KipIngram

Phi for All's answer is good. Beyond that, for me it's compatibility of personalities + shared interests = pleasant time together, similar life goals (re: children and many other things), and mutual attraction.

We have to know something about the growth profile. How long does it take the fish to mature from hatchling to adult? Is the growth profile exponential? Are there "growth spurts"? Etc. With absolutely no input of that sort at all, I'd *guess* a 1-e^-kt sort of curve and do a fit. But I sure wouldn't bet money on it being right.

Maybe so, but for the right reasons. I am completely opposed to the government dictating our moral behavior. As opposed to "ethical" behaviors like "don't hurt people" and "don't steal" and so on - enforcing that sort of thing is exactly the government's business.

Well, in my case my employer bought it, so it was a free opportunity to "try out the other side." And I didn't mean to imply that it's a superior machine in all respects - it's just superior to others I've used in the ways that matter to me. And, most importantly, it turned out not to suffer from what I'd always told myself was Apple's worst problem: limiting, closed ecosystem. I've used an IPad, and I'll never use another because Android tablets / phones provide for so much more flexibility. In the tablet / phone arena I still feel Apple's ecosystem is overly constrictive. I guess the other thing I'd say about all of this is that I can't overstate my disgust with Windows. If you don't go Apple, then go Linux.

Well, I think you face an uphill climb, but you clearly have a fire burning for this, so good luck to you. My favorite recent paper (in terms of how much I think it's helped me with my particular quest) is this one: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1204.4616.pdf so you can consider that my first contribution.

Also, if an observer sees only a magnetic field in one reference frame, won't they see both a magnetic field and an electric field in a frame that's moving wrt the first one? Maybe that doesn't matter - maybe there's no net charge in the line segment anyway, but there are just a lot of details to make sure you've gotten right here. Especially if you're trying to show the breakdown of a very fundamental physical principle.

I suppose that's true, but I have to believe that the 80/20 (or 90/10 or 95/5 or whatever) principle applies here. As far as educating the public goes, you could achieve the lion's share of the goal with only a fraction of that data being available online. I don't think it's necessary to have every single bit (in the data sense) of it online. I feel I've been very effectively self-educating in the last few years using what is available already. It's possible that our culture is already doing a good job of "selecting" the right parts of that data for general accessibility.

? What does that even mean?

Yes, re: showing up at the hospital with a heart attack I do see the difference - emergency services do seem more akin to the "house on fire" example I mentioned above. I'm beginning to think that it's important in these discussions to differentiate amongst the various sorts of medical service. You've got your emergency services, you've got your routine "health maintenance" type stuff, where feeling comfortable with your doctor really does highlight the importance of getting to exercise some choice, and you've got your discretionary services that likely shouldn't even be included in the debate about assisted funding at all. It's a spectrum for sure. I am a huge, huge fan of consistency of reasoning in things like this - as soon as I had the thought last night about the similarity between emergency medical services and stuff like firefighting, police protection, and so on I felt that we should bring similar reasoning to all of those things. With police protection, for example, we expect that to be funded by our general tax payments. The same with firefighting, though I did see last night that some places have controversially started to try to charge for the service. After having those thoughts I'm quite open to the idea of emergency medical service being "free" (i.e., covered from general revenues) just as police protection and other such services are. But I do think that would mean "free for everyone." I like iNow's way of describing it - your fire department protection is free, but you are also still allowed to get smoke alarms etc. to enhance your situation if you choose to. I've suggested that a privately funded system might do the job better, but I don't KNOW that - it's just an attitude that's rooted in my general political / economic philosophy. What I really want is "the best system we can put in place," with best defined by the quality and effectiveness of the services rendered. If it turns out that a single-payer style system is the best solution in those terms, then that's what I want. If a privatized system is best, then that's what I want. I want people to have access to quality healthcare services as much as anyone else in this debate. I think all of the possible solutions here have their weaknesses and would need very, very careful oversight. Private businesses succumb to greed. Government organizations often succumb to bureaucratic inefficiencies. I don't think any solution is just going to "automatically work" without us being vigilant. I also understand that an effective system will have a cost, and I'm totally down for the "more fortunate" bearing most of that cost, simply because the less fortunate can't. This all particularly comes home for me when we talk about children. I can't even put into words how wonderful I think children are (all children), and the idea of a child suffering or (worse) dying because his parents didn't have access to medical care that could have made a difference absolutely breaks my heart. And even though I try to be rational and fair minded, the place I am most likely not to be is when my own children are involved. I have five daughters, and one of them had a struggle with anxiety and depression that would up requiring a therapeutic boarding school stay to address. The facility we chose was out of our insurance network, so we had to cover it totally. During that selection process we heard horror stories about the state-provided alternatives. I don't know how true those stories are, but if they are true then it absolutely was a situation where our financial good fortune made it possible for us to "get something better." It more or less cleaned us out, but we were able to do it. Trust me - I have thought about that a great deal, and I do not consider it right that others wouldn't have had that opportunity just because they hadn't been as lucky. And the availability of those funds really was luck - in 2012 I was working for a small company that got bought by IBM, and I got a windfall from that, even though I'd only been with the company for five months. In no way can I say I "earned" that largesse in any tangible way. It was a case of being in the right place at the right time. BTW, my daughter is in college now and is doing great - I don't know what those people did, but it worked and I cannot thank them enough. So I really do support solving these problems - no parent should have to watch their child suffer, physically or mentally, when something could be done about it, if only it could be afforded.

Not so much - the momentum delivered by accelerating the vehicles will be returned as the vehicles roll to a halt. What you're talking about is a reactionless drive, and they don't work. You have to actually eject something from Earth to have a permanent effect on its momentum. And as noted above the magnitude of what you describe would be miniscule.

Pizella: My employer updates my workstation every four years. This go round I decided to go with an Apple Macbook Air (the 13" model). I was hesitant initially because of my perception that Apple is a "closed" environment, but the other options had very poor battery life and that matters to me, so I took the plunge. It definitely wins the battery life contest - it's better than anything else I've ever used in that regard, though it is important that you pay attention to your setup and make sure you're not running needles power consumers. I can get 12-14 hours of actual work on one charge. As far as the environment being "closed" goes, an online friend brought "Homebrew" (an aftermarket apt-get style package manager) to my attention, and using it I've been able to set the machine up to do everything I could want it to do. I wouldn't say that every single package available on Linux is in Homebrew, but a large number of them are, and particularly the major / popular ones. I'm very, very satisfied, and don't feel that I've given up anything important compared to my personally-owned Linux notebook, which i hardly ever touch anymore. Good luck!

I'm not sure - that definitely something to be careful about in problems like this. I could imagine the return circuit as comprised of wire segments that are perpendicular to the ones shown, running away from the other wire (I'll call those perpendicular returns) and then a piece parallel to the wires shown (I'll call that the parallel return. In the static reference frame the Biot Savart law says that the perpendicular returns make fields lines in the plane of rotation of the shown wires, so the shown wires wouldn't cut those lines. The paralle return will make a field that gets cut, but we could put those as far away as we wished. In the other frame, where the shown wires are rotating, I'm not as sure that the perpendicular return fields won't matter - the same reasoning the OP uses (i.e., the distance causes a time delay such that you're seeing a field corresponding to an earlier position) applies here too. I'd be very hesitant to neglect that contribution without working out the details more rigorously.

The equation has an operator pi in it, but you mention something different in the text - is that a typo? In step 4 of your Lagrangian discussion I'd say "differentiate" instead of "derive." Really clean and easy to understand so far - thanks again for the energy you invest around here.

Oh, I did remember one other question I had. I often read that wave functions are defined "up to an arbitrary phase factor." In the context of what I've discussed so far, is that just the phase of these modes? Based on what I know about Fourier techniques those phases matter when you add up a bunch of components to get a total, but I don't really see another phase floating around in this discussion to apply that bit too.

Ok, but what it sounds like you're talking about developing is "the internet." I don't yet see how it brings something that's not already there. Not trying to be critical here, at all, by the way.

Ok, that makes sense - that's just where the probability of an interaction goes all the way to zero. But everywhere it's not zero, the possible interactions just occur per Born's rule based on the appropriate field amplitude? And there is no predictability of that whatsoever beyond Born's rule? Which photons go through the slit arise in the same way, right? The whole panel with the slits in it gets exposed to the light quanta, and it's Born's rule that determines when a photon passes through vs. getting absorbed by the barrier?

Ok, so from that I infer that you would not be in favor of banning private medical arrangements, then? I think that's the most frightening aspect of all of this to me - that someone will propose that the only way for things to be "fair" is for the government to completely control all access to healthcare services. As long as you're willing to leave the freedom to make other arrangements in place, then I'm open-minded to almost any arrangement. It was swansont's comment earlier that doctors would stop turning away Medicaid patients lickety split if Medicaid was all there was that caused me to engage that worry. I would assume that the only reason doctors would turn away Medicaid patients would be because they worried they wouldn't get paid (although I suppose it could also be related to difficulty of dealing with a bureaucracy). Either way, I'd say let's fix Medicaid so that they don't want to turn those patients away, rather than either impose some coercion on the doctors or attempt to make Medicaid the only game in town. To tie this back to ACA, I think anything like ACA, if implemented in a freedom-respecting sort of way, would have no impact whatsoever on people who already had health insurance / didn't need the ACA benefits. Short term you might see an increase in demand for medical services, as the new beneficiaries flowed into the situation, but supply and demand should cause that to take care of itself in a small number of years. So by "no effect" I meant no direct effect, not second order effects arising from increased demand. In other words, the attitude should be, "Hey, here is a new benefit for those of you who need it," not "Here is a new way and now all of you have to use it."

So, what do you plan to accomplish with this that's not already available? Just as you yourself note, the internet IS a great source of materials for self-education. One does have to weed through some stuff that's just incorrect / deliberately biased (e.g., http://www.electricuniverse.info/Introduction), but generally speaking there is a lifetime's worth of good education out there for free. If your goal is to eliminate the need for that weeding, I laud you, but how do you plan to establish your reputation such that people can count on having all good and no bad by using your site? Do you plan for this to be science and math only? Or do you plan to include things like history, philosophy, political theory, etc.? I ask because those latter ones are areas particularly subject to bias and propaganda.

Yes, that's the line of reasoning that leads to a mandate. I think my option 1 is neutral on that point - you've given people the financial means to afford health insurance on the open market - whether you also require them to is a separate issue. I think you have a valid point; if there is not a mandate then some people will opt out and take a vacation or something instead (or just fall prey to poor budgeting). I don't think we can have that one both ways - I think we either have to have a mandate or do just what you said: turn people who opted out and can't pay away. I feel fairly sure we'd go with the mandate. It sounds harsh, but on the other hand we all have a mandate to buy food - it's just a biological mandate instead of a government mandate. I'm required by my state to carry car insurance in order to legally operate a car on the public streets. So as much as people moan and groan about it, there is precedent. Pre-existing conditions are a problem no matter what. I think that ties in with a mandate too - if you are going to force the insurance companies to accept anyone, then you probably also have to force people to own insurance. So, yeah - I'm not going to claim that we can "have it all" - fully private industry, no mandate, guaranteed acceptance regardless of pre-existing conditions. That just won't work. And I do want to say again that my support for a minimal government intervention approach does not mean I admire the way insurance companies operate today. I think most of them are pretty despicable, when you get right down to it, and will happily screw people over for profits. I don't think that can be fixed without government regulation and oversight. iNow: Just so you know, I am actively thinking about this from as many different angles as I can, trying to give every perspective a fair shake. For example, just now I was thinking about how emergency room service is really "different" from when I go in to see my doctor for a regular checkup. ER service is rather like having your house catch on fire, and I don't sit around thinking about how we should have privatized fire departments. Is it possible that there's more than one situation in play here, and that the different "types" of service might be addressed in different ways? Like, what about discretionary surgery, for example? Totally superficial things, like cosmetic surgery? Cosmetic surgery is "required" in very few cases - it's usually a vanity thing that doesn't really need to be done at all. So I certainly don't think the government should be footing the bill for things like that. That's one extreme, whereas life-and-death trauma such as that faced in emergency rooms is the other extreme.

A couple of weeks back Mordred posted a link to this paper in some thread or another: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1204.4616.pdf I read it and have been mulling it over - I think it's causing my brain to "click" to some things that have previously been fuzzy for me. I'm going to summarize the new insights briefly in hopes that some kind folks can validate / correct me. So, what I'm getting from the paper is as follows: There are no "particles" per se - what we call particles are just certain excitations of this or that field. There's not just one field - there are quite a few (I believe someone said twenty-ish in some other thread). Like all wave phenomena, we can decompose excitations of these fields into modes of various frequencies. The amount of energy associated with any given mode is quantized, E = Nhf for frequency f, where N is an integer. Each mode of any field has infinite spatial extent. Changes in energy for any mode are instantaneous events. I bolded item 5 because that one was a key part of my change in thinking from reading the paper. I just hadn't been clear on that before. So, based on this a lot of things become more clear to me. It's easy to see why we get interference in the double slit experiment even when we run it one photon at a time - the quantum is spatially extended and interferes with itself in the usual way we think of interference happening in such a situation. The Bell-type "spooky" entanglement stuff becomes clear - the quanta are spread out all over the place, and when Alice makes a measurement the field mode that is involved changes everywhere instantly, including where Bob is doing his measurements. Superluminal signaling is prevented by the uncertainty principle. And so forth - things that seem paradoxical with the particle perspective just don't with the field perspective. Where I begin to get a little fuzzier is on explaining, for instance, why we wind up getting localized responses on the photographic film or whatever used to detect the interference pattern in the double slit experiment. The arriving quantum is spread out. It's stronger where the interference is constructive and weaker where it's destructive, but it's still extended over a substantial area of the film. But when the interaction happens it happens in one place. Hobson talks about this but he doesn't go into great depth. So, I've tried to ponder through it myself. I recognize that the matter comprising the film is also composed of matter field excitations, and that those excitations (which we recognize as electrons, atoms, molecules, etc.) also have modes that are space-filling. Hobson mentioned that the spot on the film involved a substantial number of atoms (500, for example). I assume that has to do with the size of the emulsion crystals and so on. The only way I can think of to "get at" a localized spot on the film is to regard a collection of modes of the matter field that correspond to the Fourier transform of such a localized spot. It does seem that if I started with the spot (basically an impulse function) and took the FFT that I could pinpoint a specific set of modes. But then it seems like I'd have to have a quantum of energy for each mode, and we may only be sending one quantum of light at a time. I realize the energy quanta might not be the same size, but I'm still not sure that's the right track to be on. As an alternative to that line of reasoning, I recognized that the slits are very small too. For one photon, which strikes the barrier in a spatially extended way, the whole quantum of energy either goes through the slits or does not go through the slits, and that's just a probabilistic thing. So is it that way too for the film? If the energy of the photon is spread out over the whole film, one "quantum unit of response" is just chosen at random (i.e., according to Born's rule) to register the event? I guess I'll stop there. This is nice stuff - I think I understand more than I did. But it feels like step one (or maybe ten or so - I've been at it for a while) of a lengthy journey. Oh - one other question. Each of these modes can have a variable number of quanta associated with it; Hobson presented it that way for the photon field. Is this where the exclusion principle comes in? Is it the case that a single mode can have any number of quanta of energy associated with it for bosons, but only one quantum of energy (or zero, leaving just the vacuum energy) for fermions? hobson.pdf

Well, I think you are, yes. You're the only one living your life. +1; that's exactly the message I was trying to send, only you sent it better.

Yes, that sounds right (HPV). Anyway, the governor's mind set struck me as "Hey, if you won't choose to adhere to my personal brand of morality, then I'll make sure you're too scared not too."

Yes, that sounds right. I'm not familiar with the area, but surely there is some way to deploy such an analysis. As long as that process was guided by the genuine welfare of the population and not politics I think it makes great sense. Here in Texas a few years ago a new vaccine was proposed. I forget the exact one, but in some way the condition it vaccinated against was transmitted through sexual activity (possibly other ways as well, but that was the one that caused the controversy). Our conservative governor opposed the vaccine on the grounds that it would "encourage promiscuity." I don't think the disease was life-threatening, but it was permanent once you contracted it and caused an impact on quality of life. Only girls were affected. I consider myself a generally conservative person, but I honestly did want to smack the guy. That's just not the way you ought to make such decisio Edit: It passed - he didn't get his way.

Except that's not what I'm saying. I'm not trying to defend the status quo; I've been trying very hard to talk about new things we could actually do to make healthcare available to everyone. It's how I feel about poverty-related issues in general; I truly believe that a nation as rich as ours could lift everyone above some meaningful poverty line if we implemented the right sort of approach. I just believe it's at least possible that we could do so with a minimum of government intervention outside of the tax code.

I think what swansont meant (swansont, please correct me if I'm wrong) is that even after you've paid your deductible insurance only pays X% of the remainder for some services, so the (100-X)% also has to come out of the customer's pocket and would add to the total. He's right about that, but that varies all over the place and I'm not sure how to calculate it without getting the details of some plan in front of me and crank numbers. In addition to that the plans usually have a maximum out of pocket, so there's an upper limit to that effect that would have to be factored in as well. Summing up some things, I think we've identified three different approaches to providing health care for those who can't afford it on their own: 1) give them money (or vouchers, or whatever) and let them buy insurance on the open (private) market, 2) operate a plan like Medicaid in parallel with the private healthcare system, and 3) mandate that something like Medicaid is the only system allowed, and everyone relies on it. I would love to think that option 1 could work for a reasonable cost (even if it's some percentage (10-40, say) more expensive than option 2. Option 3 seems much, much more invasive to me - it goes beyond simply taxing me (a cost I am more than willing to bear) in that it tells me, someone who has managed to not need government assistance, that I'm not free to handle my healthcare in any way I choose. The big reason I like option 1, even at a higher cost, is that it makes all of the people it helps "just as free as me" - they are equipped with funds with which to shop the same market I shop, and that market will view them no differently from the way it views me. It makes them my equal within the healthcare market. iNow: Those are nice words, but if in fact options that are available to me now are not available to me under some other plan, some of my freedom has in fact been taken away, whether that was "the point" or not. I'd much prefer to focus on giving those freedoms to everyone.