imatfaal

Good points. Only I can't think of any acts of bullying that don't involve some form of speech or expression. I guess it depends on what you define as outside expression, because it definitely involves some form of communication, no?

Speech not necessarily - communication almost certainly.

 

As for your point about political expression not necessarily involving bullying, you're right. My point was that people are going to use the anti-bullying rules to intimidate each other, the same way they use the threat of lawsuits now to intimidate each other into settling out-of-court, etc. People shouldn't let themselves be intimidated into helping the bully achieve their goals, but that is typically how victimization works.

Only the most extreme form of political expression will be able to be cast in the light of bullying and I cannot see the legislation being a problem. If the law reverses the burden of proof on the respondent to prove he is not a bully - then I can see your point and agree, but I think this legal formation is unlikely.

 

Look at the current case of Geert Wilders in Dutch government. He has been crusading against Islam for some time on the basis that it is a totalizing lifestyle instead of just a religion. Yet, all the criticism of Islam comes with statements about it not "fitting with western culture/lifestyles." So the implication is that there IS a total western/European lifestyle that should dominate everyone who lives in western Europe and that if you want an Islamic lifestyle, you should go someplace other than Europe. Part of the strategy/tactic to attacking Islam and asserting secular living is to claim that Islam is attacking secular living. In other words, Wilders is promoting a bullying strategy toward Islam that accuses Islam of bullying secularism.

Hmm. Bullying is a personal offence with an individual victim - you can criticise a religion, you can rail against it, but I don't believe you can bully it. You can bully an certain member of a religion - but that is no longer a rational political point, it's ad hom and it adds nothing to an argument; therefore I do not see the problem with it being legislated against

 

Ultimately, what it comes down to is that the people who feel the most intimidated, for whatever reason, are the ones who are going to support the most repressive measures toward the "bullies" they blame for their feeling of intimidation. This is the cycle of bullying. Victims learn to behave passively so that they can claim righteousness in accusing others of bullying them.

I see no problem in institutionalizing the protection of the weak from the intimidatory and repressive. the almost-Nietzschean myth of the passive victim has been done to death in criminology and is not highly regarded.

 

Institutionalized (state) bullying takes the position of dominance over non-governmental bullying and freedom of speech get subsequently used as a means of taunting or "drawing the teeth" of potential aggressors. In this way, we go down the road of behavioral-control culture where passive-aggression wars against active-aggression to dominate it completely.

This seems to say that freedom of speech legislation and bullying regulation together give the pretence and possibility of an open society yet remove the practical reality - if you replace bullying with libel I could agree with you more, not much, but more.

At the moment it is just a vague idea by a designer rather than an engineer. I get the impression that the Nokia name is purely hype by the designer ("The Nokia E-Cu phone, which borrows the Finnish phone giant’s moniker for its name and logo") - and frankly I cannot see Nokia or anyone else making this work. Thermogenerators are pretty inefficient, need higher temperatures, and just wouldn't produce enough juice.

 

 

wired article http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2010-10/07/concept-body-heat-phone

designers blog http://patrickhylandproductdesign.blogspot.com/2010/10/nokia-e-cu-concept-nokia-e-cu-e-for.html#comments

Lemur - why is all bullying a speech act? A significant proportion of bullying is non-verbal. Additionally, not all speech acts are necessarily constitutionally/state protected actions under a freedom of speech provision. Freedom of speech laws tend to operate by removing barriers to expressing one's opinions - they very rarely act by allowing all speech (as Marat pointed out above). I do not know of any freedom of speech legislation that does not preclude intimidatory speech (either implicitly or explicitly) - but that does not render the legislation a dead letter.

 

The expression of a political opinion is normally the very object that is protected by freedom of speech legislation and I cannot see how anti-bullying legislation will affect this - you seem to be equating the expression of a differing viewpoint as potential bullying which will be trammelled by new legislation. To say that A disagrees with B is by no means equivalent to saying A is bullying B. Of course, at the limit this disagreement may transcend the debate and become oppressive; but for it to become bullying is possible to envisage but unlikely outside imagination. Anyhow, at that point the bullying legislation would come in and freedom of speech might be limited.

We need to take all of the predictions of water and goldilock's zone with a massive pinch of salt - I heard Prof Andrew Fitzsimmons on the radio a few days ago trying to calm the media hype. "the signal is around the same level as the noise, as the uncertainty" - "it needs work to be positive that the planet actually exists" - "water: complete conjecture". The exciting part is that of the nearby stars surveyed we have now found two very distinct possibilities for rocky planets in fairly near orbits - hopefully we will find one soon that transits across the face of its star and we can get an idea of hte atmosphere

I would go with Dog as well. Strange snout and balance of front legs/back legs however. I tend to envisage dogs with shoulders and hips equal or shoulders higher / more massive. Here is a list of floridan mammals http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mammals_of_Florida

I think Lemur is correct in asking

What is the underlying strategy of your writing?

But IIRC the drop size from a pipette is governed by the outside diameter of the tip and the surface tension of the liquid - and I think therein lies the reason for Mr Skeptic's question. If you are measuring the liquid with an accurate volume measure or doing the whole experiment on an accurate scale then fine. But you need to get rid of surface tension as part of your known variable measurement if it also makes up part of your question

3-26,

I think Hawking originally said that the information was retained in new black holes in baby universes - but has retreated from that position and now believes that the information is retained within this universe. Susskind, I think, was responsible for the string theory development that AJB referred to.

Boboe - not sure about why you would call your first idea Density, it seems to be a measure of occupancy, and a slightly strange one at that. Personally I would say the rug occupies area_rug/area_floor and not any form of the square root.

 

I think you also need to engage with lorenz boosts rather than just time dilation. Both x and t are transformed by lorenz boosts in a very similar way (x' = (x-vt)gamma and t'=(t-vx)gamma - but they are not the same.

 

The second formula you give is not an equation - as you give it, but does seem to be the factor for calculating proper time through gravitational time dilation. The major question is - why can the two equations for time dilation due to velocity and time dilation due to gravitational effects not co-exist? You state they cannot - but dont give a reason.

 

Not sure about your problem with mass - a kilogram can be viewed as a multiple of the planck mass which is formed from the fundamental universal constants. Many properties of matter do not have maximum finite values.

 

Gravitational effect time dilation has, i believe, been verified in many everyday situations - if it is incorrectly formulated you need to show why experimental data fits.

This question has taxed the greatest minds - Stephen Hawking and Kip Thorne had a long running and public bet with John Preskil on whether information was lost or maintained (hawking said lost, preskill maintained.) Hawking has paid up and he now believes that the information is retained within the universe. I don't believe the solution has been found yet; although a group claimed to have done so a few years back.

Further to cypress; could I suggest a thought about units of resistivity and how they come to be what they are.

I prefer to use Euler's Matrix because you can use it to multiply any two numbers and it's easy to check for mistakes.

 

Could you run that method past me - I only know Euler Matrices as the result of a three dimensional rotation. I hope there is some other Euler Matrix - cos long multiplication is easier for two digit numbers than messing around with Euler Angles/matrices

And conclusions drawn from heresay, which is a euphamism for conjecture

 

is this a dastardly combination of heresy and hearsay?

 

Michel and RMW - if you have access to JSTOR then you can find thomas youngs original write up here http://www.jstor.org/pss/107135 . the later experiments showing destruction of the interference when pathway is known are easier to find. And whilst we must be careful to avoid anecdotalism and defending the paradigm merely for its own sake; we must also acknowledge that science is enabled by "standing on the shoulders of giants". QM is remarkably well evidenced, and rigorous.

 

 

 

Hello Wick, not sure which angles you mean. The angle of the two surfaces where they touch is by definition zero. I understand the setup (I think) just not sure of the question

I had always assumed that the extended life in science fiction was merely that the author presumed that by the point in history that we become space-faring we will be better at preventing and curing disease and possibly have some form of gene therapy to combat natural ageing in our genes (telomere extensions or some such) whilst avoiding cancer. Everything I have heard about life in zero gravity tallies with above posts that it is not particularly good for you.

I think this problem is the same as arranging the points in a nice symmetric pattern; ie around the edge of circle - and it is much easier to visualize the relations

 

If you imagine numbering each point 1,2,..n around the circle then a triangle of a single colour is formed when you complete an entire circuit in three legs (ie from point 1 to point 4, point 7 and back to point 1 again). Alternatively you can see this triangle as a journey around in which the total steps add up to n. Example for seven points 1 to 2 to 4 to 1 is three legs making a triangle and the steps (1+2+4 = 7) add up to number of points. With point in a circle and always counting in same direction all triangle must have journey steps adding to total number of points.

 

It is quite easy to show that stars (and possibly a diagonal that halves the shape) that are made from moving a fixed number of steps around the circle will only make a triangle when (total number of points)/(step size) = 3. Similarly it is just a matter of adding three numbers to show that two stars overlaid will not make a triangle iff no three-step combination of their (step size) equals the (total number of points).

 

worked example 14 points

steps possible 1 (clockwise) = 13 (anticlock wise)

1,13

2,12

3,11

4,10

5,9

6,8

7,7

 

these can quite easily be divided into three groups/colours (7,7 6,8 5,9) (3,11 2,12) (4,11 1,13) within these groups no combination of 3 steps makes 14 - there are no triangles formed vertices at points and sides of same colour. Ie there is no 3-combination of 7,7 6,8 5,9 that equals 14, similarly with other two groups. Once all possible steps have been placed it is clear that every point is linked to every other point.

 

For all n from 3 through to 14 this works and at least one formation produces no triangles of one colour (with a little shenanigans for n=6,9,12). For n=15 this Does NOT work. I will continue to think and see if I can find a way to show that 15 is not possible in any method. I will also draw up a nice illustration.

 

Matthew - convinced that this is a dead question on a dead post , but still quite interested in it

 

 

 

proof that 14 points can be linked (with links of 3 different colours) and no triangle with vertices at points is made of a single colour