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DrKrettin

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Posts posted by DrKrettin

  1. On 11/20/2017 at 1:57 PM, studiot said:

    But surely the great grandmaster of uncertainty - Heisenberg - has a greater than sign in his principle?
    So any amount of uncertainty that is greater than the minimum value will conform to his principle.

    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. 

  2. 8 minutes ago, Strange said:

    I think there are two events: picking the first sock and picking the second sock. They are independent in that the first has no effect on the second (other than changing the number of socks available).

    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.

  3. 4 hours ago, Orcus said:

    Einstein once said "if you can't explain it to a 6 year old you don't understand it yourself". 

    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. 

  4. 3 minutes ago, studiot said:

    "You all saw what happened. Why did the box topple over?"

     

    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.....)

  5. 20 minutes ago, zapatos said:

    Yes, you are probably right.

    Alternatively, it might be good to ditch the 'checklist for ensuring wedded bliss by eliminating those whose genetic compatibility index fails to meet your standards', and instead choose a mate based on love, respect, compatibility, and friendship. 

    Nah, that's just crazy talk!

    Yes - please stop being so ridiculous.

  6. 5 minutes ago, geordief said:

    If the large ball is filled with helium it does shoot up,surely.

    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.

  7. 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.

  8. 7 minutes ago, scherado said:

    He may have submitted his application today,  we shall see: I made the point yesterday that he is making today, if you get my drift.

    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.

  9. 21 minutes ago, mad_scientist said:

    Before receiving any conviction that you want to spend the rest of your life with them, it is still good to consider other factors as well. You select a mate based on many factors - their weight, beauty, facial symmetry, education level, career, life purpose, compatibility of values and inclinations, character traits etc. All these can come before that commitment to stay and be loyal to your partner until death.

    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.

  10. 1 minute ago, mad_scientist said:

    Do you think for this reason, it is best to avoid marrying someone from a different ethnic group so your children/offspring can get bone marrow transplants easier if they ever need them?

    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)

  11. 1 hour ago, dimreepr said:

    I'm repeating a claim by the BBC program QI (a fact-based comedy game show with a team of researchers)

     

    Well, that's one interpretation but a little tenuous.

    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. 

  12. 37 minutes ago, Roamer said:

    If you don't know how a smart phone works, buy one and you'll learn.

     

    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.

    23 hours ago, dimreepr said:

    AFAIK no society has suggested the Earth is flat, until recently; any discrepancy, as far as I can see, is the result of an ever-increasing inequality in our modern capitalist system and the education it provides.

    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)

  13. On 9/28/2017 at 9:09 PM, mikeco said:

    The answer to that question is the key to love. The Greeks apparently didn't know, or I suspect they would have stated it. They defined different kinds, or forms of love but they didn't define love. There are different kinds of pride but only God knew the exact definition, ... Because he was the one who created the word. The same is true with love.

     

    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. 

     

    On 9/28/2017 at 9:09 PM, mikeco said:

    Because he was the one who created the word. The same is true with 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. 

  14. 3 hours ago, scherado said:

    I do not have a degree in computer science. Did I not make that clear? I can't remember. You have been added to my ignore list, congratulations.

    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.

  15. 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.

  16. 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.

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