Function

Agreed

We can only measure and interpret what we perceive: reality as it does present itself towards us. What we measure, interpret and formulate theorems on is perhaps not reality, but merely a best guess of reality: the manner in which it shows itself to us. And whether you like it or not, we could never do better than that.

I'd surely be the obsessive-compulsive one. Few years ago, when I helped my dad with in his pub, I'd carry the empty beer bottles down to the cellar in crates, dividing them evenly on left, right, front and back so the weight would be evenly distributed. Then again ... If I'd have to bare in mind different concentrations in the different pipette tips, I'd surely place them in the predictable way, to keep stuff organised and logical.

Boo

According to Newton's law of universal gravitation, all objects with a certain mass exert some attracting force towards each other. That fact has nothing to do with eventual other forces to which an object is exerted (e.g. centrifugal force by rotational movement). The force by which 2 objects attract each other is expressed by the following formula [math]F=G\cdot\frac{m_1\cdot m_2}{r^2}[/math] F being the attracting force, G being the gravitational constant, m1 being the mass of one object, m2 being the mass of the other object and r being the distance between the centres of mass of both objects. So surely, earth and its gravitation are attracting you. To come to the gravitational acceleration g we all know: [math]F=m\cdot a[/math] F being the resultant force exerted on an object with mass m subjected to an acceleration a. Let's combine this with the earlier formula. Let's say you have a mass m2 and earth has mass m1. If we want to know the acceleration a we are subjected to as per result of the gravitational force, given that we are not subjected to any other force: [math]F = m_2 \cdot a[/math] [math]\Leftrightarrow \frac{F}{m_2}=a=G\cdot\frac{m_1}{r^2}[/math] [math]\Leftrightarrow \frac{F}{m_2}\approx 6.67408\cdot 10^{-11}\text{ }\frac{\text{m}^3}{\text{kg}\cdot\text{s}^{-2}}\cdot \frac{5.972\cdot 10^{24} \text{ kg}}{6,371,000^2\text{ m}^2}[/math] [math]\Leftrightarrow \frac{F}{m_2}\approx 9.82\text{ }\frac{\text{m}}{\text{s}^2}\approx g[/math] So yes, the g you mention is the acceleration we are exerted to by the force which fundamentally pulls us towards earth (but also pulls earth towards ourselves, but in a quite negligible way (try to find out the acceleration we exert on earth by pulling it towards ourselves), as is proven by Newton. Luckily enough we can withstand this force and its acceleration with our muscles. Note that as the distance between yourself and earth increases, the force by which you are attracted towards it will decrease exponentially, as will the acceleration you would be subjected to, so at a certain distance, it may become negligibly small, but it will never be 0.

If it's French, wouldn't it be pronounced as "de Broy-lee"?

OneDrive

Thinking of buying a Macbook when I - finally - get some money by summer job. I've never heard owners complain of it (perhaps some Festinger or chauvinism?) and I've always seen it run quite smoothly ... And I don't feel the need to game so yeah ... Contra-indications? Anyone?

You could turn it into a drinking game with a table of elements with "open-able" 'door-like' things, such as on an advent calendar, with some chemistry question associated to the element on it; answer right and the others get to drink; andwer wrong and you get to drink. Makes me think ... There are a lot of elements, so perhaps it wouldn't be wise to put alcohol in every drink associated to any element. (Or you could, but then you'd better play it with lots of people. Or Russians)

Not sure if this belongs here or in the suggestion and comments section. What did I just experience btw?

Is anything what any living creature does, that would not happen in the natural environment the creature resides in, if the living creature were to cease to exist, unnatural? If yes, then by all means, we, the things we do and thus, our clothing, are unnatural. But then so is every other living creature. If using natural resources in ways that make our time more comfortable, more adaptable to the circumstances in which we find ourselves, if possible, then why would that be unnatural? I can see why such things would be called unnatural, but then we have to consider other species living unnatural lives. Is it unnatural if a beaver builds a wooden dam in a river? If you answered "yes" to the first question, then please be consistent. Answering "no" to this question would be quite contradictory. If you cannot resist yourself from answering "no", then we should consider a division of entities: naturality as such, and naturality for an organism. If you answered "yes" to the first question, then yes, it is unnatural if a beaver builds a wooden dam. But no, it is not unnatural for the beaver to build wooden dams. And then by extension, we must acknowledge the idea of considering clothing as unnatural, but the production and usage of clothing, and basically clothing itself, not unnatural for human beings.

It doesn't. It's a probable hypothesis concerning the subject of this topic: trying to explore the science of boredom. I'm sure Schrödinger didn't actively help anyone with his dead-or-not cat.

Yup, I was/am sure. Also line spacing was the same.

I find it really unsettling when adults (but also adolescents and kids) reply to news articles on Facebook that e.g. a convicted murderer has been freed after sitting out his time, and then they reply things as they should kill him, he should be relieved of his civil rights, they should torture and kill him ... And then we haven't even mentioned reactions to posts concerning pedophilia. Public opinion takes mental illness and psychological well-being (or the lack of it) too little into account when flinging its coloured view into the world. The things that certain people dare to wish that would happen to murderers, rapists, pedophiles, ... are, in my opinion, often way worse than the crime committed by the subject. They appear ISIS-ish in my eyes. Lots of comments in this video ( ) are stuffed with such wishes, directed at a certain William, a kid. If curious enough, the comment by "sarah singleton" is quite ... disturbing, as are the bulk of comments in reaction to her comment. However ... I'm most certain that none of these people would ever hurt a fly. Telecommunication has made threats and looking "tough" much easier than real-life situations and lots of these comments will probably only be posted for likes by, in essence, the same narrow-minded nitwits. Yet, I'm shocked lots of times when reading that kind of stuff. And I'm not sure whether they'd actually do the things they post against rapists and pedophiles when confronted by them. Concerning the last, rather off-topic, but I really find it important to screen every convict of any presence of mental illness. Not all pedophiles have pedophilic disorder (DSM-V), and the latter ones (the ones with the disorder), imo, should not be treated (locked up) equally as those without the disorder. But that aside: we should grow towards a society in which psychiatry takes up more space in the federal system, including justice. Criminals belonging in psychiatric wards should be sent there instead of jail, or even instead of receiving death penalty.

Find a way to isolate specific cults and species. Then homogenise all soils to be 'about equal' and try your experiment again. Find a way to quantify your data.

Are you sure the dishes are contaminated and colonised by one and the same sole species?

Did they grow significantly faster? How did/can you prove that? Does this make any sense to you, given the fact that bacteria are single-cell organisms, and are not able (nor feel the need) to hear anything at all? Only effect your music could have on bacteria is changes in air pressure

Reminds me of the optical illusion of the lady silhouette spinning where you are asked whether she is turning leftwards or rightwards. Mostly I basically see her turning one way (can't remember which one), but when I focus really hard, I can manage to trick my brain in believing she's turning the other way. Or on my train. Some trains here have black displays with yellow light letters displaying some text. Above the text, which moves from right to left (so that the letters, naturally, appear in the right order), there is a static yellow dotted line. When focussing on the line, you can't see the static dots moving (as they aren't), but when reading the text underneath, you're tricked in believing the dots are also moving along with the text, from right to left.

If that proof were to present itself under the form of A1-published, peer-reviewed articles, then yes, by all means. Posted a line of thought on the inverted-sight woman in an edit of my previous reaction.

My pleasure. The thought experiment on what would happen when babies were to be born in zero-gravity circumstances is intriguing and would basically solve the question once and for all partly, but is under not any circumstance ethically justifiable. Edit: perhaps not once and for all, since, if the inverted-sight theory would be true for newborn babies for some time (perhaps even for some minutes), then the inversion of the inverted sight would perhaps also happen in space, if the baby were to move his head up and down: the brain will learn that the movement of the head and what the baby eventually sees (and thus the changes in perceived image, a visual movement), are not conform (are discrepant), and will potentially still correct the inverted sight to decrease the discrepancy between head movement and contradictory perceived vision movement. One could argue that "why would the brain even want to put effort in correcting the image", if the baby is able to learn to live with the discrepancy in head movement and visual movement. However, stating this would also undermine the original theorem about inverted vision in newborn babies: they could perfectly learn to live with it. That's why I think gravity isn't the main argument for our brains to invert a potentially pre-inverted image, but rather a discrepancy between head movement and visual movement. Imagine that everyone would be born with inverted sight that were never to be corrected. We would have learnt to live with it and we would be having the discussion from the other side of the table and we'd be asking ourselves things such as "why are things falling up and why isn't our brain correcting that image?" All of this, imo, leads to the statement that there is no inverted sight in newborns. On the people seeing upside-down: perhaps an error in neur(on)al development; cortical dysplasia? ... ?

Aha. Luckily enough I said "almost indisputable". No I'm just saving my ass now. My apologies. You say that they get used to it after a while and function normally. But that says nothing about visual correction by the cerebral cortex; it does, however, have something (and perhaps, mostly) to do with cerebellar corrections as I basically explained in my first reaction. Or was it stated that the vision was automatically re-inverted after a while when wearing the goggles?

Never intended to be the first one to insinuate something ... Thought that was basic neurophysiology ... As displayed in this figure below from the great Kandel et al. (Reference to Eric Kandel; I have his "Principles of Neural Science", 5th ed.; if you want to get insights in neuroscience and neurophysiology, this book is an absolute must-have.) To answer your question: that is what I thought was the case. Do you have articles proving the wrong-side-up theory in babies?

Do you have any source saying that babies see stuff inverted for a short period of time? Or any period of time? I don't see why that would be, truth be told; that is, not if the brain automatically is designed to 'reflip' the image vertically, which, imo, it does. You're right when saying that the image is inverted on the retina, but the upper and lower half of the retina project to parts of the brain that are also clearly separated from one another, by the calcarine fissure, if I'm not mistaken. In that way, the upper field of vision will project on the lower (retina and) primary visual cortex, whereas the lower field of vision will project on the upper (retina and) primary visual cortex. But if I were to flip my eye, I would, of course, see everything inverted. It is almost undisputable that my brain wouldn't be able to correct-flip the image for me, since plasticity of our synapses has decreased too much from when we were a baby. The question arises if the flip ever happened and, by extension, if it were necessary whatsoever. Babies holding up their heads is, as far as I know, not guided by their vision, but rather is a postural reflex, determined by their vestibular system etc. On the other hand, it's true that our vision is able to adapt to new situations quite quickly. I'm thinking specifically of the recalibration of eye movements when tracking someone (-thing) or when having to fix on another object: when e.g. someone is calling you withing your field of vision and you want to look directly at them, when suddenly wearing glasses, never having worn these before, you won't be able to fix the person on a first go. That is because your vision is distorted in comparison and your eyes are used to certain movement necessities to adjust to fix the person, that is, without the glasses. With the glasses, however, depending on the strength (actually: + of -), your eyes will move too much or too less and will have to readjust to fix the person. In fact, the correction and readjustment is controlled by the cerebellum. After a few tries, your eyes will have learnt the new 'set of movements' and will, without any problem, be able to fix new objects on the "first go". Which, truth be told, doesn't have much to do with what you're asking and saying, but interesting nonetheless.

Hello everyone Ran into a new problem formatting the thesis I will be writing: The distance before the chapter heading "CHAPTER 7" respectively "CHAPTER 8" to the border of the page, is not equal. Why is that? In the paragraph options, the distance is equal. So why is there a discrepancy in distance? It classically happens in chapter headings after a new part. So what I do is, I make a new section on an odd page and there I put, in the middle of the page (perfectly aligned in the vertical middle): "PART I INTRODUCTION" Whereafter I insert another section ending with start on a new odd page so that the chapter will start on an odd page. All parts and chapters begin on an odd page. The decreased distance between "CHAPTER X" and the top of the page occurs in every new chapter after a "part title page". Does it have something to do with the lay-out of the part title pages, being vertically aligned in the centre? Can someone help me on this one? Thanks. F EDIT: the problem seems to disappear when I insert a hard enter between the part title and section break Now it is "PART I INTRODUCTION ---SECTION BREAK---" instead of "PART I INTRODUCTION---SECTION BREAK---" But, porque?