Everything posted by swansont
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'Living in the time of Nero'
! Moderator Note That’s not how it works. Rule 2.2 still applies - respect copyright protections
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Who should have children?
There are a number of problems here (in addition to the OP talking about individuals rather than country-level issues) There’s an underlying implication that population should continue to increase or remain constant. Why? There are a lot of things that would get better if the world population dropped. Looking at the birth rates and simultaneously assuming they are not changeable and must be changed points to some cognitive dissonance. Birthrates below 2 does not imply some terminal condition. “Self-eradication” is hyperbole. If birthrates are at 90% of replacement level it will take ~7 generations for the population to drop below 50% of the current value. That’s 150-200 years. It’s not imminent. Plenty of stuff is going to happen in that time that will impact the situation. And it would be much longer before there were any genetic bottleneck issues. The graphs shown above include extrapolations, which must be based on assumptions. None of that is a certainty, and there’s plenty of time to adjust the conditions that would support a sustainable birthrate. Emigration/immigration happens, so a notion that any one country or region must have replacement-level birth rates has racist/ethnic echoes to it.
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Gap between life and non-life (split from What if god...)
Scientists say a lot of things, and it’s not always about science. Argument by quotation is pretty lame, as I think I’ve mentioned before (it’s the argument from authority fallacy) and it’s even worse when there’s no context or even an actual quote.
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The movement to destroy American culture and traditions.
Out of ~155 million votes, it would be small, but since he won by less than half of that, it's thin. Compared with the margin of recent elections it’s quite thin. Not as thin as 2016, which was negative, or Bush in 2000, but smaller than other elections dating back to Carter in 1976, when Carter got only slightly more than half of the votes that Trump did (40.8 million vs 77.3) That says a lot about how the electoral college is structured. Biden got 306 four years ago, and there were no shouts about a mandate. Obama got 365 in 2008, and we didn’t get the mandate nonsense we’re getting now. Did Kamala run on an “anti-gun” platform, or is that some more “alternative” truth?
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1. Sub Quantum Echo Particles...(SQEP's) & Sub Quantum Echo Particle Kinetic Resonance Flux
Gravity is proportional to mass, but the acceleration you feel depends on the mass of the nearby celestial body, not your own.
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Elevation angle for solar panels...
It might be more instructive to think of power you’d be throwing away. If a sub-optimal angle reduced your power by, say, 10%, do you want to lose 10% of a small number, or a big number?
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Gap between life and non-life (split from What if god...)
Well that’s not very clear. Telling how you don’t judge isn’t very illuminating, and admitting you violate a religious teaching? That can’t go over well with the eye in the sky.
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Gap between life and non-life (split from What if god...)
Do you judge others? How does that comport with your religious text?
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Elevation angle for solar panels...
Noon is when the Intensity is the highest, so it makes sense to maximize the geometric efficiency for a fixed panel for the part of the day when you get the most sun. You’re only tilting based on angle above horizon at noon, not on the orthogonal direction, and the sun passes through more atmosphere near sunrise and sunset, which scatter blue light more efficiently (i.e.the light actually used by the panels) Do you want to optimize for when you’re getting 50 W/m^2 or when you’re getting 250 W/m^2?
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Heart
To expand on Phi’s answer https://www.sciencefocus.com/the-human-body/heart-muscle-tired “the heart is made of cardiac muscle, consisting of special cells called cardiomyocytes.Unlike other muscle cells in the body, cardiomyocytes are highly resistant to fatigue. cardiomyocytes are primarily powered by mitochondria (the energy house of the cell), similar to your other muscles. However, cardiomyocytes have as much as10 timesthe density of mitochondria, skyrocketing their energy output.”
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Gap between life and non-life (split from What if god...)
Why does that matter? It’s not the matter under discussion. The point is that you don’t have to be judged by a supreme being. If you ask about my criteria, do you question yours? There are other religions out there, with other gods. Did you shop around? Are you like so many religious folks, who pick and choose what parts of their religion to follow (e.g. a-la-carte Christians) and somehow justify ignoring other parts of religious doctrine? But you are acting like a troll. Sealioning. Textbook example. And here we are discussing belief in gods. How do you tell if you have uncovered reality? Is there a way to test it? If science is trying to understand reality, why are there so many parts of physics just mathematical constructs, that are identified as not being real?
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Gap between life and non-life (split from What if god...)
To make yourself a better person. That this does not occur to you means it’s unlikely you would understand what motivates others who aren’t like you. But they/we exist.
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The movement to destroy American culture and traditions.
Trump did not get a majority, and the victory margin was quite thin. And we need to wait and see how much buyer’s remorse sets in. I suspect it won’t be that long until finding people who admit voting for him will be harder.
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The speed of light
Movement is always in relation to some reference. The earth moves relative to the sun, for example. The earth does not move relative to some building resting on its surface. Light moves relative to any object in an inertial frame of reference. Because light does not have some fixed frame of reference, asking if the earth moves relative to light can be problematic; you can say it does, relative to any photon, but since photons can move in different directions, “in relation to light” suffers from being too vague of a statement.
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Gap between life and non-life (split from What if god...)
Did you ever consider you can judge yourself?
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Statistics in science (split from How to read papers)
If AI is a fancy name for computer processing, sure. But I think it dilutes the language to refer to everything as AI when there’s no actual “I” And fiction is, well, fiction.
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Speculative science questions
Spacetime is not a substance.
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surge in cases of the flu-like human metapneumovirus (HMPV) in China
“Fears of a Covid-style pandemic are overblown, experts say, noting that such events are typically caused by new viruses, which is not the case with HMPV.” Please do better
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The movement to destroy American culture and traditions.
That seems to be the thrust of MAGA, too. “Things were better when we could be bigots and there were no repercussions”
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Statistics in science (split from How to read papers)
As long as you quantify data, you are going to have statistics of some sort. Unless the conditions of two studies are the same, comparisons might not be meaningful. It’s highly dependent on the experiment, and the presence of confounding variables (which I think tend to crop up more in life sciences) I don’t see how that makes anything better.
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Measuring Artificial Intelligence
And I asked for some clarification. That’s how discussion works.
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Measuring Artificial Intelligence
You don’t mention the veracity of answers. If you don’t require correct answers, have you really achieved 1.1.2?
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Can the rotation of distant galaxies be explained without the use of Dark Matter and Energy?
But not left or right. If it’s edge-on, you can’t see the far edge anyway, so that’s moot. You’ve provided no reason why this timing matters. The stars would have to speed up or slow down, which requires the distance from the center change, which requires a radial velocity component. Is there evidence of this?
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The movement to destroy American culture and traditions.
But why do you get to be the arbiter of what’s offensive to others? You also don’t get to decide if it’s too hot or cold to do something outside for anyone but yourself. Do I get to decide that you can’t be offended if someone here called you a sh!thead, or cast aspersions on your mother, wife or daughter?
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Can the rotation of distant galaxies be explained without the use of Dark Matter and Energy?
Because that’s how rotation works. You are missing information here. You can get doppler shift information even if it’s only a component of the velocity. If the galaxy was edge-on, you can get the information from the opposite edges, which would in fact be the same distance away, but wouldn’t get the information from the interior part, since you can’t see it. The individual parts still had gravitational pull. And at distances far enough away, it won’t matter if the mass is concentrated or not (it’s why a black hole has the same gravitational attraction as a normal star of equal mass, as long as you’re further away than the radius of the star. (i.e. the earth wouldn’t notice a gravity difference if the sun were a 1 solar mass BH)