pavelcherepan

 

What is your opinion of people who don't travel or go on holidays or lack interest in the outside world apart from their own country?

These are two different things. You may have an interest in other places, but not go traveling, because it costs a lot, because you're afraid of flying or any other reason.

When I was single and working on either "7 days on - 7 days off" or "14 on, 7 off", I would go travelling practically on every single week off. In fact it was even financially beneficial, because practically any place I could reasonably travel to would be cheaper than staying in Australia, even taking the airfare into account.

I don't usually plan much for holidays, I just usually have a few places I want to see or a few things that I want to experience, but for most part I play it by ear. In fact, It should be a relaxing experience and having everything scheduled in advance with every waking hour already accounted for is just too stressful. I why would I want to be stressed on a holiday?

 

 

Do you SFN members think that there is something wrong with these people?

No. Some people just have other interests. For example, my brother almost never goes to overseas on his holidays, because he's a huge fan of fishing and so every holiday he has he goes on a fishing trip with his friends and you don't need to go overseas for that.

OK, so I was thinking about black holes for some reason last night and got a question.

Say, here on Earth the escape velocity at the surface level s around 11.2 km/s and any object crushing on Earth from outer space, even if initial relative velocity was 0, should end up hitting the surface at least at 11.2 km/s, if there were no air or the object is sufficiently massive so it's not slowed down by atmosphere as much. But if the object has a relative velocity to begin with, it can impact at a higher velocity.

Now, by the very definition of the Event Horizon of the black hole, the escape velocity at that region equals to c and, therefore, if you start at 0 velocity wrt the black hole, you should cross the even horizon at c. But what if you're moving towards the BH?

Obviously, you can't move faster than c (or even at c for that matter), which means that you'd have to cross event horizon sooner to account for all that extra velocity. Say, I'm flying towards the black hole having started at some relative velocity v and at one moment in time I'm passing the other observer, who is stationary wrt the black hole. If at that moment we both observe and measure the apparent size of the event horizon, will I see it as being larger/closer to me?

It's electron anti-neutrino.

Thanks for the correction

 

Yes, I had the Impression that Neutrons are such fundamental Particles that are not newly created or destroyed except in the formative processes when the Matter itself was created.

The OP was based on this.

In the nuclear processes I thought that Neutrons which were part of Heavier Elements were released and not newly created.

[latex]\beta^+[/latex] and [latex]\beta^-[/latex] decay types are responsible for creation and destruction of neutrons in the atomic nucleus respectively. In addition to that, free neutrons (not bound with protons in the nucleus) have a half-life of about 10 minutes before decaying into a proton, an electron and an electron neutrino.

I always thought that the reason Columbus got funding was that King Ferdinand (who knew how big the world really was) wanted to get rid of him permanently because Columbus was seeing a bit too much of Queen Isabella.

I've heard that version too, but I haven't seen much evidence in support.

I don't see that fall even close to the issue of dysgenics. The main issue is not whether it was nicely worded or not, but not recognizing that in humans fertility is not simply a biological, but mostly a social trait. How many offspring someone gets in many societies (with at least a sense of gender equality, for example) is decision-based as humans have the ability to restrict offspring production. Thus, in the end, it is not a question well-suited for the biological section.

Rather than the example your provided a better analogy would be trying to figure out whether we are evolutionary driven to like Apple products.

I respectfully disagree. First of all, this question, for whatever reason, has been originally posted in the Lounge and was later moved to Biology by Phi, so if you don't think it should be in biology, mad_scientist had nothing to do with it. Secondly, while I don't support this view, papers I've linked seem to place this question firmly in a realm of dysgenics and there are quite a lot more of studies on the same topic.

As I understood the question in the OP, I would paraphrase it as: "Is there any correlation between Total Fertility Rates vs some measure of intellect, IQ for example? Will this eventually lead to an increased prevalence of lower-IQ individuals in the population?"

At least that's how I understood it.So it's not about fertility per se, as in "ability to have offsprings", but about the average number of children per woman.

Finally, on one hand there's Flynn effect showing the gradual increase of IQ over time, for multiple reasons, which suggests that the simple answer to OP is a "no", but on the other hand there are some recent studies that show that this increase had either stopped or even turned into a decline in the last two decades.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect#Possible_end_of_progression

I don't have enough knowledge of the topic to even try to analyse the potential cause, but I think there is a scientific value in this discussion.

 

 

So, you're saying that Columbus actually had a long list of investors for his "Round the World" venture, or do you think that prior to him, the conventional wisdom may have been of a different logic? It's not that he was the one who first discovered the New World, or first thought of the Earth as being round, but he was the one who had enough influence, or at least enough fame, to bring the idea from ridicule to acceptance.

"Round the world" and "western route to Orient" are very different things. Columbus wanted to do the latter. The reason why he didn't have enough financial support is because scholars of the time considered his estimate of travel distance as far too low, while the distance in his estimates was already on the very edge of what was possible to accomplish with naval vessels of the time. Also around the same time Spanish explorers managed to find the southern tip of Africa and now the eastern route to India was available.

Just came across this while catching up with various blogs:

http://ottawacitizen.com/storyline/worlds-main-list-of-science-predators-vanishes-with-no-warning

 

Beall's list of predatory publishers has been taken off-line.

People who organise these sort of takedowns seem to completely forget about the Streisand Effect.

Slightly off-topic, but I'm interested in some clarification.

I sense a bit of hostility towards the OP. Is this because the question in not politically correct and reeks of classism?

Personally I have a very little sentiment towards the current epidemic of political correctness, especially when I'm on science forums. Also, films like "Idiocracy" that I mentioned in my first reply have been, while having the exact same premise, a major critical success. Is it more acceptable to ask this sort of question in a form of satire? For many reasons this feels very wrong.

Furthermore, responses like "So in terms of evolutionary science, it's a dumb question" are either dishonest or just simply incorrect. Dysgenics as a field of study to the best of my knowledge is not considered non-scientific or a pseudoscience and simply searching in Google Scholar for "dysgenic + intelligence" gave me slightly over 9000 hits for papers and books on the subject. So this topic is getting some attention of science community and, therefore, the sentence quoted is plain wrong. Some examples for your reference:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886914006278

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016028961000005X

Simply brushing away these sort of questions on the premise of them being "not worded nicely" or not politically correct is just wrong as far as humanity in general is concerned. If there were any correlation and statistically significant decrease in intelligence levels of the world population over time (and I'm not saying there is), studying it and understanding the causes will help develop ways of dealing with it. By being so easily triggered you're not doing favours to anyone.

Maybe a poor analogy, but see if you can find something wrong with this phrase - "Our team has developed potentially the most effective cancer treatment, but further research has been abandoned, because testing the medicine on either humans or animals is morally wrong".

Not really. He was elected by an electoral system.

Well, technically, yes. But regardless of oddities of US electoral system, it's still generally considered to be a democratic one, so in generic sense my comment still stands.

What is the exact thing you plan to achieve? Do you want to get a vacuum in some container or do you need to pump compressed air into a container?

Did you just watch "Idiocracy"?

No. It's not about being smarter or not. It's because smarter people of either gender often have more career opportunities and are often focused on advancing their careers rather than making babies. But this doesn't mean that stupid people, when they have similar opportunities for whatever reason, will not pursue the path of wealth and financial stability... or just being hungry for power.

As to your second question the answer in probably no again. A unit of evolution is not an individual, but the population (unless you're Genghis Khan with several million direct descendants). What this means is that, let's say we have a person who is a super nerd. Very smart, but lacks any social interaction skills completely. As a result of this he, while having very desirable "smart" genes, will not pass them along. Does it mean that he failed the humanity and these useful genes are forever lost to us? Not really, because, unless, by some chance he is the only person with this particular gene or a set of genes, this genetic material is still present within the population. Maybe these alleles are recessive, but they are still present in the population and maybe his neighbour, a dumbest redneck you could ever imagine, is the carrier of a recessive allele and if he were to marry a woman with the same recessive allele, they might have lots of kids and some of them would have every potential to be as smart as our lonely nerd.

EDIT: Even in case the lonely nerd had a unique mutation and was the only carrier of the useful gene, it might still resurface, although it might take a while. It's well documented in geological record that similar adaptations often happen in completely unrelated species separated by vast amounts of distance and/or time. But due to the randomness of mutations, it could take a very long time.

 

A panel of experts, who are selected democratically. Transparency and objectivity in selection criteria would be paramount.

Trump was elected democratically...

 

 

The presidency should not be a voluntary position. The best and brightest college grads, as determined by a special panel of experts, should be encouraged to join presidency school. Candidates are paid well and learn the subjects important to a good president, including economics, global and domestic politics, history, law, natural sciences, debate, (what other subjects?) etc. They are kept under constant surveillance while they attend presidency school, so the unfit candidates, wackos like Trump, would get weeded out. After they are well-educated, they can run for office.

While I'm totally in support for meritocracy, but this particular way leaves too much to be desired. There's endless opportunity for fraud and corruption.

Using simple gas laws, if the universe was at Hydrogen combination temperature ( approx. 3500 deg ), 300 mil yrs after the Big Bang event ( approx. 13.5 bil yrs ago ), and is at 2.7 deg currently, then it has expanded by over 1000 times.

This is volume, so separati0ns would have increased by over 10 times in the same period.

MigL, I think recombination is supposed to be 380 thousand years after the Big Bang.

Yes but very rarely.

No. Human intuition works well for finding food and running away from predators, as this is something it evolved to do. It doesn't work well at all in science. Most of the time the intuitive answer is the wrong one.

Thanks mate!

Thanks!

a.) Yes

 

b.) Not sure what you mean. The events are successive and random (and independent) - that is identically and independently distributed (i.i.d) - aren't they? Or do you mean that they are no longer independent, or no longer identically distributed?

Thanks for the help. In the second question I'm talking about a situation where, let's say, I have a sample of 1000 events like in the original post. Would it matter in any way, whether I take a series of consecutive events, say 1-10 or if i take a random sample of 10 events, for example #34, 121, 357.. etc?

Take out your mobile and pretend to talk to someone if you haven't been spotted yet. Nod to the other person as you walk past

Correct me if my thinking is wrong. I have a series of independent events; in each of those the probability of a desired outcome is 0.1, for example. I need to find out the probability of getting a desired outcome at least once in a random series of n events.

It's been a while since I'd done any probability theory. The only way of not getting a desired outcome is if all n events produce a non-desired outcome. The probability of a non-desired outcome in my example is (1-0.1)=0.9, therefore failing n times will have the probability of 0.9ⁿ and then finally the probability of at least one desired outcome will be (1-0.9ⁿ).

a) Is this correct?

b) If events are entirely independent, will the answer change whether I have n successive events or n random events?

I have no idea what point you are trying to make. Yes, there is, currently a need for wood (and wood pulp to make paper).

Yes, that causes "deforestation" which is a major problem for many reasons. Yes, as long as there is a "need" for wood, there will be deforestation.

Wasn't that hard, was it? This is the point I was making (highlighted). All other fantasy notions in your post have nothing to do with what I was saying.

But it is just one of the reasons for deforestation to happen. A very important one, but as Silvestru had correctly pointed out, not the most important. It is beneficial for loggers to keep sustainable operation, although it doesn't happen as often as I'd like to see.

Other causes for deforestation include things like the growing need for farm-able and grazing land. As long as there is a demand for these things, trees will need to be cut down. This can be managed at least in part by offering alternative and preferably cheaper materials to use in place of wood, increasing agricultural productivity and strict government control, but all these things are hard to accomplish in less developed parts of the world.

Hey, I'm a 19 year old young man about to start university. I'm going to be studying Computer Information Systems. I'm looking to get involved with Cyber Security. I'd like to know what type of laptop I'd really need. I don't need to play video games. Any answers help! I don't want to waste my money on some thing that's going to break down and give me problems. I'm not sure how powerful my processor should be. Or how much RAM I should have. Any help's great! I'm looking currently at an ASUS Zenbook Pro UX501VW. Is that a good pick? Should I downgrade? Upgrade?

When choosing a computer/laptop the most important thing is to carefully consider what kind of tasks it will be used for and then go from there. Check what courses you'll be doing and what software you'll be using and use it as a guideline.

Personally, I'd be wary of buying an ultrabook, such as the one you're considering. If you'll need to perform very CPU/GPU intensive tasks, temperature will become an issue since ultrabooks, due to their size, have sub-par cooling. Also ultrabooks generally can't have a normal hard drive, only SSD. Which brings a question of whether you'll need to store a large amounts of data on your system. If yes, large SSDs are still very expensive and standard laptop might be a better choice.

And personally I'd stay away from Apple, especially as a uni student. It's just not a cost-efficient option.

There are multiple things at work that can result in eventual breakdowns after a while. Here are a few:

1. Thermal stress on components

2. Poor maintenance (such as regularly replacing thermal compound and cleaning system of dust build-up)

3. Static accumulation (usually from dust)

4. Sodder failure

5. Inconsistent electrical supply causing jumps in current/voltage and no safety system

6. Short-circuits

7. Physical damage to components

8. Jerk manufacturers creating hardware in such a way that it fails not long after warranty expires

Demand creates supply. There is a demand for wood and this demand creates loggers' jobs and allows them to feed their families. You can reduce the demand by, for example, introducing an alternative "artificial wood" that will be similar in properties to the natural, but will not require large-scale deforestation.

Loggers are not 'getting away with it' - for the most part they are not doing something illegal and they don't have evil entention to destroy the planet, but you can't solve the issue by just cutting off the supply. As long as the demand exists, deforestation will still be going.

Well, it's generally a bad survival strategy to have parents who are very close genetically. In such a situation you're having a higher chance of having both parents with the same recessive allele and this can lead to some severe genetic disorders. This has been observed since ancient times and this is why marriage between close relatives is taboo in most cultures.

Not sure there's any reason you'd need to specifically choose a partner from a specific ethnicity or background. Genetic planning is still in its infancy.