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Showing content with the highest reputation on 01/24/23 in all areas

  1. I suspect distaste for homosexuality is inborn in many of us. Given that we have a drive to be attracted to the opposite sex, we find the idea of sex with someone of the same sex a big turn-off. Consequently we may find the idea of a sexual approach from somebody of our own sex rather disturbing. If that is homophobia, then I am a homophobe. It seems to me that the blanket term "homophobia" is thrown around too easily. One needs to draw a distinction between personal sexual taste and the attempts by some to condemn different (minority) tastes in others. It is the latter that society should refrain from.
    3 points
  2. They could do it, if they so choose. They just should be aware that this is not an indicator of where they are intellectually. I.e. one should not misinform folks on the meaning of such measures. If you are doing well in something, you are doing well regardless of what your score might be, and vice versa.
    1 point
  3. We all have impressions of how others tick that may not be easily answered with evidence. I have no idea if social science based surveys have been done on this, or what percent of straight males are uncomfortable (phobia might be too strong a term) with sexual advances from men. That's probably more a matter of social conditioning in childhood, and defining one's identity within a culture, than any other factor. As a midwestern straight male, I would definitely be nervous about such an advance while recognizing that a citizen of ancient Athens would likely just get a pleasant ego boost.
    1 point
  4. No, as John pointed out earlier, they were designed to figure out learning deficits. It is more about the IQ 90 rather than the 180 folks. And this is an awful way to decide a And this is an awful way to start an education. If there is no interest in the topic, the whatever the IQ is measuring is doing nothing. Universities are full of bright, bored and struggling students.
    1 point
  5. I hadn't thought of that answer, i was going for Pithyon.
    1 point
  6. No. Infants don't pop out of the womb hating others for who they love. No This speculation is unsupported by evidence. What would you call it when a female experiences personal discomfort at the prospect of a sexual advance from a man? Why would that be different?
    1 point
  7. You surely can and I agree Seth deserves one. See below to make your choice of like (blue) or upvote (green) . The only restrictions are that new members are restricted to 5 posts in their first 24 hours to prevent spambombers.
    1 point
  8. NASA considers Pluto to be a Planet and says so many times in this article. https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/dwarf-planets/pluto/in-depth/ There was discussion of the status of Pluto presented in their New Horizon's video, which as I recall, came down on the side of planet, dwarf or otherwise. Of course if we discount dwarf planets as being planets the not only are we not speaking English, but we must also discount giant planets , such as Jupiter. What a daft situation.
    1 point
  9. I’d say a feeling (or any kind of mind-state in general) is never in itself reprehensible, because it is the result of very many different internal and external causes and conditions that we generally do not choose to put in place. What we can choose though - at least to a degree - is how to act in response to our mind-states. Thus, merely having personal distaste or discomfort over anything is ethically neutral, whereas (eg.) beating someone to a bloody pulp because of such mind-states, is not.
    1 point
  10. It’s interesting to ponder what this actually means in the case of black holes, because there is no obvious reason why a region of completely empty spacetime (which is what a Schwarzschild BH is, in classical GR) should have finite non-zero entropy associated with it at all. Even if we disregard the issues around singularities etc for the moment, if we consider an ordinary star of 1 solar mass, then its total entropy is on the order \(~10^{57}\). If we let that star collapse gravitationally, and ignore any energy losses during the collapse process, then the resulting 1 solar mass Schwarzschild BH will have entropy on the order \(~10^{77}\), which is 20 orders of magnitude larger. While it is interesting in itself that the total entropy of the system increases by orders of magnitude, what’s really surprising is that the resulting BH has finite, non-zero entropy at all - remember again that classical Schwarzschild spacetime is everywhere empty. Simply and somewhat sloppily put, entropy is a statistical property that reflects the number of ways the microstates of a system can be rearranged without affecting its overall macrostate. But a Schwarzschild BH is just empty spacetime - every point within that manifold is exactly the same as every other point, meaning no small local neighbourhood can be physically distinguished from any other small local neighbourhood. And because this is a classical model, the spacetime manifold is implicitly assumed to be smooth and differentiable everywhere (disregarding the singularity for now), or else the entire formalism of GR makes no sense. Thus we can just pick any arbitrary pair of events within the volume in question, and swap them - doing this will not change anything about the BH at all. Because the manifold is smooth and differentiable, there are infinitely many such pairs in any given volume of empty spacetime, so the total entropy of this system should diverge. But it doesn’t - it’s finite and well defined, and always >0. IOW, there is a finite, well defined number of distinct operations one can perform in such a volume that leaves the overall system unaffected. It would seem to me that this is possible only if spacetime within such a volume is not in fact smooth and continuous everywhere - there needs to be some kind of non-trivial structure present at least in some subregion of the volume enclosed by the event horizon. The mere fact of geodesic incompleteness in and around r=0 doesn’t seem to account for this (a point singularity has no degrees of freedom, and isn’t part of the manifold in any case) - it would take a very non-trivial kind of micro-structure to yield an entropy of the magnitudes mentioned above. So what is this micro-structure? I for one would dearly like to know…
    1 point
  11. Well put +1 I think it is a crucially important life skill to - in some situations - be able to respect things that we don’t personally like. This isn’t always easy, since we generally tend to equate our own preferences, views, beliefs and opinions with some notion of “truth” about the world. It takes a certain amount of introspective awareness to recognise this dynamic and suspend it, if and when necessary; sadly, not everyone is able to do this.
    1 point
  12. No, it does not. The time dilation and length contraction you mention apply to two inertial frames moving relative to each other. This is not the case in the expanding universe.
    1 point
  13. I mainly meant when there where no civilization nor any advance in human tech. like in 100K YA when the humans were barely humans or like when the neanderthals spread in eurasia or when the sapiens did the same whole over the globe By the way i wanted to thank all those who responded but the site says you can only react to a certain amount of post each day ......
    1 point
  14. Not really. Pumping someone full of drugs to keep them unconscious for a year sounds terrible. If they could survive I assume they would be pretty useless for months upon waking.
    1 point
  15. Different forces are in play with different orders of magnitude through the start up process. When you start rotating the mixing bar, it acts like the impeller of a centrifugal pump and creates a pressure low spot at the 'eye of the pump'. This draws water down past the calcium block while the vortex is developing its parabolic profile above. The calcium rich water is then propelled radially outward until the flow regime is fully established. Now entropy takes over and calcium slowly diffuses up through the water column until it's evenly distributed.
    1 point
  16. I don't think they migrated because they enjoyed travel. More likely, as their population increased, limited resource availability forced them to expand into new territories.
    1 point
  17. Use the right tool for the right type of work you intend to do. If you want to write end-client Windows applications (freeware,shareware,commercial, sold to individuals or companies) then you should consider using C/C++/C#/C++ Managed If you want to develop front-end web-server applications (installed on a virtual hosting service) then you should consider using PHP (it will generate HTML, eventually CSS, eventually JavaScript, eventually other file-formats). PHP is installed on all/most virtual hosting services (other technologies are not) If you want to develop back-end web-server applications (installed on a dedicated server) then you should consider using Bash, Python, Perl, CGI (obsolete, it's compiled C/C++), jNode (server-side JavaScript) and endless list of new technologies. Actually, you can use any language to generate HTML/CSS/JS for users (visiting WWW), because you own the dedicated server and can install anything (unlike virtual hosting, where you are limited to the software installed by the IT company where you bought the hosting). If you want to develop applications for smartphones then you should learn (Android) Java, Kotlin, (iPhone) Swift. To start, install Visual Studio Community https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/pl/vs/community/ and use one of many template projects. Nowadays, people use GPUs (OpenCL,CUDA) to accelerate applications.
    1 point
  18. If your goal is to be "that" guy... The one that software engineers fear and gossip about when you arrive at the office, you'll want to go with C to start. You'll also want to learn x86/64 Assembly and LOAD your C applications up with unnecessary functions written in Assembly for the purpose of speed. When you create your GitHub account, you'll want to create things in Lisp, Cobol, and Fortran (mention that its for fun). You'll want to post random rants on your twitter about how C++ is TRASH, treating it like a disease that needs to be eradicated. Go and C# are fun and pretty cool too. At some point you'll realize its ALL bullshit and doesn't even matter any more what you're using.
    1 point
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