Cap'n Refsmmat

If measurements from other frames are "inaccurate", what consequences come from this inaccuracy? Are there implications for predictions made based on these "inaccurate" measurements?

No, SOPA is specifically targeted at websites hosted overseas. For example, SFN is hosted in the UK. If a US copyright owner gets mad at us, they can't easily get us taken offline via US courts, so SOPA provides them a mechanism to have our advertising revenue cut off by Google by request of a copyright owner in five days, with no court order required. John and I wrote letters to our congressmen about this, detailing how it can easily affect sites all over the world: letter.pdf

The absolute value of a complex number [math]z = x + iy[/math] is defined as [math]|z| = \sqrt{x^2 + y^2}[/math], so the absolute value of i is [math]|i| = |0 + 1i| = \sqrt{0 + 1^2} = 1[/math].

Hm. I had checked the gap on my Lorentz spacer with a spark plug tester and gotten something close to what the manual says is optimal for typical buoyant installations. My rocker cams have nitrogenated pretty heavily, so I'm trying to avoid messing with them. Maybe I'll dip them in some trundling fluid and get the gunk off sometime. Is there a way of compensating for the vibrulation another way? Maybe I can rig something up with an anechoic combinator loop or something.

So I've been working on a little project over my winter break: re-aligning the terminal Poisson amplifiers on my VX equipment. I've gotten pretty far -- the T-pulses are easily collimated to a five-gram tolerance -- but I've been having a bit of trouble with sticky girdle springs keeping the Albertson flange from rasterizing. At this rate, I'll never be able to get the phase detractors to properly control the flux through the Poisson amplifiers. I was thinking of using some homeomorphic walnut oil to lubricate the springs, but I was worried that the extra inductance would cause a phase loop and blow out the monad. Should I be worried, or will the type unifier prevent that?

Relativity lets you exactly determine its shape as viewed by every reference frame. The shapes may be different, but that doesn't count as not knowing at all.

Mains electricity is 240 Volts in the UK and 120 in the US. That merely indicates the energy per unit of electrical charge in the electricity; it has nothing to do with how many watts of power the resulting laser consumes. (Although, if you plug a laser made for a 5V power supply into a 500V one, it will put out 100 times the power... very briefly, before something important melts.) Heat is a big problem. Lasers are not particularly efficient, so a lot of the power you put in just goes to heat. You have to cool the system effectively if you want it to run for any significant period of time.

A watt is a Joule of energy per second. So a 1 watt laser delivers 1 Joule of energy to the surface you point it at every second. A 1 watt light bulb uses 1 Joule of energy every second to make light.

Oh, I thought you said that science knew it didn't change.

Could you please point me to an experiment in which the Earth's diameter is varied in different reference frames and found to not change?

True. And in science, you often have to deal with mountains of pre-existing code written in C. Perhaps mooey could specify what sort of programming -- web programming, scientific computing, client apps, whatever -- she's interested in. The OP mentions modelling but doesn't go into much detail. The mention of Perl and PHP5 doesn't really go with scientific computing...

What do COM and CORBA have to do with scientific computing? COM is a Windows system, and most scientific computing runs on Linux; and CORBA doesn't seem related to scientific computing at all. C and C++ are definitely essential for scientific computing, though. Experience with various linear algebra and numerical analysis libraries would be useful. Your best bet is experience, not certificates. Learn to program however you want -- books, videos, online tutorials, whatever -- and then program some stuff. Put it on GitHub, a personal website, or any other place you can find. Contribute some patches to open-source projects you find interesting. A smart method might be to pick something you want to learn about (say, using numerical solutions to differential equations in simulations), find a resource for learning it (book, website), and then pick a small project to work on. As you learn about the subject, implement it in your project. If I were reviewing applicants for a job, I'd want resumes that say "I built X", not "I took course X". Most of the "tips for aspiring programmers" stuff I've read agrees. (The exception is large companies with giant HR departments that just look for lists of qualifications, since they don't know anything about programming.)

YouTube does the video encoding themselves. (Playing video in the HTML5 format requires re-encoding them in a couple formats.) However, they haven't gotten around to redoing every video in their entire database, and certain videos, like those with advertisements, can't be played in the HTML5 form. https://www.youtube.com/html5

I think questionposter is referring to the common way of representing sine and cosine through the unit circle, as in this animation: http://js.2x.io/trig-paperjs.html One could easily concoct other geometric shapes which produce the graphs of trigonometric functions when you animate them in some way.

(I've just merged Daedalus' thread into this one.)

Cut it out, guys. If someone has made an error, correct it, rather than insulting them.

Reason must start from premises. What experimentally-verified premises lead to the falsification of this claim?

The question for this thread is whether philosophy is relevant to science. As a scientist, swansont gets to decide. Have any of those astronomers made measurements while traveling near the speed of light relative to Earth? You should really stop using this example, since it blatantly does not contradict any prediction of relativity.

I think morgsboi is trying to say this: http://www.astrosociety.org/pubs/mercury/31_02/nothing.html

Here's the article Wikipedia cited: http://cdp.sagepub.com/content/13/4/148 It's interesting to note that the full data shows that for children under 18, the heritability is much less than 0.85. So in the years when children are in school -- the years where their performance decides whether they do well and go to college and such -- genetics are a weaker factor.

Riiiiight. Color me convinced. It was blatantly obvious to many people that miasmas and bad airs were responsible for disease a few centuries ago. Har. It was founded by Robert Graham, not Hermann J. Muller. Muller was dead by 1980. Mothers were required to be educated and intelligent. Hence, if intelligence is determined by experiences and education in the early years of life, these mothers would already have intelligent children, regardless of sperm choice. How do you decide what was responsible, the mother's actions or the donor sperm? There's been no successful survey of all the offspring produced from his sperm bank, so you can't even reach the conclusion they have high IQs. ("Except for two families that have discussed their (wonderful) kids publicly, the repository is a blank. No one seems to know what has happened to its children, its parents, its donors.") A good article: http://www.slate.com/articles/life/seed/2001/02/the_genius_babies_and_how_they_grew.html

I'm fairly certain there's quite a bit of research into heritability of intelligence. I've seen some of it. You should look into it, instead of assuming you're right without any supporting evidence.

That's an interesting viewpoint. The point still stands, though. There are numerous other social and political movements that I could use as examples, and it's not just the leaders of those movements (who might be "intelligent" according to your vague definition) who make a difference. I eagerly await your citation of scientific research supporting genetic predetermination of natural intelligence to a high degree. ("High degree" meaning with a specificity sufficient to place a "normal" human, who is somewhere in the 85-115 IQ range, above or below the 100-point line which divides the sterile and the fertile.)

You didn't just advocate sterilizing stupid people. You also advocated aborting any fetus with a genetic diversity. I believe the point is that this takes quite a long time. A human generation is perhaps twenty-five years, and you'd need hundreds or thousands of generations before meaningful diversity develops. Are there not other ways of benefiting the world, beyond intelligence and invention? For example, the leaders of the civil rights movement may not have been college-educated electrical engineers, but they achieved a great deal of good.

Emf is also a commonly used acronym for "electromotive force," which is measured in volts. That's probably what TonyMcC was thinking of. Could you not connect a signal generator to a small amplifier? You don't need terribly much power.