Everything posted by MigL
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What does Putin hope to gain?
That's right. On this site we like to comply with requests.
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Calling all Philosophers - A question about cause and effect.
It's a 10 l reservoir 😃 ! But yes, I see what you mean.
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What does Putin hope to gain?
Ignoring D Trump for now ... What V Putin wants is to save face and retain power. He knows he has lost this war, but cannot quit as he will be humiliated, lose all credibility as a 'strongman', and 'replaced'. He is constrained to keep going, no matter how much he ruins the country, or the attrition of equipment and personnel. As for China and Taiwan. Although D Trump, and Republicans, are driving the US towards isolationism, China knows that any attack on Taiwan will bring some response from the US due to dependence on electronic fabrication. Since they don't know the scale of the American response, their only hope for success is eliminating the American threat in the area. That means pre-emptive strikes on American assets on Japanese and Philippine air bases which have little, if any, hardened aircraft shelters, and bring Japan, US, and the Philippines into the war. To cover the landing invasion, China will need to blanket Taiwan with missile attacks thereby destroying Taiwan's semiconductor manufacturing capabilities. TSMC is not a world leader in semiconductor design, but can produce them at design scales surpassing any other manufacturer in the world. It will eventually bog down to a logistical nightmare, even if China manages to establish a beach head on Taiwan, as they will not be able to re-supply them. So they will either bog down into a war of attrition, continue with the missile barrage rendering Taiwan useless to them, or evolve to a nuclear exchange. I don't think China welcomes any of those possibilities, but they are very good at playing the long game, and will simply wait until D Trump and Republicans finish destroying America, as they are their main opposition.
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Calling all Philosophers - A question about cause and effect.
Well, ... yes. Feedback is self correcting, and require only some limited knowledge of how the system will evolve. Feedforward only works if you have considerable 'a priori' knowledge of how the system will evolve, so corrections can automatically be made as needed throughout its evolution. And this method seems kind of useless to me. If you know enough about the system to predict the corrections that will need to be made so as to restrict deviations and divergences while the system evolves, could you not build the 'corrections' into the initial conditions and eliminate the need for feedforward controls ? For example ... Say I'm filling a 10 l reservoir with an inlet flow of 2 l/min and an outlet flow of 1 l/min. and want to prevent overflowing. After a period of time, the reservoir will be close to overflowing, so a 'feedforward' control will open the outlet to 3 l/min to bring the reservoir down to an acceptable level before resuming the original rate. This assumes I can calculate when the feedforward controls need to be active to prevent overfilling ( easy calculation ). But knowing all this, could I just as easily set the initial conditions such that the inlet and outlet flows are equal to prevent overflowing ?
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Defining Terms
Some of the previous discussion concerns the unalterability of some fundamental constants It is interesting to note that the one-way speed of light has never been measured, as a matter of fact, it cannot be measured due to causality considerations. We can only ever measure the round-trip speed of light from a reflection. And although we have many other ways to conclude the value of c is fixed ( the original being J C Maxwell ), we have no empirical evidence that reflected light behaves the same as incident light. ( only principles such as Cosmological, Equivalence, Invariance of Relativity, etc. ) P.S. This arises from my interest in causality as of late.
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Calling all Philosophers - A question about cause and effect.
I have to admit to being a little puzzled by the term feed-forward. Feed-back samples the output and uses that signal to 'correct' the input so as to modulate the output. Feed-forward uses the input signal to modulate the output directly, but through a separate pathway. The cause and effect can be the same ( beginning and end ), but the causal path will differ.
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Calling all Philosophers - A question about cause and effect.
My apologies; I assumed a discussion about causality.
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The Official JOKES SECTION :)
And William's wife, Kate, has been diagnosed with cancer. I'm really starting to feel sorry for the poor fellow.
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Calling all Philosophers - A question about cause and effect.
Maybe 'causality' is the wrong word to use. We don't make 'measurements' along the time dimension the same way we make measurements along spatial dimensions. We use sequencing as we can't be at the origin and the end of a time segment simultaneously; we compare the sequencing to another sequence we call a clock, and establish ordering of events. This sequencing, or ordering, would need entropic consideration, as the ordered state always precedes, and is much less likely, than the many states of disorder ( entropy as the arrow of time ). If I throw the pages of a thousand page book up in the air, there is only one state where the pages are ordered 1 to 1000, but there are 1000! ( factoral ) states of disorder, so it is virtually impossible to go backwards in the sequence. This also aligns with KJW's statistical consideration of cause and effect. Or maybe I don't know what I'm talking about, and should leave Philosophy to others ...
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Today I Learned
Which led me to learn that the Butterfly Effect ( not the movie ) is a special case of a Jonbar hinge point, where a trivial change in the initial state can be amplified, and diverge, resulting in huge changes in the final/later state, for non-linear, chaotic systems ( just about everything ).
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Calling all Philosophers - A question about cause and effect.
Sure some aspects of GR support this causal structure. But GR also allows for the Alcubierre metric and Closed Timelike Curves, both of which allow for causality violations. IOW, there is no fundamental principle which clearly defines where causality is violated, and why. I do know S Hawking proposed a Chronology Protection Conjecture based on the thinking that causality is an emergent property, but this was essentially a convenient opinion to prevent paradoxial situations arising from his work on Black Holes.
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Defining Terms
With the advent of social media, people seem to think they can pick and choose facts to fit their world view, instead of having facts shape and modify their world view.
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Calling all Philosophers - A question about cause and effect.
I am of the opinion that causality is a fundamental aspect of reality, that hasn't been codified by Physics yet. Quite a few things, such as FtL travel, time travel, etc., are 'allowed' by our models, with the final arbitrer being causality violation, but no specific indication of how the principle of causality actually works in such cases. Feedback and feedforward would then simply be the non-linear properties of causality. Not so much a Philosophy problem ( although I'd like to hear their take on the issue ), but a Physics issue that needs overdue addressing.
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The Official JOKES SECTION :)
I think it's about a joke. But I could be wrong; it all depends on the amount of laughter 😄 .
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A math and science theory I came up with
Your brain, your eyes, your finger tips, your toes, etc. are separated by a distance. Light/information has a finite speed, so it is impossible, by strict definition, for the 'feelings' to be simultaneous. Further, electrical signals through nerve fibers travel much, much slower, making 'simultaneity of existence' a ridiculous idea.
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A math and science theory I came up with
You don't want to discuss math or group theory. You want to play word games. Just what do you mean by 'exist' ? And there is no simultaneity.
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Zohran Mamdani and taxpayer funded grocery stores
Thank you for the education. People should be able to afford, and have available, the food they want. I still don't see how it is profitable to operate a grocery store in downtown Manhattan. I guess any rich people that can afford to live there don't home-cook much.
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The False Flag of Freedom
One might argue that the rules and regulations intended to ensure the maximum equal freedoms for all, are not being followed by certain groups within society, leading to excessive incarceration. One might also argue that those rules and regulations are not being applied fairly and equally amongst the various groups within society, leading to excessive incarceration of certain groups. I suppose it all depends on your frame of reference. ( hey, this is a science forum 😄 )
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A math and science theory I came up with
Even after posting a 'clarification' of your OP, it is still gibberish. This is a science forum; we expect better.
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Zohran Mamdani and taxpayer funded grocery stores
It would be interesting to see where these grocery 'deserts' are. This being New York city, I can imagine Manhattan being considered one such desert. No grocery store is going to be profitable if they need to pay $1 Million per year rent on a 10 or 20 000 ft2 building. And I fail to see why the rest of the citizenry need to subsidize the willingness to live there. If they can afford to live there, they can afford delivery. Also keep in mind the willingness of American governments to succumb to 'ideology'. We've seen some already in previous posts in this thread, with the idea of making only foods that are deemed 'healthy' available.
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The False Flag of Freedom
Freedom should not be dismissed so lightly without considering its nuances. It is exactly the rules and regulations of society that allows for the maximum freedom of all society. What some people see as 'freedom' is their individual ability to do as they wish, while disregarding or subverting the freedoms of others in society. An obvious example are people who oppose mandatory vaccinations as that infringes on their freedom to choose, yet they have no regard for others' freedom to not be infected. Freedom is a right, and just like any other right, it stops once it starts infringing on the rights of others. It is the rules and regulations that ensure where where individual rights stop so as to ensure equal rights for all society. Why not ? I was, for 17 very happy years 🙂 .
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Flood of Spam 12th July 2025: Why Would Someone Do That?
This assumes that the spammer is a persistent person who will give their info/email, wait for a response, then flood us with spam, only to get immediately banned. A bot, or a 'casual' spammer, will not; they just visit random sites and spam at will. I am a user of two other forums, which require an admin to email you back before you are allowed to be a posting member ( or sometimes even see additional content ) Not a holding cache for their posts, Studiot, but rather a wait for permission to 1st post.
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Flood of Spam 12th July 2025: Why Would Someone Do That?
If it's not the cranks, then it's the bots with spam. Can't seem to catch a break lately. I'll keep pushing my solution to the latter problem. New members are not allowed to simply enter their information and start reading/posting; they can read immediately, but have to wait for a Moderator 'go ahead' before they can post. You guys seem to be on top of things, so the new member would get the 'go ahead' within a few hours, or later that day. Not a great burden for a new member, but a big detriment to bots/spammers.
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Is all belief irrational?
I think you need a more strict definition of 'belief'. If, by belief, you mean thought that is not validated by fact, then, by its very definition, that thought is not the result of rational thinking, i.e. irrational.
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Which side will Canada be on in the forthcoming second US Civil War ?
The gloves are off tonight. No more 'Mr. Nice Guy'.