Janus

I wouldn't place too much faith in the polls; as of late, they have been shown to be highly unreliable. Right up to the '22 midterms they were predicting a "Red wave" with Republicans making large gains in the House (60+ seats). In the Ohio election dealing with the Republicans attempt to change the requirements to alter the state constitution, the polls said it was close and could go either way, while in the election it was overwhelmingly rejected. And most recently, a Democrat won in Florida in a red district when polls showed him losing. A lot of this can be put down to the polling methods not keeping up with the times and thus oversampling certain segments of the population and under-sampling others.

While Trump will be sure to fill his administration with yes-men who's only qualifications are a sworn fealty to Trump. What little reining in and push-back he got last time will be nonexistent.

That would only be applicable if you were shrinking the Earth in order to keep all of its mass contained within a sphere with a radius of r as r decreased. As you move towards the center of the Earth this is not the case, as the amount of material within r decreases as you do so and thus M is not a constant throughout the trip. So while at the surface of the Earth Gravitational potential is -GME/rE, at the center, it is -1.5GME/rE Thus the difference in gravitational potential between the surface of the Earth and its center is smaller than that between the surface and an infinite distance, and so would be the time dilation factor difference.

The argument you so often hear is that gun regulations won't stop gun violence. It's the all or nothing approach; that if a regulation doesn't prevent all gun deaths of innocents, it shouldn't be enacted. Saving 10 lives a year isn't worth it, nor is saving 100 or, 1000...

As pzkpfw alluded to, If it requires a new, now unknown, physics to allow for FTL, then it is pointless to speculate about what would happen, because we have no idea what rules we'd have to adhere to in this new physics.

The Republicans have been playing this game with the border for years. They have no interest in dealing with it, as fixing it would give them one less thing to complain about, and all they have to run on are grievance issues.

Agreed, the.. is a silly one. Good thing for the big bang model that it doesn't claim this.

They didn't. The Babylonians divided the circle in 360 degrees. They then defined a "degree of time" as how long it took the Sun to travel 1 degree in the Sky, which they then divided into 60 minutes of 60 seconds each( we still see this in the practice of measuring angles in degree, minutes, seconds.) Thus the Babylonian minute and second were not the same duration as our modern one. The division of the day into hours was an invention of the Greeks. It wasn't until the middle ages that the two systems were combined, making the hour divisible in the same way that the Babylonian degree of time was. So, there is no mystery, as it is the result of cobbling together two different time keeping systems.

It is not a contradiction, it just isn't compatible with the Newtonian model of time and space. And at its heart, Relativity uses a completely different model for these. In Relativity these measurements are not absolute but frame dependent. An analogy would be these images of two lines: The same set of lines, just viewed from different perspectives. In the first image the red line is "taller" than the green, and in the bottom image the green line is "taller" than the red. The point being that in Relativity, time and space are measured more like the "height" of the lines in the images and not by their absolute length.

And considering that the magnitude of High-Low tide cycle coincides with the phases of the Moon, as does the varying time period between successive low and high tides (which can vary a fair amount to either side of 12hrs), It seems a bit silly to brush away the influence the Moon has on the tidal cycle.

But, does the hen recognize what it has found, or is it just a shiny rock that attracts it attention? And for the hen's purposes, a nugget of gold is less valuable than a small rock. Chickens ingest these small rocks to hold in their gizzards, were they serve in lieu of teeth. The contractions of the gizzard use the rocks to grind up the grain, etc. into small digestible bits. Gold, being a soft metal, serves as a poor substitute for common rocks.

You may "always hear that", but it isn't what model actually says. All it says is that the Universe, in it's earliest stages, was extremely hot and dense, and says nothing about it's size. One of the still unknowns about the universe is whether it is finite or infinite. The references to being "smaller than a proton" likely are referring with the "observable universe", which, for all we know, could be a tiny corner of a much vaster, or even infinite universe.

That hasn't been my experience. Both my thumbnails look perfectly normal, and you'd never guess that anything out of the ordinary had ever happened to them.

Unfortunately, it isn't the fungus that causes the regrowth. I talk from experience. Over my life I've lost two thumbnails, due to trauma, that then grew back.

The 1927 Solvay conference.

There is a neat story about Einstein concerning this. This occurred during some scientific conference. Einstein and a few others were at a table debating QM. Einstein would come up with some problem that he felt disputed QM, and the others would go over it until they found a flaw with his argument. Einstein finally came up with on that no one could find the flaw in. It started to get late, so they decided to call it a night. They met up again the next day. Whereupon Einstein stated that he'd been thinking about it, and had found the problem with his own argument.

I fail to see where this would matter, other than Einstein taking credit for that which he was not due. It has nothing to do the validity of the conclusions. And as pointed in the previous post, the theory has survived every test thrown at it, and much of the equipment we use today would not function if it were incorrect to any large degree.

Mine would most likely come through my paternal grandfather. But he was born nearly 170 years ago so it's a bit hard to verify.

I came across some new info that solidifies the idea that I have at least some Sámi in my ancestry. It was a YouTube video which broke down the DNA of a Sámi male. It used results from the same test I took. It identified one of the genetic groups as matching one of mine. It returned a result of 7% Inuit, which adds weight to my suspicion of where my 2% result came from. The icing on the cake was in another video on the Sámi, which had a photo of a Sámi girl. I saw a strong resemblance to my sister. I called my wife over and asked her if the photo reminded her of anyone( without giving her any other context), and she said my sister. So while still not 100% conclusive, I'd say that the odds are pretty high.

The issue I have with these polls is that I doubt that hey have changed their methods since the '22 primary. For example, they do phone polls. But these polls rely on people actually answering their phone. There is a generation gap in this factor. Younger people, who tend to vote more liberal, are much less likely, in general, to answer their phone when they get a call from an unrecognized number. Whereas people in the older age demographic, who tend to vote more conservative, in general, are more likely to do so. As a result, phone polls tend to over sample in favor of conservatives, even if they don't intend to.

The galaxies that show blue shift are those that are part of our group or cluster. Galaxies are not evenly spread out but segregated into collections bound by gravity. First you have local groups of 50 or so galaxies, then these isolated groups form a cluster, then you get super clusters. Collections up to clusters are held together by mutual gravity and don't separate with the universal expansion. As a result, galaxies within them can have various velocities with respect to each other

Gravitational red-shift is due to light going from one gravitational potential to a higher one. Imagine it like a hill. Climbing the hill takes energy. Light gives up the energy it needs to "climb the hill" by through a decrease in it frequency. For our galaxy to see a red-shift from all directions would mean we would be at the "peak of the hill". and everything else lower down the slope. But that means everything else would see our galaxy as higher up the slope, and see light coming from our galaxy as being blue-shifted. For your idea to be correct, our galaxy would have to have a unique and special position in the universe. The second part, as pointed out by others is an old hypothesis, and has been discounted.

In order to reach LEO, a fully loaded shuttle needs all the fuel in that large external tank, plus two solid fuel boosters. As I pointed out in an earlier post, you need about 2.2 km/sec of delta v to enter a trans-lunar orbit from LEO. Even if the entirety of the cargo capacity of the shuttle was extra fuel, the SSME's wouldn't be capable of getting the shuttle up to this speed. Once at the Moon, your shuttle would be moving ~ 0.8 km/sec slower than the Moon, and would need to do another burn in order to be able match speeds and enter orbit around it. Then to return, another burn is needed to re-enter another trans-lunar orbit in order to get back to Earth. Once back, the shuttle will be moving at ~2.2 km/sec more than LEO orbital speed. The shuttle can't hit the atmosphere at this speed, so it will need to do another burn to shed enough for re-entry. So, this works out to at least 6 km/sec total delta v for the trip. This jumps the fuel requirements to 2.8 times the mass of the empty shuttle. Adding a lander would increase this fuel requirement. (some thing the equivalent of the Apollo LEM, would require ~20% more fuel. A good part of the Shuttle's mass is there for re-entry and landing, and would be dead weight as far as the majority of the trip is concerned, so you'd be burning a lot of fuel to get something to the Moon that is of no use when you get there.

Those circular rings in the image were a choice made by the artist. He could have easily chosen to use a rectangular grid instead.

Halc's original statement dealt with the difficulty of even putting a craft into orbit "near" the Sun. Let's take the Parker Solar probe, on its closest approach it is ~7 million km from the Sun in a highly elliptical orbit. This took several orbits and 7 gravitational assists from Venus to achieve. But let's look at its first perihelion, which was at ~22 million km. What would it have taken to circularize the orbit at that distance? A delta V of ~ 56.6 km/sec. This is 5 times the escape velocity from Earth's surface. Now, given a typical launch vehicle engine, it would take roughly 11 kg of fuel for every kg of payload to reach escape velocity. For 56.6 km/sec, that jumps to 232245 kg per kg of payload.