DrKrettin

Everybody translates Heisenberg's principle as Uncertainty, but I have always thought that Indeterminacy is a better translation of his Unbestimmtheit. That way you avoid the association with probability. I remember decades ago reading that Heisenberg preferred that translation as being nearer what he meant, although I have no longer any faith in my memory, and I may well have imagined it.

I have a photo of a manuscript from the 2nd or 3rd century which is the earliest known example of a zero, being a dot. On the bottom line near the righthand corner.

But the first does have an effect on the second in that after the first has picked a sock, the second can no longer pick that particular sock. The choice of socks for the second pick depends on the pick of the first one. I don't really understand what they mean by independent in this scenario, to me it seems redundant and confusing.

Does this all work for other bases? Would it be casting out of 7s in octal, or casting out of Fs in hexadecimal?

I find it very difficult to believe that he said that. A 6-year-old probably does not grasp physical concepts of mass, time, energy, force and 3-D space sufficiently to understand even Newton's laws.

The answer to the thread title is extremely simple: yes

Anybody who denies that there are differences must be clinically insane. Anybody making value judgments based on those differences must be sexist.

All I can think of is a firework attached to one side which explodes, thrusting burnt gunpowder sideways. This would give an impulse which would topple the box (with a bang). This would of course only work if the box is not airtight. (Reminding me of the lorry with a 5 ton load limit, carrying 6 tons of birds.....)

Yes - please stop being so ridiculous.

I thought that too, but thought it too obvious. Also "I struggle up a podium lugging a large ball" negates that possibility because you would not have to lug it. Anyway, it still conforms to the proposition, because it is the heavier air that falls, not the ball.

The subject is an interesting one, but I need a little more padding in that to understand the point.

Living outside the UK, I have discovered that some friends in the UK have adopted the procedure of never actually answering the phone. They check for missed calls and return calls from numbers that they recognize. That explained why when I called old friends they never seemed to be at home. This procedure has been adopted simply because of the number of unwanted sales calls they had. This works as long as you are the only person who does it. If you return a call to somebody who has the same procedure, you'll never talk to each other.

This is actually fascinating, because I have never encountered anybody online who is so absurdly arrogant as to attach so much importance to their "ignore list" on the assumption that it might upset anybody included on it. That, plus the obsession with irrelevant detail about some BA qualification (I dare not be more specific) points to some psychological state which needs some clinical attention. I find myself thinking about Trump for some reason.

It's time you joined the IgnoredByScherado club

Again, you seem to consider these things on a completely rational level. It is as though you have a check list, and potential mates tick various boxes and clock up a score, above which they are suitable as a lifelong mate. If you make choices like that, then I agree that potential genetic problems should be on the list. But if you make decisions using these criteria, my guess is that it is all irrelevant because it won't be a long-term relationship. I hope I'm wrong.

You seem to assume that choosing a partner is a totally rational decision based on calculated risk factors. Life is not like that - you might use this criterion and then discover that you can't have children. Choose the partner based on a conviction that you want to spend the rest of your life with them. Everything else is peripheral and unpredictable. (Although no doubt somebody will come up with a valid exception to my generalisation)

Fair enough, but I suspect none of them were classicists, making a claim like that, because they are very shaky ground. Any one example as I gave is necessarily tenuous, but taken together with other examples, we can be fairly certain that the flat Earth was assumed until early Greek scientists came along. I could go on, but this is off-topic, so I'll just quote Wiki: The flat Earth model is an archaic conception of Earth's shape as a plane or disk. Many ancient cultures subscribed to a flat Earth cosmography, including Greece until the classical period, the Bronze Age and Iron Age civilizations of the Near East until the Hellenistic period, India until the Gupta period (early centuries AD), and China until the 17th century.

I think you are confusing "how to use one" with "how it works". I suspect the vast majority of uses are adept at using it, but have absolutely no idea how it actually works. What an extraordinary claim. Try reading a few lines from Homer's Odyssey (ca. 700 B.C.) Book 1.22: "But Poseidon was gone now to visit the far Aithiopians, Aithiopians, most distant of men, who live divided, some at the setting of Hyperion, some at his rising." Aithiopian (now Ethiopian) means literally "burned face" i.e. black. The idea is clearly that they lived where the sun rose or where the sun set, and they had black faces because the sun was obviously much nearer the Earth at those points. That makes total sense with a flat Earth, standard assumption of that era (or earlier tradition at any rate)

I suppose the question in the thread title begs another question, namely: what constitutes "great"?

This seems to be to be an extraordinarily uninformed statement about the Greek attitude to love, based purely on a totally christian concept of identifying one love with their one god. Greeks were far more subtle and flexible about this. Greek gods are the embodiment of all kinds of forces, and I take Eros as one example of how they were well capable of describing it: (Longus II,6) θεός ἐστιν, ὦ παῖδες, ὁ ῎Ερως, νέος καὶ καλὸς καὶ πετόμενος· διὰ τοῦτο καὶ νεότητι χαίρει καὶ κάλλος διώκει καὶ τὰς ψυχὰς ἀναπτεροῖ. Δύναται δὲ τοσοῦτον ὅσον οὐδὲ ὁ Ζεύς. Κρατεῖ μὲν στοιχείων, κρατεῖ δὲ ἄστρων, κρατεῖ δὲ τῶν ὁμοίων θεῶν..... "Love, my children, is a god, a young youth and very fair and winged to fly. And he delights in youth , follows beauty and gives our fantasy her wings. His power is so vast that that of Zeus is not so great. He governs in the elements, rules in the stars and domineers even over the gods that are his peers......" You also have to consider that we only have a fraction of what Ancient Greeks recorded in writing, so you cannot say they did not state it - all you can do is assert that we have no record of a definition, which is entirely different and arguably completely wrong anyway. I have to say that what really irritates me about christians is that they are usually arrogant and narrow-minded enough to consider any other religious system as inherently inferior, and only they have the true concept of anything like, for example, love. That is merely the christian view, and other cultures have other equally valid belief systems. Incidentally, when John says᾿Εν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος , for some reason, christians choose to translate λόγος as "word" where any sensible person would translate it as its usual meaning : "rational thought". In the beginning was rational thought - pure Stoic doctrine.

It is ridiculous that you think that adding somebody to your ignore list is somehow a punishment, and it is also ridiculous that you think anybody cares about your stupid list. Why don't you grow up and stop throwing your toys out of the pram when somebody disagrees with you? And who the hell cares exactly what your degree title is? There is no evidence that you learned anything from it anyway.

I'll try, but I'm probably in ignore as well.

Start here:

It may sound silly, but try watching children's cartoons to get an idea of simple conversations. I also found that watching old Western films (cowboys and indians) can be an effective way of learning a language (in my case, dubbed in a foreign language) , because the plot is always simple and the dialogue is usually simple sentences ("The town isn't big enough for both of us" etc.). The ability to understand the language is inversely proportional to the intellectual content (generally) so try something really primitive, even if the subject is boring.

It may sound silly, but try watching children's cartoons to get an idea of simple conversations. I also found that watching old Western films (cowboys and indians) can be an effective way of learning a language (in my case, dubbed in a foreign language) , because the plot is always simple and the dialogue is usually simple sentences ("The town isn't big enough for both of us" etc.). The ability to understand the language is inversely proportional to the intellectual content (generally) so try something really primitive, even if the subject is boring.