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Showing content with the highest reputation on 02/05/23 in all areas

  1. We can only respond to the words you type and submit, which in this case were the following: Simply repeating an invalid point over and over again without adding any new information doesn’t magically render it true. You were wrong, and/or your phrasing sloppy. Big deal. Man up. Either do a better job at defending your stance to support why it’s correct or acknowledge that you made a mistake and learned something new today. Is your ego too fragile to acknowledge or accept that latter possibility? Can you not even conceive of the possibility that you too are imperfect? Will you now attack me with bile and vitriol and childish whining to remind everyone just how thick your skin is?
    2 points
  2. The line of comments above brought memories of this sketch:
    2 points
  3. Preamble I'm not sure if you have Scottish roots or what, but my experience of Scots abroad is that whilst they are warm and friendly in their homeland, they are more often than not defensive and prickly outside it. So I don't want to upset you by my commenting on this. All credit to Scotland to win (retain) the Calcutta Cup yesterday. I find the English establisment unreasonably big headed about its position in these competitions and so like to see a few tumbles. Now my comment In this very thread I was passing some information to joigus about a very English saying concerning "a bull in a china shop". Contrast this with the contents of your PM exchange (no I don't want to know the details).
    2 points
  4. An ISRAELI CORPORATION You have two cows. They come with guns. Move you to a dusty cowshed and take your cows. Then they bulldoze your cowshed and when you protest, they shoot you for being a terrorist. Then American taxpayers pay to replace the bullets. Then end times.
    2 points
  5. One stated reason for the initial reluctance of the US Airforce to shoot down the Chinese balloon spotted over Montana was the risk of debris falling onto populated areas below. This wasn’t simply a matter of being concerned about the risk of heavy bits of metal or plastic landing on the heads of hill farmers. A more specific worry was that the object appeared to be dirigible to some degree, which raised the possibility that it might be equipped with reaction thrusters of some type, which in turn raised the possibility that there could be highly explosive and very dangerous hypergolic rocket fuels onboard. Photos indicated that the balloon clearly had outboard communications equipment and electronic scanners attached to its gondola, which in turn means that it must have had some sort of electrical power supply on board. Satellites and drones of this type don’t rely on Lithium ion batteries, (Lithium batteries function very poorly in low temperatures). It is much more common for long-range reconnaissance units of this type to be equipped with an RTG (Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator) which uses thermal energy produced by the radioactive decay of Plutonium 238 to generate electricity via a thermocouple system. Shooting down a dirigible with a large lump of Plutonium in its PS probably didn't seem like a good idea to the USAF, so they waited until the balloon had cossed the Atlantic coast and was safely out to sea before bringing it down in a controlled manner into about 40 of water where the debris can easily be recovered by divers and reassembled for further examination. Rhetoric by MAGA extremists like Donald Trump jr. who was urging Montanans to shoot it down themselves (the ballon was well over 10 miles high) were deflated almost as rapidly as the balloon when a Pentagon spokesperson confirmed that 3 similar dirigible incursions had occurred during the Trump presidency, and that the POTUS had declined to authorise shooting them down. A humorous take by Vlogger Fran Blanche: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2Z8-qxTQ-A
    1 point
  6. An ISRAELI CORPORATION You have two cows. They come with guns. Move you to a dusty cowshed and take your cows. Then they bulldoze your cowshed and when you protest, they shoot you for being a terrorist. Then American taxpayers pay to replace the bullets. Then end times. https://www.scienceforums.net/topic/35130-political-humor/page/17/#comment-1228505 (post content from other thread added by moderator for context) The joke takes a swipe at Israeli hardline policy, seems like. Maybe not the greatest joke, but I would not want to start downvoting jokes. Am counteracting the DV, not because I agree with all the premise of the joke but because I like this thread being one thread where people feel accepted to make weird or even smelly transgressive attempts at political humor. (one can also Google "Palestinian olive trees destroyed" for further research on what triggers such jokes - quite the eye opener!)
    1 point
  7. Is these things tat i write right ? If there is a part in a planet that have bulged out too much or concaved in too much............ The gravity of the planet would pull in the bulged out part and fill in the concavity and add the volume of the bulgness to the radius of the planet equally and also the volume of the concavity would be equally reduced from the radius .....
    1 point
  8. The balloon collected intelligence about how the U.S. responds. They watched the ballon cross into Alaska and how we responded. They watched how the government and military responded the entire next week. They watched the news coverage and national freak out on social media. The conspiracy theories that were most cited. The anger and disappointment at Biden. They watched family members sniping at each other. They watched what other things and places we stopped watching while watching this. Now the next time when they want to deploy a virus against our banking system or energy grid, or just want more leverage in a negotiation over carbon credits and trade… they’ll just float a balloon across the continental US so we look up and watch it like wide-eyed children. “Oooohhh… shiny!”
    1 point
  9. According to this source, the USAF chose to use an optically guided AIM-9X Sidewinder missile without any warhead fitted to puncture the envelope of the balloon and bring it down in a controlled manner within the USA 12 mile territorial water limit. Cannon fire would have been cheaper but less accurate, and would have inflicted greater damage on the payload they wished to examine. One nice touch was the use of the operational code name 'Frank', a nod to Frank Luke jnr. a WW2 fighter ace who shot down 14 enemy reconnaissance balloons and became known as the 'Arizona Balloon Buster'.
    1 point
  10. The flavor eigenstates are not mass eigenstates, correct. This is an example of a mixing angle between the two, like happens with quarks (and I only recall this because that’s the Cabbibo angle, and I gave a lab tour to Cabbibo, not knowing who he was, because it’s not my area of physics. Only found out later from some jealous colleagues, who were more familiar with that area of physics)
    1 point
  11. May I add the word sufficiently ? If the material of the planet is sufficiently fluid, yes. Note also that the pull will always be present, regardless of the state of the planetary material. Ice for instance will flow under quite small pressure. So if an ice planet is large enough the gravitational pull will be large enough to create flow pressure. But there are other mechanisms at work as well. Some of them in conjunction with gravity, some of them opposed. For instance if the planet spins the pull experinced will vary from equator to pole. Also if the planet surface is subject to weathering, eg by heating and cooling causing cracking, then gravity will pull the broken off pieces into the concavities. Good question, @Saber . +1
    1 point
  12. As repeatedly noted above, there isn't such a thing as 'three different types of mass.' You could speak, in some sense --and some people do-- about two types of mass: Majorana mass, and Dirac mass. But those are not different types. It's really about how the mass term --the only type of mass we all know and love-- connects the left-handed component to the right-handed component in the Dirac equation. But it's the same kind of mass in terms of inertia. 1, 2, and 3 refers indeed to three distinct values of mass. It's really the three kinds of so-called flavours that the theory doesn't predict. IOW: Why are there three families of particles? Ie: three versions of every other particle that there is in the universe, with every other parameter exactly the same, except for mass, which differs from one family to another.
    1 point
  13. Ah, it does ring a bell now that you mention it. I must have mixed them, as in Spanish it's rather "an elephant in a pottery shop," (un elefante en una cacharrería), which I seem to have adapted to some kind of hybrid form. Live and learn! Duly noted. The list of things you don't like is growing thick. I was benevolent, I'd say. You juxtaposed the words "more or less entirely" which is a notorious oxymoron that didn't escape my attention. But I'll stay tuned for further nuances on when something is "more or less entirely" this or that. Pointing at straw-clutching is not the same as doing as strawman. That's your call, not mine. But I'll refer to my previous comment on 'kid gloves.' I'll try not to correct you anymore. Let other people do that thankless job, because, (My emphasis.) God forbid! You read too much into what people say. You think I'm upset... You clearly don't know me at all. It's anecdotal, but it tells quite a bit about the problems you seem to be having with some people. No 'hello' or 'cheers' or 'how are you?' or 'see you around''... Just a blunt 'blah' coming from a lurking presence in the darkness. "Consciousness" It took me a couple of seconds to realise it wasn't some kind of threatening / cryptic message from out of the woodwork. Nice.
    1 point
  14. TLDR. This stuff is beyond you. Flick the switch on your tin foil hat from transmit to receive. You might learn something.
    1 point
  15. Yes of course it's possible and common. Google says 'About 1% of supermassive black holes have an "accretion disk" of gas and dust swirling around them.' So I guess it looks like an object being pulled apart from the inside. If you want to consider some other object, it should be similar. Some "forces" give the object its shape and keep parts of the object away from the black hole, whether it's the inertia of a spinning accretion disk or chemical bonds of solid matter, and the BH rips away any parts that get too close, regardless of what holds the object together. It would look like spaghettification. The process is just gravitation, not some magical suction that vacuums everything up. For example a human on an extremely massive planet would be crushed by gravity. A black hole with similar gravitation would devour a human from the inside because the latter doesn't have the structural integrity to resist such strong pull. A small enough asteroid would barely have the strength to keep a human stuck to it, let alone damage its shape. A black hole with similar gravitation wouldn't have the strength to rip a human apart or pull more of it in.
    1 point
  16. This, i suggest, is generalizing from an inadequate sample size. (Not that I believe that dialogue coming from a 3-year-old in the first place). People's characters are not determined by their genitals or hormones alone. In my household, for example, the exact opposite was true. The girl was outspoken, willful, changeable and in her mid-teens, could be volatile. The boy, one year younger, at first relied on her protection; as he grew older, he expressed his resentment of her dominance through subtle provocation: he was the innocent cherub; she was the aggressor who got reprimanded. And in spite of all that jockeying for position, the altercations and jealousies, they were the only people in the world the other sibling trusted. None of this had to do gender; it was a matter of innate temperament and early childhood experience. (We learned something of their pre-adoption history) There are as many variations to sibling relationship as there are to individual personality.
    1 point
  17. hold on a minute, INow ... You previously agreed with others, and yourself stated, that gender identity is a learned trait at a very early age, and probably picked up from parents and siblings who may influence you at a very early age. Yet now you clain that the child has innate gender identity and, what is abusive, is if the parents don't accept the child as they 'are'. How exactly 'are' they without an environmental influence to their gender identity ? Pick a side, and have some logical consistency in your arguments. I realize you're passionate about the subject, but don't let that passion cloud your thinking.
    1 point
  18. Ok, cool. Possible I may have misunderstood the intent there. It is odd that it's a necropost in that it replies to a post that's 14 years old today. Also going to say I was unaware that cows came with guns. And that IS a joke. (Using my standard formula of taking ambiguous sentence structure the most obtuse way possible)
    1 point
  19. @TheVat I didn't misunderstand you at all. If anything I thought you misunderstood mistermack. This section is for Political Humor, it is not the Politics section. As silly as it might sound, people should show a little respect for the Political Humor section. Simply dressing up a political rant in the form of a joke does not make it a joke. Even in the politics section this likely would have been seen as little more than a one-sided bitch about Israeli and American policy, and may well have been trashed. Just my two cents. P.S. I did not upvote or downvote your post as you and I simply interpreted mistermack's post differently. I did not think he was making any attempt at all to post a joke, which is what this section is reserved for. Thanks for judging me and my willingness to be fair.
    1 point
  20. I personally would prefer some more neutral phrase like 'Carnot coefficient'. Or just 'eta'. Remember that it is a standin for (QH - QC) / QH = W / QH for an isentropic process, and its inverse is the maximum theoretical amount of heat that can be transferred to a hot reservoir by a heat pump with a work input of W. Clearly, this inverse can be far greater than 1 for low temperature differentials and tends to be called the Coefficient of Performance (COP). Another neutral phrase. It's absolutely clear that COP is not an 'efficiency' in any normal scientific sense, but how should we express the actual real world efficiency of these machines? For a heat engine I think it ends up being actual work output divided by the closed path integral of TdS. A simplification (!) of this may be: Isentropic efficiency ~ Wact / (- THdSH - TCdSC ) evaluated for the reservoirs (SH & SC are numerically equal for the reversible case so conveniently cancel out). More than a bit of a challenge to measure accurately, though not so difficult to estimate fairly closely I think.
    1 point
  21. I find it distateful to discuss my sexuality on a public forum, so let's stick to food ... I have always liked Italian food. I grew up with it,and it was the first food I tasted other than mother's milk. I suppose my sexuality developed the same way. The first people I wanted to hug, other than my parents were girls. And I still remember my first kiss, even after all these years. ( I know, I'm a sentimental softie 🙂 ) Who knows how things might have turned ou thad I hugged a boy ... As for other foods, if I didn't find them too distateful, I tried them. And no, I don't mean sexual experimentation, but I assume it works the same. If I am allowed to think certain habits, like spitting, coughing without mouth covering, picking your nose, or scratching your balls is distateful, why am I not allowed to think certain sexual practices are distateful without being branded a homophobe ?
    1 point
  22. She's now a delightful adult. I hope she doesn't meet you either. Contact with the spineless and dishonest rarely proves positive.
    0 points
  23. Wow! That's a great excuse. I'll have to brush up on my lawyering skills so I can make posts like that. Thanks for the tip, Dr. Moderator, and you have yourself a spectacular day!! 😆
    -1 points
  24. I've never seen or heard anyone complain about that before in all my life, and I've seen and heard many other people use the expression. In most cases, the word "more" isn't meant to be taken literally when used with "entirely", and "less" isn't meant to be taken literally when used with expressions like "not at all". Please correct me any time I make a mistake, joigus. No kidd gloves required. Just make sure you correct what I actually said and not some exaggeration or fantasy that you made up in your imagination. I'm trying to understand how we have such different ideas of terms like "state of mind" and "impressionable". Mostly I'm referring to things like political and religious beliefs, prejudice, and other convictions that people tend to form later in life. Sometimes social theorists make too many assumptions about people. As I said, no one is born a capitalist or a communist, and I don't think anyone is born a bigot. I guess the tendency toward social activity is important, so maybe that and other factors predispose individuals to certain kinds of belief. I'm sorry if I didn't express myself clearly enough. Irked? Offended? Put off? Would one of those terms be better? You obviously had some kind of negative reaction to my message, joigus. I remember you said something about it some time ago, and now you've mentioned it again. When you're communicating in a foreign language with people from other cultures, maybe you should be more careful about how you interpret their comments. So you weren't upset, and I read too much into what people say, but you read the possibility of a threat into my attempt to help you with English wording on a science forum. You also read "insult" into "strawman argument", which I've never seen or heard anywhere else in my entire life, called "more or less entirely" a "notorious oxymoron", which I've never seen or heard anywhere else in my entire life, and interpreted "upset" in a more extreme way than I intended it. To be perfectly honest, joigus, I had a suspicion that you might object to the word "upset", because I think I already understand how you operate: Basically, you have a consistent habit of exaggerating what other people say, or interpreting what they said in the most extreme way possible, and you always use that interpretation as an excuse to criticize and disagree with them. Here in the US, we call that playing "Gotcha!". Disagreement as a form of competition rather than communication. You call me thin-skinned, but your "not upset" reaction to my message shows that you're even more thin-skinned than I am. You say I read too much into what people say, but you consistently start arguments by reading too much into what other people say. You act more like a paranoid lawyer than a science enthusiast, joigus. I really hate chatting with you, because you keep finding or making up fake or trivial things to argue about unproductively. In the simultaneity thread, I was describing a hypothetical scheme for accelerating a train to relativistic speeds by calculating the required acceleration of each car ahead of time, converting the resulting time series to proper times, using the time series to preprogram the engine in each car, and using synchronized timers to start the engines simultaneously (in the ground frame): Contrast this with the contents of your reply: Not a shred of support or explanation. What is this supposed to mean, studiot? Are you literally so senile that you think train cars can accelerate willy-nilly without breaking apart or crashing into each other, or that it's impossible to preprogram machines? And I'll just say now that I don't think you are, but I found this comment of yours very intimidating when I had just started posting on this forum. So what's the explanation, studiot? Do you think you're some kind of dictator who can tell everyone else what the forum's official doctrine is? This website is allegedly a science forum, not a tea party. I will be delighted to discuss science with anyone who cares to, but I'm not a high-society socialite.
    -2 points
  25. What is "None, obviously..." supposed to mean? First you complain that I'm thin-skinned, and then you turn around and post what appears to be a straw-man argument. Is there something about "None, obviously..." that you think is relevant to this thread?
    -3 points
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