mistermack

Another factor in plants storing easy-to-access energy reserves, is that it would attract attention from plant-eating animals. It could well be self-defeating, to make yourself an attractive meal, when you can't run away from the animals that would like to eat you. If you evolve an energy store, some animal is going to evolve a way to eat it, and you end up worse off. The plant would have to evolve successful defence mechanisms, along with evolving the store.

I don't think that would affect it, because what you are measuring is the velocity of your clock. I think that the doppler shift would affect all of your readings equally, so it wouldn't change which reading gave the minimum value for T. Since your various clock readings can be in varying directions as well as various speeds, the clock that gives the smallest value for T should give direction as well as speed. Edit: not so sure having thought about that. Maybe you could compensate for doppler, if you already have a value for redshift?

If the bag was sealed at sea level, it then contained a fixed volume of air, once it's sealed. As you climb the mountain, the outside pressure drops, and so will the pressure in the bag, if it's not tightly packed. With the drop in pressure inside the bag, the gas inside will expand. As you climb, the air inside the bag will keep expanding, as the pressure keeps dropping. Once the bag becomes tight, the tightness of the bag prevents the air inside the bag from expanding any more. So then you have a pressure difference between the inside and the outside of the bag, so the bag will become fully tight, like a balloon, and will keep the gas inside under higher pressure than the outside air. The temperature outside will play a part. It will cool the gas in the bag, and work AGAINST it's expansion. But if the bag expands, then the pressure effect has outweighed the cooling effect.

Wouldn't it be more simple to just monitor the overall light level in the room? Does it matter if it's sunlight or LED, if the light level falls below a certain point, the LEDs come on. Just like a thermostat on the heating. It doesn't matter where the heat is coming from, it's the temperature that's important.

Just in case there's some confusion, it should be pointed out that the atmosphere is spinning WITH the Earth, so the speed of sound will not vary much relative to the Earth, apart from local wind conditions.

Redshift and Blueshift tell us something about the motion of far distant galaxies, but it's only a rough approximation. It only says something about the motion directly towards or away from us. Nothing more. Could this method be used to give an accurate measurement of velocity, even from millions of light years away? If an event is timed by a clock that is stationary in it's frame of reference, (call the result T), any other clock that is NOT stationary in that frame will measure a time greater than T for that event, as it' will observe the event happening slower. So, if we find a pulsar in the far different galaxy, and accurately measure the interval for a thousand pulses (for example), then keep repeating the experiment using clocks moving at varying velocities, you will get different times for each different clock, and you should be able to plot a 3d graph of the results, and deduce from the graph, the velocity for the clock that gives the shortest time for the thousand pulses. The point in the graph that gives the lowest value of T must be at rest in the inertial frame for which the pulsar is at rest. So you would have an accurate figure for the ACTUAL direction and speed of the Pulsar. It might be a difficult thing to set up, but would it work in principle?

If a black hole is a bottomless well that sucks in matter and energy, the opposite would be something that expels all ANTI-MATTER and ANTI-ENERGY. How could anybody tell if they were next to a white hole? It would have expelled everything by now. And how could anything get in there in the first place?

I saw a woman on the tv a few days ago, and the thought popped into my head that she looked really Welsh. She was wearing ordinary clothes, and the sound was off. Then they put her name up, a University doctor or prof. and her name was a very Welsh name, and with the sound up, she sounded a bit Welsh. I was just going by her face, she could have been from anywhere, but the thought just occurred to me that she looked particularly Welsh, for some odd reason. If her name had come up, against her face, I would have chosen it without hesitation. Nothing to do with the name matching her face. Just both matching a certain location. But if the two equally Welsh names had come up, I would have had to guess.

Since this is an Israeli Study done at the Hebrew University, it might not apply to the rest of the world in general. Jews in Israel have historically come together from different parts of the world, and names that are popular in families might have ties to different jewish communities, in different parts of the world. So in their case, a certain kind of face may well be reflected in a name. The people who took part in the study are probably some of the worst people you could pick, for such a project.

From personal experience, I have a reasonable control of what I tell myself. But not much over whether it works or not. I can tell myself that the audience don't matter one jot to me. And I'm pretty sure that I've convinced myself. But that little panic attack happens anyway. With me, it's not the fear of public speaking, it's the fear of getting a panic attack WHILE I'm speaking. Essentially a fear of fear itself, rather than the thing that sets it off. I've rationalised it till the cows come home, but it's still there every time. And heights are a nightmare. There are some cliffs on the west coast of Ireland, on Achill Island, that are 2,200 ft, almost vertical. I remember I climbed up there from the land side years ago, and peeped over the edge. I had to lie flat on my belly to even go near the edge. And I absolutely swear that as far as I was concerned, the whole MOUNTAIN was swaying from side to side. I knew it wasn't, but that didn't stop it feeling like it was. Matter certainly wins out over mind for me, most of the time.

Check out the thread on stammering then. And Tourette's and Anorexia. You should be able to provide an instant cure. A lot of people will thank you. I have a fear of heights, and no amount of deciding not to has ever helped. Same with the fear of public speaking. It takes more than just deciding in most cases. I can force myself to do those things. But it's not gone away.

It's a bit like rhyme. No reason why words that rhyme should have any more significance than those that don't. But they catch something in the human brain. Poetry and song rely on it, and can be very powerful. Politicians come up with a good rhyming slogan, it can swing an election. And people see something in poetry that absolutely baffles me. We look for links all the time, trying to make sense of our environment. Evolution made us that way. Our brains take a mass of random information and try to link it up.That's how conspiracy theories work. You find all sorts of meaningless coincidences, and make a false story out of them. Like the moon landings that "never happened". A shadow, a ripple in a flag, put them together and make a hoax in the desert rather than people walking on the moon. There's nothing in the words and numbers. It's all in the human brain.

Plants don't use energy in the same way as animals, for getting around. If they have energy available to them, it's best to use it immediately, to grow, and compete better with their neighbours. That way, they invest the energy they have, to have better access to space and light and soil and water. The most common need for a plant to store energy is in seeds, for it's offspring, or in tubers, as mentioned. A seed can't use solar energy till it gets to a certain size, likewise a tuber, so they need an energy store. Deciduous trees must store energy somewhere, so that they can produce buds in spring. I imagine it's probably just under the bark, around the vascular bundles. Or maybe in the roots. They don't seem to store any excess in re-usable form though. They just put on more wood, in a good year and less in a bad.

You wouldn't get any measureable motion. It would just shatter, no matter what material you chose. Imagine the mass of a rod that was a light-year in length. If you tried to push it by hand, it would just feel like a brick wall. If you made it thicker, the mass would increase even faster. In the end, it would be totally impossible to cause any noticeable motion. Unless you had a few million years to spare.

I think for me, that confuses change, with time. If you designate the change involved in light as 1 unit, then change tends towards 1, not zero, as you approach the speed of light. Time on the other hand tends towards zero.

The bad news is that you will probably die of the effects of carbon dioxide, before the lack of oxygen kills you. Concentrations of one percent can make people feel ill, and some people will start to die once you pass five percent in the air. I suppose the people to ask are builders of submarines. They must have a some rules about air quality, and examples of people dying in closed rooms. Edit : Of course, NASA will have full data on what happens when the air runs out. Whether they have posted it on a website is another matter.

Yes, I was thinking that it could be a hard nut to crack, when I wrote that post. I've read comments by people who stutter in the past, that they can sing without stuttering at all. Even to large audiences. Maybe that's because you know that the audience already KNOW what the next word is, so they aren't waiting for you to say it, in the same way. I can't think of anything to try, other than deliberately break up your flow of words, to disrupt the other person's expectation of exactly when the next word is coming. Like, adding a tiny pause, or dragging out the odd word, just to alter the natural flow. I don't suggest that with very great confidence, but I suppose it's worth a try. I would do a google search for people who have found their own method, and try them out, to see if there is one that works for you. And I wish you success.

One other thing that occurs to me, is that when you talk to a human, as opposed to a dog, or a mirror, there is an EXPECTATION of the next word, by the other party. A dog, or mirror, or video camera, isn't "waiting" for the next word whereas a human is. As in the case of "would you like me to ppp" there is in the back of the mind the knowledge that the other party is waiting for the p word, and when it doesn't come out smoothly, the mental block jumps in and prevents the very thing that you are trying to do. So it could be that you need to find some way of removing that unspoken mutual expectation of the next word arriving on cue. Maybe by subtly altering the rhythm of how you speak, so that the words come out in a less predictable flow, you might break that mutual expectation of the next word coming on time.

When you are talking on your own, you're not communicating. So your brain doesn't have to subconsciously decide how to put the thoughts in a way that the other person can understand. You already understand it. So there is a whole mental process that is not happening when you talk to yourself, or a mirror or a dog. My suggestion is to find someone who has the time, and practice talking total gibberish at them, to train yourself not to care what the other person is thinking, or how they receive what you are saying. If you can talk gibberish without caring, then you might be able to keep some of that non-caring attitude when you talk normally. I don't stutter, but I do play the odd musical instrument. If I care about always playing the right note, I can't maintain the rhythm. But if I practice playing any old rubbish, but just caring about keeping a steady beat, then eventually, the right notes come, to the steady beat. So that's basically something to try. Talk right through it, using gibberish, and train your brain to "keep the beat" rather than worry about the right words. And it's not my fault, if you end up talking total gibberish !

When animals originally evolved the compound eyes, they were exploiting a niche that was vacant at the time. Seeing animals were deriving great advantage over their rivals by evolving eyes, of the different sorts. Now, the situation is entirely different. Animals that have no eyes at present, wouldn't get the same advantage from an eye, because that niche is well and truly exploited by animals that can see much better than they possibly could. So I think the answer to the OP is a highly likely no. Not unless the clock was reset, and all seeing animals went extinct.

In spite of our modern state of knowledge, nobody has yet produced a living organism out of non-living building blocks. That's what gives creationists hope that some god must have started it off. It's tempting to think, if they can't do it in modern labs, how could it just happen on it's own? The answer for me is that the Earth before life was a soup of chemicals. Each slightly different set of circumstances was it's own lab and it's own experiment. Where now there might be just a few dozen human labs working on this type of experiment, four billion years ago there were billions, trillions, squillions, there just isn't a number big enough, of random encounters between chemicals going on, in vast numbers of varying conditions. Those numbers are impossible to replicate, so human labs could never hope to replicate it randomly. If you multiply the number of random chemical events, by the hundreds of millions of year before life DID kick off, you get mind-blowing figures for the number of random chemical events that happened before life appeared. Given those kinds of numbers, you have to suspect that if abiogenesis is possible, then it's almost certain to happen. All you need is a dead planet, covered in oceans of water, and a few hundred million years.

Yes, if plants don't get enough exercise they can become pretty obese. Just look at the Baobab tree.

It seems to be a huge double standard from creationists. Believe in the bible, purely because some superstitious people wrote it thousands of years ago. But don't believe in evolution of new species, even though the evidence is set in stone over millions of years. (and not by a man)

The pope of course saw the hypocrisy embedded in his arrogant stance, and had his defence ready. He knows that people won't change their consumption in response to anything he says. But, he's just covering his back. In the real world, each new person is going to generate a huge volume of CO2 in their lifetime. And many of those people are conceived as a direct result of his words.

It does by my definition. If people want to talk about something else, that's fine. But as far as I'm concerned, if it's not free, it's not free will. My suggestion, call it unique will. Or personal will. At least the expression will fit it's words.