xkcd

tomandlu

BTW does anyone recall, or have a reference for, the old-time quote about it being hard to draw the absolute line between night and day, and yet it being tolerably easy to tell the two apart in general?

The Google has failed me so far, but I'm sure I'm not making it up.

tomandlu

But then really, what reason do you have for using statistics? At the root, all evidence is aesthetic. Tomandlu, I promise your kid isn't too young for Feyerabend. Ah, we've moved on now to Panpsychism (fwiw we both think it's reasonable). [EDIT] That aside, I shall pass on the reference. He's jugg...

tomandlu

gmalivuk wrote:Badly formulated theories, such as the "theory" that Russel's teapot exists, are provable with one example but only disprovable statistically.

Would you define (or consider it reasonable to define) that one example as a statistic?

tomandlu

I don't know if the term "statistical evidence" is a thing. Ideally, all theories would be supported by empirical (i.e. measured) evidence. In many cases we'd want to perform statistical analysis to see if the results we have are statistically significant. Wouldn't something like smoking ...

tomandlu

My son and I were having a (friendly) dispute over whether all evidence for a theory is essentially statistical. He maintains that it is, even if the sample-size required is only 1 (e.g. the 1919 eclipse proving Einstein was correct). Whilst I concede that he has a point, this strikes me as making t...

tomandlu

Phew, ta (no humble pie today!).

tomandlu

Does this make a good case that Wakefield may have been right about vaccinations and autism? https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24354891 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28031551 This study reveals that the risk of autism during from the late1990s to early 2000s in the US significantly decreased...

tomandlu

Okay, so in relation to a (smartphone) battery, is the quote right, wrong or ambiguous?

My sort-of understanding of a battery is that voltage is the potential, current is how quickly that potential is being consumed, and resistance is how you control the flow of current.

tomandlu

In this article: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/oct/10/samsung-how-batteries-work-smartphones-explode there is the following statement: The higher the resistance the harder the battery has to work to maintain a usable voltage and so the amount of power it can produce per charge decrease...

tomandlu

This seems like a good place to start. Also, in the book Hatchet , which is really accurate to real life, the protagonist figures out how to make garments out of animals he kills. I forget exactly how he did it; I can go look it up in my copy if you want. Heh - the taxidermy net link was fun, but m...

tomandlu

Does anyone have any idea what the basic skill-set would be to make animal hides durable and adaptable? I'm thinking specifically of four requirements: ⋅ Is it enough to just scrape a skin or is more necessary to preserve it? ⋅ How would you soften a skin? (clothing) ⋅ ...

tomandlu

Angua wrote:<snip>

For topic/username synergy, you should drop the 'n'.

tomandlu

Just jumping in with the fact that you can only taste bubbles if your body can turn the CO2 into acid. You don't actually taste the bubbles! Some medications have this as a side-effect. Ah! Which might imply that warmer tonic does taste more fizzy, since smaller bubbles = greater surface area for r...

tomandlu

The best way to decrease CO2 loss is to increase the partial pressure of the CO2 in the atmosphere the carbonated beverage is in. Pouring it into a smaller container and securely sealing the top on is an easy way to do this. Squeezing the (plastic) bottle so that there's a much smaller air space be...

tomandlu

I need to send an email in French to try and recover a phone and ipod from a Parisian garage. Can someone confirm that Google has given me a reasonable translation (and that it doesn't sound rude?): English: Hello, You are very kindly looking after a small, blue 'Centre Parcs' bag that I left behind...

tomandlu

Hah! This sort-of happened at a client's site, and it took us a few hours to figure out what they'd done. Basically, they called in to say that a whole bunch of Word documents generated by our application had gone awol, which didn't make any sense, given the trail in the application, but, yes, they ...

tomandlu

Thanks all - I'll get back to you when (hopefully) I've got my head round this...

tomandlu

So, you say you understand the examples with FTL spaceships. Could you elaborate on your understanding of how these can break causality as a starting point? A transporter is exactly the same, is the issue. Well, 'understand' would be pushing it, but all the examples seem to depend on communication ...

tomandlu

doogly wrote:teleport to somewhere else "now," boost a little so that "now" changes meaning, and teleport back into the past lightcone of your original action.

I know I'm being thick, but that really doesn't help me understand.

tomandlu

Err... an instantaneous transporter *is* FTL travel... And "instantaneous" transport in one reference frame can always be backwards-in-time in another. Thats the whole point. So can I have an example where I can break causality by using transporter technology? I get that it's possible to ...

tomandlu

This came up elsewhere, and I've been trying to find a resource that will deal with this specific set-up, but I can't find anything that helps me... If you don't have FTL travel, but you do have instantaneous transporters, how would you use that technology to break causality? I sort-of get the examp...

tomandlu

Oh, you could get a new universe spawned from a random fluctuation all right, but the average timespan for that to happen is thousands of orders of magnitude greater than the lifespan of an individual universe from Big Bang to heat death. Isn't that a reasonable mechanism for the creation of a new ...

tomandlu

Point was - should we count descriptions of (human or otherwise) anatomy, including neuroanatomy, as 'laws of nature' in the same sense as laws of motion or thermodynamics? Yes. Why? I mean, I can see that the underlying physics would be 'laws of nature', but in the case of specific anatomy, these ...

tomandlu

Some of the information here might help...

https://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/i ... 456AAj5PK8

tomandlu

Oh, you could get a new universe spawned from a random fluctuation all right, but the average timespan for that to happen is thousands of orders of magnitude greater than the lifespan of an individual universe from Big Bang to heat death. Isn't that a reasonable mechanism for the creation of a new ...

tomandlu

Quizatzhaderac wrote:Yes,
Alice can receive a note at A1,
pass it to Bob ad B1,
who can then pass it back to Alice at A1 again.

Thanks (sort of - now I've got to figure it out).

tomandlu

Quizatzhaderac wrote:The energy content of a heat dead universe is still well defined, but it's an epiphenomenal quantity at that point.

I like that word - so it exists but it cannot affect anything? (a bit like my libido, really)

tomandlu

Which means a loop exists in form of A1 -> A2 -> B1 -> B2 -> A1 TBH, I'm no wiser (I never really understand this concept however it's phrased), so can I ask a simple Y/N question, and then I'll try to figure out the details later? Q: Using this model, can Alice send a message to herself that she t...

tomandlu

I offer you my sig...

tomandlu

Zohar wrote:You could flip your picture.

But then he'd need to read all the messages back to front and would not be able to digest sugars.

(I did consider it, but it's a fairly iconic image imho - would you flip the mona lisa?)

tomandlu

The potential energy due to gravity does not have mass, that's where you get off the chain. GR is all about gravity being "different" from other forces. Ah! Many thanks - I did not know that. n is number of particles, k is boltzmann's constant. My confusion partly stemmed from my mistake ...

tomandlu

How do you create a time-paradox in this scenario? All the paradoxes I've seen seem to depend on communication between moving ships.

tomandlu

My only gripe is that my avatar doesn't look at the posts anymore - now he looks like someone caught with their porn-stash open.

tomandlu

As to your second point, I don't know why you think these wouldn't exist. Like, this seems a deep misunderstanding. Let's say you have perfect gas at perfect thermal equilibrium, T. Maximum entropy. Energy is well defined, it's nkT. Right? Would it help explain my problem if I said I've no idea wha...

tomandlu

I don't think this has been touched on in this thread or the GR one, so can anyone help me with my latest confusion/question? If potential energy has mass, then presumably this counts for gravitational potential energy. So, a 1kg object lifted a few feet will have more mass than the same object rest...

tomandlu

Tyndmyr wrote:The cake was, of course, a lie.

Yes, but a very small lie.

tomandlu

Isn't one of the problems with trying to classify things like economics as a science that it's subject to feedback? People who understand economics will make different choices than those who do not, so you then need another layer to account for the impact of those choices, and so on, elephants all t...

tomandlu

Does a charged battery have more mass than an uncharged battery? That's actually a neat party trick. Have someone hand you two equal batterys, one of them charged. To everyone's surprise, you can point out the charged battery simply by holding them! There's no trick to it. You just take one in each...

tomandlu

A world with 100% unemployment is likewise antithetical to economics as we currently know it. If we can't adapt to the current problem, adapting to the hypothetical future problem will be no more possible, as predicting the distant future is a nightmare in addition to this. I would say that they ar...

tomandlu

A world with 100% unemployment is likewise antithetical to economics as we currently know it. If we can't adapt to the current problem, adapting to the hypothetical future problem will be no more possible, as predicting the distant future is a nightmare in addition to this. I would say that they ar...

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