Prometheus

Proto ideas about what we would recognise now as evolution have existed at least as long as the ancient Greeks. According to the wiki page on it, Taoist thought also denied eternal or fixed species, which is consistent with its general philosophy.  None of this is on an empirical basis though.

When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things. 

Really no hobbies?

You're on a science site - does science interest you? Were there things in the past that interested you but lost touch with?

If you can find something you are interested in it's much easier to talk about, especially if the other person is interested in it too.

Same as i feel about having been dead 'forever' before i existed.

If you're happy anyway don't worry about it.

If you actually do want friends, join a hobby group doing something that interests you.

1 hour ago, tim.tdj said:

The only emotional response I have towards torture is deep horror and the feeling that my blood has become very cold in a very unpleasant way.

I think that's the emotion they are going for.

Being entertained is a nebulous, but it seems clear that people don't simply want to experience the one emotion. We watch horror to be scared, but from a safe distance. I doubt nearly as many people would watch torture if they thought it was real.

Following String's hint and using studiot's notation for the squares, of which we need only 3, i've come up with:

\( A = int_{0}^{1}(r^2 - x^2) dx - 2  \)

\( B = int_{1}^{2}(r^2 - x^2) dx - 2  \)

\( C = int_{2}^{3}(r^2 - x^2) dx - (A+B)  \)

Which give reasonable looking answers too.

I'll give Studiot's method a go later, it looks like a more refined approach to the one i first described.

4 minutes ago, StringJunky said:

Wouldn't you be looking for the Area under a Curve?

You may very well be right, thanks. I'll get back to you once i get a chance to give it a go.

Yes, even at a cursory glance it seems obvious this will work. 

I have a grid through upon which a circle is drawn, as shown below.

Now, for every square in the grid through which the circle runs, i want to calculate the proportion of the square covered by the circle. So one of the squares close up:

I thought this would be relatively straightforward but i've ended up with a horribly convoluted way involving working at some angles where the circle crosses the squares, using that to find the area of the circle, then subtracting that from the area of a rectangle that contains that circle segment, and so on for other squares. Only need to do this for three squares as symmetry saves me a lot of work, but it's still a meandering method. Just seems to me there should be a much more simple method, but i can't figure it out.

Does anybody know of a more elegant way of solving this problem?

There does seem to be a point many liberals miss about such news topics related to the rise of populist movements, and seem constantly surprised when people vote for 'stupid' things.

I can understand the push towards progressing society, but there is a very real risk that pushing too hard will actually regress society: I cite Trump and Brexit as examples.

Populism shouldn't dictate legal issues, but that's beside the point. Due process is being followed, i understand; the government have declared their intent and the courts will decide the legality of this situation. 

The court of social media, however, is what forms people's opinions. We should consider the large swathes of people who feel their views are being constantly ignored and so turn to increasingly extreme politics in an attempt to rectify the situation. We'll end up with Farage in charge if this continues unabated.

\( (-i)^2 = (-1)^2*i^2 = -1 \)

Maybe the question should be how do all these environmental crises interact. As Itoero alluded to there is significant overlap between them (like ocean acidification and CO2 levels). Trying to identify one as the most urgent might lead us to lose focus on the others and neglect the complex interactions between them all. A systems approach rather than a reductionist approach. 

3 minutes ago, Gees said:

When you talk about a "single point of all creation", you come precariously close to challenging evolution,

Huh? How's that?

4 minutes ago, Gees said:

I think that you are putting too much emphasis on "God" in your view of monotheism.

Maybe there are monotheists that don't emphasise god, but i've not met them. Seems almost a contradiction of terms.

6 minutes ago, Gees said:

Consider that Zhuangzi questioning reality does not automatically translate to a "God" playing with people. That is one hell of a jump.

You made that jump, not me; a common misconception among monotheists. It is not that a powerful being is playing with you, it's that you are the powerful being and you are at play. To view oneself as God is often the ultimate conceit, the sin of sins, in monotheism. 

I've not studied Hinduism in detail, but my understanding is that there is no single point of all creation, but rather an endless cycle of birth, sustenance and death. Destruction is as divine as creation - it's all part of the cosmic play.

There's a fundamental difference in perspective between many Eastern religions (and some Paganism/neo-paganism interestingly) and monotheism. We aren't things that come into the universe, created as if molded by some creator. We come out of the universe, as an apple will grow from an apple tree. 

2 hours ago, Gees said:

Doesn't Buddhism accept reincarnation as a matter of course? Sounds like some serious tail chasing to me.

Buddhism teaches rebirth - certainly circular. The difference seems to be they actually learn to enjoy chasing their tail whereas monotheists get all wound up when people don't take their tail chasing seriously. Just how it seemed to me when i was young and looking at these things. Now i'm discovering that Europe has always had similar traditions, from Hellenistic and Stoic thought, through to Northern Shamanic practices: unfortunately Christianity erased those traditions.

But my point was about discarding sophisticated theological cleverness for direct experience, which you seem to agree with.

1 hour ago, Strange said:

Apparently, some people drink it. 

Surely a phallacy?

5 hours ago, iNow said:

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/forecasting-a-robot-driven-workplace/

I'm delighted to see lawyers on the redundant list. However, i think it far too optimistic. Lawyers (in the UK at least) come from a privileged sector of society and they will not let their children's future cushty jobs go easily. Once jobs for the affluent are started to be affected there will be significant push back (not that there won't be push back from the poor - but who cares about the poor).

3 minutes ago, John Cuthber said:

To be fair, if all you want to do is sit round watching daytime TV, that's fine too.

The point is that it lets you choose what you do.

True enough. Though i hope by then we'll have some damn fine virtual gaming.

6 hours ago, Obsessed With Gaming said:

Will we just sit around all day doing nothing?

We could learn new languages, write poetry or literature, connect with other people, dance, sing and play. But the fact that many people can only imagine sitting around doing nothing says a great deal about the modern psyche. 

I agree that it wasn't meant as a computer simulation, but the magic, or technology, by which it is achieved is irrelevant. It's the same concept - a reality is created for a powerful being to play with. Anyone who thinks the Matrix was ground-breaking haven't read much sci-fi or religion: the ideas been around at least since Zhuangzi said:  I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man.

Also, it's difficult to talk about Hinduism without stating which flavour: they vary so much they can start to look like different religions all together.

In terms of all those questions, they go away if you think of it just as an analogy. That's why i like Buddhism and Taoism - they rarely start chasing their tails with such questions, and just focus on the direct experience of living.

I don't know, but it is kind of fun.

Maybe it could be used to induce certain emotions as people play VR games or watch movies (assuming it can reliably stimulate emotions with that precision).

What are the 'brain genes'?

Well i might change the ending in light of koti's suggestion: put a slither of silver in the lining at least.

When black holes are very small, they're very hot. But do they actually emit gamma rays? I couldn't find much information about what happens to a black hole in its death throes. 

Well then it seems that time is the only thing that eats black holes, and lots of it. Is the CMB temperature falling? If so this could speed up BH evaporation - but still at cosmic timescales i guess.

Anyway, i'm writing a sci-fi short so i'm just going to have the scientists create virtual particles at the event horizon to attempt to evaporate it more quickly. It's going to go wrong and end with a gamma ray burst that sterilises life for a wide sweep of the galaxy.

Would hearing be noticeably affected by lower pressures? With a lower density i imagine the intensity any vibrations would be lower.

On 1/20/2019 at 5:35 PM, MigL said:

This is a 'crude' explanation of the mechanism, but it is easy to understand, and so, often used.

I would imagine the virtual particle 'flux' is related to the surface area of the event horizon.
Increase the EH surface area and you increase the virtual particles involved in the mechanism.

However, the EH surface area is also a measure of the BH's entropy, which implies it has a temperature.
Increasing the EH surface area decreases the temperature, so the peak of the black body spectrum of the emitted radiation is at a lower temperature.
For stellar size ( and above ) the emitted radiation is at very low temperatures ( so low in fact, that the 2.7 deg of the CMB increases the BH's mass faster than Hawking radiation decreases it ) is very long wavelength/low energy.
 

The only way of increasing the EH surface area would be to increase its mass though, isn't it?

Isn't it the case that the more massive BH, and hence larger EH surface area, the more slowly it evaporates, implying something else is at play?

On 1/20/2019 at 6:47 PM, beecee said:

Simply, it is the law of conservation that is being enforced...the possibility exists that the positive escaping particle becoming real, and the virtual particle falling in is negative, thereby subtracting from the overall mass of the BH.

So these virtual particles pairs have to obey conservation laws - is it a mass/energy conservation?