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swansont

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Everything posted by swansont

  1. Is god really George Costanza?
  2. ! Moderator Note You’ve already opened two threads related to this; we don’t need more. And if it’s just an excuse to post links to advertise some site, you will be banned as a spammer.
  3. ! Moderator Note From rule 2.7: Videos and pictures should be accompanied by enough text to set the tone for the discussion, and should not be posted alone. From 2.12 (emphasis added) Example of tactics that are not in good faith include misrepresentation, arguments based on distraction, attempts to omit or ignore information, advancing an ideology or agenda at the expense of the science being discussed, general appeals to science being flawed or dogmatic, conspiracies, and trolling.
  4. So it’s not new, as you claimed
  5. So, an offshoot of nihilism?
  6. FTL

    swansont replied to Seten's topic in Speculations
    ! Moderator Note On the contrary, this is a science forum, and specifically the speculations subforum, which has rules that you need to follow. If you make stuff up, don’t expect it to go unchallenged. If you’re looking for a credulous audience, it isn’t the right place for you.
  7. It’s not an information gap. Emotional persuasion has to be countered with better emotional persuasion. Unfortunately, fear is pretty primal, so making people afraid of “different” (be it skin color or sexuality or whatnot) is pretty effective. But step 1 is not repeating, and thus reinforcing, the lie. Trump won by a narrow margin, not as he keeps claiming, but people keep saying the m-word, and now that’s the narrative. Same with Musk and his purported intelligence.
  8. FTL

    swansont replied to Seten's topic in Speculations
    Time is not absolute and not an invariant
  9. As with most grammar and punctuation, it’s a convention that was adopted. People decided it was to be capitalized. I suspect the reasons that are presented are “just-so” stories rather than historical facts A lot of these rules were driven by typesetters, either for ease of printing or ease of reading. If it was because typesetters tended to run short of lower-case “i” in their kit, so they decided to capitalize the pronoun, would that decision have been recorded for posterity?
  10. Just like with any other sort of propaganda, if you repeat it enough, people believe it to be true even if it’s not. And even if you can debunk it, if you use the propaganda’s phrasing, you reinforce the incorrect description.
  11. Some excitation, yes. The peak of room-temperature photons is longer than 10 microns, but shorter wavelengths exist in the spectrum, as you note. The function is exponential, so increasing temperature will increase the excitation probability. But the color is probably due to what visible photons do to it, as with all things that have a color.
  12. 1 eV is not a thermal photon. kT for 300K is 0.026 eV e^-E/kT (probability of excitation) is going to be quite small
  13. How was it estimated? The article only states the number, not the method or evidence.
  14. All the money is going to go toward people making >$360k per year. Everyone else will see a tax hike
  15. We’ve known who Trump is and still elected him president. This is related to the “information gap” error - the assumption that lack of knowledge is the problem, and can be fixed by filling in the gap. Or perhaps you’re so invested in him being a genius that you can’t accept any evidence to the contrary. What scientific papers has he authored? I can’t find any. So how do you conclude that he’s a successful scientist? Because a company he owns, and that employs ~10,000 people (and the technical people are likely engineers and technicians rather than scientists) has done some things? That speaks to the competence of the employees, not him. You’re giving him credit for other peoples’ work
  16. So far it’s about $5 per taxpayer, so I don’t think that’s going to sway too may folks, especially those who have lost some kind of support
  17. I missed where anyone has proposed curing him of any afflictions/deficiencies. Seeing as this is posted in politics, the “something” we do about it are political solutions, not medical ones.
  18. ! Moderator Note Since you aren’t going to follow the rules, the thread is closed. Don’t bring the topic up again.
  19. So, as MigL notes, blind people are an issue here. Or if you have a glass eye, or just close one eye.
  20. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190513-it-only-takes-35-of-people-to-change-the-world “nonviolent campaigns are twice as likely to achieve their goals as violent campaigns. And although the exact dynamics will depend on many factors, she has shown it takes around 3.5% of the population actively participating in the protests to ensure serious political change.” “During a peaceful street protest of millions of people, the members of the security forces may also be more likely to fear that their family members or friends are in the crowd – meaning that they fail to crack down on the movement. “Or when they’re looking at the [sheer] numbers of people involved, they may just come to the conclusion the ship has sailed, and they don’t want to go down with the ship,” Chenoweth says.”
  21. Timely article “Author of Upcoming Elon Musk Biography Says ‘There Is No Evidence’ Billionaire Has Any ‘Intellectual Achievements’” https://www.yahoo.com/news/author-upcoming-elon-musk-biography-040538098.html “He was sued for stealing the idea for Zip2—which fired him as soon as investors got involved. He was going to run PayPal into the ground after his company merged with it—again he was fired. He invested in Tesla when it was distressed and quickly began running it into the ground.”
  22. Trump (via Hegseth) fired the head of the joint chiefs, a black man, and the proposed white replacement is not qualified to take the job, and so will require a presidential waiver. The kind of situation DEI was designed to avoid. But that’s the point of getting rid of DEI; gotta have white guys in charge wherever you can.
  23. FTL

    swansont replied to Seten's topic in Speculations
    I got it from “but the universe outside appears to get larger (redshift) in front of the spacecraft” I don’t care how it looks. We were discussing with time dilation and length contraction, which are actual effects. The distance the spacecraft travels, as it measures it, gets smaller. Yes, it’s a gravitational effect. We were discussing motion, though, not gravity. Yes. Separate causes. So there’s no point in bringing up gravity when we are discussing motion.
  24. FTL

    swansont replied to Seten's topic in Speculations
    Motion does not cause gravitational lensing, and lensing is not caused by redshift. We do not measure a larger universe owing to redshift. You’re using these terms like you’re pulling them from a grab-bag Descriptions do not suffice when equations give us precise descriptions, rather than dreck like “energy fighting back against your acceleration”

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