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swansont

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Everything posted by swansont

  1. Meaning it has no place in a technical discussion based on fact. As I pointed out, they pulled more rods out of the core than they were supposed to, As I recall, this was because of a buildup of Xe-135. Had they waited for it to decay, the situation would have been quite different.
  2. I'd say it does matter, because by and large it's one party is repeating Kremlin talking points and subverting democracy, while the other isn't. That there isn't a clear distinction on some aspects of government, that doesn't extend to all aspects of government. These are the acute effects, but I worry about the long-term. I think we will be seeing the effect of TFG for some time, as things bubble through the courts. Roe v Wade is likely to be gone soon, and that won't be the end of it. All because of justices he appointed.
  3. ! Moderator Note I think everyone would be better off with fewer insults and condescension all around, and more focusing on discussing the topic
  4. Dropship has been suspended for repeated thread hijacking violations, in addition to other infractions. A course correction is needed.
  5. While I would hesitate to call a nuclear weapon a precision instrument, there are treatments in medicine that you can describe as precise. Proton therapy, for example. You send a beam of protons at a tumor, and tune the energy so that the protons will deposit the bulk of their energy in the tumor rather than the healthy tissue, so you disrupt the tumor. (They have a proton therapy center at TRIUMF, where I did a postdoc)
  6. Indeed. But I'm saying the court might argue that something that's not a problem when one person is doing it might be a problem if a dozen people are doing it. Can you fit a dozen people into a 15' radius around a police officer and not interfere with them, while they are dealing with a suspect and also trying to do crowd control? From the description you included, this isn't a case relevant to the legislation. Destroying a recording is not the same as saying you need to be X feet away to record. And I'm saying that a court system that routinely finds that officers shooting unarmed people are not at fault (and whose numbers have been swelled for four years by an administration that was sympathetic to police-state attitudes) might not be swayed by that argument.
  7. ! Moderator Note This has been mostly off-topic for a while, and I just don’t have the bandwidth to filter the tiny bit of wheat from the chaff. Thus it’s all chaff, and to the trash it goes.
  8. I think statisticians have known this for a relatively long time.
  9. No, that's not accurate. The control rods had graphite tips, but were made of boron, which readily absorbs neutrons (graphite, not so much). One of several issues was that a bunch of the rods were completely withdrawn from the core. When the control rods were inserted, the first part in was the graphite tip. Graphite is a moderator, so it improved the efficiency of slowing neutrons down, making for an increased fission rate, which is exactly the opposite of what you want to happen when you are trying to shut the plant down. It was a design flaw, and was exacerbated by not following safety protocols - they pulled more rods out of the core than they were supposed to. The system also had a positive void coefficient, so when excess steam started forming inside the core, it increased the fission rate. Again, the opposite of what you want when trying to shut down. It's not about the rods being cheap. There were design shortfalls and procedures were circumvented; multiple issues which all acted together to cause the accident. https://www.vice.com/en/article/597k9x/why-the-chernobyl-nuclear-reactor-exploded https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-security/safety-of-plants/chernobyl-accident.aspx
  10. v = at works for constant acceleration; it occurs to me that you didn't specify that (though a constant thrust over a period of time might be happening). If acceleration varies with time you'd integrate. a = dv/dt, so v(t) would be the integral of a(t) dt
  11. That’s not actually what I meant. Evolution has been observed - that’s what makes it a fact. There is also a massive amount of evidence that tells us the theory is correct. That’s not the metric by which you assess a theory. There are areas on earth and in space where gravity has not been measured, but that does not call models of gravity into question. That would be a ludicrous standard to apply.
  12. It’s a theory and also a fact.
  13. This held up well. https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/15/opinions/war-crimes-russia-invasion-ukraine-newton/index.html
  14. We define what we mean by speculation But he didn’t call it “the theory of relativity” when he first aired it. The paper was “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies” and Einstein later referred to it as the relativity principle.
  15. ! Moderator Note If you can’t be on topic, please consider whether you should post at all
  16. Standard physics kinematics equation will give you this. v = at for an object starting at rest, with a constant acceleration. You just have to put this in SI units
  17. Hillary is not in politics anymore, and Hunter never was. Jen Psaki doesn’t make policy AFAIK. And no GOP members/pundits on the list. I wonder if they get paid in rubles, will they continue to shill for Putin as the exchange rate drops?
  18. Again, I think this is getting into the game too late. If you grow up poor the system is stacked against you all the way through your youth. A company can hire a middle/upper-middle class worker just by virtue of the fact that they are likely to have better credentials. They can afford to have gone to better schools, gotten tutors to help, and been able to afford a low-paying internship to get experience, because they are supported by their family. It's hard to show that an employer harmed candidate A if they can show candidate B (whom they hired) has a better resumé. Or harm to candidate C, who had to drop out and work to support a family, without getting to go to college. That's not the fault of Acme Products Inc. I think what you really need is to have programs that level the playing field from the start.
  19. I disagree with your position that socioeconomic class should be a protected class. Not because there is no discrimination, though. Classism is a problem. Some people are snobs. The problem as I see it is that protected classes are groups of people who are trapped in their group (though they might not agree with my wording of being trapped, and I don't mean any disrespect by it) What I mean is that if you are of a particular race or skin color, or are a woman, or you follow a particular religion, or are above a certain age, etc. there is no way (other than via extraordinary means for one or two categories) out of being in that category. That's not so with socioeconomics. It's not easy, but it's possible to go from being poor to being middle class, and you can go from middle to upper class. And you can go in the other direction with poor planning or bad luck. Further, the solution of applying this to hiring practices is too small. The friction of being poor happens continually, and isn't just an issue of when someone is hired. My issue here is not so much that I disagree with the broader thesis about classism (because I don't) as that I think you aren't making a good argument for assigning protected class status for hiring purposes.
  20. Smartphones, or any phone with good video, storage and bandwidth to send video didn't exist back in 1995, so my point holds - a decision made when cellphone cameras were not ubiquitous might be ignored by the court, especially if the court is hell-bent on changing the rules. Furthermore, Fordyce wasn't charged with interfering with police, so I have to wonder if it would even be considered relevant.
  21. ! Moderator Note Personal attacks and slurs such as this will not be tolerated. Stick to discussing the subject
  22. I don’t see the relevance. I didn’t claim that anything was eradicated. I didn’t claim that all modern medicine is new knowledge, only that some of it is. Can we dispense with the straw man now?
  23. Perhaps it's because I said no such thing. The only people to mention ruble/rubles in this thread before now are you, iNow and The Vat (assuming the search function is to be trusted)
  24. It sort of coincided with the industrial revolution. Which predates Dalton, so I don't know that there were chemical formulas to burn. But I'm pretty sure that they didn't know about e.g. mRNA, so some vaccines we have today are definitely not some re-imagination of a folk cure for COVID.
  25. and the connection to my post is...what?
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