xkcd

Eebster the Great

The main reason is the comparatively thick atmosphere of the Earth, which absorbs infrared radiation at night and circulates air. Mars has a thin atmosphere and much more dramatic temperature changes, from about -125 C to 25 C. On the Moon, with no atmosphere, it's even worse (-173 to 127 C). On Mer...

Eebster the Great

I don't know how expensive spectroscopic equipment is, but you can learn a lot from that about chemistry and thermodynamics. In particular, if you can see deep UV, you can experimentally corroborate Planck's Law. If you can analyze gases cryogenically, for instance if you can afford liquid helium, t...

Eebster the Great

The TV people have already standardised on the "how do we show portrait-orientation photos on our landscape-orientated-medium?" issue. Instead of black background that gives vertical letterbox-bars that are increasingly annoying as the portrait and landscape ratios each head well away fro...

Eebster the Great

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but this is due to the fact that the states aren't independent of each other? If they were there'd only be a 0.3% = (18432/18432)^50 chance of states matching? No. There are 18,432 different possible combinations of responses, but they are not equally likely, since ...

Eebster the Great

phillip1882 wrote:a

Did you accidentally the OP?

Eebster the Great

Or for that matter, the prepepperer, who peppers before either the pepperer or the repepperer.

Eebster the Great

How about "yous guys"?

Eebster the Great

It describes it as "gonadal cancer" and points out that they can transform other cells into cancer in mice. I am sure they don't get cancer "just like humans," but they do get malignant neoplasms. I'm not fully understanding the distinction you're trying to draw. Some organisms v...

Eebster the Great

The Bekenstein bound is an upper bound, not a lower bound. To reach the bound you need to form a black hole. For constant energy density (E ∝ V ∝ R 3 ), it gives S max ∝ R 4 , which is not particularly intuitive. Given a vacuum energy of 10 -9 J/m 3 , the formula is approximately S max = 10 18 m -4 ...

Eebster the Great

Fine, but evidence of cancer in mollusks is not controversial to my knowledge. Here's another study of cancer in claims. It may be due to an environmental contaminant of human origin, but if a chemical pollutant can induce cancer in clams, it can probably happen naturally. Mussels are apparently use...

Eebster the Great

Please don't tell me that "globalist" is now used to mean "someone who believes the world is a globe". I mean, if that's actually true then please tell me, but please don't tell me. No, the term is "globist." The globalists are the Illuminati reptoids that are trying t...

Eebster the Great

If you aren't doing something to induce cancer in an invertebrate, then you're going to be waiting around a long time. But if it can be induced, then it can occur. EDIT: Here are examples of malignant cells in marine invertebrates: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022098111002929 .

Eebster the Great

doogly wrote:
Flumble wrote:Does anyone have a good explanation for why the volume (or surface) of an n-ball is the way it is?

You mean, better than integrals?

Integrals are the way hyperglobists lie about the shape of the flat hyperearth.

Eebster the Great

"Y'all" is surely already in every general English dictionary worth its salt.

Eebster the Great

Linguistics is multidisciplinary. Most linguists don't have a background in science, but some do. Since it focuses on the details of human culture, it is more of a social science (like archaeology) than a natural science (like chemistry). It's still "real".

Eebster the Great

For what it's worth, if the spheres are the mass and radius of Earth, the final relative velocity will be 15.8 km/s. If the Sun, 874 km/s. If solar mass white dwarf stars, 8,710 km/s. As gmal said, you only really run into relativity for more compact objects, though I think it first becomes signific...

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"Suppose two identical, uniformly dense, rigid balls of mass M and radius R are initially at rest in a vacuum separated by a distance r . If they interact only gravitationally and relativistic effects are negligible, at what speed v will they collide?" I think the answer is v = √( G M (...

Eebster the Great

What organism most distantly related to human is capable of getting cancer? Or conversely, what is the creature that is most closely related to humans that can't get cancer? Is this what you meant? There's specifically a myth that sharks don't get cancer, and a such someone has bothered to document...

Eebster the Great

Looking back on the earlier parts of this discussion about "year omega" raises a math question that I guess might belong here: Can you not do subtraction on transfinite ordinals? "Omega minus one" seems like something that couldn't exist, because omega is by definition the first...

Eebster the Great

Yeah, I'm basically saying that, in either direction, the universe is either infinite or it isn't. If the universe has a beginning or end, that beginning or end must be some finite time in the past or future. So if the universe is infinitely old (has no finite age), then it has no beginning, and as ...

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In that case you can't trust the info; the traveler came from a future where you didn't flip two tails, but the travel will influence the results this time. Although with enough experimentation with more sensitive quantum effects, you could be reasonably confident whether or not the universe ensure...

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But now we have a factor of 2! Sometimes! Surely that's worth getting upset about. Now let me grab my calendar reform proposal and collection of infographics showing how dumb MDY dates are.

Eebster the Great

SuicideJunkie wrote:The difference between knowing after the flips, or before the flips.

You missed the super obvious context that I knew I wouldn't flip two tails because of information I got from a time traveler from the future.

Eebster the Great

It sounds as though you could get a nice SF story about intelligent races struggling to extract enough energy to keep going at the end of the universe, seeking out the boundaries and resources, and scavenging each other. Not a million miles, I suppose, from the end of the cities in flight stories. ...

Eebster the Great

Similarly, if I flip a coin twice, I know that I am twice as likely to get a heads and a tails as I am to get two heads. And if I know for a fact that I will not flip two tails, I now have a 2/3 chance of flipping a heads and a tails and a 1/3 chance of flipping two heads. If flipping the same coin...

Eebster the Great

Nickel-62 has the most binding energy per nucleon, so if your future species can somehow get all the nuclei to fuse or fission into those, they could probably extract a little more energy than the expected process of iron star formation I think. (Assuming protons do not decay.)

Eebster the Great

I'm not sure I understand the Ferris wheel analogy. Whether or not a satellite's mass is constant, if the only force acting on it is gravitational, its acceleration should not depend on its mass. That's not the problem with OP's proposal. You definitely have to consider relativistic effects, since t...

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You can extract energy out of a rotating black hole by slowing down the rotation though. This is fun. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penrose_process This is far too efficient. I prefer to wait until the universe has cooled down to a lower temperature than the black hole and collect its Hawking radia...

Eebster the Great

You can of course adapt to 24.65 hour days, because you can quite easily adapt to 28 hour days. It's probably true that schedules on Mars would be based on the length of the Martian sol, which is fine, because that's almost identical to the length of an Earth day. People's circadian cycles already v...

Eebster the Great

On the other hand, you say that because of the UV catastrophe, classical thermodynamics is useless. I have not mentioned the UV catastrophe, or EM radiation. I said the classical and statistical thermodynamics aren't perfectly consistent, but I didn't say either was useless. You said that they prov...

Eebster the Great

People on Mars would be living under and around artificial light 24/7 anyway like we do on Earth, but to a greater extent and with a weaker sun. If there were a long-term evolutionary effect on circadian rhythm on Mars, because people with certain rhythms had more successful children than others, I ...

Eebster the Great

since the variables that we use simply would not be macroscopic variables While scientists have a tendency to define the the macro-states in terms of the micro-states, knowledge ultimately goes the other way: We know the macro system first, and we learn the micro system through careful analysis/ ex...

Eebster the Great

First) The second law under classical thermodynamics definitions is (in principle) separable from the statistical mechanics definitions. For Pfhorrest's original question, I would consider any situation regularly breaking the classical law as valid example of the experiment he is seeking. I agree w...

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The second law is easily laid bare. It's not like we discovered statistical mechanics first. We worked backwards from what we observed to determine a mathematical truth, which is very nice. Regardless of your ontology, it is a historical fact that the understanding of information theory came from th...

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As I understand it, metal oxide semiconductor FETs use metal oxide semiconductor material. So for a silicon wafer, you will have a layer of SiO or SiO₂ on top of the silicon, which then gets etched to make a working chip.

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@prosilo Dont take it personally, this is the internet. There are people around on the web that will argue to the death that 1*1 cannot equal 1 (Im serious. This is a real thing that some people believe) and that modern mathematics is a conspiracy. Oh my God I just looked this up, and now I wish I ...

Eebster the Great

That is incorrect. The second law is an empirical law that states "these statistical rules apply". There isn't (and cannot be) anything a priori that says the statistics must apply to the world. Sort of. As I already pointed out, there is nothing making it impossible in principle for the ...

Eebster the Great

Pfhorrest wrote:Silicon dioxide has no "ish" about it, that's straight up what most of most stones are made of.

I am not so educated in the ways of minereroalogy as to know stone from metal or clay or whatnot. But it's a thingy and it does homework.

Eebster the Great

That is why my calc teacher preferred the conditional, I could teach a stone to get a 5 on the ap if the stone did its homework. Well, I could teach a stone to get a Nobel Prize if the stone did its homework. Silicon is kinda stone-ish, and I could program some to do homework, but I doubt you could...

Eebster the Great

I assume you started this thread to discuss an idea, but the problem is that it isn't clear what your idea is yet and you won't accept the answers you've gotten based on what it appears to be. Maybe you could help fill in some details. 1. What are the required elements in your design, and how are th...

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