knyazik

So this weekend I showed this cartoon to a female friend of mine and she had the best response. She said, "I think you're missing a lot of colors..." and then she listed another dozen colors that she thought of. No smile, straight face, etc. Looks like she didn't really see nor interpret the whole right half of this picture!

Yesterday on CNN there was a lot of newscasters that were talking about god knows what but were really into it, and had lots of comments, etc. Then all of a sudden Christopher Cooper buts in and says, "Now take a deep breath, and inhale it fully because next up we will discuss marijuana law..." That was absolutely priceless!

Is there a fundamental reason in the way that we describe space time that we cannot switch space axis and time axis? If we for instance talk about a space momentum 6D space, switching the axis, or rotating by 90 degrees is allowed, why can't we use similar logic to switch space and time axis?

So what does this mean as far as the resistance of a capacitor? Is there some sort of periodic effect that you're identifying?

not negative space. negative location. and I if you just tell me where your origin is, I will definitely show it to you!

From personal experience, if there is ever any disagreement between physics and religion, those disagreement multiply when you have metaphysics. I think its because it tries to combine the two and there is a huge push back (not sure about the religion community) from the scientific community. I am curious about what exactly metaphysics does, and if you know of any good sources or can explain some basic ideas with examples, I think that would be really useful.

I don't think that's a good way to look at it. We can always define an origin at some point in space, and in time. No matter where it is, we can always plot a position and time of a certain event that occured. Suppose that event occured right now. Any other event that we observe will be observed with a positive time separation from this current event. However in terms of space the location could vary in either positive or negative (or be the same) as the current event. Therefore it's not that you are defining negative distance, it is a negative position, which is compared to a certain origin which is completely possible, however it's not possible in terms of time. What petrushka.gogol said before makes sense, however us as living beings see, and consider direction of increasing entropy to be positive, and you can make an argument that it's the same as saying that for us time is always running in the positive direction. It would be really cool to do the whole back to the future thing though

It is also very peculiar, that although according to Einstein's space time continuum and the whole concept of a four space, time behaves very different from position. You can always move an object to a negative direction in terms of position, but with time, although theoretically you can make calculations and predictions about what happened before right now, you can never go back to that particular moment.

Putin, Russian Minister of Finances, and Russian Prime Minister go to a fancy restaurant. The owner comes over to greet them, and says that he will take their order as they are very welcomed guests in this establishment. He asks them what they would like to eat tonight. Putin replies with, "Meat!" The other two are silent. Bedazzled by Putin's response the owner inquires, "what about the vegetables?" Putin looks at both his ministers, and replies, "The vegetables will also eat meat!"

Unfortunately there is also no idea capacitors, resistors etc. Physics, unlike math, never claims to be exact but an approximation of reality that is good enough at the scale that you define your world. Just a side note!

I think that in all honesty there is hypocracy in both approaches. A lot of religion is built on faith, and doesn't require facts in order for one to believe that something is true. Science on the other hand always makes people question what they observe and what they believe, and try to setup other observations that can potentially prove or disprove what they believe to be true today. Both of those approaches are not absolute. Religion transforms with time and current trends. Just look at what the current pope is doing, and if you were to compare how we interpreted religion in the dark ages compared to today, you will clearly see that there has been progress in interpretation of the ideal truth. People do not believe the same thing they did 500 years ago, so there must have been someone who questioned validity of certain aspects of religion, and then convinced others that he is correct. That is how religious approach is being hypocritical. The scientific approach is not pure as well. If you think about it, even though we try to teach people to question everything, think outside the box, etc. the vast majority of people that are highly trained in different sciences have role models such as Einstein, Hawking, Feynman, Watson, etc. They try to think like their role models do, and operate like their role models do. Very few try to think outside the box, therefore most of the science that is done today falls much more under engineering then it does under pure science, so uses well known approaches to measure something that others just had no time to do before. Perhaps you can make an argument that people are people, and although they are curious about how things behave and want answers, they also don't want to move too far out of their comfort zone. And from absolute point of view both aspects fail, and therefore conflict seems much more superficial then it appears from first glance.

A man gets pulled over for going really really fast. The officer asks him, "Do you have any idea how fast you were going?" The man replies, "No. But I knew exactly where I was!"

Perhaps I did not make myself clear. Hmm. Ok. If you were able to divide time indefinitely you can look at the problem as an infinite sum of infinitely small quantities, that get smaller and smaller, and tend to 0. I think it is effectively a rhetoric of how you define limits, and you're right that in the case of such a series I suggested there is no ambiguity. Thank you for correcting me.

Thank you for splitting me to a different topic hypervalent. I'm pretty new here, so didn't know how to go about this, so I appreciate you letting me know. And thank you Sensei for the links. That picture is exactly what I wanted!

Thank you so much Ryan for that list. I just discovered it here, and it is truly amazing. You rock!

I wouldn't worry about extinction whatsoever. Even in the darkest hours of history, people still survived, even when 90% of the human population was wiped out. And today we are much better at diagnosing and separating people that are a biological threat so there will not be any problem with ebola. Don't believe me, look at this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_epidemics.

This might be a little bit off topic, but I remember back in college we had a lot of different colored wooden spheres that had different amount of holes in them that would represent different elements. I remember black was carbon, white was oxygen, etc. And you could connect them with either wooden sticks or springs, which we used in a lot of our chemistry classes. I cannot remember what they are called. If someone knows what they are called, or even better has a link to where I can read up on them/buy them, I would be really grateful.

Does anyone have a picture or a link to the original periodic table, or perhaps even a chain of pictures of how the periodic table progressed. I am very interested in this from a historic point of view.

Thank you so much. This guide was incredibly useful to me!

I love the dictionary. You did a superb job!

One way that you can answer that is by transfering everything into the imaginary plane. If that is the case, you can think of capacitor of capacitance C being a resistor with resistance equal to j C. From one point of view it is 0. However from another it gives you exactly the exponential decay solution that you need. Moreover if you add inductors and think of them as being L/j, then you can combine all 3 in whatever series or parallel that they are formed by the same token that you combine resistors, and find out the complex resistance of the whole system, and therefore would completely characterize its behavior by writing out that differential equation.

That is peculiar, but you can always think about it from another point of view. Suppose you were drinking tea and 1 % of it was crude oil. I'm sure you would notice the difference, lol! As Einstein always said everything is relative (silly joke out of theory of relativity).

When calculating make sure you include the conservation of energy. So if one of the waters is much warmer then the other then the amount of heat that one of them loses will be the amount that the other gains. If there is a phase change (for instance going from solid to liquid) first thing to check is that the amount of heat necessary to change all the ice into water is not more then the amount of energy that the other water has above 0 C. If it is, you can average the rest of the energy and make the same argument about conservation of energy. If not then only part of the ice will turn into water, and it will be more of a question of given a huge amount of ice and water, when you mix them, how much ice will be left, because a portion will turn into water. Plug in all the necessary constants like specific heat to make this quantitative.

One thing I know for sure is that you cannot think of time as of something that doesn't quantize, so there is some limit to the smallest amount of time we can have. if we have two runners one 1 m away from another, where the lagger runs twice as fast, we can make an argument that while the lagger gets to where the leader is, the leader will move a half meter, then by the same algorithm by 1/4 meter, etc. and according to such an argument the lagger will never catch the leader because he will always be (1/2)^n meters behind. we know what that series converges to, and we know that after the leader runs for approximately 1 m the lagger will catch up to him, but if time was indeed forever divisible it would never happen.