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Showing content with the highest reputation on 03/29/22 in all areas

  1. Here's the slides: https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/biodiversity/bio.pdf
    3 points
  2. Guess it's just as well that Ricky Gervais didn't host this year.
    2 points
  3. Yes, it did not. But because neutrons are heavier, they can be squeezed into smaller spaces. Gravity does not overcome the exclusion principle either. But it is strong enough to push the neutrons to higher energy levels, which is the way to obey the Pauli.
    1 point
  4. "The photons begin to overlap" means that the photons, bosons that they are, begin to favour forming a common state (Bose condensation). The thing going on in BH's is the opposite quantum-degeneracy force: neutrons are fermions, so they cannot be in the same quantum state. In the case of BH formation, quantum-degeneracy force is overcome by gravitation.
    1 point
  5. But it's alopecia, not lung cancer or schizophrenia. I have male pattern baldness and people have made jokes at my expense since it began in late high school. While bald jokes are kind of cheap and not really that funny (to me), I have never once gotten terribly upset or felt the need to strike someone. As @StringJunky noted, jokes are nearly always at the expense of someone. While Rock's joke may not have been that funny, he was doing what he was hired to do and what the audience wanted and expected of him. If Smith had not struck Rock, nearly no one would have given the joke a second thought. I believe Rock did nothing wrong and that Smith needs to gain better control over his impulses.
    1 point
  6. He wasn't actually wrong, despite all the dunking the internet has done. https://www.bloombergquint.com/onweb/paul-krugman-got-something-very-right-about-the-internet-the-fax-machine-and-the-economy "What people see as a major economic impact is really the social impact. From a true data impact, Krugman wasn’t wrong. “Productivity growth has been substantially weaker during the age of the internet,” Amarnath wrote. “The same deceleration is visible in terms of both nominal and real investment in software and even the broadest definition of hardware (information processing equipment). There has been some shifting and cannibalization of activity as a result of retail moving to e-commerce channels, and new media dominating advertising services at the expense of old media, but if we’re talking about macro impact beyond substitution, the burden of proof is with those eager to mock Krugman on this point.” You can see the chart here, showing that the era of the internet has not been an impressive one for tech investment. And we all know, of course, that measured productivity states have been mediocre. Furthermore, as Matt Darling, vice president of behavioral economics lab Ideas42, has pointed out, the quote came in the context of a big, national debate about how the internet would have some turbocharging effect on economic growth. There was for example a WSJ piece by Rudi Dornbusch that year arguing that we would experience a forever boom. <...> There was a considerable discussion at the time that the internet would fundamentally change something. Either lead to a perma-boom, or faster growth, or greater productivity, or something fundamentally new in how business cycles worked. And yet we've seen none of that. Instead we’ve had mediocre growth, long broad downturns, and declines in both productivity and general tech investment. So yes, for sure Krugman was wrong on the societal impacts, such as how much we all have to say to each other. But on the question of the difference between the internet and the fax machine, the data back him up."
    1 point
  7. Thanks!!! These notes are quite more complete than the video.
    1 point
  8. Thank you! I'm glad I didn't need to watch that video. This was easy 😉
    1 point
  9. It's not a haircut. It's a medical condition called Alopecia and making a joke about it was crass and IMO an example of "punching down" I wasn't aware that Judd Apatow had medical training that would make his pronouncement have any weight at all. Sure you can Google these statistics and find this information.
    1 point
  10. I don't consider this thread (or any for that matter) a competition so I'm not sure where you got that idea. But I see it as a moral choice, yes it could be one that I may have voluntary chosen to make, or one that was forced on me as part of my job and responsibility. Yes, and like I said, I see it as a moral duty to try and save lives and if the situation becomes so unfortunate that I have to inflict pain on another to do that then I see this as a necessary evil for the greater good.
    1 point
  11. You are in way over your head here and looking rather foolish. No offense.
    1 point
  12. Yes, it goes deep ... and into the parts of mechanics with which I'm mostly unfamiliar. The main point is, H does not correspond to an equilibrium state until it reaches the minimum, and thus its decreasing does not correspond to the thermodynamic entropy increase. However, the initial value of H corresponds to an equilibrium state before constraints are removed. The final value of H corresponds to a new equilibrium state, after the decrease of H. This difference between the initial and the final values of H corresponds to a difference in thermodynamic entropy between the two equilibrium states. Thus the inconsistency is removed. Banzai!
    1 point
  13. (Emphasis added) Or that we should be paying more attention to the possibility of panspermia. Until we have established, with a high degree of confidence, one or more plausible paths from pre-biotic to primitive cell, then any alleged estimate of probability for abiogenesis remains a wild-assed guess. I am not saying we shouldn't make wild assed guesses. They are entertaining and can inform future research, but we should remember they are just wild-assed guesses.
    1 point
  14. Here's the paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-29113-x Seems the researchers started off with a strand of RNA that included the code for a replicase, i.e. an enzyme enabling it to replicate from nutrients supplied. So it was already self-replicating when they started. Thus, self-replication was not something acquired during the experiment, so that part of the puzzle of abiogenesis is not addressed. What was interesting is that during the course of the experiment, different lineages of RNA appeared, due to mutations during the replication process. These competed with one another in a Darwinian manner and eventually several "won" and became established as the main successful types. However something else also happened, which is that some cooperation developed between them. In some cases the replicase code became lost due to mutation, but then RNA lacking this code still could reproduce, by using the replicase created by other strands which still retained this capability. So the final ecosystem of RNA was more subtle than might have been expected. At least, that is how I read it, skimming rather quickly.
    1 point
  15. Remember? You're making a fool of yourself, and this is off topic; I'm just pointing it out...
    -1 points
  16. The way I'm looking at this is either I'm right or they're just trying to come up with an idea worse than like, the security holograms from dead money, or a touhou yokai, or thunder kiss '65 No offense
    -4 points
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