Good point. It probably would be safe in a collision I'd imagine, it's not like VW to not think of that. Weight isn't the biggest issue in a crash, how the energy is absorbed is. My Miata only weighs about 2000 lbs and it has a 4 star safety rating. It's so light that if I leave it in neutral I can easily push and pull the car back and forth with one hand.
I'd just hate to have to merge onto a 70 mph highway with only 39 hp. The Miata has about 140 hp and I usually floor it to get on the highway. Even flat out it takes over 7 seconds just to get to 60 mph (though it's so low it feels like you are going much faster, it's a fun car). What would the 0-60 be with 39hp and 1000 lbs less to move? Is this VW a two seater or a four seater? Two extra passengers would add 300-500 lbs.
Indeed, I might have done so. The arts can be frustrating, particularly contemporary art. There is a lot of infuriating bullshitting done, though sometimes someone stumbles on something truly miraculous.
"Good" doesn't really enter into it. As the old saying goes "beauty is in the eye of the beholder". For the artist it's more of a journey, an artist is a sort of a tourist in their own mind.
I'm not an artist myself anymore, I buy and sell it, but I understand how it works.
The guys I know that are really good usually average one artwork every 2-3 days. Their brains are constantly churning, slowly refining from artwork to artwork. Sometimes they work on one canvas at a time, sometimes they work on multiple pieces simultaneously. They aren't necessarily fixated any one piece, that's a habit you have to break in art school. Each piece is an experiment, nothing more, and hopefully these experiments are more successful over time.
How do you determine success? That's where the infuriating bullshit comes in. Everyone has got to eat. No one knows anything about contemporary art. They might understand the history, but no one can tell you what's good, the closest they can say is: "this is an excellent example of such and such school or movement or artist". The truest statement anyone has every made about the relative "goodness" of an artwork is: "I don't know art, but I know what I like!".
I know an artist that went through a phase where he made one 8"x12" painting every day. He was showing a lot and was meeting the right people. If you were to ask about an artwork at a gallery the sales person would slide into an eloquent bunch of nonsense: describing the masterful brush work, refined and unique technique, dropping names of more famous artists that this subtle little drop or swish was an homage to (though the artist that made the piece probably wasn't even aware of the guy). All this to justify the painting's $1000 price tag.
On the other hand if you meet that same artist in his studio (galleries hate that as they don't get their cut) he'll show you a pile of paintings the size of a king size bed and hand them to you one at a time, giving you a couple seconds to look at each one. If you ask him about what he means by the paintings he'll say a few things about specific elements and maybe talk about certain aspects that keep reappearing from painting to painting, but mostly he will refuse to say much; saying that everything is there in the paint and trying to translate paint into english is futile. If it wasn't, he'd save some money (paint is expensive) and write a paper.
Thanks for your reply. I'm aware that these questions are mostly academic and that they don't really effect our estimates of our distance to Betelguese, but I've found this a very interesting discussion. I don't have a global question, just a lot of little ones. The water thing has been bugging me for some time.
Another thing that's been bugging me is whether if it's true that some "stuff" (light, whatever) that doesn't posses mass naturally propagates at the speed of light (in a vacuum) when at rest. It slows down when energy is imparted to it (not in a vacuum), resistance I suppose. It's the opposite of an object with mass, or at least I've been told.
I'm really glad that I started this thread, I learned a few things that I didn't anticipate to learn. Sometimes starting a thread is better then just reading the wikis (which I'm reading or have read).
That's fascinating. I'd heard of the "aluminum clock" but I had no idea it was so accurate that it could actually measure the dilation effect of the Earth's gravitational field.
I wish I could get a PHD in Physics, but it's a little impractical right now and like most laymen I gravitate to the most spectacular elements of a field I know only a little about. Its nice to be able to speak people better informed.
Thank you for the links, I'll look them up.
I know many artists that would spit in a physicist's face too. It's stupid, and an unfortunate divide, as I know plenty of interesting people on both sides, and a few that straddle the two fields. If someone is curious, the good thing to do is be helpful. That AC didn't get that.
I completely agree from a practical point of view. I actually wasn't trying to challenge the distance to Betelguese. This just seemed a good threat to bring up all the other questions in my original post, which was more about getting answers regarding relativity and the whether the speed of light is constant in expanding space-time.
Thank you though for your info on Betelguese, it's a facinating star.
I'm not really contemplating metaphysics, just trying to understand better 20th century physics. I should have used something like JKCS041 as an example instead of Betelguese, but its rare a thread comes up where you get to ask these questions and Betelguese was the topic.
Doesn't General Relativity postulate that an object with mass would acquire infinite mass and require infinite energy to travel at the speed of light?
Therefor not a possibility.
I'm not saying its possible, I'm just saying if it magically happened the object wouldn't experience time.
I wonder if "stuff" with no mass experience time. Just something to wonder about, I don't think there is any evidence to suggest massless "stuff" degrades.
Thanks, I wasn't even thinking about the electromagnetic forces. Though isn't there a point (going by the heat death theory), that space-time expansion will overcome the electromagnetic forces? Or is that too controversial still?
I think the poster was talking about the light's point of view. Something with mass moving at the speed of light would theoretically not experience time. Though I don't want to put words in his mouth.
I wonder if something without mass experiences the passage of time when moving at the speed of light.
The difficulty with the last part is the contradictory nature of the info when you ask these questions to a search engine. Though your Google-Fu might just be much better then mine, too.
I have a serious question about the speed of light, and our ability to determine the relative distance and speeds of stellar objects. I specialized in the arts not the sciences, so maybe one of you physics buffs can help me. Please humor me if these are the dumbest questions in the world.
How do we actually know that the wave/particle/whatever I see when I glance up at Betelguese is about 600 years old. It seems to me that we would need to know a few things first, before we could calculate that:
How fast is the Earth moving through space? Not toward or away from Betelguese as in red and blue shifts of that particular star but just how fast are we moving through space in general. Can we look at one part of the sky and see everything red shifted and another part of the sky and see blue shifted and extrapolate the total speed from that (obviously we would need a series of measurements)? Do we know how fast the galaxy is moving, or even the speed that the sun moves around the center of the galaxy? For instance if I'm driving a car east at 60 mph, can we take all those factors, add them together and determine the total speed of me and my car.
Does that combined speed cause a time dialation effect (even a tiny one) on Earth? I know time and mass becomes distorted as you approach the speed of light, but I've never heard how steep that gradient is or if there is a lower limit. Would a hypothetical stationary cup of water cooled to absolute zero experience time differently then a similar cup boiling at 100 degrees (obviously the difference would be very tiny, but would it be there or is there a cut off)?
If the universe is expanding in the sense that there is more space between all particles (this was how it was explained to me: that with each passing moment the distance between all particles increases as the fabric of space-time slowly expands) wouldn't the speed of light be slowly increasing (or decreasing) as well. Would a lightyear 600 years ago be the same as it is now?
I know that the margins of error in determining astrological distance are way larger then any of these factors, and wouldn't effect the "about 600 lightyears away" distance of Betelgeuse. I'm asking more hypothetically. "Are these even factors?" is what I'm asking. What do we know and what don't we?
It's kinda hard to find the answers short of getting an astrophysics degree, so I'm hoping someone here with one could help me out.
True. Not to mention that if you're trying to get your salaried employees to work double shifts the smart ones are going to read between the lines and realize: this company is out of money and about to fold, better start job hunting now.
That was my exact thought as well. Most companies fail. In this guy's case they are just salaried employees without stock, they don't even have a vested interest in the company succeeding. Asking programmers (or anyone for that matter) to work 11 hours a day just to keep their job is just a good way to get rid of your employees.
Also, as far as actual productivity goes: in my experience 6 hours of actual work is pushing it for a programmer. Sure they show up for a full day, but after a certain point the brain burns out and they're posting on slashdot instead of coding, or they are making a lot of mistakes.
There is a reason that a lot of start ups spent a lot of money on game rooms and making their employees happy and comfortable. I'd rather have 4 good hours of a programmer at his absolute best then 8 hours of mediocrity.
Thank you for the very informative post. I was just about post "if it has got a liquid core layer, where's the magnetic field" so thank you also for answering my stupid question before I got a chance to ask it.
The unlawful activity was that these documents were classified in the first place. It is very specifically unlawful for many of those documents that were classified to be classified.
The second unlawful activity is treating unclassified documents as classified. The vast majority of the documnets "leaked" were technically public domain.
The problem I'd have with that is that it would be too difficult to determine what is frivolous spending and what is not. Look at food: What do you tax more caviar or cheeseburgers? How about arugula or spinach? Do you tax mansions more then small houses? What if the small house is made of exotic wood and the mansion is made of pine?
You want to tax yachts; most yachts are used for business. What if the yacht is used for fishing? What if its used for impressing foreign business executives so that they bring thousands of fishing related jobs to the US? The fishing yacht only benefits the fisherman, the exotic wine-and-dine yacht benefits potentially thousands of fisherman.
How about something both personal and cosmetic like breast implants. Who do you tax more, a stripper or a women that has had a mastectomy. What if the stripper has a family to feed and the mastectomy patient has no financial reason to justify the procedure, only her own self image?
The last one is a particularly harsh example, but I think it illustrates my point. On one hand you have an individual doing something politically distasteful that frees a group of children from poverty, on the other you have an innocent person disfigured by disease but who's purchase will benefit no one but her. My point here is that having anything other then a flat sales tax model allows for politicians to enforce morality or even "class warfare" (clumsy word, I know) via that form of tax code.
That is based on the largest deployed US warhead (variable yield, max 1.2 MT). The Russian deployed equivalent is about 25 MT. Also I don't understand what you mean by all the nukes in the world can only destroy a single city? Do you mean that you would need all 23,375 (estimate, 2007) to destroy one city? Or that you could destroy roughly 23,375 cities (one per nuke) out of 36,722 (estimate, 2007)? Neither makes much sense.
I'll completely agree that we don't have the capacity to render the planet sterile, but I think we could pretty much end the species if we really tried. It would take a lot longer then 8 seconds, but once anarchy, famine, and general radiation poisoning set in there wouldn't be much left.
Unless the initial press-only Wikileaks docs were leaked to N. Korea, this most recent flare up, which started when N. Korea shelled S. Korea and S. Korea shelled them back, started before Wikileaks took its dump. It seems more likely that Kim's failing health and the transfer of power to his youngest son are responsible.
Also, starting a nuclear war in response to finding out you only (massive, nuclear armed) ally wants you to sit down and shut up seems counter productive. Not to say that anything N. Korea does is sane: but I doubt it was a secret to N. Korea that China wanted N. Korea to make like it wasn't there (though the kid might not have been happy to hear it). The Chinese have the most to lose by a destabilized East Asia, whereas the N. Koreans have virtually nothing to lose. I'm sure China has spoken to them directly about the matter. They probably said something like: swing your dick around a few times to save face about the shelling, then go back to barely being there.
My understanding of RP's stance on abortion is that he doesn't feel that the constitution provides authority for the federal government to be involved one way or another. His personal beliefs might be pro-life, but his political stance is that abortion is a 10th amendment issue and should be regulated by the states (last I checked).
Personally I'm very much pro-choice, but I see his logic. There is really no constitutional provision for abortion being banned or allowed on the federal level. Dispensing with Roe v Wade is a pretty scary notion though. In an ideal world I'd say sure it has no place in our system of government, but the world is far from ideal.
Unless he invited Rosario to take the (assumed copyrighted) disc with him it wasn't pirated, just a copy. Copies are protected under fair use, distributing copies is not. Using a copied disc would be a necessary step in determining if the procedure was effective, so it would be impossible to perform the procedure without one. Therefor he did nothing wrong, even if the DMCA (which contradicts the CoTUSA) might disagree.
I'm imagining that the 61% that answered yes envisioned a "cyber attack" as their computer screens blowing up in their faces like on Star Trek. They probably don't realize that a cyber attack would probably take the form of shutting down potions of internet, so a presidential switch to shut down portions of the internet would essentially achieve the thing it's trying to prevent.
That kind of logic reminds me of the "Nike Hercules" program which attempted to thwart incoming Soviet nukes by detonating American nukes above American cities as a shield.
Slashdot Mirror
Good point. It probably would be safe in a collision I'd imagine, it's not like VW to not think of that. Weight isn't the biggest issue in a crash, how the energy is absorbed is. My Miata only weighs about 2000 lbs and it has a 4 star safety rating. It's so light that if I leave it in neutral I can easily push and pull the car back and forth with one hand.
I'd just hate to have to merge onto a 70 mph highway with only 39 hp. The Miata has about 140 hp and I usually floor it to get on the highway. Even flat out it takes over 7 seconds just to get to 60 mph (though it's so low it feels like you are going much faster, it's a fun car). What would the 0-60 be with 39hp and 1000 lbs less to move? Is this VW a two seater or a four seater? Two extra passengers would add 300-500 lbs.
27 hp in eco mode, 39 hp in "sport". I don't think that would even be legal on a US highway.
Indeed, I might have done so. The arts can be frustrating, particularly contemporary art. There is a lot of infuriating bullshitting done, though sometimes someone stumbles on something truly miraculous.
"Good" doesn't really enter into it. As the old saying goes "beauty is in the eye of the beholder". For the artist it's more of a journey, an artist is a sort of a tourist in their own mind.
I'm not an artist myself anymore, I buy and sell it, but I understand how it works.
The guys I know that are really good usually average one artwork every 2-3 days. Their brains are constantly churning, slowly refining from artwork to artwork. Sometimes they work on one canvas at a time, sometimes they work on multiple pieces simultaneously. They aren't necessarily fixated any one piece, that's a habit you have to break in art school. Each piece is an experiment, nothing more, and hopefully these experiments are more successful over time.
How do you determine success? That's where the infuriating bullshit comes in. Everyone has got to eat. No one knows anything about contemporary art. They might understand the history, but no one can tell you what's good, the closest they can say is: "this is an excellent example of such and such school or movement or artist". The truest statement anyone has every made about the relative "goodness" of an artwork is: "I don't know art, but I know what I like!".
I know an artist that went through a phase where he made one 8"x12" painting every day. He was showing a lot and was meeting the right people. If you were to ask about an artwork at a gallery the sales person would slide into an eloquent bunch of nonsense: describing the masterful brush work, refined and unique technique, dropping names of more famous artists that this subtle little drop or swish was an homage to (though the artist that made the piece probably wasn't even aware of the guy). All this to justify the painting's $1000 price tag.
On the other hand if you meet that same artist in his studio (galleries hate that as they don't get their cut) he'll show you a pile of paintings the size of a king size bed and hand them to you one at a time, giving you a couple seconds to look at each one. If you ask him about what he means by the paintings he'll say a few things about specific elements and maybe talk about certain aspects that keep reappearing from painting to painting, but mostly he will refuse to say much; saying that everything is there in the paint and trying to translate paint into english is futile. If it wasn't, he'd save some money (paint is expensive) and write a paper.
Thanks for your reply. I'm aware that these questions are mostly academic and that they don't really effect our estimates of our distance to Betelguese, but I've found this a very interesting discussion. I don't have a global question, just a lot of little ones. The water thing has been bugging me for some time.
Another thing that's been bugging me is whether if it's true that some "stuff" (light, whatever) that doesn't posses mass naturally propagates at the speed of light (in a vacuum) when at rest. It slows down when energy is imparted to it (not in a vacuum), resistance I suppose. It's the opposite of an object with mass, or at least I've been told.
I'm really glad that I started this thread, I learned a few things that I didn't anticipate to learn. Sometimes starting a thread is better then just reading the wikis (which I'm reading or have read).
Whoops! Good catch.
That's fascinating. I'd heard of the "aluminum clock" but I had no idea it was so accurate that it could actually measure the dilation effect of the Earth's gravitational field.
I wish I could get a PHD in Physics, but it's a little impractical right now and like most laymen I gravitate to the most spectacular elements of a field I know only a little about. Its nice to be able to speak people better informed. Thank you for the links, I'll look them up.
I know many artists that would spit in a physicist's face too. It's stupid, and an unfortunate divide, as I know plenty of interesting people on both sides, and a few that straddle the two fields. If someone is curious, the good thing to do is be helpful. That AC didn't get that.
I completely agree from a practical point of view. I actually wasn't trying to challenge the distance to Betelguese. This just seemed a good threat to bring up all the other questions in my original post, which was more about getting answers regarding relativity and the whether the speed of light is constant in expanding space-time.
Thank you though for your info on Betelguese, it's a facinating star.
I'm not really contemplating metaphysics, just trying to understand better 20th century physics. I should have used something like JKCS041 as an example instead of Betelguese, but its rare a thread comes up where you get to ask these questions and Betelguese was the topic.
Doesn't General Relativity postulate that an object with mass would acquire infinite mass and require infinite energy to travel at the speed of light? Therefor not a possibility. I'm not saying its possible, I'm just saying if it magically happened the object wouldn't experience time. I wonder if "stuff" with no mass experience time. Just something to wonder about, I don't think there is any evidence to suggest massless "stuff" degrades.
You must be fun at parties. Thanks for the link.
Thanks, I wasn't even thinking about the electromagnetic forces. Though isn't there a point (going by the heat death theory), that space-time expansion will overcome the electromagnetic forces? Or is that too controversial still?
I think the poster was talking about the light's point of view. Something with mass moving at the speed of light would theoretically not experience time. Though I don't want to put words in his mouth.
I wonder if something without mass experiences the passage of time when moving at the speed of light.
The difficulty with the last part is the contradictory nature of the info when you ask these questions to a search engine. Though your Google-Fu might just be much better then mine, too.
I have a serious question about the speed of light, and our ability to determine the relative distance and speeds of stellar objects. I specialized in the arts not the sciences, so maybe one of you physics buffs can help me. Please humor me if these are the dumbest questions in the world.
How do we actually know that the wave/particle/whatever I see when I glance up at Betelguese is about 600 years old. It seems to me that we would need to know a few things first, before we could calculate that:
How fast is the Earth moving through space? Not toward or away from Betelguese as in red and blue shifts of that particular star but just how fast are we moving through space in general. Can we look at one part of the sky and see everything red shifted and another part of the sky and see blue shifted and extrapolate the total speed from that (obviously we would need a series of measurements)? Do we know how fast the galaxy is moving, or even the speed that the sun moves around the center of the galaxy? For instance if I'm driving a car east at 60 mph, can we take all those factors, add them together and determine the total speed of me and my car.
Does that combined speed cause a time dialation effect (even a tiny one) on Earth? I know time and mass becomes distorted as you approach the speed of light, but I've never heard how steep that gradient is or if there is a lower limit. Would a hypothetical stationary cup of water cooled to absolute zero experience time differently then a similar cup boiling at 100 degrees (obviously the difference would be very tiny, but would it be there or is there a cut off)?
If the universe is expanding in the sense that there is more space between all particles (this was how it was explained to me: that with each passing moment the distance between all particles increases as the fabric of space-time slowly expands) wouldn't the speed of light be slowly increasing (or decreasing) as well. Would a lightyear 600 years ago be the same as it is now?
I know that the margins of error in determining astrological distance are way larger then any of these factors, and wouldn't effect the "about 600 lightyears away" distance of Betelgeuse. I'm asking more hypothetically. "Are these even factors?" is what I'm asking. What do we know and what don't we?
It's kinda hard to find the answers short of getting an astrophysics degree, so I'm hoping someone here with one could help me out.
Given Facebook's IPO will probably be quickly be proceeded by its demise, GS is probably doing Americans a favor.
True. Not to mention that if you're trying to get your salaried employees to work double shifts the smart ones are going to read between the lines and realize: this company is out of money and about to fold, better start job hunting now.
That was my exact thought as well. Most companies fail. In this guy's case they are just salaried employees without stock, they don't even have a vested interest in the company succeeding. Asking programmers (or anyone for that matter) to work 11 hours a day just to keep their job is just a good way to get rid of your employees.
Also, as far as actual productivity goes: in my experience 6 hours of actual work is pushing it for a programmer. Sure they show up for a full day, but after a certain point the brain burns out and they're posting on slashdot instead of coding, or they are making a lot of mistakes.
There is a reason that a lot of start ups spent a lot of money on game rooms and making their employees happy and comfortable. I'd rather have 4 good hours of a programmer at his absolute best then 8 hours of mediocrity.
Thank you for the very informative post. I was just about post "if it has got a liquid core layer, where's the magnetic field" so thank you also for answering my stupid question before I got a chance to ask it.
The unlawful activity was that these documents were classified in the first place. It is very specifically unlawful for many of those documents that were classified to be classified.
The second unlawful activity is treating unclassified documents as classified. The vast majority of the documnets "leaked" were technically public domain.
The problem I'd have with that is that it would be too difficult to determine what is frivolous spending and what is not. Look at food: What do you tax more caviar or cheeseburgers? How about arugula or spinach? Do you tax mansions more then small houses? What if the small house is made of exotic wood and the mansion is made of pine?
You want to tax yachts; most yachts are used for business. What if the yacht is used for fishing? What if its used for impressing foreign business executives so that they bring thousands of fishing related jobs to the US? The fishing yacht only benefits the fisherman, the exotic wine-and-dine yacht benefits potentially thousands of fisherman.
How about something both personal and cosmetic like breast implants. Who do you tax more, a stripper or a women that has had a mastectomy. What if the stripper has a family to feed and the mastectomy patient has no financial reason to justify the procedure, only her own self image?
The last one is a particularly harsh example, but I think it illustrates my point. On one hand you have an individual doing something politically distasteful that frees a group of children from poverty, on the other you have an innocent person disfigured by disease but who's purchase will benefit no one but her. My point here is that having anything other then a flat sales tax model allows for politicians to enforce morality or even "class warfare" (clumsy word, I know) via that form of tax code.
That is based on the largest deployed US warhead (variable yield, max 1.2 MT). The Russian deployed equivalent is about 25 MT. Also I don't understand what you mean by all the nukes in the world can only destroy a single city? Do you mean that you would need all 23,375 (estimate, 2007) to destroy one city? Or that you could destroy roughly 23,375 cities (one per nuke) out of 36,722 (estimate, 2007)? Neither makes much sense.
I'll completely agree that we don't have the capacity to render the planet sterile, but I think we could pretty much end the species if we really tried. It would take a lot longer then 8 seconds, but once anarchy, famine, and general radiation poisoning set in there wouldn't be much left.
Unless the initial press-only Wikileaks docs were leaked to N. Korea, this most recent flare up, which started when N. Korea shelled S. Korea and S. Korea shelled them back, started before Wikileaks took its dump. It seems more likely that Kim's failing health and the transfer of power to his youngest son are responsible.
Also, starting a nuclear war in response to finding out you only (massive, nuclear armed) ally wants you to sit down and shut up seems counter productive. Not to say that anything N. Korea does is sane: but I doubt it was a secret to N. Korea that China wanted N. Korea to make like it wasn't there (though the kid might not have been happy to hear it). The Chinese have the most to lose by a destabilized East Asia, whereas the N. Koreans have virtually nothing to lose. I'm sure China has spoken to them directly about the matter. They probably said something like: swing your dick around a few times to save face about the shelling, then go back to barely being there.
My understanding of RP's stance on abortion is that he doesn't feel that the constitution provides authority for the federal government to be involved one way or another. His personal beliefs might be pro-life, but his political stance is that abortion is a 10th amendment issue and should be regulated by the states (last I checked).
Personally I'm very much pro-choice, but I see his logic. There is really no constitutional provision for abortion being banned or allowed on the federal level. Dispensing with Roe v Wade is a pretty scary notion though. In an ideal world I'd say sure it has no place in our system of government, but the world is far from ideal.
Unless he invited Rosario to take the (assumed copyrighted) disc with him it wasn't pirated, just a copy. Copies are protected under fair use, distributing copies is not. Using a copied disc would be a necessary step in determining if the procedure was effective, so it would be impossible to perform the procedure without one. Therefor he did nothing wrong, even if the DMCA (which contradicts the CoTUSA) might disagree.
I'm imagining that the 61% that answered yes envisioned a "cyber attack" as their computer screens blowing up in their faces like on Star Trek. They probably don't realize that a cyber attack would probably take the form of shutting down potions of internet, so a presidential switch to shut down portions of the internet would essentially achieve the thing it's trying to prevent.
That kind of logic reminds me of the "Nike Hercules" program which attempted to thwart incoming Soviet nukes by detonating American nukes above American cities as a shield.