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Showing content with the highest reputation on 09/12/20 in all areas

  1. It isn't as simple as that, because intelligence (which I assume is the 'observable' you are quantifying here) isn't a linear thing, it is multi-dimensional. What I mean by that is that most people are differently abled in different areas of life. For example, I have a friend who is absolutely useless in maths and most other academic subjects, but a brilliant artist, and earns a decent living by producing art. I myself am very intellectual-minded, and thus perform well in academic subjects such as maths and physics, but I am useless when it comes to social skills, so I'd be a miserable failure if I were to go into (say e.g.) politics. So what does it mean for someone to be 'stupid' or 'intelligent'? These terms are meaningful only in a specific context. You don't need to have book smarts to be successful in life, and conversely plenty of book-smart people never do particularly well in the competitive world of business. So no, we shouldn't give money to people purely for lack of intelligence, unless of we are dealing with a recognised intellectual disability. What would be a far better thing to do is provide an unconditional universal basic income for everyone, because that would give people a better chance to develop their full potential in life without having to worry about their basic survival, even if that potential cannot be immediately quantified in terms of monetary value.
    2 points
  2. Spotted this playing one of my old Pokemon games under the Pokedex entry for Magneton: "It is actually three Magnemite linked by magnetism. It generates powerful radio waves that raise temperatures by 3.6 degrees F within a 3,300-foot radius." That got me wondering how much power that would actually need, and whether it would be feasible for Magneton to actually output it via microwave radiation. Best equation I could find was the heat capacity equation (altered for power instead of energy): P = mcΔT/t (P = power in watts, m = mass in kg, c = heat capacity in J/kg.K, ΔT = temperature change in Kelvin, and t = time in seconds) We know ΔT is 2 K, and I'm assuming c is the value for water vapor (steam) at 1996 J/kg.K. m is a bit trickier - I assumed an average relative humidity of 30%, which gives 0.0066 kg water vapor per cubic meter air. In non-Imperial games, that 3300 feet is replaced with 1000 meters, so I'll use a sphere of 1000 meter radius for Magneton's maximum influence, which has a volume of 4.1887902 x 109 m3, giving a total water content of 27646015.3 kg. t is also tricky - I assumed Magneton takes one hour (or 3600 seconds) to achieve this temperature rise. No real reason behind the assumption other than giving it plenty of time. From all this, I get a value of 3.0656359.2 x 107 W, which seems pretty realistic given the sheer mass of water being heated (and pretty terrifying for a lone Pokemon to be outputting somewhere in the wilderness). However, I want to take into account more complex factors, such as attenuation of the radiation, the frequency of the microwave (which I'm assuming is 2.45 GHz, since that's the one commonly used in commercial microwave ovens). I found this graph for attenuation of a range of EM frequencies from oxygen and water: However, I'm not quite sure how to factor all this stuff in. Plus, assuming the number doesn't drop too much, what would be the temperature one meter from Magneton? What would be some other consequences of that much microwave radiation in the atmosphere?
    1 point
  3. The winners of the Insight Investment Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2020 awards have been announced with some truly spectacular images. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/in-pictures-54105085 Nicolas Lefaudeux: Overall Winner I don't have sufficient permissions to upload all the images but I'd like to give the winners a name check nonetheless... Nicholas Roemmelt: Aurorae category Bence Toth: Best New Comer Alain Paillou: Our Moon category Alexandra Hart: Our Sun category Lukasz Sujka: Planets, Comets and Asteroids category Thomas Kast: Skyscapes category Peter Ward: Stars and Nebulae category Alice Fock: Young category Julie F Hill: Annie Maunder Prize for Image Innovation Finally, Rafael Schmall: People and Space category (my particular favourite) The star in the centre of the image is the Albireo double star, surrounded by trails of moving satellites.
    1 point
  4. Or, stupid is an aspect of behavior, or cognitive choices, but NOT an aspect of humans themselves. People can do and say many stupid things without being intrinsically stupid. In fact, by labeling the whole person, you're discriminating against groups you've judged as "stupid". You should stop that. "Money so they can be happy" is hideously short-sighted, imo. We should give a basic universal income so after several generations we'll see less ignorance and more educated people. Education and improving job skills are high priorities when people get past paying for the necessities. It should be money available to every citizen over a certain age so it will be supported by every citizen. I know it sounds petty, but if you don't give it to everyone, the wealthy will eventually resent it and work to take it away from those who rely on it. That's what they do with public parks, museums, swimming pools, healthcare, social security, and libraries, because they don't use them. But tie the basic income to citizenship, and they'll defend it as their right.
    1 point
  5. Well... there's this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heliosphere#Heliopause which is sort of
    1 point
  6. Ok. It appears I understand even less about relativity than I thought. I'll take a few days to read an introductory book.
    1 point
  7. It's an amusing perception. Do you have any evidence to support it. For example, how many wealthy people did you interview to arrive at this conclusion? The wealthy have fewer children largely for two reasons: they no longer need to ensure sufficient numbers to support them in old age; they wish to use their wealth for their personal pleasure, not to support large numbers of offspring. I see you didn't get the e-mail about the evolutionary pressures to breed.
    1 point
  8. I'd take a nice idiot over a smart arsehole, every day of the week. But just to be clear, I'm not accusing anyone of being smart...🤒
    1 point
  9. That simply isn't true. Some kids have parents that don't give a damn, they drink or have problems with drugs or money. Some schools have outdated textbooks, broken laptops and no or limited access to the internet. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/16/reader-center/us-public-schools-conditions.html Some students don't have the internet at home or have very bad internet and only reference books. Some families need help at home and take kids out of school to help out on the family farm or are forced to help out on the farm after school. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6728209/Children-skipping-education-help-family-farm-drought.html Some kids don't have access to extra curricular activities like sports or music. https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/01/the-activity-gap/384961/ Some kids don't have access to tools and equipment required to study certain activities. One example could be a student in my school built a wooden boat as a school project from wood and tools his family had just lying around and got an A1 in the woodworking class. I had little to no tools at home and barely got a C. But it gets worse. Some kids have access to tools like Unreal Engine because their parents can easily afford computers capable of running. For a long time I didn't have a computer that could run unreal engine at all. Then there is the university places gimmick. Access to university is controlled by a points system. The number of places puts people in their boxes. Poor people do the low paid courses and rich people do the better courses. There is some allowed movement between rich and poor but really the government doesn't want too much change. If poor people start to do better then the points increase. https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/aug/13/almost-40-of-english-students-have-a-level-results-downgraded
    1 point
  10. Hey, just to let you know I had the Russian Covid-19 vaccination yesterday and can tell you there are absolutely no negative sideffski efectovski secundariosvki Кто может это прочитать, это уродливый парень .Привет друг Антонио !!
    1 point
  11. The direction of currents make no difference whatsoever to the physical nature of the surrounding field - in both cases they produce the same electromagnetic field, just oriented differently in space. So long as those are peer-reviewed publications, we shall be looking forward to it.
    1 point
  12. When you say 'fertility rates drop' do you mean the biological ability to conceive or actually giving birth? Either way, it could just be a coincidence like so many other things... https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations
    1 point
  13. You said the trip was 10 light years, but didn't say what frame that's measured in. It sounds like you intended that to be in the Earth's reference frame, so Earth would measure the trip taking 11.11 years. In John's reference frame, the distance to the destination is length-contracted, so even though the destination approaches John at 0.9c, it arrives at John sooner than 11.11 years. Gamma is ~ 2.29, the contracted travel distance is 10 LY/gamma = 4.36 LY, taking 4.84 years at .9c, measured by John. This could be true (until the last sentence) if it was 10 LY as measured by John. If that were true, then it's true that he'd measure 11.11 years and that Earth would measure more (11.11 years * gamma = 25.49 years), but Earth would also measure the distance traveled as much greater too (10 LY * gamma = 22.94 LY), and the speed would still be .9 c. Earth would not experience time dilation in those measurements, it would measure 25.49 years as normal. The only time dilation it would experience is that a moving clock ticks slower, and it agrees that John's clock ticks only 11.11 years during Earth's 25.49 years.
    1 point
  14. Run this command in your shell pip install anytree
    1 point
  15. Where you write y, it should be (in standard notation), \[\gamma=\frac{1}{\sqrt{1-v^{2}/c^{2}}}\] Then you would have, \[\sqrt{1-v^{2}/c^{2}}t'=t-vx/c^{2}\] \[\sqrt{1-v^{2}/c^{2}}x'=x-vt\] It's Gauss reduction of linear equations from here quite straightforwardly. If you need more clues, tell me. Edit: Maybe Gauss elimination is a more familiar name...
    1 point
  16. A good question is worth somewhere between 5 and 10 good answers. I think this is a good question. In my next-to-blank-slate mind, the Sun's magnetosphere could potentially protect us from supernova radiation, when the time comes. As the situation stands, the most potentially harmful radiation that we get comes precisely from the Sun. But it's not inconceivable to me that its magnetosphere could act as a screen for us.
    1 point
  17. That is not possible. If he was going .9c his travel time would be WAY less than 10 years (too lazy to work it out).
    1 point
  18. If the universe were not expanding, we would not see any red shift with distance. Thus the increasing red-shift we see with increasing distance is evidence that the universe is expanding over time, and was smaller in the past than it is now. If we extrapolate back in time, we get the very dense, very hot state of the Big Bang. The acceleration of the the expansion over time is evidenced by the exact relationship between red-shift and distance. There are three possible scenarios for an expanding universe. All of them will show a red-shift: Case 1: expansion slows over time Case 2: expansion remains constant over time. Case 3: expansion speeds up over time. Only in case 2 will there be a perfect direct relationship between distance and red-shift, where doubling the distance exactly doubles the red-shift. In the other two cases, doubling the distance results in a red-shift that is not an exact doubling. Whether it is less than double or more than double distinguishes between the two cases. We have found that the red-shift distance ratio indicates that the universe's expansion rate has been increasing over time, and thus the rate of the expansion is accelerating.
    1 point
  19. As much as I love empiricism and science, these mass delusions show that we are social first and empirical second, and that even what we call "history" is a record of what people believed at the time as it includes, by extension, what people knew and/or believed about whatever was really happening at the time as it happened. In social contexts we largely do whatever the crowd is doing, say whatever the crowd is saying, and simply assume all of it to be reasonable by proxy of being popular. This makes us all too easy to manipulate because it creates a positive feedback loop, and the problem can be expected to worsen as the size of the crowd increases, e.g. the massive crowd sizes seen in modern contexts. This undoubtedly interacts with the social psychological phenomena that researchers call deindividuation, diffusion of responsibility, and the false consensus effect + pluralistic ignorance, to name a few. We are, intentionally or unintentionally, negligently or maliciously, being repeatedly gaslit by our own sources of information. Thus we are all compromised agents, the victims of gaslighting, unless we can cautiously contemplate whatever the simpler alternatives to whatever the prevailing wisdom might be might be. A perversion of the simplicity principle is actually one of the virtues of a lie, a lie which is false enough to achieve the ends of the liar but still true enough to seem functionally 'good enough' to the dupe... sorta like Rutherford's atomic model / nuclear model of the atom. Alas, that is in an idealized model of how we should operate, not how we actually operate. In truth, it is tautologically true that we don't know how we operate when we aren't paying attention to how we are operating, and that we may not be able to know what a lack of scrutiny looks like if a lack of scrutiny cannot be properly scrutinized. One thing social psychology told me was that how we really think is very different from how a philosopher might think a person should think, and that we may be optimized for group behavior at the expense of critical thinking functions. Moreover, I think groupthink might be a bigger problem now than it ever was for our hunter-gatherer ancestors two-hundred-thousand years ago.
    1 point
  20. All of them; but by proxy.
    1 point
  21. God made water right here on Earth, but it is unclear when. In Genesis 1:1 it is written that: and in Genesis 1:2 it is written that: so it is unclear if God made water on day one or two.
    -1 points
  22. The solar wind blows away asteroids and comets that may have otherwise impacted the Earth.
    -1 points
  23. Protons and helium nuclei have mass which means they can impart momentum just like air molecules can impart momentum despite their small size: The solar wind radiates a current past the Earth and towards the asteroid and Kuiper belts which slows down objects originating from those belts and ultimately blows them away:
    -2 points
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