There are definitely trolls in the flat-earth community and I am pretty convinced that the majority of the 'famous' flat-earthers on Youtube are only doing it for the money. They are scam artists and their target is the myriad of scientifically illiterate people who genuinely believe their crap. Look at all the people who believe in unscientific ideas such as astrology, homeopathy, spiritism, power of crystals, ancient hidden civilizations,... Add to that the bronze age cosmologies described by the holy books of most religions and you have the perfect environment to bring people to the border of the rabbit hole. Once they are there, Youtube provides the final kick to fall in the hole.
An important factor is the recent resurgence of creationism in the US and in most areas of the world where religious fundamentalists are thriving. Initially, the creationist movement was only targeting the Evolution Theory but all sciences are connected: - The old ages of Earth and of the Universe are confirmed by Geology, Astrophysics, and Nuclear Physics (i.e. via Radiometric dating) so those sciences MUST be wrong. - The common ancestry of all life forms is confirmed by DNA analysis, Paleontology and Anatomy so those sciences MUST be wrong. - The Noah Flood is disproved by History, Geology, Climatology, DNA analysis so those sciences MUST be wrong. - etc The end result is that a fundamentalist preacher has no other choices than to denigrate all modern sciences to justify his bronze age beliefs. Youtube and other social networks are not the cause of irrational beliefs but they provide a good environment to amplify them.
The Wolf moon part is absolutely irrelevant since this is just a name given to the full moon in January. The same event in August would be called a Sturgeon Moon Eclipse and in November that would be a Beaver Moon Eclipse.
Also about 1/4 of all full moons can be classified as supermoons (3 or 4 per year) and supermoons are barely noticeable. Finally, there is Total Lunar Eclipses are also quite common (about 1 per year on average) and they are always visible from half of the world. So Supermoon Total Lunar eclipses are really not that rare. That is something that anyone can expect to see once every 10 years.
For instance, the next total lunar eclipses will be 26 May 2021 and it will also be a Supermoon or, if your care about the month names, a Total Flower Supermoon eclipse.
I did not notice the rope when I first saw the video but the event looked fake to me. The problem is that the trajectory of the robot does not make a lot of sense. It is falling on the side but without any rotation or lateral movement. This is inconsistent with the robot being hit by the moving car.
Thank you! I am now reassured. I was terrified by the prospect of the Great Tribulation but I now know that this won't happen before the next nearby supernova. We know that IK Pegasi - the closest supernova candidate - is too far away to cause us any harm so I can now assume that the Great Tribulation is not due before we approach another candidate so in several millions years. Thanks again! I can go back sinning.
The problem is that there is a minimum speed for any object falling on the Moon or any planet) without being slowed down by an engine or by friction with the atmosphere. If I am not mistaken, that speed is equal to the Escape Velocity. For Earth that is 11.1km/s and for the Moon that is 2.38km/s. This is easy to understand if you consider that any massive object sits at the bottom of a gravity well. The same amount of potential energy is required to enter or exit the well. https://xkcd.com/681/ This is also why dropping ice comets cannot be a viable solution for global warming even if the ice is initially at -273C. The kinetic energy given to that ice (so 11km/s) would be enough to boil it several time. Slowing down the comet with rockets or parachutes would not work either because the same amount of energy would be released in the atmosphere.
This is about SELF-DRIVING flying vehicles! Anyways I agree that even without human drivers, this is going to introduce some huge risks. The noise is also going to be problematic. Last but not least, flying requires significantly more energy than driving so this is probably going to be quite expensive. To summarize, I predict that this technology will only be affordable by the wealthiest peoples and that it will have very little effect on the rest of the population (except for the noise).
The article explicitly mentions a growth of "one 74 thousandth of a second per year" but the slashdot editors wrote "one 74 thousandth of a second per year". Pfffff...
Anyways, 24h minus 18h41m = 5h19m = 19140 seconds. For a period of 1.4 billions years the rate of change is 19140 / 1.4e9 = 1.3671e-05 = 1 / 73145 second per year.
This is quite similar to psychokinetic and telekinetic powers. About 200 years ago, mediums could use the 'power of the mind' to move very heavy objects such as tables or people. And somehow, during the 20th century, the 'movable' size decreased while the ability to detect frauds increased. Nowadays people with powers can barely move teeny weeny objects and only when the conditions are good (aka no expert watching them to detect frauds).
UFOs are a bit like that. They are still sittings but most of the proofs, usually videos, do not resist a careful analysis by a CGI specialist or anyone with a true critical mind. See for instance the Oskar Jungell videos on YT. https://www.youtube.com/user/O...
Of course, one could argue that aliens want to remain undetected (e.g. the Star-Trek Prime Directive) and consequently they stopped visiting us when the risk of being caught on camera became too high. That is a reasonable argument but that does not help to prove that aliens really exist and have visited us.
You are probably right but if there is an excess of mutations in the male sex cells then that means that the Y chromosomes are on average more subject to mutations than the X chromosome. Another way to see the problem is to consider that the 'ancestors' of a Y chromosomes were all males while the 'ancestors' of a X chromosome were 1/3 males and 2/3 females. By 'ancestor', I of course mean from which parent that chromosome was inherited. So over multiple generations the Y chromosomes should accumulate more mutations than the X chromosomes. This is of course assuming that the effect described in the research paper can be generalized in time and to larger populations.
The 'ancestors' of non-sexual chromosomes should be 1/2 males and 1/2 females and so should not be affected.
I think that you put too much faith in the old generations. As far as I can remember, most companies have been releasing products containing shit codes. Most managers do not understand technical issues and that has nothing to do with millennials.
The test track is short so a huge acceleration is currently needed to reach a significant speed. The final version, if it ever exists, will probably require a smaller acceleration but for a longer time.
Let's assume a desired speed S = 700km/h ~= 200m/s at a constant acceleration A = 0.1g = 1m/s^2 (that is a typical acceleration in a train). The acceleration time is T = S / A = 200 / 1 = 200s = 3m20s. Also the average speed during the acceleration phase is S/2 = 100m/s so the required distance is 100m/s * 200s = 20000m = 20km.
I am pretty sure that an acceleration of more than 0.1g can be achieved without being too inconvenient. After all, unlike in a classical train, the passengers are supposed to remain sited during 'takeoff' and 'landing'.
Though, I am wondering how well the hyperloop would be able to manage altitude changes. At 200m/s, each 1% of slope would cause a vertical acceleration of 200*0.01 = 2m/s = 0.2g. At 5% you get 1g. Yeah! Zero gravity if the train goes downhill.
It seems to me that the cosmic engineer fucked up its aesthetically design. The apparent sizes of the Moon and of the Sun vary significantly (because orbits are elliptical instead of circular) so their relative apparent sizes vary by -10% to 10%. Also, if the moon orbit was aligned with the ecliptic, solar eclipses would be a lot more frequent.
"There's a simple solution to this - tax profits in the country where they originate. If a multinational wants to trade in a country, they pay her taxes. End of."
Actually, this is already the case. The problem is that the companies are designed to minimize their profit by moving the money between various legal entities in other countries. For instance "Starbucks reportedly paid just £8.6m in corporation tax in the UK over 14 years and nothing in the last four years - despite sales of £400m last year... As part of its tax affairs, the firm (i.e. Starbucks UK) transferred some money to a Dutch sister company in royalty payments, bought coffee beans from Switzerland and paid high interest rates to borrow from other parts of the business." ( http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-pol... )
Compared to modern languages and even to K&R C, the Fortran 66 language had very of the features that we all take for granted.
Variable names were case insensitive (so UPPER CASE in practice) and limited to 6 characters
The IF statement was applied to a SINGLE statement so any complex behavior had to be implemented using conditional GOTOs ( no ELSE, no SWITCH-CASE,....) .
For example, in Fortran77 you can write structured codes such as
And of course, no stack, no recursivity, no dynamic allocation nor pointers, no function prototypes, no struct nor classes, no strings of variable length,...
In Asimov mind, "Twist the genetics" probably did not have the same meaning that it has today. The science of the "genetics" so the study of heredity was already well established in the 50s (see Mendel, William Bateson,...).
The Moon Escape velocity is 2.38 km/s while on Earth it is 11.186 km/s.
Since energy is proportional to the square of the speed (E=1/2*m*v^2) we can conclude that it is (11.186/ 2.38)^2 = 2 time easier to reach free space from the Moon than from Earth.
However, even if a rock is launched from the Moon at 2.38 km/s, it still inherits the inertia of the Moon. Simply speaking, the rock would not fall to Earth. It would be in an orbit similar to the Moon orbit.
The orbital speed of the Moon is about 1km/s so the rock must be given that additional acceleration to cancel its orbital speed.
At that point, the rock is immobile (from the Earth point of view) and it will start falling toward Earth because of... gravity.
When it reaches Earth, its speed will be equal to the Earth Escape velocity (a bit less in fact since the rock did not start falling from an infinite distance) so 11.186 km/s.
The kinetic energy is given by the formula 1/2 * m * V^2 so for 1kg the kinetic energy at 11km/s is 1/2 * 1 * 11000^2 = 60 * 10^6 Joules
As a comparison, 1kg of TNT provides 4 * 10^6 Joules so each kg of moon rock would be equivalent to approximatively 15kg of TNT
The Hiroshima bomb was 15 kilotons of TNT = 15 * 10^6 Kg so a similar effect would require a 1000 tons of Moon rock and the ability to accelerate that rock to a speed of 2.38+1 = 3.38 km/s.
The relevant bit is "At that time African elephants branched off first. Then just 440,000 years later, a blink of an eye in evolutionary time, Asian elephants and mammoths diverged into their own separate species."
The 1mm/1000 years figure is flawed. It is based on an incorrect value of 14 millions tons of dust per year computed in the early 60th. More recent figures are 100 to 1000 time smaller.
Even creationists websites do not use anymore moon dust as an argument. For instance look at the last paragraph in the Conclusion section of https://answersingenesis.org/a...
"Calculations show that the amount of meteoritic dust in the surface dust layer, and that which trace element analyses have shown to be in the regolith, is consistent with the current meteoritic dust influx rate operating over the evolutionists’ timescale. While there are some unresolved problems with the evolutionists’ case, the moon dust argument, using uniformitarian assumptions to argue against an old age for the moon and the solar system, should for the present not be used by creationists."
I could almost agree with you except that my critic was not against religion as a whole but against a literal interpretation of religious texts.
The issue is not science vs religion but reality vs blind faith in an absolute truth.
More generally, the same problem is found in non-religious contexts such as flat earth and other conspiracy theories where people will first assert a truth and then will ignore any evidence against it.
What you are suffering from is called a displacement. More precisely you appear to assume that scientists, like the creation myth in your favorite holy book, are claiming an absolute trust.
That does not work like that in the real world. Scientists create models and then try to invalidate them by comparing to reality.
Eventually all models become invalidated and are replaced by newer models that fit better with reality.
No sane scientist will ever claim that a specific model is absolutely true. That is why the article is full of "may" and "suggests". Same for the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... page that describes the single large collision model.
The only thing that is correct in your post is that from the 5 scientists involved in your short story, the last one is probably the one that merits the most to be fired.
Why? Because scientists #1 and #3 are both proposing a model. Scientists #2 and #4 are defending those models. The only one that is not contributing in any useful way is scientist #5.
Slashdot Mirror
There are definitely trolls in the flat-earth community and I am pretty convinced that the majority of the 'famous' flat-earthers on Youtube are only doing it for the money. They are scam artists and their target is the myriad of scientifically illiterate people who genuinely believe their crap. Look at all the people who believe in unscientific ideas such as astrology, homeopathy, spiritism, power of crystals, ancient hidden civilizations, ... Add to that the bronze age cosmologies described by the holy books of most religions and you have the perfect environment to bring people to the border of the rabbit hole. Once they are there, Youtube provides the final kick to fall in the hole.
An important factor is the recent resurgence of creationism in the US and in most areas of the world where religious fundamentalists are thriving. Initially, the creationist movement was only targeting the Evolution Theory but all sciences are connected:
- The old ages of Earth and of the Universe are confirmed by Geology, Astrophysics, and Nuclear Physics (i.e. via Radiometric dating) so those sciences MUST be wrong.
- The common ancestry of all life forms is confirmed by DNA analysis, Paleontology and Anatomy so those sciences MUST be wrong.
- The Noah Flood is disproved by History, Geology, Climatology, DNA analysis so those sciences MUST be wrong.
- etc
The end result is that a fundamentalist preacher has no other choices than to denigrate all modern sciences to justify his bronze age beliefs.
Youtube and other social networks are not the cause of irrational beliefs but they provide a good environment to amplify them.
The Wolf moon part is absolutely irrelevant since this is just a name given to the full moon in January. The same event in August would be called a Sturgeon Moon Eclipse and in November that would be a Beaver Moon Eclipse.
Also about 1/4 of all full moons can be classified as supermoons (3 or 4 per year) and supermoons are barely noticeable. Finally, there is Total Lunar Eclipses are also quite common (about 1 per year on average) and they are always visible from half of the world. So Supermoon Total Lunar eclipses are really not that rare. That is something that anyone can expect to see once every 10 years.
For instance, the next total lunar eclipses will be 26 May 2021 and it will also be a Supermoon or, if your care about the month names, a Total Flower Supermoon eclipse.
http://macop.tripod.com/mac/To...
I did not notice the rope when I first saw the video but the event looked fake to me. The problem is that the trajectory of the robot does not make a lot of sense. It is falling on the side but without any rotation or lateral movement. This is inconsistent with the robot being hit by the moving car.
Thank you! I am now reassured. I was terrified by the prospect of the Great Tribulation but I now know that this won't happen before the next nearby supernova. We know that IK Pegasi - the closest supernova candidate - is too far away to cause us any harm so I can now assume that the Great Tribulation is not due before we approach another candidate so in several millions years. Thanks again! I can go back sinning.
The problem is that there is a minimum speed for any object falling on the Moon or any planet) without being slowed down by an engine or by friction with the atmosphere. If I am not mistaken, that speed is equal to the Escape Velocity. For Earth that is 11.1km/s and for the Moon that is 2.38km/s. This is easy to understand if you consider that any massive object sits at the bottom of a gravity well. The same amount of potential energy is required to enter or exit the well. https://xkcd.com/681/
This is also why dropping ice comets cannot be a viable solution for global warming even if the ice is initially at -273C. The kinetic energy given to that ice (so 11km/s) would be enough to boil it several time. Slowing down the comet with rockets or parachutes would not work either because the same amount of energy would be released in the atmosphere.
That gives me an idea for a new source of renewable energy! Catch some whales and attach them to giant offshore wheels to produce electricity.
This is about SELF-DRIVING flying vehicles! Anyways I agree that even without human drivers, this is going to introduce some huge risks. The noise is also going to be problematic. Last but not least, flying requires significantly more energy than driving so this is probably going to be quite expensive. To summarize, I predict that this technology will only be affordable by the wealthiest peoples and that it will have very little effect on the rest of the population (except for the noise).
The article explicitly mentions a growth of "one 74 thousandth of a second per year" but the slashdot editors wrote "one 74 thousandth of a second per year". Pfffff...
Anyways, 24h minus 18h41m = 5h19m = 19140 seconds.
For a period of 1.4 billions years the rate of change is 19140 / 1.4e9 = 1.3671e-05 = 1 / 73145 second per year.
Where can I buy Post-It with pre-printed passwords? That would save me so much time.
This is quite similar to psychokinetic and telekinetic powers. About 200 years ago, mediums could use the 'power of the mind' to move very heavy objects such as tables or people. And somehow, during the 20th century, the 'movable' size decreased while the ability to detect frauds increased. Nowadays people with powers can barely move teeny weeny objects and only when the conditions are good (aka no expert watching them to detect frauds).
UFOs are a bit like that. They are still sittings but most of the proofs, usually videos, do not resist a careful analysis by a CGI specialist or anyone with a true critical mind. See for instance the Oskar Jungell videos on YT. https://www.youtube.com/user/O...
Of course, one could argue that aliens want to remain undetected (e.g. the Star-Trek Prime Directive) and consequently they stopped visiting us when the risk of being caught on camera became too high. That is a reasonable argument but that does not help to prove that aliens really exist and have visited us.
You are probably right but if there is an excess of mutations in the male sex cells then that means that the Y chromosomes are on average more subject to mutations than the X chromosome. Another way to see the problem is to consider that the 'ancestors' of a Y chromosomes were all males while the 'ancestors' of a X chromosome were 1/3 males and 2/3 females. By 'ancestor', I of course mean from which parent that chromosome was inherited. So over multiple generations the Y chromosomes should accumulate more mutations than the X chromosomes. This is of course assuming that the effect described in the research paper can be generalized in time and to larger populations.
The 'ancestors' of non-sexual chromosomes should be 1/2 males and 1/2 females and so should not be affected.
I think that you put too much faith in the old generations. As far as I can remember, most companies have been releasing products containing shit codes. Most managers do not understand technical issues and that has nothing to do with millennials.
The test track is short so a huge acceleration is currently needed to reach a significant speed. The final version, if it ever exists, will probably require a smaller acceleration but for a longer time.
Let's assume a desired speed S = 700km/h ~= 200m/s at a constant acceleration A = 0.1g = 1m/s^2 (that is a typical acceleration in a train). The acceleration time is T = S / A = 200 / 1 = 200s = 3m20s. Also the average speed during the acceleration phase is S/2 = 100m/s so the required distance is 100m/s * 200s = 20000m = 20km.
I am pretty sure that an acceleration of more than 0.1g can be achieved without being too inconvenient. After all, unlike in a classical train, the passengers are supposed to remain sited during 'takeoff' and 'landing'.
Though, I am wondering how well the hyperloop would be able to manage altitude changes. At 200m/s, each 1% of slope would cause a vertical acceleration of 200*0.01 = 2m/s = 0.2g. At 5% you get 1g. Yeah! Zero gravity if the train goes downhill.
It seems to me that the cosmic engineer fucked up its aesthetically design. The apparent sizes of the Moon and of the Sun vary significantly (because orbits are elliptical instead of circular) so their relative apparent sizes vary by -10% to 10%. Also, if the moon orbit was aligned with the ecliptic, solar eclipses would be a lot more frequent.
"There's a simple solution to this - tax profits in the country where they originate. If a multinational wants to trade in a country, they pay her taxes. End of."
Actually, this is already the case. The problem is that the companies are designed to minimize their profit by moving the money between various legal entities in other countries. For instance "Starbucks reportedly paid just £8.6m in corporation tax in the UK over 14 years and nothing in the last four years - despite sales of £400m last year ... As part of its tax affairs, the firm (i.e. Starbucks UK) transferred some money to a Dutch sister company in royalty payments, bought coffee beans from Switzerland and paid high interest rates to borrow from other parts of the business." ( http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-pol... )
The FORTRAN origin of the code is obvious.
The original code was written in 1977 and so was probably using Fortran 66 (or a derivative)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Compared to modern languages and even to K&R C, the Fortran 66 language had very of the features that we all take for granted.
Variable names were case insensitive (so UPPER CASE in practice) and limited to 6 characters
The IF statement was applied to a SINGLE statement so any complex behavior had to be implemented using conditional GOTOs ( no ELSE, no SWITCH-CASE, ....) .
For example, in Fortran77 you can write structured codes such as
IF ( X .EQ. 42 ) THEN
A=1
ELSE
A=2
ENDIF
but in Fortran 66 you had to write something like
IF ( X .NE. 42 ) GOTO 666
A=1
GOTO 777
666 A=2
777 CONTINUE
And of course, no stack, no recursivity, no dynamic allocation nor pointers, no function prototypes, no struct nor classes, no strings of variable length, ...
This is because clock_gettime() is POSIX but not C99. The option -std=c99 enforced a strict respect to the C99 standard and so ignores POSIX features.
As of now, -std=c99 is only needed to compile the 'compile' program. I recommend to do it manually and to compile the rest without C99.
If you did not change the Makefile then the following should work:
make clean
gcc -std=c99 -o compile compile.c
make
In Asimov mind, "Twist the genetics" probably did not have the same meaning that it has today. The science of the "genetics" so the study of heredity was already well established in the 50s (see Mendel, William Bateson, ...).
As far as I can tell, this code is syntactically correct (if executed by a Perl interpreter).
Unless something goes terribly wrong with Perl, the code behavior is pretty well defined. It shall output the following 2 lines:
> This is the header of the output
> where are the entries?
So the only sensible answer to the question"why doesn't this work" is "it works"
The Moon Escape velocity is 2.38 km/s while on Earth it is 11.186 km/s.
Since energy is proportional to the square of the speed (E=1/2*m*v^2) we can conclude that it is (11.186/ 2.38)^2 = 2 time easier to reach free space from the Moon than from Earth.
However, even if a rock is launched from the Moon at 2.38 km/s, it still inherits the inertia of the Moon. Simply speaking, the rock would not fall to Earth. It would be in an orbit similar to the Moon orbit.
The orbital speed of the Moon is about 1km/s so the rock must be given that additional acceleration to cancel its orbital speed.
At that point, the rock is immobile (from the Earth point of view) and it will start falling toward Earth because of ... gravity.
When it reaches Earth, its speed will be equal to the Earth Escape velocity (a bit less in fact since the rock did not start falling from an infinite distance) so 11.186 km/s.
The kinetic energy is given by the formula 1/2 * m * V^2 so for 1kg the kinetic energy at 11km/s is 1/2 * 1 * 11000^2 = 60 * 10^6 Joules
As a comparison, 1kg of TNT provides 4 * 10^6 Joules so each kg of moon rock would be equivalent to approximatively 15kg of TNT
The Hiroshima bomb was 15 kilotons of TNT = 15 * 10^6 Kg so a similar effect would require a 1000 tons of Moon rock and the ability to accelerate that rock to a speed of 2.38+1 = 3.38 km/s.
The answer is likely in there: http://news.nationalgeographic...
The relevant bit is "At that time African elephants branched off first. Then just 440,000 years later, a blink of an eye in evolutionary time, Asian elephants and mammoths diverged into their own separate species."
The 1mm/1000 years figure is flawed. It is based on an incorrect value of 14 millions tons of dust per year computed in the early 60th. More recent figures are 100 to 1000 time smaller.
Even creationists websites do not use anymore moon dust as an argument. For instance look at the last paragraph in the Conclusion section of https://answersingenesis.org/a...
"Calculations show that the amount of meteoritic dust in the surface dust layer, and that which trace element analyses have shown to be in the regolith, is consistent with the current meteoritic dust influx rate operating over the evolutionists’ timescale. While there are some unresolved problems with the evolutionists’ case, the moon dust argument, using uniformitarian assumptions to argue against an old age for the moon and the solar system, should for the present not be used by creationists."
I could almost agree with you except that my critic was not against religion as a whole but against a literal interpretation of religious texts.
The issue is not science vs religion but reality vs blind faith in an absolute truth.
More generally, the same problem is found in non-religious contexts such as flat earth and other conspiracy theories where people will first assert a truth and then will ignore any evidence against it.
What you are suffering from is called a displacement.
More precisely you appear to assume that scientists, like the creation myth in your favorite holy book, are claiming an absolute trust.
That does not work like that in the real world. Scientists create models and then try to invalidate them by comparing to reality.
Eventually all models become invalidated and are replaced by newer models that fit better with reality.
No sane scientist will ever claim that a specific model is absolutely true. That is why the article is full of "may" and "suggests". Same for the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... page that describes the single large collision model.
The only thing that is correct in your post is that from the 5 scientists involved in your short story, the last one is probably the one that merits the most to be fired.
Why? Because scientists #1 and #3 are both proposing a model. Scientists #2 and #4 are defending those models. The only one that is not contributing in any useful way is scientist #5.