Nope, that's just a load of balls that no one but Libertarian nutjobs cares about. Mod me down all you like, the fact remains, no one gives a fuck that you can go to jail if you don't pay your taxes, actually most people think it's fair. So suck it up.
I'm not sure I can explain why, but when I hear such comments my gut reaction is "wow, that's a lot of faggotry going on here!".
Maybe because of the false humbleness that goes with saying such things as "Most people cannot even comprehend it, I can a little bit (<--false modesty here) and anyone who can (i.e. the elite of people who even have the brain power to picture it that you are part of) will necessarily then truly comprehend how small, short-lived, and insignificant they are in the grand scheme of things. (<--false humbleness and all-out faggotry here)".
But it's cool, we all know chicks dig such statements, it makes us sound smarter than anyone else and "deeper" too. And gayer too.
You are considering Earth as 3D because you are saying that Cartesian coordinates are what really exists and polar coordinates are a human construction.
Nope, I say that discarding one of the coordinates in either Cartesian or polar coordinates just because they're useless is a human construction. Altitude magically pops up again when it becomes relevant again. The Earth is in 3D, no matter how you look at it. You have to discard something for it to only be 2D.
Also I must disagree with N particles being 6N dimensional. That's like saying a colour raster picture is 3N dimensional (N being the number of pixels). First of all I don't know what you would call that but a pixel's colour isn't 3 dimensions, its a position in a 3D space. Same thing for a particle's position and momentum, each are 3D values, not dimensions, because they can only be one value at the same time. That's like, a sound's sample is not a dimension, it's a value, but a sound's instant frequency (if we'll pretend there's such a thing) is a dimension, because it's a full dimension with lots of simultaneous values. A value is in 0D, and 6 times 0D is still 0D.
At that point it's not "just math", it's "math that correctly matches reality and makes predictions
No, just having the maths working out isn't enough. You can imagine a mathematical description of a universe that accounts for all the possible observations ever yet get the nature of things completely wrong. In terms that relate to string theory, you can make string theory work out on everything, it still won't make matter be out of tiny strings.
That's like a black box which only has inputs and outputs. You can get a mathematical model that fits the functions between inputs and outputs, but that won't tell you for sure what's actually inside the box.
Exactly, String Theory is the layman's Rubik's Cube: "It's a stupid toy, because it's just like masturbation for my relatively low level cognitive skills and is about as fun as measuring with a chronometer the time it takes for you to jack off."
Quantum mechanics were necessary to account for a newly discovered set of phenomenons. String theory isn't here to account for anything not already taken into account, it's here to hold the whole thing together. And to do so, it will go at any lengths to distort itself into fitting whatever we already know and take into account.
I think the problem with string theory is that the entire approach seems flawed. You create a whole lot of stuff that we have no reason to think exists, such as tiny vibrating strings, or 26 space dimensions, just to explain what we know, and we'll create 100 more dimensions if we need to take new observations into account. It just seems like "we have nowhere to go so let's just try something anyways" approach.
You wish scientists would open their minds? Wait, I thought that string theory was very much the mainstream theory you can totally can get grant money for in the field of theoretical physics? It just seemed to me like all the theoretical physics were going into it because without the search for a unification theory they'd have little left to do with their career.
they are saying that the 3 dimensions we observe are emergent from a lower-dimensional description.
You know what that reminds me of? Computer data storage. All data in any form or dimensions is ultimately represented as a 1D string of bits/bytes in a computer.
So maybe all that means is that you can work something out to turn the universe and all its dimensions into a single thread, but as you said that's just a way to look at things.
As for the black hole entropy, not like I have any insight on the matter, but you said "we can indeed reduce all the information about a 3D region of space (the black hole) to an expression that only relies on 2 dimensions (the surface of the black hole)", and it reminded me of how I have a quibble with people claiming that the surface of the Earth is in 2 dimensions because we only need two coordinates to locate a point on the surface. It's not in 2D, it's in 3D polar coordinates, it's just that the distance is always the same, so we discard it and only keep the two angles. So, just saying about your black hole comment, it's not because one of the three coordinates in a 3D space isn't of any use that it ceases from existing.
So, if I get it right that means string theory is still just only an extremely complicated model that distorts itself to match to observations and still hasn't made any original predictions?
Just wondering, shouldn't philosophers in science at some point point that out so that we can abandon once and for all this approach that seems senseless and fruitless?
"The grand scheme of things", yeah, I love how people compare themselves to the hole universe as if it somehow was the objective way to look at things.
I don't compare myself to the whole universe, I compare myself to elemental particles. In that tiny scheme of things, I'm giant made of tiny molecules that make up cells that make up tubes and organs and shit, which millions of organisms and such living in me. I'm a world of its own.
I'm being serious here, I don't get how people can go "oh look I'm so much smaller than the whole fucking universe, and so much younger too, that just blew my mind". I for one don't see how the size of the world you live in is relevant to what you are. That's just a misplaced point of view to look at yourself from. Also, I think it's just an exercise of mental masturbation in the dimensions abstractions department, i.e. it's hard to really picture to ourselves what large numbers really represent rather than just a bunch of zeroes, so the exercise of picturing how many times bigger than you the universe really is is humbling, but still completely irrelevant to your life. The universe could stop 50 kilometres up in the sky, it could be only 6000 years old, what would it change to you?
Because meteors don't have to kill a cow for us to know how many make it to the ground?
Helfand, an astronomer, is presumably the one who estimated that âoeapproximately 3,000 meteors a day with the requisite mass strike Earthâ. This is a difficult number to get. How much mass? How fast does it need to be moving? But letâ(TM)s assume that this number is correct; it translates to 125 meteors per hour.
Sounds reasonable to me, even if necessarily imprecise.
Given this information how do they get the statistic of around 100 people per decade killed by meteor without ignoring reality?
Mmmh, where do YOU get that statistic from? I can't see it anywhere in TFA. All I see is that they claim that given the current air traffic you'd get one plane struck by a meteor every 400 years.
So you feel you have control over the odds, and you do, but in the end the odds in a car are still higher than in a plane, therefore you feel better about a higher risk as long as it comes with an illusion of control?
What if nobody as allowed to visit the beach of Columbus's first landing sites?
You wouldn't be allowed there if his footsteps were still visible. And as far as we're concerned, Armstrong's footprints may very well outlast mankind.
It sounds like you're confusing proportions with atmospheric density. But yeah, two orders of magnitude is a bit much, and no peer-reviewed paper anywhere to give it some credence. It is nonetheless an interesting idea indeed.
You realise that these days, if you see someone who never heard of Google you can safely call him a Luddite, right? Everyone knows who Google is, a lot of people even refer to their web browser as "Google". They have as much brand recognition if not more than Microsoft and Apple, and everyone knows that Google makes great services.
Given how much muscle they can flex on any front if they really get into it, in 10 years even your mom will want a "Google laptop".
Which means they're a giant. What, you thought that all it took to replace Windows on hundreds of millions of computers was to slap a nice package manager on top of GNOME? It takes a giant to do damage to a giant.
I just realised a few days ago that there was something wrong with the desktop OS market: you have a declining giant which held until now pretty much 98% of its market (non-Mac PC market), a strong but much smaller giant which is much more limited in how it can eat the big declining giant because he requires buying a whole new machine (and doesn't even cover all the ranges of machines, i.e. hardly any low end machines), and the rest, which is the tiny Linux and BSD guys who can't do much because well, none of them are anywhere near being giants.
So I thought something is missing, cause if the big giant is declining fast, then another giant has to help him lose its market share. Apple can only do it in a very limited manner, and even if desktop Linux was ready as a product it just isn't pushed into the desktop OS market by a giant.
And there comes Google and its Android platform. If they are actually going for the desktop market, and if they do things right, then I believe that within a few years they'll manage to relieve Microsoft from a portion of their desktop OS share that we'd consider quite significant by our current standards (understand 5-10% in 5 years), and in the long term they may turn out to be the ones who break the Windows' image of being the big OS you can't do without.
That's a huge challenge, but the thing about Google is, they're fucking huge now, but their biggest thing is still by far their web searching, and they're as big as one can be there, so I think they need something else that is huge to get into. Taking a shot at replacing Windows on desktops/laptops/netbooks seems like a logical choice.
Do you even know how barometers work? They work by putting mercury in a tube, inverting that tube into a bath of mercury so that mercury flows freely in and out of the tube and interfaces with the atmosphere. As you go up in the tube the pressure for the mercury gradually decreases, to the point that 76 millimetres above the surface the pressure drops to 0, so the mercury can't go any higher. You can do the same with a column of water over 10 meters high too. Anyways the point is, if the atmospheric density is 370 times higher as speculated in GP's link, then instead of stopping at 76 millimetres the mercury would now be able to go as high as 28 metres (not that I'm saying it would have been this dense). Please tell me you see how that relates to blood going up vertically in veins in the neck of gigantic animals.
By the way the really sad part is that you were modded anything else than Funny. I guess people in IT don't have such a good recollection of high school physics.
lol, ah once again, the good old "I explain the majority of UFO sightings therefore I can dismiss all UFO sightings" argument. Yep, you raise a good point, but it doesn't say much about truly mysterious UFOs as a whole.
Slashdot Mirror
+1, Insightful!
what about rethinking our punitive tax policy?
Nope, that's just a load of balls that no one but Libertarian nutjobs cares about. Mod me down all you like, the fact remains, no one gives a fuck that you can go to jail if you don't pay your taxes, actually most people think it's fair. So suck it up.
lol, nice comeback, not. Nothing to do with actual homosexuality, I was talking about faggotry in the "omg ur teh ghey!!!111" sense.
I'm not sure I can explain why, but when I hear such comments my gut reaction is "wow, that's a lot of faggotry going on here!".
Maybe because of the false humbleness that goes with saying such things as "Most people cannot even comprehend it, I can a little bit (<--false modesty here) and anyone who can (i.e. the elite of people who even have the brain power to picture it that you are part of) will necessarily then truly comprehend how small, short-lived, and insignificant they are in the grand scheme of things. (<--false humbleness and all-out faggotry here)".
But it's cool, we all know chicks dig such statements, it makes us sound smarter than anyone else and "deeper" too. And gayer too.
You are considering Earth as 3D because you are saying that Cartesian coordinates are what really exists and polar coordinates are a human construction.
Nope, I say that discarding one of the coordinates in either Cartesian or polar coordinates just because they're useless is a human construction. Altitude magically pops up again when it becomes relevant again. The Earth is in 3D, no matter how you look at it. You have to discard something for it to only be 2D.
Also I must disagree with N particles being 6N dimensional. That's like saying a colour raster picture is 3N dimensional (N being the number of pixels). First of all I don't know what you would call that but a pixel's colour isn't 3 dimensions, its a position in a 3D space. Same thing for a particle's position and momentum, each are 3D values, not dimensions, because they can only be one value at the same time. That's like, a sound's sample is not a dimension, it's a value, but a sound's instant frequency (if we'll pretend there's such a thing) is a dimension, because it's a full dimension with lots of simultaneous values. A value is in 0D, and 6 times 0D is still 0D.
Call me when the market starts caring. No, seriously, you have to give it to Apple and its talent for making people take that sort of shit.
At that point it's not "just math", it's "math that correctly matches reality and makes predictions
No, just having the maths working out isn't enough. You can imagine a mathematical description of a universe that accounts for all the possible observations ever yet get the nature of things completely wrong. In terms that relate to string theory, you can make string theory work out on everything, it still won't make matter be out of tiny strings.
That's like a black box which only has inputs and outputs. You can get a mathematical model that fits the functions between inputs and outputs, but that won't tell you for sure what's actually inside the box.
Exactly, String Theory is the layman's Rubik's Cube: "It's a stupid toy, because it's just like masturbation for my relatively low level cognitive skills and is about as fun as measuring with a chronometer the time it takes for you to jack off."
Fixed.
Quantum mechanics were necessary to account for a newly discovered set of phenomenons. String theory isn't here to account for anything not already taken into account, it's here to hold the whole thing together. And to do so, it will go at any lengths to distort itself into fitting whatever we already know and take into account.
I think the problem with string theory is that the entire approach seems flawed. You create a whole lot of stuff that we have no reason to think exists, such as tiny vibrating strings, or 26 space dimensions, just to explain what we know, and we'll create 100 more dimensions if we need to take new observations into account. It just seems like "we have nowhere to go so let's just try something anyways" approach.
You wish scientists would open their minds? Wait, I thought that string theory was very much the mainstream theory you can totally can get grant money for in the field of theoretical physics? It just seemed to me like all the theoretical physics were going into it because without the search for a unification theory they'd have little left to do with their career.
they are saying that the 3 dimensions we observe are emergent from a lower-dimensional description.
You know what that reminds me of? Computer data storage. All data in any form or dimensions is ultimately represented as a 1D string of bits/bytes in a computer.
So maybe all that means is that you can work something out to turn the universe and all its dimensions into a single thread, but as you said that's just a way to look at things.
As for the black hole entropy, not like I have any insight on the matter, but you said "we can indeed reduce all the information about a 3D region of space (the black hole) to an expression that only relies on 2 dimensions (the surface of the black hole)", and it reminded me of how I have a quibble with people claiming that the surface of the Earth is in 2 dimensions because we only need two coordinates to locate a point on the surface. It's not in 2D, it's in 3D polar coordinates, it's just that the distance is always the same, so we discard it and only keep the two angles. So, just saying about your black hole comment, it's not because one of the three coordinates in a 3D space isn't of any use that it ceases from existing.
So, if I get it right that means string theory is still just only an extremely complicated model that distorts itself to match to observations and still hasn't made any original predictions?
Just wondering, shouldn't philosophers in science at some point point that out so that we can abandon once and for all this approach that seems senseless and fruitless?
"The grand scheme of things", yeah, I love how people compare themselves to the hole universe as if it somehow was the objective way to look at things.
I don't compare myself to the whole universe, I compare myself to elemental particles. In that tiny scheme of things, I'm giant made of tiny molecules that make up cells that make up tubes and organs and shit, which millions of organisms and such living in me. I'm a world of its own.
I'm being serious here, I don't get how people can go "oh look I'm so much smaller than the whole fucking universe, and so much younger too, that just blew my mind". I for one don't see how the size of the world you live in is relevant to what you are. That's just a misplaced point of view to look at yourself from. Also, I think it's just an exercise of mental masturbation in the dimensions abstractions department, i.e. it's hard to really picture to ourselves what large numbers really represent rather than just a bunch of zeroes, so the exercise of picturing how many times bigger than you the universe really is is humbling, but still completely irrelevant to your life. The universe could stop 50 kilometres up in the sky, it could be only 6000 years old, what would it change to you?
Because meteors don't have to kill a cow for us to know how many make it to the ground?
Helfand, an astronomer, is presumably the one who estimated that âoeapproximately 3,000 meteors a day with the requisite mass strike Earthâ. This is a difficult number to get. How much mass? How fast does it need to be moving? But letâ(TM)s assume that this number is correct; it translates to 125 meteors per hour.
Sounds reasonable to me, even if necessarily imprecise.
Given this information how do they get the statistic of around 100 people per decade killed by meteor without ignoring reality?
Mmmh, where do YOU get that statistic from? I can't see it anywhere in TFA. All I see is that they claim that given the current air traffic you'd get one plane struck by a meteor every 400 years.
So you feel you have control over the odds, and you do, but in the end the odds in a car are still higher than in a plane, therefore you feel better about a higher risk as long as it comes with an illusion of control?
So the very first one might be erased. What about the thousands of other ones Armstrong left?
What if nobody as allowed to visit the beach of Columbus's first landing sites?
You wouldn't be allowed there if his footsteps were still visible. And as far as we're concerned, Armstrong's footprints may very well outlast mankind.
It sounds like you're confusing proportions with atmospheric density. But yeah, two orders of magnitude is a bit much, and no peer-reviewed paper anywhere to give it some credence. It is nonetheless an interesting idea indeed.
True, I noticed that after some more reading.
I think the problem is not the aerodynamics but the power it would take for the animal to fly (at least according to this page)
You realise that these days, if you see someone who never heard of Google you can safely call him a Luddite, right? Everyone knows who Google is, a lot of people even refer to their web browser as "Google". They have as much brand recognition if not more than Microsoft and Apple, and everyone knows that Google makes great services.
Given how much muscle they can flex on any front if they really get into it, in 10 years even your mom will want a "Google laptop".
which means?
Which means they're a giant. What, you thought that all it took to replace Windows on hundreds of millions of computers was to slap a nice package manager on top of GNOME? It takes a giant to do damage to a giant.
I just realised a few days ago that there was something wrong with the desktop OS market: you have a declining giant which held until now pretty much 98% of its market (non-Mac PC market), a strong but much smaller giant which is much more limited in how it can eat the big declining giant because he requires buying a whole new machine (and doesn't even cover all the ranges of machines, i.e. hardly any low end machines), and the rest, which is the tiny Linux and BSD guys who can't do much because well, none of them are anywhere near being giants.
So I thought something is missing, cause if the big giant is declining fast, then another giant has to help him lose its market share. Apple can only do it in a very limited manner, and even if desktop Linux was ready as a product it just isn't pushed into the desktop OS market by a giant.
And there comes Google and its Android platform. If they are actually going for the desktop market, and if they do things right, then I believe that within a few years they'll manage to relieve Microsoft from a portion of their desktop OS share that we'd consider quite significant by our current standards (understand 5-10% in 5 years), and in the long term they may turn out to be the ones who break the Windows' image of being the big OS you can't do without.
That's a huge challenge, but the thing about Google is, they're fucking huge now, but their biggest thing is still by far their web searching, and they're as big as one can be there, so I think they need something else that is huge to get into. Taking a shot at replacing Windows on desktops/laptops/netbooks seems like a logical choice.
Well I must say it does indeed sound like quite a hell of a value, but other than that fact, can you elaborate on why it makes it crank science?
Do you even know how barometers work? They work by putting mercury in a tube, inverting that tube into a bath of mercury so that mercury flows freely in and out of the tube and interfaces with the atmosphere. As you go up in the tube the pressure for the mercury gradually decreases, to the point that 76 millimetres above the surface the pressure drops to 0, so the mercury can't go any higher. You can do the same with a column of water over 10 meters high too. Anyways the point is, if the atmospheric density is 370 times higher as speculated in GP's link, then instead of stopping at 76 millimetres the mercury would now be able to go as high as 28 metres (not that I'm saying it would have been this dense). Please tell me you see how that relates to blood going up vertically in veins in the neck of gigantic animals.
By the way the really sad part is that you were modded anything else than Funny. I guess people in IT don't have such a good recollection of high school physics.
lol, ah once again, the good old "I explain the majority of UFO sightings therefore I can dismiss all UFO sightings" argument. Yep, you raise a good point, but it doesn't say much about truly mysterious UFOs as a whole.