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swansont

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Everything posted by swansont

  1. Physics works, and it’s all intertwined. For me to explain why it works one way and not another would require you to meet me partway and have an understanding of physics; I don’t know what that level is, but I’m not prepared to teach you several semesters’ worth of it. Absent that, you just have to defer to folks who give you the big picture: Energy isn’t a substance. That’s been tried and it failed (e.g. caloric theory) “I have no understanding and I reject your science with no basis” isn’t an argument, either. BTW, convertibles and roofless cars exist. We could discuss how roofs keep rain out, because I presume you have an understanding of rain.
  2. What is says is that we have a model - a very successful one - where energy is a property. If you want to hypothesize that things are made of energy, feel free to come up with such a model.
  3. Hard to say what she’s getting at without knowing how she thinks how we are taught to see science. Presumably this refers to how non-scientists are taught.
  4. Concur. We have a number of examples where the data show that the "conventional wisdom" fails spectacularly ("girls are bad at math" as an example) so why assume that it's true in general?
  5. Or maybe that's how people are brought up. When title IX went into effect and forced schools to give women equal opportunity to participate in sports (among other things) in schools that got federal funding, there was an explosion of participation. What was holding that back wasn't "natural affinity", it was opportunity. “Since 1972, thanks to increased funding and institutional opportunities, there has been a 545% increase in the percentage of women playing college sports and a 990% increase in the percentage of women playing high school sport.” https://www.womenssportsfoundation.org/education/title-ix-and-the-rise-of-female-athletes-in-america/
  6. Yes, and that doesn't really change anything. Sometimes the change is in your favor and sometimes it is not. If you are right more often than you are wrong, you still make money. The point of "technical analysis" (as I understand it) is that you don't delve into the reasons and complications. You bypass that. (One of the reasons I don't partake)
  7. But the stock market is not random in the same way a coin flip is, and what the analysis is leveraging is the response of people, not of the company. And people do research on stocks, so this is like a second-order effect of that research. Probably tied into the "efficient market hypothesis" (which is also partly bullshit) Stocks will move up or down based on news, but they fluctuate daily/weekly in the absence of it, and I think that's where technical analysis is used. Take the concept of resistance - stocks will tend to hit a ceiling or floor in the fluctuations, because the number of buyers vs sellers depends on the price of the stock, and you run out of one or the other when you hit some limit...in the absence of new information. It's all about the reaction of the people doing the trading. Technical analysis exploits certain patterns. And it only has to work somewhat better than random guessing in order to make money. And as Sensei points out, if you have a bunch of people doing the same analysis, you can create a trend by doing the analysis. But others may try and exploit this by using a different analysis.
  8. If you're lucky as a scientist you get to have a few of these "Eureka!" or "It is alive!" moments. I had one - I was the first person to see fluorescence from radioactive K-37 and our lab was the first to magneto-optically trap it. It was, AFAIK, the shortest half-life atom ever trapped (about 1.25 s), a record that we broke a short time later when we trapped K-38m, which has a half-life just under a second. (I don't know if anyone has broken that record) But just figuring things out, getting past some issue that's stumped you - are these moments on a much smaller scale. There are always roadblocks in experimental physics (and, I imagine, other sciences) that you have to figure out. As my thesis advisor put it (when I felt stupid for not getting a result quickly because of a roadblock) "If we knew the answer it wouldn't be research"
  9. You’re in a regime where classical physics gives a good description if it involves an antenna, but I think the “time of detection” concept has a classical application. If you don’t emit or detect for long enough the sine wave will be truncated, so it will have higher-frequency harmonics and you might detect that, or detect nothing at all.
  10. Almost. We have brown laser goggles that protect against multiple wavelengths, yet there is no brown in the spectrum, because the response of the eye is a factor, especially once when multiple wavelength ranges are involved.
  11. So when they both appear, you have to divide one by the other, and can’t say that the equation varies the same way that c does. So how does the fine structure constant vary? It’s not (1+Z)-1/3 right? It should vary as (1+Z)+1/3 If the variation depends on Z, then why do you say that c grows by 7.25 mm/s per year? There’s no redshift. Except that won’t work, because the Bohr energy levels depend on k2 owing to the Coulomb interaction, and k depends on ε0 So you have to account for the change in the energy levels (also the Bohr model isn’t right, but that’s a separate discussion)
  12. ! Moderator Note Posting to advertise your youtube channel violates rule 2.7. You’ve been told this before. Do it again and you will be banned as a spammer
  13. My objections were posted pointing out that your answers are inconsistent. So simply repeating your answer doesn’t address this. It makes it look like you’re avoiding critiques of your conjecture. If c varies and ε varies, then the fine structure variation is not the same as the c variation. That’s simple math.
  14. Why not? Isn’t pro-legalization the same as anti-prohibition?
  15. Since we can see the existence of propaganda leading to people resisting a certain action in the name of freedom, how is it unreasonable to say that drug prohibition is not immune to similar manipulation? Would false claims involved in trying to make drugs legal be a counterexample? https://retrorevolution.com/the-top-10-reasons-marijuana-should-be-legalized/ claims that alcohol consumption drops by 50% after pot is legalized, but studies don't back this up https://jcannabisresearch.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s42238-021-00085-x Colorado households showed a 13% average monthly decrease in purchases of all alcoholic products combined Estimates in Washington were suggestive of an increase in spirits purchased I also see a couple of really nebulous claims on their list, too, like cannabis leads to better relationships. I pointed this out earlier - peer pressure is not part of the legal system. Yes it's there, but it's still not part of any law.
  16. That Godwin-ed unexpectedly. How did legality of alcohol lead to Hitler (a prerequisite for Hitler youth), exactly?
  17. That slope, I presume, is slippery. There is a fallacy that describes this justification. The fact that it is a fallacy means that it is indeed unreasonable. We've had legal consumption of alcohol for centuries, through multiple cultures and countries. Where has it become mandatory? If this is such a danger, surely it's happened somewhere by now.
  18. You expect a null result only if α does not change, but you are claiming it does change, though you refuse to cite a value. No, since you are measuring relative values calibration is not needed. When you take the ratio of the frequencies, any calibration factor divides out - it's not part of the result. You have not addressed the issue of other "constants" changing. Since c=1/√(ε0μ0) what changes will we see in ε0 and μ0? At least one of them has to change if c changes. Ignoring this problem won't make it go away
  19. a fabricated propaganda campaign against prohibition and the furphy of government control, and some, (the more gullible) will approve of being able to do what ever we want. I would think current events regarding COVID would show that propaganda about government intervention/control can lead to people screaming about freedoms. Maybe it's just more obvious to me being is the US. (though I'm not sure what furphy is or is supposed to be; it's not in my dictionary)
  20. ! Moderator Note Posting to advertise your youtube channel is against the rules (2.7). The link has been removed As exchemist requests, you need to post the material for discussion here
  21. The time-varying depression of the ocean bed and adjacent coast (from the tides) was a factor that entered into an experiment that measured the variation in pendulum clocks owing to changes in g caused by the moon Analysis of Records made on the Loomis Chronograph by Three Shortt Clocks and a Crystal Oscillator. Ernest W. Brown and Dirk Brouwer p584 https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Analysis-of-Records-made-on-the-Loomis-Chronograph-Brown-Brouwer/507ddf49e246d79933bd77cb871969994581465d
  22. Yes. Your point being? Form factor is likely an issue here, as Phi notes. Can you plug an Arduino into a socket for the chip? No? Then it’s hardly a replacement, even before considering if anyone is shipping them to Russia.
  23. Or less useful, if GLONASS is being jammed or spoofed
  24. I imagine the removal of the effects would depend on the goal of the picture. It would be a corruption of data if you were investigating an area of sky near the star, but I imagine you can put an aperture in place if you were looking at the star itself. As noted, those particular stars are overexposed, so you've already screwed up if you were trying to determine their luminosity. If it's just for PR, it's a neat effect that some people probably like.
  25. I like that people do this, because it recognizes that retribution makes it much less likely that they will call, and that yelling at them after the fact doesn't prevent the situation from happening. Yes, it does. As do the misunderstandings of what alcoholism entails. But the "social necessity" isn't law, and that's what we were discussing.

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