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TheVat

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Everything posted by TheVat

  1. TheVat replied to Gian's topic in Ethics
    Agree. Just trying to retrieve valid points from Macks post and lean toward assuming that hyperbole is part of his style. If he really thinks Likud group is worse than Hitler, then I will revise my no-DV policy. I do think Israel government could chart a better course in engaging with neighbors and not condemning everyone as a terrorist. Yes. The gap in democracy lies in the occupied territories where Palestinians have no right to vote, yet their lives are controlled by Israeli government. The US has this problem (though less fraught) with Puerto Rico.
  2. My post, though joking, was a hint. So was Genadys reply. Watch the video very closely.
  3. TheVat replied to Gian's topic in Ethics
    I have no idea why you were neg voted on this. Before someone neg reps me for asking this, let's consider Mack's assertions. Israel is indeed run by a far right coalition. The Likud Party is a RW populist and Zionist party. This is public record. And billions of dollars in US support do indeed provide some check on the party's more radical proposals. And they do indeed want to compromise the supreme courts independence from the executive and power to render decisions through a plan thinly veiled as "reform." And they have, by almost any standards, promoted a fascist shift in government and continued herding Palestinian Arabs off of their lands, shoving them into narrow and crowded strips of land and depriving them of freedoms, fundamental rights and economic access. TWIMC: Maybe knock off the neg reps and just debate the facts?
  4. It is sleepy.
  5. Might do better switching to to the Penrose process, which is much more efficient conversion than proton-proton chain. First, you get a properly sized black hole... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penrose_process
  6. This may be a shortcut?
  7. I have passed your unique mythology of numbers on to Mr Von Daniken. Though most believe it was Cardano who first proposed complex numbers, there is evidence that ancient alien astronauts may have shown them to Ezekiel.
  8. As I recall in the novel Callisto and Ganymede develop mild terrestrial climates which makes human colonization easier. Europa has sentient aquatic life, so the monolith makers ban humans from going there. I have never factchecked the science for all this, but Clarke was pretty good about that, so it may be possible to terraform some Jovian moons if Jupiter becomes a star-like primary.
  9. 2010, Arthur Clarke. Self-replicating machines ignite Jupiter. All these worlds are yours, except Europa. Side note: I wrote Clarke a letter when I was eleven. A school assignment was to read a book then write the author with a question you had about the book (the one on the Great Barrier Reef). To my amazement, Clarke sent me a handwritten note from Sri Lanka. I have a heard a vulgar version of Waltzing Matilda that your comment reminded me of. Perhaps it will appear in a more appropriate thread. Someday.
  10. Yep. Or other technologies. Kurzweil sees a universe post-stellar, filled with computronium, using matter in the most efficient way to indefinitely prolong the lifespan of the universe. Charles Stross wrote about matrioshka brains built around stars, which would eventually replace the dying star with some artificial energy source.
  11. In democracy the reforms would need to encourage more wisdom in those we elect as our representatives, as well as civic education of the voter. (it's easy to say the latter would lead to the former, but you can have wise voters faced with a candidate field of sociopaths, showbiz hucksters, and the clueless wealthy (not mutually exclusive sets)) Equality factors in as equality before the law - in voting that means access and fair districting, as others point out. Any voting system with a single type access point will favor some over others. Probably a wide menu is best - online, mail-in, brick/mortar polling stations, mall kiosks, etc.
  12. Another green one is going past us this week, and will be visible in the N hemisphere for the next few days before it's too close to the sun. From AP News: https://apnews.com/article/comet-northern-hemisphere-nishimura-200f8cc81140387177b3436c4c3a7663 (....)Italian astronomer Gianluca Masi, founder of the Virtual Telescope Project, said in an email that the next week represents “the last, feasible chances” to see the comet from the Northern Hemisphere before it’s lost in the sun’s glare. “The comet looks amazing right now, with a long, highly structured tail, a joy to image with a telescope,” he said. If it survives its brush with the sun, the comet should be visible in the Southern Hemisphere by the end of September, Masi said, sitting low on the horizon in the evening twilight. Stargazers have been tracking the rare green comet ever since its discovery by an amateur Japanese astronomer in mid-August. The Nishimura comet now bears his name. It’s unusual for an amateur to discover a comet these days, given all the professional sky surveys by powerful ground telescopes, Chodas said, adding, “this is his third find, so good for him.” The comet last visited about 430 years ago, Chodas said. That’s about a decade or two before Galileo invented the telescope.
  13. I think the food threat is more from climatic changes and stress to the arable land we do have. Most foods, no matter how they are genetically enhanced, require regular water and soil nutrients. What we are losing are the crisis buffers and backups that assure a consistent food supply for all 8-10 billion mouths. I recall that was one of Paul Ehrlich's points. Not that mass Malthusian catastrophe is inevitable, but that we inch closer to that line where everything is a gamble, where escaping famine relies more and more on being lucky and having everything go right and every country that's a big agri producer also will retain the wealth and governmental benevolence to ship massive quantities globally whenever there's a drought or other agricultural failure. I don't think we need to totally give up dairy and meat, but most people in wealthy nations eat way more than nutrition requires. Not sure if you've heard...for those with latex allergies (quite common among medical workers) there are alternatives to rubber.
  14. LoL running around kettle. If you have a temperature probe which is plunging through the kettle at relativistic speed, wouldn't it be impacted by molecules with an average velocity that is higher? Moving through the star, your proton-man would get higher temperature measurements, as atoms whacked into the probe at near-c. (i am being whimsical, because I know that a proton taking measures is purely a gedankenexperiment) (and we still get your correct answer which is faster cooling because there are two readings - we can just as easily get this from Lorentz contraction, where in one nanosecond by Proton's clock, it has traveled farther through the star, and more time with more cooling has passed for the star and observers in its rest frame)
  15. This is sort of clear, but the measurements by the proton-man are still frame dependent. In his one nanosecond, he travels farther in the star interior which is Lorenz contracted. And temperature is a measure of average kinetic energy. Something seems off, but...as @iNow observes I am afflicted with human fallibility. 😀 Great thread, btw, as many of yours are.
  16. You don't have a proof there. Sounds like the Einstein proof was based on the fact that a right triangle can be decomposed into two similar triangles that are similar to the original. This was well known before Einstein, but he like many smart pupils reinvented it. You extract an equation with fA2 and fB2 and fC2 which i will leave as an exercise...
  17. TheVat replied to Gian's topic in Ethics
    Hannah Arendt nailed it with her phrase the banality of evil.
  18. It would help (both us and yourself) to label each vertice. Also, think on what the most basic meaning of c squared is, geometrically. Now look at your original hypotenuse. Start with this maybe....
  19. Of course, and I corrected in my subsequent post. I actually meant to say the correct way, I was typing all this distracted and couldn't use the edit in time. If you read my two later posts hopefully it is clear that I understand the reciprocal nature of observations from the FoRs. We had a wildfire nearby, so I'm checking other posts to see if other errors happened. Sorry for confusion.
  20. Okay, then the significant observation is the proton watching the center of dwarf approach at (I checked) .996 c. Using Lorentz, γ = √(1 - v²/c²) the dwarf is now seen by proton as a pancake that is shortened to .089 its rest frame diameter. The proton finds its path is less than a tenth the distance of a rest frame. And all clock-like functions in the dwarf are perceived as slower, happening at 8.93 percent of the dwarf's proper time. The proton is essentially free-falling as it moves in, so would GR be significant? I mean it is already at 99.6 c, so how much would the gravity pull of the star accelerate it?
  21. Then we have something like the muon paradox, don't we? To the muon, time is moving slower on Earth as the Earth speeds towards it at near-c, while to the Earth observers the muon's clock is slower and so it is not decaying as fast as expected. So the cosmic ray observes the WD as speeding towards it near-c, and the WD aging more slowly, therefore cooling more slowly. But the rest frame of the observer sees the CR/muon as aging more slowly. So you can't really reconcile those observations. And, afterthought, there is an almost instantaneous velocity change, because of the vector reversal for the CR muon. One nanosecond, the white dwarf is approaching the muon, but the next it is receding. And there is also a Doppler effect on the WD spectrum that the muon can observe. (edit: I should use proton CR because it will last longer than a muon, right?) So, back to your OP question: the perspective that matters is the muon, which will see the star cooling more slowly due to its relative velocity. To an earth observer, which shares a rest frame with the dwarf, the dwarf will be cooling normally because they (observer and star) are co-moving. Is the instantaneous velocity change important here? Also, would a proton make it through the packed neutrons core of a WD? Would it lose a lot of its velocity if it did?
  22. Well, the cosmic ray's clock is moving more slowly relative to an observer on, say, a nearby planet or space station. So if the ray were passing through an object of negligible mass, then it would observe that's object's clocks as moving faster, therefore cooling faster. But that white dwarf's mass is not negligible, so its clock is also moving slower to an observer on the nearby planet. (even on Earth, with it's small mass, the center of the Earth has aged 2.5 years less than its surface) So it would depend on the competing effects of gravitational time dilation and relative velocity time dilation. Generally, given that cosmic rays (like protons) move very close to c, I would think that would be the stronger effect and the proton would "see" the star as cooling faster.
  23. Yes. I was amused by the wide range of responses to the rooster from different family members (and cats). Also the philosophic thoughts on eating a pet v turning it over to strangers.

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