the likes of the UPA who let the "human rights" mafia led by that terrorist Arundhati Roy spare Mohammed Afzal and repeal POTA.
Nice try Mr Anonymous Coward, but I'm neither. I'm a regular Mumbaikar, born and raised, but am ethnically Bengali. Every Maharashtrian Mumbaikar I know says "Mumbai". The name has always been "Mumbai" as transliterated from Marathi. Check the markers on train stations sometime and look at the Devanagari script. It's said "Mumbai" (Ma-hrasya-u + ma-ba-yugtakshar + hrasya-i) not "Bombay". Not ever. It's only natural to make the English name correspond to the Devanagari transliteration instead of the Anglic appellation. Only mindless moonbats and/or Macauleyists pine for "Bombay". Which one are YOU?
Like I implied in an earlier post, India, like Ireland, has been a victim of English (people) linguistic imperialism (Historical pointer: Both India and Ireland had rich indigenous languages until the English squashed them, read the works of Macauley sometime and you'll see that this was part of their plan to subjugate their vassal colonies, both physically, psychologically and culturally).
However, it seems that the Irish are more in tune with their heritage than most Indians are with theirs (they renamed Dublin to Baile Atha Cliath, the original Irish Celtic name of the city), and rekindling OUR history by a proper name change causes you pinkos to get your underwear in knots. Shame!
I was using the term "prove" loosely, not in the categorical sense. My main point is that those who cherry-pick a few cases of censorship in India (there are worse examples than the ones in TFA by the way, like Taslima Nasrin's "Lajja" which got banned in some states, or the books of Sita Ram Goel all of which are banned, or banning of the Da-Vinci Code on the insistence of some Christians) to conclude that India is some sort of "fake democracy" should go visit some other developing countries and see what goes on there. India is by far the most democratic country in the developing world. Only developed countries with democratic governments are better (obviously).
You should have stayed in India longer and travelled more. You'd see a wider cross section of the population that's quite religious.
Millions of Hindus goto Varanasi for pilgrimage every year.
Millions of Indian Muslims do Hajj at least once in their lifetimes.
Millions of Indian Christians goto the tomb of the Apostle Thomas in Chennai for pilgrimage.
Also, you should have seen Kerala, "God's own country". They have the cleanest cities in South Asia, as does Tamil Nadu and most places down South.
Generalizing about a country of a billion people is the first step towards becoming a bigot.
Fair enough. Then it should be obvious even to a non-Indian why India is not tolerating rampant Indophobia any more than Germany or Israel does not tolerate anti-Semitism.
India is surrounded by rabidly totalitarian regimes that conducted government sponsored genocide of Hindu minorities in East Pakistan in 1971 (death toll estimates range from 1.5 million to 3 million, with 75% of the victims Hindus and 25% Bengali Muslim intellectuals), just like Nazi Germany did to Jews and Romanis and Homosexuals (the death toll was higher for the shoah/pojramos than the 1971 Bangladesh bloodbath of course, but the concept of targeted ethnic cleansing/genocide is the same in both cases) and why a rapidly developing but still struggling country like India is a little apprehensive about hate speech directed against Indians.
If you don't believe me then just drop by any Pakistani internet forum and see what they say about Indians there. The Nazi rhetoric of "Blut und Boden" or whatever pales in comparison to the rabidly genocidal streak of the more radical Pakistani Nationalists/Islamic Fundamentalists. Believe me I am not Godwinning when I say that the Jamaat-e-Islami in Pakistan and the Bangladeshi Nationalist Party in Bangladesh are no better than the Sturmabteilung or Einsatzgruppen (read about their rhetoric and violence against Pakistani/Bangladeshi Hindus , Qadiani Ahmadiyyas, Mohajirs etc.)
"No One like Ted Haggard"?
You obviously haven't heard of Zakir Naik (just google for him), who rails about "the prophet Muhammad being predicted in the Vedas" and demands that Islamic Sharia law be enforced in India or Ahmed Deedat (in South Africa actually, but Indian born), who denies the holocaust of Jews by Nazis, demands that "idolatrous Hindus" mass-convert to Islam under the point of gun and says that all Christians are "Bible-Thumpers".
Plus, Ted Haggard, for all his nuttery, never blew up trains like in Mumbai last July by the Students "Islamic" Movement of India (somebody should give those bastards a real Qu'ran lesson), not to mention the Samjhauta Express bombings just last month.
No, we in India have way too many crazies running around with bloodlust in their hearts to have the kind of unrestricted literalist interpretation of "Freedom of Speech" that the west enjoys. That will come only when we are developed enough to eschew all violent religious fundamentalism within our society.
However, always remember that we are by far the most democratic country in the developing world DESPITE all this censorship issues and book-bannings and what have you. Just compare the status of Free Speech in India with our neighbours to the North and West, or any other developing country.
I challenge anyone to give me the example of ONE developing country in the world that is more democratic than India (FYI, Taiwan , Korea, post-apartheid South Africa, Mexico etc. are no longer "developing" but essentially "developed" on the global HDI scale).
"Small radical Hindu Group"???
You mean the RSS that has 3 million members and is classified by the Economist as the largest anti-Communist organization in the world (at least some people still have the balls to combat the rampant infestation of moonbats and terror-apologists who pass for the "intelligentsia" in India these days, Hang Muhammed Afzal I say!)?
You mean the RSS that has 100,000 Sikh members (not Hindus), 30,000 Roman Catholic members (also not Hindus) and that financed militancy-hit Muslim children (i.e. hit by other Muslims) in Kashmir so as to sent them to Islamic madrassas for education?
And yes, the name is "Mumbai", and it's widely used among the actual people of the city ie the Marathis, who are the overwhelming majority, and always have been, despite what the moonbats say.
Time to see the ground realities, friend.India is shifting to the right. Live with it, or go live in North Korea.
|They have as much right to say "Hail Hitler" as I have to say "Hail Linux."
Why do people in Europe go to jail for doing just that. Where is the all-American liberal's "righteous indignation" there?
This crap got modded up? Unbelievable, the level of ignorant racist bile that passes for "Insightful" on slashdot these days."Cows rank higher". Care to point out the clause in the Indian Constitution or the Indian Penal Code that says so? What about the 150 million Muslims in India who EAT cows? Way to go, generalization seems to be a purview in the counterculture shithole that slashdot has become. I could just as easily state that "Jeebus" ranks higher than humans in the American Deep South, which is where this fool probably hails from anyway.
You can start a religion that worships the Kiwi bird, but you have to gain a significant following before you can get support against insulting the Kiwi bird. Religion is all about following. If India winds up with enough Scientologists tomorrow then the environment will dictate that public criticism of Xenu the space warrior will be absolut verboten.
You forget that Indians are among the most deeply religious people in the world (more so than the Middle-East even:Indian Muslims especially Sufis and Chistis are more deeply religious and observant than most Arabs, Hindus are obviously deeply religious, and even Indian Christians of all major denominations ie Roman Catholic, Pentecostal, Evangelical etc are more religious than their western coreligionists), so it's impossible not to mix faith and politics in such a culture.
With regards to your remarks on censorship, in an environment where petitioning for removing the Quran from the Kolkata high court causes Muslims to amass rocket propelled grenades and Kalashnikovs and cry out for Jihad, a certain degree of censorship is not a bad idea. It's important not to take it to Orwellian levels, of course, but that will never happen in India, where democratic political checks and balances exist that act against such extreme possibilities (remember the emergency, and how Indira the great bitch got spanked by the Supreme Court over it?). We are not Pakistan or Iran, you know.
Keep in mind that the Chhatrapati retaliation thing was done by a small group of nutjobs (Sambhaji brigade), and the worst they did was raid the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in Pune. No lives were lost, although there was property damage. It was a response to that racist turd James W. Laine publishing a defamatory tirade against Chattrapati Shivaji (one that had precisely zero historical validity or credibility by the way). Also keep in mind that Chattrapati Shivaji is a vital and iconic figure to most Marathas. He was the first warrior in medeival Maratha history to unite the clans into a Confederation that rivaled and eventually exceeded the Mughal Empire in extent and glory. By all historical accounts he was learned, articulate, a brilliant military tactician, a religious pluralist (he revered both Hindu saints like Tukaram as well as Sufi Muslim pirs like Yacob Avaliya) and significantly more tolerant towards different religions than that Islamic Fundamentalist genocidal iconoclastic lunatic Aurangzeb in the Mughal Empire, the inventor of guerilla methods of warfare, an accomplished equestrian etc. All this has created a whole ethos surrounding Shivaji in Marathi culture, much like Robert Bruce in Scotland or Charlemagne in France. If somebody made fun of Robert Bruce in Edinburgh, there would be thousands of Scotsmen in kilts chasing him right off of Arthur's Seat or wherever. So while one can't approve of Sambhaji Brigade's actions, one can certainly understand it in the broad context of human behaviour over cultural icons.
And compare this little spat over Shivaji to the worldwide riots by Muslims over some otherwise insignificant cartoons of Muhammad (incl our Mujahid friends in Kashmir), and you will see that it really was not that big of a deal.
Bottom line is that it's about revitalizing our culture, to which we have every right. The original name of the region was "Mumbai" (after Mumbadevi the Sea-Goddess of the fishermen). If the Irish can call "Dublin" "Baile Átha Cliath" then we can call "Bombay" "Mumbai" for the same bloody reasons.
The fact that you can say so out loud in the middle of Colaba in Mumbai without getting arrested, strung upside down and flogged with a stick by "Secret Police" proves that it is a REAL democracy Mr "Rao".
Don't like it? Pakistan is just across the border, Balochistani/Waziristani/Taliban/Pukhtunwa terrorists, the Jamaat-e-Islami Islamic Sturmabteilung, various military dictators, warlords in NWFP, 20,000 radical madrassas and everything.Mubarak ho janaab. See ya. Won't wanna be ya.
Doesn't that still violate causality? Suppose I had two points A & B along the path of the dot on the moon. Both points had LED's connected to two computers. Point A precedes point B along the path.Computer A is programmed to log the sentence "I am sending a peice of information X to B" when the LED fires. Computer B is programmed to log the sentence "I received a peice of information X from A" when it's LED fires. Thus, the time between A logging a send and B logging a receive of X is less than the lightlike interval.
Also, when you calculated the speed of the dot, you used the formula
v=w*r
where w=angular velocity of the pointer and
r = earth-moon distance.
This formula is not lorentz covariant:
dx^i/dx^0 = w x^j
x^0 is time
a boost of speed "beta" with a transformation Lambda(beta)^{mu nu} transforms both numerator and demoninator of LHS but only one term w changes in RHS (suppose boost is to the instantaneous rest frame of the rotating pointer so x^j is perpendicular to boost with no transformation thus). Thus, this formula is not Lorentz Covariant.
YOu can think of it in terms of classical mmentum. The Classical momentum density, in this case, is the Poynting Vector:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poynting_vector
The formula momentum=mass*velocity is a formula for the MECHANICAL momentum, which is just ONE kind of momentum. There are many kinds of momenta.
e dMomentum.htmle ctor.html
The best way to define momentum is through the concept of "generalized momentum". Every physical system is ultimately described by a quantity called a Lagrangian or Lagrangian density that's given to you axiomatically with respect to certain generalized coordinates. The generalized momentum is defined as the rate of change of the lagrangian with respect to the generalized velocity for a particular generalized coordinate. Notice that I have not put mass anywhere into the definition.
This means that anything that has a generalized coordinate, a corresponding generalized velocity and a lagrangian has a momentum, even massless objects. The relation p = m*v (non-relativistic) can be derived as a special case from the lagrangian of massive objects. In the case of light, which is massless, the generalized coordinate is the electromagnetic vector potential, and calculations on the postulated lagrangian show that the momentum is a product of the electric and Magnetic field called the Poynting Vector. You do second quantization on this and you get massless photons of the same momenta. Notice that mo mass was needed.
Sorry if the above sounds too pedantic. Somebody else may be able to offer a less technical explanation...
Refs:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian
http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/physics/Generaliz
http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/physics/PoyntingV