Velocity_Boy

Here's a cool, accessible, light hearted even slightly humorous article telling you everything you need to know our magnetic poles and the real ramifications when they flip. Turns out to be not such a big deal after all. https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/01/earth-magnetic-field-flip-north-south-poles-science/

Yeah.....he was. Actual approximate size of EW95 is about 180 miles in diameter. That's around the long ways. It's sorta potato shaped. And is about 120 miles diameter wide. So a bit less than half a Pluto. Which begs the question if it can be rightly called massive?

So...now I can finally say I've seen a documentary that had changed my life. Or...at least my Outlook on life....my opinion on both our Government...and maybe even our future. I'm speaking of the Superb, chilling, compelling, and totally Game Changing, paradigm busting documentary by Dr Steven Greer. Unacknowledged. Filled with unimpeachable souces all testifying about how we've been visited by extraterrestrial intelligence for decades now. And how the government had spent billions trying to hide that fact. Yes. I did say unimpeachable witnesses. Like ex CIA directors.... military high ranking officers....the former Chief of Operation Blue Book. Do yourself one of the biggest favors you ever will. Watch it. Now. It's on Netflix and YouTube. I'd like to get your take on it. And after you see it will look very very forward to discussing. But I won't answer or defend any questions or comments from those who do do without watching it first. Since such people are simply too ill informed to argue with. Not their fault! As I said.....billions were spent insuring that. Thanks. Life changer, guys. And I've never said that before. About ANY book, movie, or TV show. Or any sort of media presentation. I envy you who have not yet seen it but will do so soon. It's the sort of super enlightening kick in the teeth we rarely get. Thanks!

You beat me to the punch! Catcher is my all time favorite novel. I first read it as a teenager of course but since then I try to re-read it once ever couple years or so. Thus....prolly read it about fifteen times so far. Which reminds me......I'm about due........ Hey Nevster..... Well...of course Kafka is most known for The Metamorphosis, which some say is the granddaddy of absurdism. I myself read it in junior high in English and thought it was Uber cool then....but read it again in college and it struck me as sort of silly and somehow sterile. Unfinished in it's attempted message, perhaps. Hard to explain. At any rate I was nonplussed. You might try his novel The Trial...which contains my favorite short story of his......A Little Fable. For stand alone short stories....try The Penal Colony or maybe The Hunger Artist.

Mmm...if one were allowed to narrow it down a bit from the vast pantheon of Classic Literature and discuss the arguable classics Horror and Fantasy....I am of the opinion that SK's...IT.....The Shining....Tommyknockers....The Stand...and Thinner (my personal fave of his) could all be called Classics. Thank God for your final comment above! I was afeared I might be the only poor bastard in the world who could not get into HP. It was like some huge glaring and even worrisome cognitive disconnect with me. I was totally flummoxed and without a clue as to what could be found compelling or just plain enjoyable about the whole Hogwarts thing. Somebody would, for example, be wearing a Hogwarts or Dumbledore shirt and I'd vadk them what the hell that was... and they'd blook at me adcif I'd just grown a second head. The only comparable experience that comes to mind...where I just could. Not. Understand. The hoopla, was with that movie Lost In Translation. That movie, indeed, still Garner's the #1 slot on my all time WTF movie list. A title in what genre? What sort of fiction do you enjoy? Maybe you could name a few favorites? Let me know and I'll offer up a couple titles. Hmm..perhaps a kernel of truth there, insofar as going into a highly lauded novel with a covert attempt to discern reasons for said lavish praise. But I for one truly rarely do this. Rather...I am looking forward to enjoying a good story and I often use past reviews to help me decide where to begin reading. If I were a professional literary critic I might be more apt to jump into a highly acclaimed novel with my red pen in hand. But believe me, I'd much rather enjoy a book I just spent twenty bucks on and thus jump on the bandwagon praising bit than to be disappointed and have another offering for my Overrated list.

Oops....that would be one Richard Doty. Sorry. My goof. More on him here...... https://www.huffingtonpost.com/alejandro-rojas/exair-force-law-enforceme_b_5312650.html Intelligent beings visiting Earth not only CAN be looked at as science....it is science. And of the highest order. Imagine how much more addvanced they are than we. Since they have to be travelling at least 4.3 light years to get here to the third rock. Thus...their science is to ours what is your high school frog dissection to modern neurosurgery. This dude maybe did more than anyone on Earth to discredit UFO apologists. Even went do far as to destroy lives doing it. All in the emoloy of Uncle. He is quite candid about it. And had never been discredited. Hmm. https://www.huffingtonpost.com/alejandro-rojas/exair-force-law-enforceme_b_5312650.html

All too true. But anybody who cannot see through Trump's duplicity and crass, used car salesman demeanor and sincerity level is either hopelessly biased towards him already, or is so politically obtuse that they could serve as a poster child for a Grass Roots lobby to require competency and IQ tests for voters. They say a country gets the leaders it deserves. If that maxim is indeed true, than we need to take one good long look in the mirror.

Intelligent life has been visiting this planet for many years. The former Operation Blue Book head honcho once admitted to having an embarrassment of riches for UFO proof. A guy named Steven Doty is very candid about how his job as an Air Force spook was to orchestrate cover-ups and discredit UFO witnesses and apologists. The cover-ups are actually out of the US government hands at this point. And beyond congressional oversight. It's really a quadi military shadow government. I know that sounds to the uninformed like Tin Foil Hat woo. But one need only read some of Dr. Steven Greer's work on this topic. Or maybe begin by watching Unacknowledged..on Netflix. That doc will knock your Sox off, amigos. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6400614/

Hmm..what I had in mind was a bit more toward hearing from you guys about particular novels you've read that were alleged literary classics, or just had a glowing and impressive critical and popular reputation....but alas, after you read it you couldn't for the life of you understand what all the hoopla was about. In other words....you were left to wonder, wtf? Thus far we were doing novels...which are of course fiction. We could now morph this thread into discussing nonfiction books. Cone to think of it...this might be more befitting a science forum? So let's go! Nonfiction books that enjoyed splendid reps but left you muttering, WTF? Thanks. Yeah....tell me about it! To me, Dickens had always been way too wordy and just too much of a chore to read. What's the point of recreational reading if you're not enjoying it and feel like throwing the book across the room once ever twenty pages or so? Dickens and his two page long sentences. I'll leave him to his fans and the anglophiles. I actually initially typed "anything by Dickens" in my OP for this thread! But erased it when I figured it was too harsh, and besides, who am I to denigrate van author's entire opus?

One needn't bloom any further than our good buddies in Russia for an example of how climate change can be a grand thing! Seems that, if this current warning trend continues, the permafrost on that fast frozen tundra to their East and into Siberia via gonna thaw faster than a snow cone on a Phoenix sidewalk. Thus freeing up a literal mega fortune in minerals and fuels and ores that were once much too difficult to extract.

Oh..I believe that one time stigma had nowadays in our modern world been lessened drastically. Sure, back in the day dining alone was often seen as bring tantamount to being a parish. But now? Hell...it might even be seen as cool or hip by the tech-stetilized millennials crowd. You know.....too cool for school. Too busy and independent and on the go to be anchored by a dining partner. Or worse! Ye gods! A clinging S/O! Besides......the hip lone diner could be texting the entire time he dined alone. Which would beg the Aristotelian question....is he really alone? LOL For more on how it is increasingly acceptable and often even preferred to do things alone...things once meant for socializing...you might wanna read the book Bowling Alone. Cheers.

Just so, iNow. And one could doubly piss off the godists when listing their holy book here on my list by restating that it is certainly eligible for inclusion,xsince we are talking about Overrated works of Fiction! Ouch.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/soil-depletion-and-nutrition-loss/ Good point. Both are somewhat depleted...but veggies suffer more due to their less-nutrients-to-begin-with status. Vegetables crops are also more usually of the annual sort, where a new crop is planted every season. Norco much with fruit. In layman's terms....the veggie soils are simply more depleted and spent, thus causing them to lose a higher percentage, generally speaking, than fruits. Fructose is of course far far better for nutrition Bryan defined sugar. Indeed, tis the best source for the human body.

I believe children are better served....pardon the pun...with an all fruit and no veggie diet rather than the other way around. My nephew is a fruitarian and he does triathlons and set swimming and track records in school. Any vitamin deficiency your kids incur from eating a diet bereft of veggies can easily be rectified by taking some of those specialized kids gummi vitamins that are specifically cocktailed for veggie hating children. Besides...so poor is the nutrition state of most store bought veggies these days! Mostly from the depletionbof nutrition the played about soils they're grown in. Veggies are mainly now only good for fiber. Anything else they have..or used to have...you can glean from fruits.

Wow....really? How so? Care to elaborate on what thoughts or ideas in it you found profound or compelling? Thanks!

Hey guys..... In some recent conversations here, I made an offhand remark about how I thought a classic well-known novel mentioned in a post was hugely Overrated. Just my two cents, of course. But it started a bit of an exchange on the topic of Overrated books. I've always found this subject to be hugely entertaining and providing for some spirited discussions in the past. So how about it? What allegedly classic Novels do you feel got way too much kudos or acclaim? What Novels come to mind for you when you hear the term Overrated? Allow me to throw in first...... The Great Gatsby.....F Scott Fitzgerald 100 Years of Solitude.... Gabriel Marquez Garcia The Scarlet Letter Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance...... Robert Pirsig. (I'm not sure this was a novel...in fact I don't think it was. But so profound was my utter dismay upon reading it...being a lifelong motorcycle devotee...and given the absurd amount of accolades it received over decades...I just have to list it. Confederacy of Dunces.... John Kennedy O'Toole Angela's Ashes Moby Dick.... Herman Melville Your turn. Thanks.

Exactly. Thanks for saving me the time to post that very same fact.

American Gods by Neil Gaiman. And I must say...that thus far its a big "meh" I'm having s little trouble figuring out what all the hoopla about this book is about. A popular TV series.....and if you Google Best Fantasy Novels of the 21st Century, I can promise it will be on virtually every single list. Why? Maybe it gets better? I'm about two thirds through. Cheers. Actually...Koontz could be correct. Nobody knows for certain what the final outcome of universal expansion will be.it may end in a void where distances have become so great and the stars become extinguished from old age to where gravitational machinations are no longer a factor. In other words...a cold and lifeless void. The discovery of Dark Energy probably rules out the old notion of a possible Big Crunch ending. As Hawking thought might happen. It also..to me..increases the possibility of the expansion-to-cold death scenario. Hope this helps! A must read for whom? electrical current is measured in amps. volts is a measurement of potential. hope this helps!

Actually...what happens in dreams...or more accurately.. Night terrors..can hurt you and even kill you. All it takes is for the dream or nightmare to be vivid and lucid enough to cause cardiac arrest. Given the fact that thousands of people who were illness or disease free die in their sleep ever single day on this planet, dream-spurred cardiac arrest is most likely not even all that uncommon. One out of five alcoholics experiencing Delirium Tremens also die. Due to cardiac arrest. DT s are basically bad dreams brought on by the CNS s over heating due to the abrupt deprivation of a depressant chemical....alcohol in the form of ETOH5..that it has been flooded with for a prolonged and continual period of time. Hope this helps.

Your post conjures up a cool imaginative scenario. And I love your title...it sounds like a Phillip K Dick or Kurt Vonnegut novel. LOL or a neat rock band name. As for the actual logistics of doing such a swim on this Saturnian moon...ya gotta remember it'd be a chilly one, with an ambient temp of a brisk -300 degrees F. Brrr! Your lost conjures up a cool imaginative scenario. And I love your title...it sounds like a Phillip K Dick or Kurt Vonnegut novel. LOL or a neat rock band name. As for the actual logistics of doing such a swim on this Jovian moon...ya gotta remember it'd be a chilly one, with an ambient temp of a brisk -300 degrees F. Brrr! Oh...a quick addendum...fwiw I predict that we will one day discover Titans seas to be the only place in our solar system that harbors..pardon the pun...life more complex than the single celled microbial level..which is all but assuredly indigenous to Mars ice sheets. VB

And I'd say you're wrong. The act of opening the box is the act of observation. Observation tells us the state of the particle in question. So I think I'm sticking with Swanny's answer about how incoming photons from opening the box don't effect superposition. I think I'm also gonna do some more research. But so far I'm feeling as if I was more on target with the interpretation of S's kitty than was young Alex. I believe it was in Austria in 1935. This Wikipedia blurb is pretty good. At least for us on the laymen level for QM. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schrödinger's_cat

Pity you don't dig ABM. I consider it Russell Crowds greatest performance. The critics and the Academy knew he got jobbed for not getting the Best Actor nod, which is why they made it up to him the very next year by giving it to him for his mediocre Gladiators role. A role many many actors coulda done. I also usually list Gatsby on any Most Overrated Novels Ever lists whenever I do one for one of the many reader's forums I frequent. Fight up there with One Hundred Years of Solitude. But for very different reasons. I just find Gatsby hopelessly dated. It resonated with the post war lost generation Zeitgeist but I never was moved in the least from Jay's plight. Oh well...to each their own I reckon...which is why discussing books and movies is so damn enjoyable, eh? . Cheers.

Hey all. I need some of physicists who are well-versed (as anyone CAN be in that weird-ass sub-field of Physics) to settle a wage I have with my young nephew. A recent EE grad who fancies himself as an expert in QM. Though I think he drastically over-estimates his prowess in that arena. So here goes........... We're talking about Erwin Schroedinger's well-known eponymous "Dead Cat/Live Cat" metaphor. Or thought problem....or hypothetical scenario, or whatever it is. I'm nobody's physicist but I always am forever intrigued with QM and read all I can on it, and thought I was fairly well-acquainted with the paradigm that drives the S's Cat. As you know....the good likens QM's idea of superposition and the notion of a particle being in two states simultaneously to a scenario of a live cat placed in a steel box along with a steel hammer, some nasty acid, and a trace amount of radioactive substance. And so we have a chance that is this substance decays even a minuscule amount, it could cause a relay to trip the hammer which will break the glass vial and enable the hydrochloric acid to kill the kitty. Well....I always thought that ES was just sort of mocking the super-position idea, and basically saying that if we listen to Copenhagen's model, we cannot know for sure WHAT state the particle is in until we look at it. Just like we can't tell about the state of the Cat till that steel box is opened. That BOTH options are valid until observed. But nephew claims it is more than that. Not just the act of observing that stops the guessing and "makes" the particle "settle down" to just one fixed state. No...he says that the electromagnetic energy that is allowed into the heretofore dark box when we open it (photons?) actually causes the cessation of the super-position. And therefore it's not just the idea that we observe it and see what's happening. He claims this whole deal is a metaphor for how observation affects quantum states from breaking open of the closed system (the steel box) that it enjoyed before we disrupted everything. Wow...that was a lot harder than I thought it would be--and took longer. Sorry. So...please tell me I haven't been totally misunderstanding this basic thought problem since I first read it about 20 years ago. Thanks, as always...for your time and expertise. VB

Odd man out is A from Q25 and C from Q26.

Mmm..but do Cosmologists really know for sure that the universe is expanding? And not just all the galaxies we can observe and detect? What I mean by this....could not the universe be either infinite...thus, no need for expansion....or could it, conversely, by static with fixed and finite boundaries? And just be comprised of galaxies that are expanding and accelerating away from each other? Maybe such as expanding clumps of particulate matter swirling from the center of a vortex in a cup of liquid that had been stirred? This last scenario could explain why no discernible loss in field strength. And remember that the law of entropy increase from Thermodynamics doesn't apply either, since the universe is likely not a closed system. Third...yeah I know I'm asking more questions and not doing a great job of answering yours...but are we sure every inch of our universe is a magnetic field? What about vacuum? And black holes? I think until we figure out what the hell Dark Energy is we cannot answer your question. Indeed, DE could be an energy infusing entity itself that is stopping the electric field from lessening. Whew...I think I feel a headache coming on.