npts2020

It seems to me there are usually some small number who profit from chaos and do everything they can to sow dissent and ensure that institutions don't work the way intended. Pretty strange since very few people I have ever met fall outside a pretty narrow spectrum of wants and desires but many think their worldview is vastly different from a significant portion of the human race.

This is something you never seem to see politicians address. So what if we have made your country unlivable, you can't come here....

Doesn't this kind of call into question this assertion? Maybe dreams are rational?

IMO it is because that is the narrative people are fed every single day by the mass media and these days that includes unverifiable online sources.

IOW there is no such thing as unconscious thought? What about dreams? Do dreams ever have fact or truth in them?

That's a good question and possibly a different discussion but everyone has emotions and at least some hinge on prior experience. A toddler waking from a nap to see his mom making out with the mailman is unlikely to have the same emotions about it than as a teenager doing the same.

Before you go sawing off the limb you are out on, you may want to define what "thought" is. Doesn't ANY action taken by humans (or probably any other living thing) require "thought", whether it is conscious or not.

IIRC Audrey didn't evolve on Earth. 😜

Still. if any good science comes from the discussion, I think it is worthwhile. I rather liked Markus and KJWs' clarification of what I wrote since I was thinking on engineering scales rather than quantum ones. What I find hard to believe is that anyone who actually discovered something like perpetual motion or "free energy" would be talking about it on a science forum instead of making billions of dollars building and selling the machines. Even if they just licensed someone else to do that, they would become very wealthy.

Saxifraga candelabrum isn't newly discovered, just its carnivorous ability and it might not be the only one. A pretty good article for a non-scientific publication. Darwin might have proven this himself if he had lived in the eastern Himalayas. Modern methods have made the discovery more definitive, however. International Business Times, Singapore EditionDarwin Was Right: Sticky Alpine Flower Confirmed as Carni...Scientists confirmed that Saxifraga candelabrum is a carnivorous plant, validating Charles Darwin's 150-year-old prediction that some Saxifraga species digest insects for nutrients.

If true, how come MIT isn't shouting at the top its lungs about this monumental discovery that would completely solve all of our energy needs? In fact, I would bet that NOTHING published by MIT even calls into question energy conservation, much less disproves it.

If there was a post that actually disproved energy conservation, it would be here forever. In fact, I would be surprised to not see it pinned at the top of the physics forum because of its wider implications. However, I have never heard of a documented case where the law of conservation of energy was violated and never seen a plausible description of a case where it could possibly be so.

Of course it would take them having used anything that lasts that long but you have isotopes produced in a nuclear blast that would be detectable for that long. Plutonium-244, for example, has a half life of over 80 million years and is extremely rare naturally.

I might be opening a can of worms but, Seth using maths to show his point got me to thinking about if a "fact" could be not true or are all"facts" simply contingent on language and context? For example, it is pretty self-evident that 1 + 1 = 2 but any computer programmer can tell you that 1 + 1 = 10 can also be true. Another example might be "the sun is shining", which is always true but if it is in the context of being raining or nighttime could easily be false

Seems to me if this had ever happened, it would leave a mark worldwide that could be found in nearly any layer of sedimentation from that time. Pretty interesting article, tho, and gives a pretty clear process for how and what to look for.

First of all, the Earth's wobble is well documented and it is not because it (or any object with mass) is "unwinding" from anything with its spin. Every free object in the universe has some amount of "spin" relative to other objects. The only reason you don't spin yourself is because you are attached to the Earth's gravitational field and spin with it. And finally, you do realize that an Atwood machine is an idealized thought experiment, like a Carnot engine, that cannot be achieved in real life but is used to compare the efficiency of anything in real life to what should be the ideal. There are a host of reasons why the ideal can't quite ever be reached but that is a whole other discussion.

I am not arguing that any particular mathematical (or other) statement is true or not and, in fact, accept their veracity and usefulness because they are true. What I would argue, however, is that those mathematical statements are, at best, a small part of truth. Kind of like being able to see only the tip of Mona Lisa's nose. Yes, it is Mona Lisa but with such a small piece of it visible, one would be unlikely to discern what the rest of the portrait (truth?) looks like without more pieces (facts?). What you are seeming to say is "facts are truth". What I would say is "facts are true by definition but any particular one is only a small piece of "truth", which is much wider (possibly infinite) in scope.

It is factual in our commonly used base 10 system so is true in that sense. Are you also claiming it is the entirety of truth, even in just that base 10 system?

Well according to Wikipedia, the price of a new 1910 model T Ford was $780 and by 1924 the cost had been reduced to $290. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Model_T I'm sure mass production wasn't the only factor but cars were also not the only product price that was affected by mass production.

I don't agree that you can even compare a car from 1984 with one today to prove your claim. To begin with, by 1984 mass production had been widely implemented in virtually every industry that produces goods for at least half a century so savings in production and sale should have been already been baked in by that time. Leaving aside the fact the model T is a very different animal from cars built 70+ years later, a fairer comparison would be a model T in relation to the cars that came before it. Whether it has had greater impact than computer tech or not is certainly debatable and I am not making a claim either way because I don't have the time and wherewithal to do all of the research required for coming up with a definitive answer. It was merely a mention of a topic I hadn't seen discussed yet in a subject I found interesting.

I think mass production is pretty similar. Automobiles were largely a rich man's toy until Henry Ford started mass producing them and tractors took over farms within a couple years of Ford beginning to produce them on an assembly line.

How Trump Can Achieve the Victory of Western Democracies He could start by stopping trying to limit democracy in his own country

I am a little surprised to see the pushback being as strong and speedy as it has been. Great to see, tho, even if those pushing back are likely doing so more to maintain their own power and status than for any concern about privatization or "spoiling" the game.

IMO the notion of poverty comes from expectation. The expectation of most the US is much higher than that of where most of the rest of the world lives, so what is considered poverty here is pretty well off in much of the rest of the world. Is there any objective minimum standard of living that can be applied worldwide? Some of the things I would consider to be in a minimum standard of living would be; food, housing, health care, and education. Are there others?

IMO the biggest part of the problem is the widespread acting as if everything in life should be digitized and assuming there is no practical limit to storage.