lemur

I wonder why these high-speed rail projects are dependent on public funding. Why can't a private company just sell bonds to raise the money for the project?

People who want less people never start with themselves or the people they care about - and if they do they're insane. Then, if you advocate population reduction without counting yourself among those subject to reductive measures, what would differentiate you from any other oppressor of human rights? I understand the scientific appeal of Malthusian thinking, but what I don't get is why people think that non-voluntary population control measures are an ethical use of social power? If someone determines scientifically that your mind is sociopathological and decides it is in the interest of humanity to lobotomize you, for example, that could be just as justifiable in terms of eugenic logic as any population control measure, but you would probably not like people talking about it.

Using science to argue with physical evidence of religious claims is like trying to use religion to prove that science studies the mechanics of divine creation. Surely no one who likes the fact that Adam is said to be buried there will want to hear evidence that he's not; and anyone who is willing to listen to evidence that disproves their belief is doubting their faith. It's sort of like the story of Lot where his wife looks back and turns into salt. People who use faith for its spiritual effects don't want to undermine their faith with proof. This isn't to say they don't seek proof in other situations where it matters, such as testing the temperature of a liquid before drinking it or immersing themselves in it. It's just that if you are into the idea of going to some physical place/temple and feeling like the true remains of Adam are buried there, you're not going to be seeking to undermine your feeling by disproving the veracity of your assumption. On the other hand, if you are looking for a reason to undermine religious claims because you dislike religion for some reason, this would be a good opportunity to re-affirm your conviction that religion is superstitious mythological nonsense; but then don't complain when you can't understand why people get so many positive feelings from practicing religious faith.

How much more complex do you want it to be? Probably there's something like the energy it takes to generate a continuous wave in the tire tread as the pressure from the road pushes against the angular momentum from the rotating wheel. You're looking for something like that?

Thanks for agreeing, but there's the problem that if remaining land is getting more expensive, so would the costs of building materials, labor, and everything else involved. So the basic economic problem you're always stuck with is how to fund one project with the proceeds of another. I suppose if you sell expensive inland land to construction workers, you may be able to hire them to build the Lilypads to pay off their mortgage (assuming banks would be lending money at that time, which they would be if they thought the land was sustainably appreciating). The problem would be that if the Lilypads turned out to be worthless, the construction workers end up with the inland land and you get stuck with the Lilypad. Hopefully they'll be truly sustainable to use as a base for productive economic activities at that point since you won't have any money left to import supplies from inland.

I'm trying to figure out the explicit physics of it, but I'm getting stuck (that could be a friction pun, couldn't it?). Needless to say, the same tire gives less rolling resistance when it's full inflated (hard) than half-flat (soft). I think the softness of the tire adds to the traction and I also though that the larger the contact patch, the more traction. E.g. this is why race cars are fitted with wide tires without tread patterns (racing slicks). I think the lack of tread not only increases the area of the contact patch but also prevents the tire from cooling, which makes it even softer for greater traction. If you could drive on narrow steel wheels without any rubber, I would think the rolling resistance would become similar to a train on rails. Hard, narrow tires, such as those of Model T Fords and bicycles have less rolling resistance than wider tires.

Because the contact patch with the road is smaller.

If something is spinning, it seems logical that the momentum of its spin could be transferred to something else and that work would have to be done to effect the transfer. So if magnetism is caused by electron spin, why can't that angular momentum be transferred to something else? Also, is there a way to calculate the amount of energy in the angular momentum of a magnet, like calculating the amount of energy in a given quantity of mass?

My point is that you can dramatically improve fuel-efficiency by reducing tire-width, but narrower tires have less traction in cornering and stopping, and I think traction is generally inversely proportionate with vehicle weight, except that I think you're right about weight-distribution aiding traction by pushing them harder against the road. Anyway, the point was that putting Model T Ford tires, spare tire tires, or otherwise narrower tires would help fuel efficiency but the trade-off would be traction and thus safety, unless the car would be designed for relatively slow travel.

I forgot about the "what are they feeling" question. That one actually seemed to be a really good one for Feynman, I thought, since isn't he the leading physicist in force-fields? Basically the interviewer was asking about the ontology of a magnetic field. I think the question got addressed well in the "'why' development' but it would have been interesting if he would have ventured some explanation about what a force-field really is, i.e. something like matter or something different than matter-with-mass. I guess he did mention that physical matter, like that of his chair, appears solid due to the same electrical force as the magnet. It would have been interesting, though, if he had said something radical like claiming that a magnetic field is just as much a material object as the chair. I, personally, still wonder how the magnetic force of the electrons can get so far displaced from the atoms yet still retain the same amount of electrostatic repulsion among the atoms of the magnet internally. Likewise, I wonder what the difference is between the mass/gravity-portion of the electron and its charge-portion. I.e. the magnetic field of a bar magnet appear to "balloon" out from the iron atoms but does a certain amount of the electrons' mass "balloon" out of the atoms as well? Is the mass of the electrons even significant enough to be measurable?

I think there are limits to fuel efficiency that come down to vehicle weight and the need to have enough traction to stop from a certain speed in a certain distance. Model T Fords got 25mpg with a relatively inefficient engine compared to modern cars but it weighed @1000lbs, had @5inch wide tires, and had a top speed of @40mph. By comparison, I think the Geo Metro weighs about the same as a Model T Ford but it is smaller, has wider tires, and is meant to cruise at highway speeds but it gets, I think, 40-50mpg. The problem with SUVs and other large vehicles is that they are expected to have power, speed, traction, safety, and size, which doesn't leave much room for efficiency improvements without compromising the other aspects. They should be called "gas-market inelastifiers" since they basically guarantee big gas sales, which can be quite profitable when prices rise. A few years ago, I think the Model T Ford had its 100th birthday and at that time there was talk about Ford creating a modern version of a utilitarian vehicle that was relatively simple, cheap, easy to work on, and got good gas mileage. I don't know if anything came of that, though. Of course, if it would be anything like the modern Beetle, the resemblance with its predecessor would be mostly aesthetic, I think.

Yes, unions are the ultimate guardians of capitalism by ensuring that no unpaid productivity can take place. I don't know why they are viewed as distinct from other businesses, because they are basically just corporations that sell labor instead of other products or services. Because they are attributed a non-business status, people never expect them to be good corporate citizens the way businesses are. It is assumed that they are doing communities a service by fighting for worker rights, but if a business claimed to be doing communities a service by keeping the price of goods and services high, it would be scoffed at. Ultimately, what is the difference between labor and any other commodity?

Have you ever thought about what it takes to economically guarantee people's welfare? For one person's food supply to be guaranteed, someone else's farm labor has to also be guaranteed. The same for housing, health-care, etc. So how can you provide some people the liberty of total economic freedom while taking away the liberty of others to choose not to perform the labor that provides that freedom for the others? What is the purpose of government spending except to influence the broader economy?

Religious language seems to attempt to transcend the ego of the individual by dealing with concepts like God and life after death that view people as being part of connected networks of actions, etc. So, when you say that your life ends when your body dies, you do realize that things that you did while your body still lived continue to have effects on other people, right? Obviously this is not what you interpret when you think about the concept of afterlife, but note that religion views the spirit as transcendent of the body, and one way to understand this is to look at how people's actions extend their "spirit" in committing those actions beyond their body. So, for example, when you have the spirit to build a house, for example, your spirit of building that house can be said to be manifested in the house. Then your body could die but the house is still there. So the deeds you commit while alive can make your "afterlife" a paradise or hell for those that outlive you. Then, if you think about your children as part of yourself, for example, you can view their lives after your death as your own afterlife, which would be eternal assuming that they continue to have children and their children continue to have children and so on. There are many different ways of interpreting various religious ideas, so I don't see what is constructive about taking the narrowest possible interpretation and ridiculing it for being less than immediately literal. It's religious mythology, not science.

I don't think the article was intended to be that specific. I think it was just giving a general explanation for why light passes through glass but reflects off metal. Obviously glass creates a glare in many situations.

That sounds like a definitional issue. Whether you call it progress or not, someone has to come up with an idea for it to be built/implemented. Sometimes it helps to come up with one idea and then develop it into a better idea. Just because you never got to the point of putting money/energy/materials into implementing the stepping-stone idea doesn't mean it wasn't part of the progress to the better idea that succeeded it. I hear people give reasons again innovation like this all the time. It's unconstructive, imo. There's nothing wrong with caution but it shouldn't become an impetus for thought-censorship. More than likely the way the economics would work is that rising land prices would make some people wealth landlords by renting to poor people moving inland. Then you could afford to spend your money living on a luxurious lillypad. Waterfront property is usually more coveted and thus more expensive, including floating property. If you were really good, you could build the land-based community for cheap and fund the homeless people's purchase of their property by employing them in building the Lilypad. You could also solicit the building materials from donors in exchange for shares in the design-revenue and then employ the homeless people to do the actual labor. It all depends on the skills and will of the various people/firms involved. It oversimplifies to just assume that everything has a price and the price is fixed. Most immediately, you're right. And part of the problem with pie-in-the-sky designs like this is that it's a lot easier to plan and create renderings than it is to actually implement building projects. I don't think most people who would design housing solutions like this would even be willing to put in the money and effort it takes to build the simplest possible single-family dwelling to give a homeless family a place to live. But that doesn't mean the idea of floating cities isn't cool or that people shouldn't come up with such ideas, does it?

So is there any difference between the concept of a wave-function as a description of the positive electrostatic field of the nuclear protons and using the same concept to describe the probability of a given particle showing up at a given position in a gravitational field at a given moment? E.g. could you say that any molecule that doesn't achieve escape velocity in a gravity field with no atmosphere (like the moon) would have wave function that predicts where that molecule could be at any given moment based on the amount of energy it receiving and expressing?

My impression is that projected future events like shoreline recession are exploited to stimulate innovation for possible mitigations. Regardless, the point is that these designs are innovative and thus stimulating in terms of engineering progress, no? If shoreline recession is occurring so quickly that such structures have functional value, I don't think economic values are going to remain stable enough for fiscal rationality to persist. If people can throw together such structures as these, why shouldn't they do so? What is wrong with people devoting labor and resources to such? What better use is there for labor and resources? You assume everything is or should be dictated by fiscal rationality, but what other investments would overshadow this? Investing in prospective water-front property by speculating on where the shoreline will stabilize?

But how would that drive engineering progress the way these lilypad structures would?

The volunteers would have to have enough oversight over all the parameters of the project to exclude interference factors like mold from undermining the overall success.

What you're describing sound like it is an equational artifact. When you're talking about an electron's mass, I think you should be focussed on whether you're referring to its momentum/force or its contribution to the mass of the atom. In relation to the nucleus, isn't the electrostatic force more significant than the mass? As for the wave-function extending indefinitely, isn't that just a mathematical probability? My sense is that the wave function is just an empirically-oriented approximation for the electrostatic force that governs how the electron will behave at various positions relative to the protons. The electrostatic field of the protons can also be described as extending infinitely away from the nucleus, I think, but you would probably focus on the part where the electrons most typically appear, right? Electrons "jump around," but the positive electrostatic fields of the protons they jump around in do not fluctuate, do they?

Maybe it's just me, but I don't understand when people claim that religion is a substitute for critical inquiry. To me, religion is an existential philosophy that promotes inquiry into the creation as one method of "going forth and multiplying" God's work by studying and knowing it. When Hawking mentions "knowing the mind of God," this somehow has an ominous tone, but I think it's misplaced because if God exists, surely S/He/It would not have any problem with humans perpetually delving into the logic/nature of the creation. If anything, I would think God would want humans to do this as a method of coming closer to "Him" through deeper understanding of "His" work. As for existential doubt, I don't think that this is a perpetual abyss to fall into. I think faith gives people a safety net that allows them to delve deeper into such an abyss. Ultimately, I don't think such doubt exposes theology as an empty fairy tale but as a very functional fairy tale that is designed quite well to recover the human spirit from despair. Theology is just another cognitive-emotional technology, but it just happens to be a very old one. Probably certain vegetables or domestic livestock were developed as long ago as religion, e.g. cattle/chickens, but no one questions their functionality as a source of food. Modernism sometimes seems to have some fixation on transcending every aspect of the past, but I think it must just ignore every facet of modern culture that is rooted in some old culture because cultures don't just emerge from nothing. Your rhetoric is moving, but I think it's one-sided. What aspect of post-religious ideology has come to replace religion, for example, do you think?

I sort of understand how you're applying the logic of the uncertainty principle here, but isn't the amount of energy in any photon precisely determined by the amount of energy that goes into generating it? And don't photons always get emitted in specific "quanta" according to wavelength? Why would one frequency's energy-quanta be more variable/fuzzy than another's? Are you saying there is more variability in emissions spectra at high frequencies than at lower frequencies? E.g. it would be harder to modulate a gamma wave like a radio wave for communications because the gamma wave would simply defy control more than the radio wave? Does the uncertainty principle even apply to photons or just electrons?

I don't think they brag about it, but I think it is ultimately the intent of fiscal conservatism. After all, what good is it to conserve government spending if popular spending still took off and drove the economy into hyper-inflation?

The issue of distributive fairness in economics obscures the issue that after money is divided, there remains the manner in which the money-spent gets distributed. So, you could redistribute all the money equally among all recipients, but as soon as the recipients spend the money, it gets unequally redistributed according to the pricing/cost structure of existing industries. So the question is whether it is possible or even desirable to restructure industries to collect and distribute revenues in equal portions. I.e. does anyone expect for all the money they spend to be returned to them in full no matter how they choose to spend it? Should each consumer receive the same budget at the beginning of each year and have that amount replenished at the beginning of the next year, without the possibility of saving? If so, would taxation be 100% for unexpended revenues at the end of each year and, if so, how would that affect spending and resource utilization/waste?