Cap'n Refsmmat

Today I went ahead and upgraded our WordPress blogs to 3.0. This brings an assortment of new features, like a new default theme, custom backgrounds, custom post types, and all sorts of other junk. You may find that some of your plugins don't work with this version; I know Firestats seems to be broken. If this is the case, please disable them in your Plugins page and let me know so I can find replacements. If you encounter any other bugs let me know. Also, for those of you particularly technologically inclined, you can nag me about bugs on Twitter instead.

I think iNow is implying that people who defend religious beliefs suffer from Stockholm Syndrome, not that Stockholm Syndrome makes religion okay.

That would be experiment, not application. Application is just using the formulas for any purpose.

http://www.engadget.com/2008/07/15/sandisk-introduces-write-once-worm-sd-cards/ These seem useful as well.

It's worth noting that I joined these forums when I was 12, and that didn't stop me from making 25 posts per day. Of course, back then my posts didn't have much substance, but oh well... There's nothing stopping you from going out, asking questions, and trying to catch up with everyone else. A lot of our members just love to explain things.

Here it is.

You're mixing frames. One frame will see the event happening at a different time when it looks at the other. There's no absolute simultaneity between frames. That's not what I said. I said step 2 is (r,0,0) for the O frame, and if v is 0 in step 4, you also get (r,0,0) for the O frame. No contradiction. I see. I wasn't sure how it worked. Why must you bring in all sorts of extra constraints, like the light postulate and the relativity postulate, when the Lorentz transformation is the special relativity way to translate between frames? When you do a Lorentz transform, it already accounts for everything -- it takes an observation in one frame and translates it into another. No extra stuff required. It sounds like you're trying to go from one frame to another, then back to the first, and get inconsistent results. If you simply do the Lorentz transformations, you'll get the right answer.

Lorentz transforms work on both space and time. When you're doing step 4, don't you have to transform the time between frames as well as the spatial coordinates? Also, in the stationary frame, isn't the v in (r (1+v/c),0,0) equal to 0, making that expression simply (r,0,0)? Which is equal to what you calculated in step 2? Or is v some other number? I'm not familiar with Lorentz transformations.

I can see a few potential advantages of a Classics degree coupled with physics. For one, a study of the classics will give you reading and writing skills far beyond what a physics degree would require (e.g. lab reports). Survey after survey comes out saying that employers wish their employees could communicate and write more effectively, and classics will help that. Second, the ideas, philosophies and stories you're introduced to in classics will help you better understand the world, deal with people and make decisions. (I think more people should get a firm grounding in philosophy just for the critical thinking it encourages.) Now, I'm not a practicing physicist but a student like you, so I don't know what an application board or potential employer would think when they see classics on a resume. On the other hand, you run the risk of going in, deciding you don't like physics after a year or two, and being forced to spend an extra year doing something new. It's almost certain that you'll change your mind about your interests at some point -- whether it's "I don't like doing research", "I don't like physics at all," or "all these old dead people get on my nerves," or something else. Most people end up changing their major or their plans at some point. (I met a guy that's gone through five majors in five years, and finally settled on physics.) Don't get too ambitious and give yourself some wiggle room. Now, I have two questions for you: If you enjoy classics so much, what drew you to physics? Why'd you choose a career in physics over a degree in classics? (I say "degree" rather than "career" because, well, you know...) If you don't mind me asking, what school is this? I've never been quite sure what a classics degree entails, so I'd like to look up the degree requirements and things.

The trouble is that supernatural things are very difficult to test. Historically, when people with claims of supernatural powers are put to the test, they end up being found to be frauds: see Project Alpha, Uri Geller, and the One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge. James Randi's made a living off of showing many psychic and supernatural powers to be stage magic tricks. The other problem is that believers in supernatural powers often explain away failed attempts to prove they're real. If equipment set up to detect a ghost detects nothing, they respond that the ghost only appears to those prepared to believe, or that it appears in dimensions undetectable by ordinary equipment. If a spoon-bender fails to bend a spoon, he explains it as nervousness or the negative energy from the skeptical TV show host. In short, supernatural powers are often fraudulent, supernatural effects often don't appear when rigorously tested by scientists, and supernatural practitioners explain away any of their failures. Also, scientists have had more success finding ordinary explanations for supernatural events than finding supernatural ones. Neuroscientists have triggered religious experiences -- where the subject believes they feel God's presence -- through magnetic stimulation of the brain, and psychologists can give people the eerie feeling that someone else is in the room through low-frequency sound and cleverness.

I don't think so. Your account seems to have converted just fine.

I dunno. I'd say that if it does apply, it could only apply to the particularly devout and radical types who believe that God is watching every single move that they make -- and act like they believe that. (I'd think that most people believe that but don't act like it. The people I refer to are the ones who follow the rules all the time for fear of being smited.) If they're constantly in fear of God's wrath, and constantly thankful that they're spared, Stockholm Syndrome might apply. On the other hand, doesn't Stockholm Syndrome require a tangible captor? Or does the victim just have to believe in the captor's power?

It's just spam.

You make fair points. There may be posters who get frustrated because they can't post in Politics or Religion and who don't come back. I wouldn't be surprised if it's happened before. Some sort of access control to the Religion forum was deemed to be necessary after our experiences years ago with the original Philosophy and Religion forum; after the mayhem in that forum, we decided we needed some way to boot out troublemakers and weed out trolls. Hence the creation of a second usergroup that requires a certain number of posts to join. Now, our policy since creating the Religion forums was that we would loosen the restrictions as time went on, on an experimental basis -- if discussions stayed civil, we'd loosen restrictions, but if things got out of control we'd keep restrictions in place to make the forum easy for us to moderate. Since the Religion forums have gone so smoothly, we may consider dropping the restrictions further. I thinks some sort of delay, even a short one, is good, if just to introduce users to our style of discussion. A note about Politics: The original motivation for politics forum restrictions was not post quality or anything like that. The motivation was a particularly stubborn troll, revprez, who would immediately re-register upon being banned, post as normal for a while, and then start trolling again. His favored forum was Politics. He openly declared to the staff that we could not stop him from coming back and posting in Politics... so I imposed the postcount restrictions on Politics, forcing him to make 50 posts in other forums (and reveal himself as revprez, as we all knew his style) before he could troll Politics. The strategy was successful. He came back once or twice more and gave up, after two and a half years of sockpuppeting and annoying us. Since then we lowered the restrictions to 30 posts, and we believe they've had a positive impact on the Politics section's quality. However, the conversion to IPB is perhaps a good time to consider alternate strategies for keeping up post quality. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged Generally we apply the term to members who are particularly rude, arrogant or condescending in their posts. Other times we apply it to members who repeat the same points over and over despite them being refuted by other members. (Generally this is in a forum like Physics, where "refuted" means "shown to contradict reality.") Other times we apply it to people like the atheist war guy, who merely comes here to post a diatribe against atheism and then leaves.

I recall reading that one further issue with corn-based ethanol is that only a small portion of the plant -- the edible part -- is used to create ethanol, as processing the rest of the plant into ethanol takes a significant amount of energy and isn't very efficient or cost-effective. However, if someone comes up with clever ways to use the non-edible parts of the corn plant, it could be possible to eat corn and have your ethanol too. Dunno if the chemists have gotten anywhere in that goal. Last I read it was still a challenge.

This thread is populated by two kinds: those who make coherent posts, and those who don't. Err, wait, maybe that's four kinds, since everything is two things, and that'd make four...

PMs will be converted but they're unfortunately left in a bit of a mess. IPB uses a "conversations" feature, where you can essentially have a private conversation with several members at once; each PM you sent or received in vB is turned into its own conversation, so your inbox is full of both sent and received PMs. It's messy, but you'll have your PMs. (On second thought, looking at the numbers here, it appears some PMs were lost in the test conversion. Never fear; we'll keep the old site running as a read-only archive for a while for data that may be lost in the conversion.) Indent tags will still work, although there won't be the colored box, just an indent. I may re-style quote and indent tags in IPB to match what we've done here. As for the rest of the list, here are some notes: Sigs - converted Friends - converted User titles - may have to be remade, but I think they're converted Rep comments - may be lost, although reputation itself will come along. IPB may support reputation comments, I'm not sure, but I haven't seen them. Smilies - converted Profiles - converted YouTube embeds - I'll be adding a custom BBCode in IPB to replicate this, so they should continue to work Thread subscriptions - not converted. IPB's subscription system is more advanced and configurable; you can even get notifications when someone quotes a post of yours. But it won't carry over subscriptions from vB. Hide - will be an alias for IPB's own spoiler BBCode mooey's forums - converted along with the rest Things to watch out for: Members with special characters in their names ([]&= and such) may have trouble being converted, although I'm hoping IPS can resolve this bug before we convert. Members with apostrophes in their names (i.e. me) will potentially be unable to log in until I manually fix them. This should be handled by the converter, so I've filed a bug. Blogs may be broken for a short time after conversion I hope I've covered everything.

So instead of two things, shouldn't we say everything is literally four things, because everything can be cut into quarters? What about electrons?

How about a Klein bottle? No inside or outside. If you cut something into two halves, can't you cut those halves in half?

In any case, The Logic of Scientific Discovery is a philosophical treatment of science that explains exactly why things must be testable and falsifiable. It may be useful to you. And I think Sayo is right. Go read the book.

What do you mean by "pure entity"? Everything that's not a fundamental particle is made up of a whole lot of things.

I suggest you pick up A Concise Introduction to Logic, by Patrick Hurley.

If you really are a philosophy student, I suggest you pick up a copy of The Logic of Scientific Discovery by Karl Popper.

Never fear. Automated backups! I have no intention of going "whoops, we screwed up, we'll leave it down until tomorrow." We'll go right back to vB if things fail.

I'd guess it'll happen within a week, although there may be unforeseen delays. Conversion takes an hour or two, followed by us frantically changing permission settings, making sure blogs work, and so on. Blogs may be down for longer, actually, as user IDs will change during the conversion and we'll have to update the blog tables so they know who their owners are. dave and I will likely be running the conversion together, so we can get things done faster. We'll have to see if we both have the time.