Bill Angel

I've read that the iPhone 5C uses a Toshiba 16GB flash memory chip. What's so difficult about pulling the chip out of the phone and sticking it into a memory reader?

Trump has recently made some controversial remarks about "enhanced interrogation techniques"

 

"I'd bring back waterboarding," Trump said during a February 7 debate. "And I'd bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding."

 

"I have made it clear in my campaign that I would support and endorse the use of enhanced interrogation techniques if the use of these methods would enhance the protection and safety of the nation. Though the effectiveness of many of these methods may be in dispute, nothing should be taken off the table when American lives are at stake. The enemy is cutting off the heads of Christians and drowning them in cages, and yet we are too politically correct to respond in kind."

The above quote is an excerpt from an OP-ED attibuted to Trump in USA Today. See http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2016/02/15/donald-trump-torture-enhanced-interrogation-techniques-editorials-debates/80418458/

Is Trump suggesting that the USA should "respond in kind" by holding public spectacles where Muslim POWs are either beheaded or drowned in cages? Bad idea in my opinion.

He the PT Barnum and Gorgeous George of the political circus and arena. He's an entertainer; although, I felt similarly about Arnold Shwarzenegger when he ran for Governor of California and Ronald Reagan for POTUS--Doh and Yikes!

Trump's idea of what he thinks is entertaining seems to be somewhat moronic. This is illustrated by citing a couple of his Tweets:

 

"I cant believe Apple isnt moving faster to create a larger iPhone screen. Bring back Steve Jobs!"

Note that this Tweet is from 2013. Steve Jobs died in 2011.

 

Another of Trump's tweets from 2013:

"So, lets get this right. Steve Jobs dies and leaves his wife everything-billions of dollars. Now his wife has a boyfriend (lover). Oh Steve!"

I would expect that winning the New Hampshire primary is good for a candidate's ego, but isn't necessarily indicative of the outcome of the electoral process.

See:

New Hampshire primary history: Candidates who won the state but weren't elected president, 1984-2012

http://www.newsday.com/news/nation/new-hampshire-primary-history-candidates-who-won-the-state-but-weren-t-elected-president-1984-2012-1.11452090

According to my inlaws who are from there, yes.

 

Hillary officially declared winner, but it took 6 coin tosses for that decision to be made (and she somehow managed to win all 6).

Funny, but Iowa apparently does award delegates on the basis of coin tosses.

See "Sometimes, Iowa Democrats award caucus delegates with a coin flip" http://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/elections/presidential/caucus/2016/02/02/sometimes-iowa-democrats-award-caucus-delegates-coin-flip/79680342/

d

 

Sorry if this is a stupid question but it's outside my field and just something I was curious about...

 

As we burn fossil fuel we release Co2 "into the atmosphere"

So my question is - does this Co2 collect in a band around the planet at a particular altitude

or is it dispersed at all levels throughout the atmosphere?

 

 

 

 

 

Radio debates would be awesome, actually. Watching televised debate coverage in the US is a lot like trying to focus on issues while playing slots in Vegas. Lots of small distractions for those who can't follow the two-and-three-syllable intellectualism going on.

 

That's a good point. It's a part of the political lore that those who watched the 1960 debate between Kennedy and Nixon thought Kennedy had won, but those who listened to it on the radio thought Nixon had won.

Nixon, pale and underweight from a recent hospitalization, appeared sickly and sweaty, while Kennedy appeared calm and confident. As the story goes, those who listened to the debate on the radio thought Nixon had won. But those listeners were in the minority. ...Those that watched the debate on TV thought Kennedy was the clear winner. Many say Kennedy won the election that night.

See http://content.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2021078,00.html

Hi, I have a question. Is the brain completely mapped by current science ? As in do we know every part of the brain and it's role ? Or is research in this department still needed ?

Research in this area is ongoing.

I've had the opportunity to be a subject in this type of research. I was asked to perform simple tasks or to look at simple drawings while my head was in an MRI machine. The researchers were able to use the images that they obtained to determine which parts of my brain were active while I performed the specified tasks. I wasn't the only research subject, but was perhaps one of 50 people they called in and perform this same experiment on.

They make educational equipment to the demonstrate feedback control in magnetic levitation.

See http://www.feedback-instruments.com/products/education/control_instrumentation/magnetic_levitation_system

Has this been proven?

Carl Jung and his followers believe it to be true.

Jung believed that dreams function to promote the most important developmental process of human life, namely, the uniting of consciousness and the unconscious in a healthy, harmonious state of wholeness. Jung calls this process individuation. One of the most distinctive features of Jungs theory of dreams is his claim that dreams express not just personal contents, but also collective or universal contents: the Archetipes. [Kelly Bulkley, An introduction to the Psychology of Dreaming, 1997]

See https://dtcproject.wordpress.com/collective/

It is not so much ESP, as it is we all have personality firmware that define human nature; propensities common too all humans. When triggers appear that can reach the firmware, what works on one, can also work on others. All potentials lower to the same place. But not everyone will stay there. Other return to potential through habit, will and peer pressure. Others will read the dream and maybe write so others can feel the trigger.

 

Your ideas about a "personality firmware" seem to be similar to the idea of a "collective unconscious" as elucidated by Carl Jung.

Here is one explanation by Jung of the meaning of a "collective unconscious":

 

And the essential thing, psychologically, is that in dreams, fantasies, and other exceptional states of mind the most far-fetched mythological motifs and symbols can appear at any time, often, apparently, as the result of particular influences, traditions, and excitations working on the individual, but more often without any sign of them. These "primordial images" or "archetypes," as I have called them, belong to the basic stock of the unconscious psyche and cannot be explained as personal acquisitions. Together they make up that psychic stratum which has been called the collective unconscious.

The existence of the collective unconscious means that individual consciousness is anything but a tabula rasa and is not immune to predetermining influences. On the contrary, it is in the highest degree influenced by inherited presuppositions, quite apart from the unavoidable influences exerted upon it by the environment. The collective unconscious comprises in itself the psychic life of our ancestors right back to the earliest beginnings...

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_unconscious

 

In other words similar stimuli can result in different individuals having similar dreams, because what they share is a collective unconscious and not because they are somehow telepathically communicating while they are dreaming.

This research could also be of interest:

 

Triggering sleep slow waves by transcranial magnetic stimulation (or TMS).

 

 

TMS triggering of slow waves reveals intrinsic bistability in thalamocortical networks during non-rapid eye movement sleep. Moreover, evoked slow waves lead to a deepening of sleep and to an increase in EEG slow-wave activity (0.5-4.5 Hz), which is thought to play a role in brain restoration and memory consolidation.

And from this same paper:

 

The alternation of up- and down-states in cortical neurons is thought to be involved in memory consolidation, synaptic homeostasis, and the restorative function of sleep, so the ability to trigger slow waves reliably could have important applications.

See

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17483481

If brain space indicates the importance of a sense, then vision is the most important. Roughly 30 percent of neurons in the brain's cortex are devoted to vision, compared with 8 percent for touch, and 2 percent for hearing.

 

See http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/brain-games/articles/brain-games-watch-this-perception-facts/

You cannot get rich off inanimate objects as 'rich' is relative.

That top 1% got rich off of the bottom 99%.

Take away the bottom 99% and you eliminate the source of the top's wealth.

( you can't have one without the other )

I agree. And most of the innovators who ended up being part of the top 1 percent and created wealth for the top 1 percent weren't born into that top 1 percent, Steve Jobs being the most prominent recent example.

Why not have a world where you are ONLY allowed to live if you are rich, beautiful, and happy?

 

A world of that kind would be a world full of happiness.

 

Your thoughts?

If you wrote a science fiction short story or novella based on this premise, many persons (myself included) would likely read it. But you would have to demonstrate how a world like that would be sustainable. In the past any society which considered that only the lives of an elite mattered had to rely on slave labor to keep functioning.

Research duo discover why non-Newtonian fluids harden on impact http://www.phys.org/news/2012-07-duo-non-newtonian-fluids-harden-impact.html

The first misconception regards why we sleep and particularly why we dream. I probably should have preference my initial definitive statement with comments regarding multiple studies supporting mental acuity recovery and memory consolidation as primary reasons for sleep and, particularly, dreaming--they are misconceptions. The neuroscience shows that sleep and dreaming occur for metabolic reasons rather than data sorting, assimilation, or elimination. Our brain works better when it is not in metabolic distress; our brain sleeps (NREM) to more efficiently remove metabolic waste (glymphatic system) and dreams to restore its metabolic reserves (glycogen). Succinctly, the sleep process regards brain health rather than mental health.

Those are interesting observations. In my own case I've noticed that I can remember more clearly the way someone had briefly looked at me 10 years ago when I was awake than I can remember the content of my previous night's dream.

I'm 67 years of age and also wonder if age effects the way that the brain sorts and assimilates information, compared to when one is younger.

"As we sat there on the mountain, the plenitude of pure, white stars seemed fixed in their positions, although of course all of them - and Earth as well - were moving ever outward toward a void at terrifying velocities."

excerpted from chapter 53 of the book "Innocence" by Dean Koontz

 

Dean Koontz's understanding of cosmology is a bit off. All the matter of the Universe is embedded in space which is currently expanding in all directions at a speed greater than the speed of light. But the matter in the universe is not expanding toward a void in the way that Koontz is visualizing it. It is the energy of space which drives the expansion and which carries the matter of the universe along with it, rather than the matter of the universe exploding into a void like the fragments of an exploded hand grenade.

There is an interesting question being experimentally researched that is related to your speculations:

 

See WHY THERES MORE MATTER THAN ANTIMATTER IN THE UNIVERSE

Inspiration can sometimes come from taking an interdisciplinary approach to problem solving. Check out the work people are doing in a field unrelated to your own, and consider whether an approach that they are using could be applied to your own area of investigation.

In his 1915 paper, Einstein showed that the effects of gravity could be described, by supposing that space-time was warped or distorted, by the matter and energy in it. We can actually observe this warping of space-time, produced by the mass of the Sun, in the slight bending of light or radio waves, passing close to the Sun. This causes the apparent position of the star or radio source, to shift slightly, when the Sun is between the Earth and the source. The shift is very small, about a thousandth of a degree, equivalent to a movement of an inch, at a distance of a mile. Nevertheless, it can be measured with great accuracy, and it agrees with the predictions of General Relativity. We have experimental evidence, that space and time are warped.

See http://www.hawking.org.uk/space-and-time-warps.html

This fellow has pretty good technique.

He provides entertainment during the Christmas to New Years period in downtown Baltimore.

I legitimately wake up everyday and hope something will happen to either kill me, or at least make life more interesting. I don't even care if it was a terrorist attack.

I'm curious as to what concept or meaning you were attempting to convey by your use of the word "legitimately" in that sentence. Are you suggesting that it can be legitimate to be indifferent as to whether or not yourself or others are the victims of a terrorist attack?

There might be a simpler way to solve your wifi connection problem. I have an android cellphone and an android tablet. I can configure my android cellphone to be a wifi hotspot, and connect my tablet to my cell phone via wifi. My cellphone's carrier (t-mobile) provides the data link.

then with this symmetry I come back to my conjecture that the universe when defined by a single quantum state produces a point on a graph with infinite octagonal axes,

I believe that you meant orthogonal, not octagonal.