Sensei

20 hours ago, dimreepr said:

OK, let's switch things up to illustrate my point.

Who cares about your point of view?

@swansont @Phi for All

Instead of you, we have the Cambridge University dictionary:

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/self-made

"rich and successful as a result of your own work and not because of family money"

I used the well-known Cambridge's dictionary definition of the word, and instead of approval ("acceptance of the statement") I got 4 negative points in this thread, for no reason..

ps. This is semantics. Your family bought you food, gave you other goods and so on when you were young. The point is in the details.

42 minutes ago, EmCat334 said:

Any advice? 

Use styrofoam..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polystyrene

5 minutes ago, swansont said:

Sure. Has anyone else brought this up?

Sure. The one who complained about Musk and government cooperation..

3 minutes ago, swansont said:

Customers trade money for goods and services. They are not just giving money to someone.

Isn't it the same as in my example with trading satellites delivered into space for money? i.e. the government pays to lift xxx tons of something for yyy amount of money, instead of NASA.. ?

6 minutes ago, swansont said:

PayPal did not magically appear from nothing.

We have more than a dozen such services at the moment, unfortunately..

It is not the point.

The issue is what someone understands by "self-made billionaire." I have expressed what most people in the world mean by it.

1 hour ago, swansont said:

Self-made means you did it yourself, with minimal outside help. Not just help from parents. It suggests that anyone can do it if they just work hard enough.

People buy stuff somebody produce..

Without buyers, fortunes cannot grow..

IOW, how can you literally do it yourself if you rely on customers?

If I bought/mined 1000/10000/100000/1000000 BTC 15 years ago, am I a sell-made millionaire/billionaire?

1 hour ago, swansont said:

There’s a baseline of support that anyone can get, but most uber-wealthy get far more than that, such as subsidies or tax breaks for individuals or companies not available to the average person.

Depends on the country..

1 hour ago, swansont said:

If someone hands you a million dollars and you can parlay that into a bigger fortune, good for you. But since most people don’t have access to a million dollars, it’s a tad insulting to imply that it’s a path to wealth accessible to all.

...if someone has earned several hundred million dollars from PayPal alone and has gained a globally recognized position, such a person is in a slightly different position than an ordinary John Doe, if we are talking about receiving government investments after completing a several dozen-page contract with the government..

ps. I feel uncomfortable in the position of Elon's advocate.. Let's invite him here on the forum. After all, he is a physicist..

On 4/4/2024 at 3:51 PM, Phi for All said:

I haven't seen any good arguments about billionaires pulling themselves up solely by their own bootstraps. It's well known that billionaires can only exist if they steal the money legally from everybody else. Does anyone have an example of a billionaire whose employees love them as much as the stockholders do? All I ever hear about is how the people who do the most work get the least pay, and the person who gets paid most does nothing but figure out how to get paid more.

"Self-made millionaire" means that someone did not get millions from his parents. Heritage them.
"Self-made billionaire" means that someone doesn't get billionaires from his parents.
And that's it.
The real way to get millions or billions is under the rug, which you don't have access to.

Now you (plural) came up with a new definition that self-made billionaire cannot get money from anybody else or government.. They how can they get it otherwise? Or how can you get any money? You (scientists) depend on government subsidies the most...

5 minutes ago, Phi for All said:

Or you were simply wrong to conflate a private salary from the government with subsidies, tax breaks, and other economic incentives Elon Musk got from the government. I'm going to go with that rather than chase this red herring.

I bet Elon would survive collapse of government subsidies.. unlike a regular scientist who rely on it on a daily basis..

The whole thread is bizarre for me.. as it is about semantics.. A long before Elon even imagined anything he had milllions from selling PayPal..

On 4/4/2024 at 3:51 PM, Phi for All said:

I am surprised, and actually shocked, to see you trying to claim that a government salary is the same as government subsidies. Subsidies for Musk, for example, include favorable loans, incentives, tax breaks, and environmental tax credits. They even built him factories. 

So your post is actually an accusation of many crimes on both sides, if the government builds someone else's factories with government money, so it's fraud.... Did you come to the FBI with your claim of a crime being committed by the government and a private company?
If they build a factory for $1B and sell it for, say, $2B to a private company, they will make $1B. So the whole construction of the factory was an investment.

25 minutes ago, iNow said:

No

..I bow before your eloquence..

8 hours ago, Moontanman said:

What do you want to discuss here? 

..about lack of consistency in statements, mutually contradictory statements over the years, change of mind depending on who is asking the questions etc. etc. ...

8 hours ago, MigL said:

Stems from the  new attitude permeating the Western world; that whatever you 'feel' cannot be wrong, and to even mention it can be offensive and you need 'protection' from other's opinions.
Meanwhile science teaches us that what is right does not need protection, as it can be proven.

I have no idea what this has to do with the so-called "cancellation culture."

8 hours ago, iNow said:

I agree. The political right and maga-class has been getting beyond ridiculous in ostracizing people who refuse to tow the party line and repeat the lies, casting out anyone deemed to be "others."

OMG, are not you the same, toward the people who claim that the Earth is flat?

You "cancel" them,

and they "cancel" you..

Two groups, have no discussions etc. etc.

On 3/27/2024 at 3:46 AM, harlock said:

If it's true it means that a tree removes heat from the environment as it grows,

No. Not exactly.

Organisms that use photosynthesis to create food absorb photons in certain visible ranges and use them to break down CO₂ and H₂O molecules to produce the compounds they require.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autotroph

Typically, energy flows from the source, which has a higher temperature, to the body, which has a lower temperature.

The human body temperature is about 36.6 C, and the ambient temperature is typically lower, so we warm the environment.

Green parts of the plants, which are designed to absorption of the photons (not green one range!), are absorbing photons, so they are not absorbed by something else.

The absorbed photons (by whatever) are re-emitted at lower frequencies, such as infrared, and absorbed by something else, and the energy is retained on Earth.

White rock reflects photons of visible light, while black rock absorbs photons of visible light.

Some of them are re-emitted into space. In this way, the Earth can be seen in the range of infrared and other photons.

On 3/27/2024 at 3:46 AM, harlock said:

therefore the difference in the quantity of trees (wood...) means that there is more solar heat in the environment compared to centuries ago and it can justify global warming regardless of the presence or absence of CO2...

Trees/plants absorb CO₂ as they grow.

CO₂ absorbs photons. More CO₂ in the atmosphere means more photons absorbed and more energy stored.

9 hours ago, harlock said:

Why politicians only talk about CO2?

They talk about CO₂ because the more there is in the atmosphere, the more energy is stored on Earth, and the layman reads this as an increase in average temperature.

10 hours ago, toucana said:

Many unusual and curious versions of the English bible have been printed since the reformation. The ‘Wicked Bible’ of 1631 found its way into history by omitting the word ‘not’ from the 7th commandment (Exodus 20:14) and enjoining its readers, on the highest authority, to commit adultery.

Others include ‘The Treacle Bible’ of 1568 (Jermiah 7:24 - “Is there no treacle in Gilead”), The Printers Bible of 1702 (Psalm 119:161 - “Printers have persecuted me without a cause” -  [instead of of ‘Princes’], and ‘Rebekah’s Camels Bible’ of 1823 which gives Genesis 24:61 as “Rebekah arose, and her camels” instead of “her damsels”.

Inevitable editorial and printing errors, or made intentionally by angry "pranksters" (typesetter).

Don't you know a parcel courier who is kicking packages (especially those marked treat with care)? I see it daily..

11 hours ago, toucana said:

But few of them are quite as odd as the ‘God Bless The USA Bible’ currently being touted by former president Donald J. Trump for $59.99. This edition of the King James translation (conveniently out of copyright) also includes a copy of the US Constitution, The Bill of Rights, The Declaration of Independence, and the Pledge of Allegiance - along with a handwritten chorus to ‘God Bless America’ by Lee Greenwood. One thing that all of these have in common of course, is that Donald Trump has never read or paid the slightest attention to any of them.

The Lee Greenwood referred to is the person who first initiated this project back in 2021. At that time it was being marketed as a new bible “Commemorating the 20th Anniversary of the 9/11 attacks”. This edition was meant to contain the NIV version of the English bible, but the NIV copyright holders Zondervan abruptly withdrew their consent, so the royalty-free King James text was used instead. That version incidentally cost only $49.99 back in 2021.

Nothing novel. Politicians have been using religion to gain more political power for thousands of years.

E.g. Caesar intercepted non dismissable position as pontifex maximus (i.e. equivalent of the Pope) by bribery..

Hemodialysis (or blood transfusion) can indeed solve many problems if they are related to the presence of microorganisms, viruses or other (unwanted) chemical elements in the blood.

But who said that autism is caused by a chemical imbalance in the blood?

If it were so easy, it could be easily detected with blood analysis and resolved with drugs which fix the imbalance.

To check whether two objects of any shape have collided, the programmer can treat them as spheres at the first stage, i.e. calculate the min-max bounding box from all points, calculate the center point and the maximum radius. Then, if the distance between two such spheres is greater than the sum of the radii, the objects are too far away to be bothered with. However, if the distance between them is smaller, a less optimal, slower algorithm is performed to check the objects nearby.

Several levels of spheres are used in 3D games. One sphere to cover the entire body. A second set of smaller spheres for all parts of the body. These are checked similarly to the previous step, but instead of comparing triangles with triangles (or polygons with polygons), because they are very slow for the processor, still spheres vs spheres are checked.

People use KD-Tree (3D), Octree (3D) or Quad-tree (2D) to optimize such work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-d_tree

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octree

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadtree

i.e. objects that are close to each other are in the same leaf or in a neighboring leaf.

If an object does not move between frames, it does not need to be removed from the leaf and added to a new one.

With a fixed number of elements, you can use voxels ("volumetric pixels").

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voxel

Remember that in animation up to a certain level, you can reuse calculations from the previous frame(s) in future frames.

21 minutes ago, swansont said:

The circumstances surrounding this and Hiroshima are hardly comparable.

If you weren't in hot water writing this post, you would have read (or between the lines i.e. in good faith) that we were talking about the potential bombing of Tokyo.. so, I was not comparing Hiroshima vs Washington, but Tokyo vs Washington, i.e. destruction of capital city of 1st country vs destruction of capital city of 2nd country.. Which is quite obvious from my statement. Thus, the introduction of Hiroshima into this topic is out of place, as I was comparing destruction of two capitals..
 

4 hours ago, Airbrush said:

To show off to the world what the US could do? Japan was already beaten. We also found out that the Nazis never developed anything close to an A bomb. Japan was already totally cut off from the world by US submarines and air force. No more imports so they were on the verge of starving. They were also having their cities systematically destroyed by huge B29 incendiary strikes, like the one that killed 100,000 people in Tokyo IN A DAY. All that happened by using the A bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was to REVEAL to the world that such a weapon EXISTS. What they should have done, IMHO, is realize that nobody needs to know about IT, and that IT should be covered up so nobody else can create an A bomb. There should have been a HUGE, Manhattan-Project-sized, intelligence operation to do everything we can to make sure that no country can create such a bomb, except for the US. The US would TRY keep the A bomb a secret as long as possible.  That would have saved so much money.  Of course you can't keep something like that a secret forever, but at least stall it as long as possible.  Or is this a naive proposal?

I like your proposal.

Politicians are like children. Want to put on the ritz, show off in the sandbox..

4 hours ago, Airbrush said:

The world's physicists were not aware of the bomb test success. 

It is irrelevant..

Nuclear fission was discovered by German-Nazi scientists in 1938.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_of_nuclear_fission

..and this led to Einstein's proposal to create an American version of it, before Nazis..

4 hours ago, Airbrush said:

Physicists cannot build a bomb.

This is patently untrue.

4 hours ago, Airbrush said:

It takes a Manhattan Project. 

Are you suggesting a large cost?

Compare how much NASA spent, and how much SpaceX spent, on the same task.

1 hour ago, MigL said:

even fire bombing Tokyo, and the first A-bomb drop, was not enough to convince them.

Would the Americans surrender if Washington was destroyed?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_of_Washington

4 hours ago, Airbrush said:

The test could have been covered up

..it could have been done anywhere and none of the living observers would have understood what actually happened..

4 hours ago, Airbrush said:

up and the US would get into an intelligence operation to prevent other nations from developing the bomb. 

This statement is silly..

44 minutes ago, Coxy123 said:

This is a world emergency post by the way , you really should try to understand .  

..everyone here understands that your understanding of physics and chemistry is petty..

47 minutes ago, Coxy123 said:

and that is why a fire does not burn in a vacuum because there is no atmospheric resistance . 

..doesn't burn because there is no Oxygen. Rockets have Oxygen in their fuel tanks, so..

Use a lighter and check again...

35 minutes ago, StringJunky said:

If you want to build a house, what's the advantage of moulding your bricks first, is my thought.

To avoid spending the next 30 years with a home loan?

33 minutes ago, Moontanman said:

Thank you, I think your suggestion might be out of my particular wheelhouse but If I can't figure out a way to turn lights off and on on a 36 hour schedule of 12 hours of dark and 24 hours of light over the course of months this maybe my only recourse.  

..at least you will have a chance to learn something unknown and have fun.. Plugging in a ready-made solution and voila it's no fun..

8 minutes ago, Moontanman said:

Thank you, I think your suggestion might be out of my particular wheelhouse but If I can't figure out a way to turn lights off and on on a 36 hour schedule of 12 hours of dark and 24 hours of light over the course of months this maybe my only recourse.  

Mechanical analog timer, such as:

will be a PITA because you will have to rewind the wheel every time the previous cycle ends.... e.g. 48h

The Arduino method will work as long as there is power (if there is no power, the plants also have no light anyway).

You can purchase an Arduino module with RTC (real-time clock) or even an Arduino clone with built-in RTC or software emulated RTC. ESP8266 has built-in WiFi ($8 cost)

https://forum.arduino.cc/t/setting-the-esp8266-internal-clock/680099

If you keep it online via WiFi, it can automatically update the time.

The ESP8266 is much smaller than a typical Arduino and does not allow external expansion modules to be connected on top of it. For basic work you don't need them anyway.

But there are cool extension modules with built-in SD/SDHC reader/writer with built-in RTC.

This one will work with the ESP8266, because it is not a plug-in from above on the Arduino.

Why you may need it? Writing logs, reading the program, when to turn on the lights or whatever you want to control. Reprogramming via SD/SDHC without touching the C/C++ Arduino source code.

Arduino with WiFi can be accessed by web browser:

https://www.google.com/search?q=set+up+http+server+arduino

For example, instead of saving SD/SDHC or reprogramming, it can be done from the phone's web browser.

3 hours ago, swansont said:

There are 7-day programmable timers. You’d only have to reset it once a week. Or do e.g. a 42 hour cycle

I think there are 14-day timers, too

 It would be cheaper and more flexible to buy a $5 Arduino clone.

e.g.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/145160861832

and relay module for $1.5

e.g. https://www.ebay.com/itm/354746987710

You can then control any 110/230-volt electrical system and turn it on or off on demand using a hand-written C/C++ program that you put on the Arduino board. Sample code in the video below. It is very simple.

An 8-channel relay for Arduino costs $6 here, so you can control up to 8 different electrical systems with different parameters.

https://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+use+relay+arduino

e.g.

It is not about the problem. It's about getting a small amount of energy, as @Airbrush pointed out in his OP.

A home office can save a huge amount of energy not wasted on travel.

Free public transportation (instead of a flood of cars on streets) can save a huge amount of energy not wasted on fuel.

If people use free public transportation, they don't have to buy new cars, spend money on maintenance, etc.

All things that the oil, gas, energy and cars sectors (and their shareholders) will be very unhappy about. Employees will demand government intervention to maintain the status quo, etc.

On 3/11/2024 at 4:23 PM, dimreepr said:

Employers care, they want more natural light during working hours, all that free vitamin D makes less sad worker's... 

The night shift, on their own... 🤞

I appreciate the sense of humor. But you can get vitamin D from the UV radiation emitted by artificial lights indoors.

BTW, imagine how much energy you save with a home office!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_battery

Atomic batteries (waste from nuclear power plants) are used in space travel. Very low capacity, but long life.

"Atomic batteries usually have an efficiency of 0.1–5%. High-efficiency betavoltaic devices can reach 6–8% efficiency.[5]"

Putting it in your pocket ("the size of a smartphone"), suggesting using it for everyday use is just silly..