Thank you for the good post. I was tempted to reply, as I have recently begun studying QM and GR but so much of what he said made no sense at all to me that I didn't know what to say. For some reason I did get the sense that the QM nervousness he spoke of (which is ridiculous) had something to do with him thinking the measured precession comes into conflict with the uncertainty principle (or maybe he dislikes the precision of the predictions). Honestly this guy reminds me of some of the people in my classes, I try to discuss the QM we are studying with them and it becomes immediately clear to me that they have no idea what is going on, and they don't even have a solid understanding classical mechanics.
You're close, but you've got your dates all mixed up (it isn't really a big deal, it is a very easy mistake to make, in fact you'll see it is actually kind of funny). I'll try to clarify things. Also I am not sure who you refer to when you say "Brahe" I thought you meant Tycho Brahe but he died (1601) before Newton.
First of all, planets don't strictly follow elliptical orbits; for example it has been shown that Mercury's orbit varies chaotically. On the other hand elliptical models are quite accurate.
1676 Ole Rømer makes a quantitative measurement of the speed of light by observing the moons of Jupiter, he concludes that the speed of light is finite. The story behind this is quite amusing, apparently it was possible for Ole to get the data he needed form the great Paris observatory because he was invited there by a man who found him quite attractive. Good ol' Ole published his findings in 1676 in the journal "Journal des sçavans"
1687 Isaac Newton publishes "Principa," his work on mechanics and gravitation. Ironically Rømer essentially killed Newtonian mechanics before Newton even published them. Clearly then, it was long known (at least by some) that Newtons laws of gravitation were wrong to begin with, however despite this they are still incredibly useful to this day and shockingly accurate.
1727 James Bradley measures stellar aberration, providing conclusive evidence supporting Rømer's idea that light propagates at a finite speed.
1846 Urbain Le Verrier's calculations contribute to the discovery of Neptune. I am not exactly sure when, but by around this time it is known, and has been shown, (in part by Verrier) that the perihelion precession of Mercury is not fully explained by Newton.
1916 Einstein publishes another paper on gravitation, he calls his new theory the general theory of relativity. One of the earliest tests of this new theory Einstein did himself. The test was to see if the theory could explain the perihelion precession of Mercury; it did, perfectly. Many more astonishing predictions arose out of GR. Among them gravitational lensing, gravitational waves, and black holes.
For some reason the article and summary only mention that Gravity Probe B was trying to measure was "minuscule" however, I at least find the actual quantity to be FAR more impressive than some journalist calling it small. Anyway want to know the precession?
Frame Dragging Effect (has NEVER before been measured): 1.1x10^-5 degrees per YEAR
Geodetic Effect: 1.8x10^-3 degrees per YEAR
Clearly then, these were not merely "minuscule" shifts...the potential for error is great.
I also have cox at home (currently I am in another state at college) and like you, at home I have their fastest residential plan (12Mb/1.2Mb) however my experience has been much better. We have had Cox high-speed internet for several years, and they have upgraded our service over the years several times. From what I understand Cox (at least they did about a year ago) had a transfer limit of 20GB down a month. A first time violation gets you nothing, no notice phone call or anything of that sort. Repeatedly and frequently exceed that cap, or do so by a significant amount and you will get a warning. I believe they have a sort of three strike policy, but maybe it is four, after which they terminate your account. However I have never heard of Cox throttling a user's rates as you claim.
In fact, a few months ago my stepfather inadvertently switched us to the 256kb/256kb plan, so obviously I noticed the huge speed difference and thought there was a problem. I called Cox and told them my internet was super slow, talked to tech support on the phone, they were nice but weren't able to do anything so we scheduled a home visit. Cox guy comes in his van, does preventative maintenance, and then starts trying to diagnose the problem. He said they had been doing work in the area recently and maybe that was messing with the signal, after about an hour+ of ruling out everything (even installing an amp they gave us for free, just in case) he calls HIS tech support line and they find out the problem, we're running a slow config...Cox guy complains the stupid tech on the phone should have noticed this right away (the one I scheduled the appointment with) and helps me switch us back to the fast config. Thirty minutes later we get 12Mb/1.2Mb again, after about 2 hours total of tech support and a home visit because our speeds are far below what we (thought) we were paying for. The in home tech even went to dslreports to do speed checks.
So, as a current customer of Cox, I can speak from first hand experience that those [speed complaints] are taken seriously, but then again the old saying goes...your mileage may vary.
In your calculations you neglected to take into account the value of the time you spend commuting. I haven't really studied economics, and I don't know your financial situation so I couldn't calculate what just being stuck in the car regardless gas prices costs you, especially if you consider the potential financial impact the stress of commuting can be, and even the value of your time as a function of time (on a clock) etc. But I can tell you: if ~21 hours of your time (the amount of time you spend in a car per month living 30mins from work vs 5mins) is worth less than ~$408 (~$19.4/h) then yes, living in the cheaper apartment 30mins from work makes sense...
I think many people do simple math just as you did (for good reason) to justify their decisions, however in situations such as these those same people don't realize that it is actually far more complicated. Thus the actual result may be much different than they expected.
I can't speak for everyone but actually it really ISN'T interesting to see "large scale nuclear power could have similar infrastructure problems to renewables - invest a lot or don't end up viable"---thats pretty much how everything works--. Nothing is free; NOTHING can be or ever will be able to fulfill a significant portion of the world's energy needs without significant investments. Oil companies didn't just drill one hole with one rig, they've made HUGE investments in infrastructure in order to provide a viable alternative to...almost everything at this point.
Exactly. The summary is very misleading and the article only says what the real problem is in the last sentence. The world is NOT running out of uranium in the sense that we are going to run out of oil sometime soon. What is happening is that supply does not meet demand (demand that is expected only to grow), and as a result stockpiles are running low.
The thing most people don't realize is that even the 1996 flavor of OS/2 Warp 4 is capable of running modern software like Firefox and OpenOffice, and it does so rather well on fairly limited hardware.
Windows has a hard time doing that these days, and Linux is travelling in that direction (at least in terms of the mainstream distros, which seem to have abandoned legacy hardware support for eye candy).
I don't really understand what you mean by "Windows has a hard time doing that these days" is "that" supposed to be "running modern software like Firefox and OpenOffice"? If so what do you mean it has a "hard time doing" this very common task? Do you mean windows 3.1 has a hard time doing it? Because that I would believe...the idea that Windows XP is so technologically primitive that it cannot even run the software that was designed for it--to me seems absurd.
Add to that the fact that, according to the New York Times, the plane was only about 20% full at the time. Oh the horrors of navigating an empty plane. So tough!
Neither you, nor the grandparent here seems to understand what is going on here.
Grandparent, you claim to be a physicist, and then go on to say "E=mc^2, anyone? Anti-matter would be impossible to use here." Just because you've read a few issues of Scientific American doesn't make you any more a physicist than my mother. What does that statement even mean? When I read it I think, "Oh he's trying to say that because of the equivalence of mass and energy, and the fact that the annihilation of mass releases a lot of energy, that such a reaction is too energetic to take place inside the body safely...but this isn't exactly a very convincing argument. Do you know what the rest mass of an electron is, or what the rest mass of an proton is? I think not...you can probably look it up somewhere if you're too lazy to figure it out on your own.
"Even if you could deliver anti-matter down a syringe needle, how big and powerful would the magnet have to be to make sure it didn't touch the sides of the needle? I'm guessing pretty darn big. Hence, I don't believe you can zap cancer directly with anti-matter. We should focus on nanobots getting rid of cancer for us, among a vast amount of other things, such as mending broken bones in a matter of days."
I don't even know what to say to this...honestly, I'm stunned. By the way, I haven't read the preprint issues of Phys. Rev. Lett. was there an article in there talking about a crazy breakthrough in nanobots? Oh wait, that's right...no one is even the slightest bit fucking close to a nanobot that can find and kill cancer, mend bones, etc. We defiantly should just forget about all the people dying of disease in THIS century and focus on making nanobots so that maybe in a few hundred years we can use them!
I haven't read it yet, probably will later today, but at first glance I see nothing wrong with the article, it just seems that the way they've written it is...a bit sensationalist. If you don't believe the claims they've made, it was published in 2000, so I'm sure theres plenty to learn about this article...and also, they did have a great list of citations. Keep in mind, this is a letter, it's not the exact same thing as a normal journal article, there is a limit to length, four pages I believe. I don't really read Nature, but with my limited experience reading journals, occasionally you will see in a letter (in say, Phys. Rev. Lett.) the author reference their own journal article (perhaps in Phys. Rev. D) for a more detailed description etc.
Actually, the process of turning a tree into paper, and then getting that paper to you, releases more CO2 than the tree absorbed over its life. Time Inc. discovered this when they decided they wanted to be "CO2 neutral".
So no, paper is not good for the environment. Is it a better alternative than other things? Quite possibly.
Directors, actually, do not have ultimate creative say in movie creation. Contracts are very complex things, but generally what you see in the movie has to meet the final approval of the studios (financial backers) and the producers. This is why it is common to see "Director's cut" as a special feature on DVDs. Many times what a director wanted to do, and what appeared in the final version of the film are quite different.
For most of us in the audience, we don't care about the process. We don't care how the Academy feels, we're just looking to have a good time, and maybe a bit of nookie afterwards. There are some who take these things very seriously though...so whether the performance they saw was genuine matters to them. Some people think of film as art, while others think of it purely as entertainment.
They do NOT compete with Thinkpads. Thinkpads are known for their durability, Apple laptops are known for exploding into 5,000 pieces if you look at them funny.
In this age of multicores and games which can only take advantage of 1 core, wouldn't the benefits of the killer nic disappear? I assume windows offloads everything else running to the 2nd core seeing as how the game will essentially max out the first core the entire time.
What I want to know, is whatever happened to the ideology that if you treat your customers well they will treat you well? From everyone I've ever spoken with, they'd rather pay MORE money (albeit some might disagree on the exact value) for honesty and real service than to save a few dollars going with an option which might actually end up costing you more in the long run because they are dishonest/have bad service etc?
1. Lower the prices on 1 CD no one wants anyway making people think CDs aren't stupidly expensive anymore.
2. Raise the prices on everything else.
3. Profit!
I live in a very wealthy, gated community. There used to be just about no street signs apart from those naming roads, and 2 stop signs. Recently they've added many speed limit signs, and stop signs at every corner. Why? Is it the traffic? Not at all. Is it because there have been a lot of accidents? I don't even think there has been one. The reason for this is simple, there are a lot of parents who are afraid of their kids getting run over. There wasn't a problem before, that I knew of anyway. It's just parents are afraid. I'm sure you've all seen those "children at play" signs people buy and stick in the middle of streets. The thing I don't understand, if you're so afraid of your kid being run over, why do you let them play in the street? Not even that, HELP them do so instead of MAKING them travel 50 yards to the park to play?
In an IT environment, any smart IT department buys a lot of the same. They buy identical thinkpads (maybe do some manual, 5minute memory upgrades as needed for the higher ups) identical desktops. Then they format one and set it up the way they want it, with all their monitoring, av, and office applications that they and the users will need along with all necessary updates. This may take several hours, yes but then they create a drive image and can deploy that image to all the other boxes they bought.
Someone managed to completely bork their computer? All their work is already on a server, reformat and install that image...sorry your background picture is gone whiny-passive-aggressive-b****. Oh look, all that third party software that was so hard to install is back again! So yeah, I agree, way too much work to install those 3rd party apps...all those lunch breaks just get in the way! Mmm this sandwich is good *ding* oh what was that, the image finished installing? Phew! Time to go apologize the user for deleting her background pictures again!
"Science attempts to construct explanations for observed data. Then it tests those explanations. No one is ever super-completely-definitely-sure, but they keep testing and trying to fit their explanations into the web of data and theory. Some things fit really well, and survive huge amounts of double checking."
And usually we also know about how far off our calculations might be. You will very rarely see scientific data that are exact. Measure the length of your mouse with a ruler, and you will know its length, relative to the speed of light (1m the length of the path traveled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299 792 458 of a second), to say, ±1mm.
Now if you have also smartly defined how to measure the length of your mouse, if you give it to anyone they should be able to achieve a result whose values overlap with yours on the real number line at some set of points.
You may also want to note that c is defined to be equal to 299,792,458 m/s. So the occasional "theories" that pop up about how "the speed of light is CHANGING!zomg" are, as Penn & Teller would say, bullshit. IAAP.
"No, it doesn't. Most of the energy used by a rocket goes into the exhaust's temperature and velocity, not into the payload's velocity."
Actually that's the point of a rocket...the faster the exhaust goes the faster the payload goes. Conservation of momentum.
Actually limecrete only reduces the emissions involved in creating it by 40% by way of using less energy to fire it, and absorbing some CO2 while curing (hardening on your sidewalk). After that, the limecrete does nothing...overall producing and using limecrete still produces prollution.
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Thank you for the good post. I was tempted to reply, as I have recently begun studying QM and GR but so much of what he said made no sense at all to me that I didn't know what to say. For some reason I did get the sense that the QM nervousness he spoke of (which is ridiculous) had something to do with him thinking the measured precession comes into conflict with the uncertainty principle (or maybe he dislikes the precision of the predictions). Honestly this guy reminds me of some of the people in my classes, I try to discuss the QM we are studying with them and it becomes immediately clear to me that they have no idea what is going on, and they don't even have a solid understanding classical mechanics.
You're close, but you've got your dates all mixed up (it isn't really a big deal, it is a very easy mistake to make, in fact you'll see it is actually kind of funny). I'll try to clarify things. Also I am not sure who you refer to when you say "Brahe" I thought you meant Tycho Brahe but he died (1601) before Newton.
First of all, planets don't strictly follow elliptical orbits; for example it has been shown that Mercury's orbit varies chaotically. On the other hand elliptical models are quite accurate.
1676 Ole Rømer makes a quantitative measurement of the speed of light by observing the moons of Jupiter, he concludes that the speed of light is finite. The story behind this is quite amusing, apparently it was possible for Ole to get the data he needed form the great Paris observatory because he was invited there by a man who found him quite attractive. Good ol' Ole published his findings in 1676 in the journal "Journal des sçavans"
1687 Isaac Newton publishes "Principa," his work on mechanics and gravitation. Ironically Rømer essentially killed Newtonian mechanics before Newton even published them. Clearly then, it was long known (at least by some) that Newtons laws of gravitation were wrong to begin with, however despite this they are still incredibly useful to this day and shockingly accurate.
1727 James Bradley measures stellar aberration, providing conclusive evidence supporting Rømer's idea that light propagates at a finite speed.
1846 Urbain Le Verrier's calculations contribute to the discovery of Neptune. I am not exactly sure when, but by around this time it is known, and has been shown, (in part by Verrier) that the perihelion precession of Mercury is not fully explained by Newton.
1916 Einstein publishes another paper on gravitation, he calls his new theory the general theory of relativity. One of the earliest tests of this new theory Einstein did himself. The test was to see if the theory could explain the perihelion precession of Mercury; it did, perfectly. Many more astonishing predictions arose out of GR. Among them gravitational lensing, gravitational waves, and black holes.
For some reason the article and summary only mention that Gravity Probe B was trying to measure was "minuscule" however, I at least find the actual quantity to be FAR more impressive than some journalist calling it small. Anyway want to know the precession?
Frame Dragging Effect (has NEVER before been measured): 1.1x10^-5 degrees per YEAR
Geodetic Effect: 1.8x10^-3 degrees per YEAR
Clearly then, these were not merely "minuscule" shifts...the potential for error is great.
More information can be found at http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/gpb/index.html
I also have cox at home (currently I am in another state at college) and like you, at home I have their fastest residential plan (12Mb/1.2Mb) however my experience has been much better. We have had Cox high-speed internet for several years, and they have upgraded our service over the years several times. From what I understand Cox (at least they did about a year ago) had a transfer limit of 20GB down a month. A first time violation gets you nothing, no notice phone call or anything of that sort. Repeatedly and frequently exceed that cap, or do so by a significant amount and you will get a warning. I believe they have a sort of three strike policy, but maybe it is four, after which they terminate your account. However I have never heard of Cox throttling a user's rates as you claim.
In fact, a few months ago my stepfather inadvertently switched us to the 256kb/256kb plan, so obviously I noticed the huge speed difference and thought there was a problem. I called Cox and told them my internet was super slow, talked to tech support on the phone, they were nice but weren't able to do anything so we scheduled a home visit. Cox guy comes in his van, does preventative maintenance, and then starts trying to diagnose the problem. He said they had been doing work in the area recently and maybe that was messing with the signal, after about an hour+ of ruling out everything (even installing an amp they gave us for free, just in case) he calls HIS tech support line and they find out the problem, we're running a slow config...Cox guy complains the stupid tech on the phone should have noticed this right away (the one I scheduled the appointment with) and helps me switch us back to the fast config. Thirty minutes later we get 12Mb/1.2Mb again, after about 2 hours total of tech support and a home visit because our speeds are far below what we (thought) we were paying for. The in home tech even went to dslreports to do speed checks.
So, as a current customer of Cox, I can speak from first hand experience that those [speed complaints] are taken seriously, but then again the old saying goes...your mileage may vary.
In your calculations you neglected to take into account the value of the time you spend commuting. I haven't really studied economics, and I don't know your financial situation so I couldn't calculate what just being stuck in the car regardless gas prices costs you, especially if you consider the potential financial impact the stress of commuting can be, and even the value of your time as a function of time (on a clock) etc. But I can tell you: if ~21 hours of your time (the amount of time you spend in a car per month living 30mins from work vs 5mins) is worth less than ~$408 (~$19.4/h) then yes, living in the cheaper apartment 30mins from work makes sense...
I think many people do simple math just as you did (for good reason) to justify their decisions, however in situations such as these those same people don't realize that it is actually far more complicated. Thus the actual result may be much different than they expected.
I can't speak for everyone but actually it really ISN'T interesting to see "large scale nuclear power could have similar infrastructure problems to renewables - invest a lot or don't end up viable"---thats pretty much how everything works--. Nothing is free; NOTHING can be or ever will be able to fulfill a significant portion of the world's energy needs without significant investments. Oil companies didn't just drill one hole with one rig, they've made HUGE investments in infrastructure in order to provide a viable alternative to...almost everything at this point.
Exactly. The summary is very misleading and the article only says what the real problem is in the last sentence. The world is NOT running out of uranium in the sense that we are going to run out of oil sometime soon. What is happening is that supply does not meet demand (demand that is expected only to grow), and as a result stockpiles are running low.
I don't really understand what you mean by "Windows has a hard time doing that these days" is "that" supposed to be "running modern software like Firefox and OpenOffice"? If so what do you mean it has a "hard time doing" this very common task? Do you mean windows 3.1 has a hard time doing it? Because that I would believe...the idea that Windows XP is so technologically primitive that it cannot even run the software that was designed for it--to me seems absurd.
Add to that the fact that, according to the New York Times, the plane was only about 20% full at the time. Oh the horrors of navigating an empty plane. So tough!
Neither you, nor the grandparent here seems to understand what is going on here.
Grandparent, you claim to be a physicist, and then go on to say "E=mc^2, anyone? Anti-matter would be impossible to use here." Just because you've read a few issues of Scientific American doesn't make you any more a physicist than my mother. What does that statement even mean? When I read it I think, "Oh he's trying to say that because of the equivalence of mass and energy, and the fact that the annihilation of mass releases a lot of energy, that such a reaction is too energetic to take place inside the body safely...but this isn't exactly a very convincing argument. Do you know what the rest mass of an electron is, or what the rest mass of an proton is? I think not...you can probably look it up somewhere if you're too lazy to figure it out on your own.
"Even if you could deliver anti-matter down a syringe needle, how big and powerful would the magnet have to be to make sure it didn't touch the sides of the needle? I'm guessing pretty darn big. Hence, I don't believe you can zap cancer directly with anti-matter. We should focus on nanobots getting rid of cancer for us, among a vast amount of other things, such as mending broken bones in a matter of days."
I don't even know what to say to this...honestly, I'm stunned. By the way, I haven't read the preprint issues of Phys. Rev. Lett. was there an article in there talking about a crazy breakthrough in nanobots? Oh wait, that's right...no one is even the slightest bit fucking close to a nanobot that can find and kill cancer, mend bones, etc. We defiantly should just forget about all the people dying of disease in THIS century and focus on making nanobots so that maybe in a few hundred years we can use them!
Just to add a bit to the information you've given. The link to the abstract (and thus also the full text PDF) is here: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v406/n6793/ab s/406277a0.html.
I haven't read it yet, probably will later today, but at first glance I see nothing wrong with the article, it just seems that the way they've written it is...a bit sensationalist. If you don't believe the claims they've made, it was published in 2000, so I'm sure theres plenty to learn about this article...and also, they did have a great list of citations. Keep in mind, this is a letter, it's not the exact same thing as a normal journal article, there is a limit to length, four pages I believe. I don't really read Nature, but with my limited experience reading journals, occasionally you will see in a letter (in say, Phys. Rev. Lett.) the author reference their own journal article (perhaps in Phys. Rev. D) for a more detailed description etc.
Actually, the process of turning a tree into paper, and then getting that paper to you, releases more CO2 than the tree absorbed over its life. Time Inc. discovered this when they decided they wanted to be "CO2 neutral".
So no, paper is not good for the environment. Is it a better alternative than other things? Quite possibly.
Directors, actually, do not have ultimate creative say in movie creation. Contracts are very complex things, but generally what you see in the movie has to meet the final approval of the studios (financial backers) and the producers. This is why it is common to see "Director's cut" as a special feature on DVDs. Many times what a director wanted to do, and what appeared in the final version of the film are quite different.
For most of us in the audience, we don't care about the process. We don't care how the Academy feels, we're just looking to have a good time, and maybe a bit of nookie afterwards. There are some who take these things very seriously though...so whether the performance they saw was genuine matters to them. Some people think of film as art, while others think of it purely as entertainment.
They do NOT compete with Thinkpads. Thinkpads are known for their durability, Apple laptops are known for exploding into 5,000 pieces if you look at them funny.
No one actually read them. They were so terribly written you read the first page and want to puke.
What about dual cores?
In this age of multicores and games which can only take advantage of 1 core, wouldn't the benefits of the killer nic disappear? I assume windows offloads everything else running to the 2nd core seeing as how the game will essentially max out the first core the entire time.
What I want to know, is whatever happened to the ideology that if you treat your customers well they will treat you well? From everyone I've ever spoken with, they'd rather pay MORE money (albeit some might disagree on the exact value) for honesty and real service than to save a few dollars going with an option which might actually end up costing you more in the long run because they are dishonest/have bad service etc?
"Why would the RIAA, a cartel, lower prices?"
1. Lower the prices on 1 CD no one wants anyway making people think CDs aren't stupidly expensive anymore.
2. Raise the prices on everything else.
3. Profit!
Wait, they've already done that.
I live in a very wealthy, gated community. There used to be just about no street signs apart from those naming roads, and 2 stop signs. Recently they've added many speed limit signs, and stop signs at every corner. Why? Is it the traffic? Not at all. Is it because there have been a lot of accidents? I don't even think there has been one. The reason for this is simple, there are a lot of parents who are afraid of their kids getting run over. There wasn't a problem before, that I knew of anyway. It's just parents are afraid. I'm sure you've all seen those "children at play" signs people buy and stick in the middle of streets. The thing I don't understand, if you're so afraid of your kid being run over, why do you let them play in the street? Not even that, HELP them do so instead of MAKING them travel 50 yards to the park to play?
No, clearly it's made of wootz ore!
http://ffxi.allakhazam.com/images/items/wootz.jpg
In an IT environment, any smart IT department buys a lot of the same. They buy identical thinkpads (maybe do some manual, 5minute memory upgrades as needed for the higher ups) identical desktops. Then they format one and set it up the way they want it, with all their monitoring, av, and office applications that they and the users will need along with all necessary updates. This may take several hours, yes but then they create a drive image and can deploy that image to all the other boxes they bought.
Someone managed to completely bork their computer? All their work is already on a server, reformat and install that image...sorry your background picture is gone whiny-passive-aggressive-b****. Oh look, all that third party software that was so hard to install is back again! So yeah, I agree, way too much work to install those 3rd party apps...all those lunch breaks just get in the way! Mmm this sandwich is good *ding* oh what was that, the image finished installing? Phew! Time to go apologize the user for deleting her background pictures again!
"Science attempts to construct explanations for observed data. Then it tests those explanations. No one is ever super-completely-definitely-sure, but they keep testing and trying to fit their explanations into the web of data and theory. Some things fit really well, and survive huge amounts of double checking."
And usually we also know about how far off our calculations might be. You will very rarely see scientific data that are exact. Measure the length of your mouse with a ruler, and you will know its length, relative to the speed of light (1m the length of the path traveled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299 792 458 of a second), to say, ±1mm.
Now if you have also smartly defined how to measure the length of your mouse, if you give it to anyone they should be able to achieve a result whose values overlap with yours on the real number line at some set of points.
You may also want to note that c is defined to be equal to 299,792,458 m/s. So the occasional "theories" that pop up about how "the speed of light is CHANGING!zomg" are, as Penn & Teller would say, bullshit. IAAP.
"No, it doesn't. Most of the energy used by a rocket goes into the exhaust's temperature and velocity, not into the payload's velocity." Actually that's the point of a rocket...the faster the exhaust goes the faster the payload goes. Conservation of momentum.
That should be the default startup sound on all macs.
Actually limecrete only reduces the emissions involved in creating it by 40% by way of using less energy to fire it, and absorbing some CO2 while curing (hardening on your sidewalk). After that, the limecrete does nothing...overall producing and using limecrete still produces prollution.