Mr Skeptic

are mice's genes and dna similar to humans?

All species are similar to humans, some more than others. This is why we can apply, say, studies of yeast to humans. Mice are more similar to humans than many animals, since we share a fairly recent common ancestor, the mammals.

From the description it sounds like it would be slightly better than laser propulsion, and would push you away from the object you're pulling toward you.

Preamble: This piece comes with a tenured understanding and perspective that not ever PHD has. One would have to understand the maturing phase of relativistic thinking. Only someone who is old enough to understand for example where both the eastern school of thought arrives, and western schools of thought collides, and how they can be woven together and made to work. Someone like that would be my intended readers.

Well aren't we feeling self-important today. As if most of us educated people wouldn't have heard of the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, or that some attempt to implement the anthropic principle, and the various other interpretations.

http://en.wikipedia....es_the_collapse

Yeah, especially if we then have to worry about edited quotes.

Sceptic: The data I cited regarding the number of American deaths caused by the lack of a public health care system can be read online at A. Wilper, et al, "Health Insurance and Mortality in US Adults," American Journal of Public Health, vol. 99, pp. 2289-2295 (December, 2009). The number of excess deaths caused in America annually by its deliberate political decision not to have a health care system without user fees as most of the rest of the developed world has is 45,000. Distinctions between passive and active causes tend to be purely Jesuitical. The US knows full well that these deaths arise from the lack of a public health care system; it has perfect power to correct that problem; yet it chooses not to. This is just the same as watching an infant drown in shallow water: in a common law jurisdiction you might be able to argue that you don't have a legal duty to rescue strangers, but in most civil law jurisdictions you would be criminally liable for doing nothing.

See how easy it is to make a convincing argument without incorrectly referring to those deaths as murder? Just a hint: anyone who would not accept "murder" as an accurate description of that would be less convinced by your argument due to that, whereas anyone who would accept the word "murder" as an accurate description would likewise not be convinced by your argument because they were already convinced before you made the argument.

No election has been held in Libya since the revolt broke out, so no country has any way of knowing whether the majority support the existing government or not. Tripoli and the Western half of the country which is in Gadaffy's control has the majority of the population, and I doubt he is maintaining control by holding everyone at gunpoint. The reason the West is in revolt and the East is not has a lot to do with tribal loyalties, not concerns over such Western interests as human rights and democracy.

That is a very legitimate point. Having noted some of the death tolls, it makes me wonder just how serious any of them are about what they are doing. I'd say 1 in 6000 is a rather low death rate for a civil war, though I understand it hasn't quite come to that with both sides being somewhat reluctant to shoot at each other. However, I seriously doubt an election would have told you what you seem to imply it would:

Repressive system

Libya is the second most censored country in the Middle East and North Africa, according to the Freedom of the Press Index.^[44]

 

Gaddafi's Revolutionary committees resemble similar systems in communist countries and reportedly 10 to 20 percent of Libyans work in surveillance for these committees, a proportion of informants on par with Saddam Hussein's Iraq or Kim Jong-il's North Korea. The surveillance takes place in government, in factories, and in the education sector.^[45]

 

Engaging in political conversations with foreigners is a crime punishable by three years of prison in most cases. In any case, Gaddafi removed foreign languages from school curriculum. One protester in 2011 described the situation as: "None of us can speak English or French. He kept us ignorant and blindfolded".^[46]

 

Gaddafi has paid for murders of his critics around the world.^[45][47] As of 2004, Libya still provides bounties for critics, including 1 million dollars for Ashur Shamis, a Libyan-British journalist.^[48]

 

The regime has often executed opposition activists publicly and the executions are rebroadcasted on state television channels.^[45][49]

 

Opinion polls in various Western democracies often show that the leader has lost so much popular support that only 20% or 30% of the country approves of him. Would that justify the rest of the world invading that country to depose him because he had lost the support of the majority? The fact is that under international law the general rule in the modern world is that it is states that are recognized as sovereign and legitimate, not particular governments. Should the US have been invaded after Bush stole the 2000 election from Gore? Should other nations have frozen US foreign assets, opened a war crimes commission against the US government, and begun invasion plans against the US when the Natives rebelled against Federal authority at the Battle of Wounded Knee and were suppressed by force? Do the numbers of rebels suppressed by force count? If so, where can we draw the line between enough and too many?

This happens in a lot of countries all the time. What you are missing, is that there is 1) usually no clear leader with greater support, and 2) the people usually accept the current leader for a while and wait for the next scheduled revolution rather than demand their immediate withdrawal.

When nations recognize each other's sovereignty, they recognize the right of each nation to control its own domestic laws, form of choice of political leaders, and to enforce its own domestic criminal code against citizens under its control. If any group of people illegally rise in armed rebellion against the legally constituted authority of the state, of course it is perfectly correct and legal in both domestic law and international law for that state to suppress the uprising, since the state is sovereign. If the state's criminal code authorizes lethal force to be used to put down armed insurrection by civilians (cf. Lincoln's action in the Civil War), then it is no business of other states to intervene. States are not legally entitled to supervise other states' domestic affairs.

But remember that almost all countries consider the government to serve at the pleasure of its people (see: elections). Insurrections are to be put down on behalf of the people, not because the current ruler wants to stay in power against the will of the people.

Reading Genesis, the garden of Eden doesn't seem like a very nice place to me.

Never changing, no challenges, nothing new or stimulating, not allowed to question anything or try anything, never dying. What use is free will if you can't exercise it? Does anyone really think living like that would be pleasant or have any meaning?

This seems worse than the descriptions of hell I've seen.

Discuss.

It seemed like a pleasant enough place. I've heard claims both that Adam had to work a bit to get his food (take care of the garden at least), and also that there was just plentiful food there for the taking and he didn't have to work. Nothing about there being no change, nor no challenges, nor no stimulation, nor not being allowed to question things or try things. Those you just made up to try to make some point. The only suggestion that it might have been sub-par was that Adam was lonely, but then god yanked a rib out of him and made him a girl and then everything was great.

However, I must say that Adam and Eve were seriously lacking in moral character. Specifically, they were completely amoral and wouldn't know good or evil if it bit them in the arse. In fact, the Bible is very clear that people should do good and avoid evil, but Adam and Eve were incapable of doing so. I don't think I'd even qualify them as human -- even animals know about morality. Also, the whole thing about having a lying totalitarian tyrant must have been a big turn-off (compare Genesis 3:22 to what god said earlier about the fruit).

¹⁶ To the woman he said, “I will make your pains in childbearing very severe;

with painful labor you will give birth to children.

Your desire will be for your husband,

and he will rule over you.”

Anesthesia and egalitarianism. In your face, god.

¹⁷ To Adam he said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate fruit from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat from it,’ “Cursed is the ground because of you;

through painful toil you will eat food from it

all the days of your life.

¹⁸ It will produce thorns and thistles for you,

and you will eat the plants of the field.

¹⁹ By the sweat of your brow

you will eat your food

until you return to the ground,

since from it you were taken;

for dust you are

and to dust you will return.”

Tractors and herbicides. In your face, god. Next up, we're making a bit of progress toward a cure for aging.

That's funny. I would think that hell would consist exclusively of social structure with various forms of short-term pleasure followed by agonizing dead-ends. Social structure in hell would be like an infinitely complex bureaucracy with the ability to endless channel you into misery by your own volition as a result of unfavorable choice structuring.

And people who would not submit to an omnipotent god would submit to some random bureaucracy why?

What you mean by "free will" sounds like what I read an imam criticize as "freedom to sin." I think God supposedly replicated "His" own free will to humans so that they would be able to choose for goodness and be free to be creative because they had the ability to identify and pursue goodness in their creativity. Imo, all that it means to resist submitting to God is that people/angels resist seeking out goodness in their creative acts. Instead, they become cynical and lose faith in goodness as being good and thus decide to become destructive instead of constructive. I believe I have deciphered a logic to why pride is considered sinful, but it's kind of a detour from this post.

Isn't god described as being incapable of sin? This of course is why some people want to hold him as a moral standard, but if he were capable of sin they'd have to admit a moral standard beyond god and they cannot accept that idea. Yet if god is incapable of choosing to sin, does he really have free will?

Yeah, I don't have any plans to obsess over force and distance as I evolve through this review, that's for sure. It's extremely confusing and I'm a little disappointed that I can't grasp it more immediately. At this point, if I can just "see" potential difference and understand the basics at the particle level, then I can move on and feel fairly comfortable about it.

It might help if for the water pipe analogy you consider the difference in potential energy rather than in pressure. For example with water pipes you could use a high pressure to pump a higher volume at a lower pressure (like a transformer), and then you realize that what you should be keeping track of is potential energy and not the force or pressure.

Ah, there's another bit of confusion for me. When I'm thinking charge carriers, I'm thinking electrons. When one mentions ions, I'm actually thinking of a charged atom containing charge carriers. Since only electrons are moving in a given electric current, I wouldn't have thought of considering the whole of the atom as the charge carrier.

Whole atoms can and do move around, for example in an ionic solution, which is also how batteries and electrolysis work. In a metal, charge moves as a sea of electrons, like water in a ginormously huge pipe. In a vacuum, the electrons can get emitted by a filament and then move around through space as free particles. In air, charge moves as a plasma with atoms getting stripped of their electrons. In semiconductors the material can be doped to have free electrons or missing electrons (aka "holes") and I'm not too sure of the details but charge flows very much better from the direction of free electrons to the area of lacking electrons. In the gap between the two plates of a capacitor, the flow of electricity doesn't involve the movement of charge carriers past the gap at all, but rather the current is a change in the electric field. In a Van der Graff generator, there are charges being carried along on macroscopic strips of metal (though it also involves more standard electrical flow), and I think that is similar to how the currents powering earth's magnetic field work. I think that if you make an electric field strong enough you'll get a flow of new particle/antiparticle pairs in opposite directions. Anyhow, I hope that clears it up for you.

What evidence do you have that any of the things you say are possible, are possible?

Just to make things interesting, has anyone heard of Resource Curse? It seems lots of oil-rich countries like Libya suffer from that.

In contrast, a survey a few years ago showed that the US murders 40,000 of its own citizens a year by refusing to institute a system of public healthcare, since this is the number of additional deaths which occur in the US each year as a result of sick people's inability to afford healthcare costs.

When you lie you can say anything, even that very horrible made up stories things are true. When it is obvious that you are lying, all that does is weaken your argument. Equating perfectly legal apathy to illegal murder is stupid and annoying, and whenever anyone does so I feel the need to slap some sense into them.

Where do you draw the line where the tipping point comes between fawning all over Gaddafy, meeting with him in Tripoli, shaking his hand, smiling next to him for group photos, setting up trade treaties and business deals (as Prime Minister Martin of Canada did just a few years ago) and sending fleets of warships to destroy him and his 'illegitimate' government?

Probably at the point where his people reject him as ruler and request our help to fight off this insurrection (which Gaddafi forces would be once no longer the legitimate government). Note that multiple cities have defected and no longer consider Gaddafi their leader, as have multiple government officials and military leaders. Gaddafi has had to hire foreign mercenaries to suppress the Libyan people. Why your presumption that Gaddafi is still the legitimate leader?

Note that many of the people do not want our military assistance, especially not in the form of troops on the ground. I think it is important as a matter of national pride, and also as an example to future leaders and current leaders elsewhere, that the people throw off their rejected leader on their own when they chose to do so. However, I think the offer to provide military assistance is probably appreciated and perhaps also of significant value.

I don't know which is more colossally stupid, the sudden demand that yesterday's friend and ally step down because some mobs are illegally rebelling against the legitimately constituted authority of the sovereign state of Libya, or the fact that no one seems to notice how ridiculous the demand is in terms of international law!

Why is it ridiculous that a government is considered to derive its right to govern from the consent of the people? And why is it ridiculous for other nations to assist a fellow nation Libya to fight off an insurrection by illegitimate ex-leader Gaddafi?

Hmm, now I think that most, if not all of our definitions (of anything) are just expressions of it in other terms. And since concepts like time, space, matter and energy are so fundamental in nature that expressing them in other terms (defining it) is impossible. But if there are no proper way of telling what they really are, how come there are so much physics revolving these concepts?

Is that any different than how in most systems of geometry points are never defined and yet they are used throughout? (not only are points not defined but they explicitly say they won't bother to define them)

Hmm,

@mr skeptic: I can't help but feel that your definition of space is akin to defining time as....

the second has been defined to be

the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium 133 atom.~ wikipedia

I probably misunderstood~

No, I defined distance in terms of time. This definition is essentially defining time as the stuff measured by using the cesium 133 atom as a clock. On the other hand, Einstein I believe defined time as distance/c by using light-clocks for his time measures. I've previously made a list of things that you will be able to understand if you know what distance is:

http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/26568-stuff-explained/

In case you're wondering, -10 degrees F is a positive temperature.

Our formal definition for distance is the length traveled by light in a given time:

The metre is the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of ¹⁄_{299 792 458} of a second.

This gives us an exact speed of light.

As for time, I think it is basically "the stuff measured by clocks".

Be careful not to confuse force and energy. If you move things that attract each other farther apart, as a general rule the force between them decreases and the potential energy increases. But consider what happens if you drop the objects, so that they fall together. Then, work can be done by allowing them to move closer together, and they get closer together. Thus the potential energy at a distance is the the sum of the energy released when bringing them closer plus the potential energy they have at the nearer distance. Even though the force gets stronger, the potential energy decreases, as the objects move closer together. But again, for a lot of electrical stuff worrying about force and distance will just confuse you and you'd be better off just worrying about the voltage difference. (incidentally, voltage is always a difference, just like potential energy. There is no one absolute voltage, though the voltage difference to a grounded cable comes close.)

Am I correct to at least assume that quantity of charge carriers determines how charged the object creating the field is?

I'd say no. There's no reason you can't have your charge carriers carry two charges each, eg magnesium ions. Better measure your charges in coulombs or in multiples of e. But charge is conserved, so if you take a given amount of charge from an item it will be lacking that much charge.

As for the (maximum) field strength, it depends on the charge density, much like a dense planet will have a stronger surface gravity than a less dense planet (if you prefer, you can think of that as being able to get closer).

I have not checked the Libyan Criminal Code, but I am sure Libya like every nation authorizes the state to use lethal force to suppress an open rebellion by any group of citizens who seek the violent overthrow of the government.

Oh really?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_of_revolution

Nothing has changed about the domestically evil character of the Libyan regime from the time when the Western leaders were wining and dining Gaddhafy and restoring normal diplomatic relations and trade ties with him.

There's a big difference between having a law on the books and actually using it.

I wonder if they're abusing the idea that "all press is good press"? The controversy will ensure this issue gets revived often, until it gets proved one way or the other.

I've long considered affirmative action for black people to be somewhat justified due to historical considerations -- despite it being racism. However, it recently occurred to me that historical considerations, at least financial ones, could be accounted for far more accurately by considering historical records of a person's ancestors. One could automatically do a bunch of calculations based on a person's ancestors income tax returns, for example, to calculate a specific person's historical financial disadvantage. The same could be done with the neighborhoods lived in, to account for nasty effects of gang culture or whatever. Doing it this way would have the disadvantage of being more complicated, but the advantage of being based on actual reality instead of racism.

As for a whites-only scholarship, I'd find it distasteful but certainly fair given that we do allow racial discrimination for scholarships.

If I had been one of the children in that case, I would have infinitely preferred being exposed to the unnerving image of my parents having sex rather than to have been brought up ignorant.

Doubtful. You wouldn't know what you were missing out on. That is, of course, the nasty thing about ignorance -- that you don't know about it. In fact, ignorance would probably make you feel more confident about the fullness of your knowledge:

http://www.ncbi.nlm....pubmed/10626367

Unskilled and unaware of it: how difficulties in recognizing one's own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments.

 

People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains. The authors suggest that this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it. Across 4 studies, the authors found that participants scoring in the bottom quartile on tests of humor, grammar, and logic grossly overestimated their test performance and ability. Although their test scores put them in the 12th percentile, they estimated themselves to be in the 62nd. Several analyses linked this miscalibration to deficits in metacognitive skill, or the capacity to distinguish accuracy from error. Paradoxically, improving the skills of participants, and thus increasing their metacognitive competence, helped them recognize the limitations of their abilities.

Incidentally, that formula is very important. It is the formula for distance if you know the x and y offsets, or if you prefer for the hypotenuse of a right triangle (which is the best kind of triangle).

Hmm, I like the way you're explaining this but I can't say I'm getting it. The separation creating more energy per unit charge is not untuitive. I need to chew on all this some more...

Would it be intuitive if the charges were replaced with planet-sized masses? The same masses at different distances would have different gravitational potential (greater for larger distance). Or, if you arrange to keep the force nearly constant, if the distance changes? Raise an object 1 m against gravity, and it has some potential energy, raise it 2 m against gravity and it has twice the potential energy, despite being the same mass. When you have charges there's a slight difference because you have to account for whether the charge is positive or negative which changes the direction "up" (against the field) would be. But distance only counts when it's along or against a field, which gets complicated if charges are moving. If you have moving charges you probably want to ignore what portion of the voltage is due to distance and what portion due to field strength, and just think of it as potential energy difference between two places, per unit charge.

In metals, you probably want to consider electron flow like this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drift_velocity#Numerical_example

Ok, much thanks for the replies.

 

It looks like I need to now grasp "energy per unit charge". I've seen that repeated in the book I'm using and I need to understand that much better.

 

What is an example of a small number of charge carriers with a lot of potential energy?

 

Also, am I supposed to assume that only the difference in charges allows for "carriers"? (Surely that must be since energy is only expended until the two "poles" are electrically neutral - or there is no longer a difference in charges). If that's true, then it would seem that two massively charged poles, one positive and one negative, with only one charge carrier difference, then you would have an extremely low voltage because of the ridiculously small difference, even though both poles are heavily charged. Is that a true statement?

Consider if you had a giant capacitor as big as your car, and one as small as your finger. If you put the same amount of charge difference in each, the potential difference will be much smaller in the larger capacitor since the charges aren't as "crammed together". Or consider if you had a set of negative charges and a set of positive charges, one cm from each other or ten cm from each other. The ones with the larger separation have more energy per unit charge, and in fact you could get energy by moving them together from the 10 cm point to the 1 cm point.

More generally, integrate the force as you move a charge against an electric field and you get the energy that charge can release when it is allowed to return. A stronger electric field over a longer distance will give you more energy per unit charge.

So, how do charge carriers get this potential energy in order to have that large V? I'm probably asking the same question again, but it does sound different to me.

Move charges against the electric field, and you increase the potential energy. If you move a significant number of charges against the field you also make the field stronger, and so increase the energy per unit charge (voltage) as well.

---

In particle physics, it is convenient to measure energy as electron-volts, the amount of energy you get by dropping an electron across 1 volt differential. Joules too relate to electricity, E = Volts * Coulombs, And watts (Joule/s) too can be related to electricity:

• In terms of electromagnetism, one watt is the rate at which work is done when one ampere (A) of current flows through an electrical potential difference of one volt (V).

Two additional unit conversions for watt can be found using the above equation and Ohm's Law.Where ohm (Ω) is the SI derived unit of electrical resistance.

So, any luck getting your car out?

Let's take the first part, nobody around. What if there is an approaching vehicle 400 mtres away? 300? 200? 100? Where are you going to draw the line?

OK, most of my cycling through red lights takes place in the city. What if there is a car 100 m away? Then, at 30 mph it will take over 7 seconds to reach the intersection. Maybe he's crazy and going at 60 mph? It'll still take 3.7 seconds, plenty enough time to cross the street even going at 10 mph. But I wouldn't do this in a 60 mph zone.

Why on a bike? Why can't a car or truck do the same? Why would rain or shine make a difference?

A bike is more maneuverable and has far greater visibility (and hearing too, but you can't trust that). The bike is smaller too. Safety-wise, on a bike you're not endangering the lives of other people, at least not compared to how much you're endangering your own life. This helps encourage responsible behavior.

As for rain, it makes cyclists uncomfortable and less maneuverable and lowers visibility all around. But it is likely to encourage any biker who likes waiting at intersections for a light to turn on an empty street question why they're doing so.

Oh, and I think similar things go for pedestrians. I think pedestrians are supposed to only cross at intersections, and possibly wait for the light to turn besides. I also largely ignore this one, and in fact quite frequently following those rules increases the danger involved (since sometimes cars turn at intersections). Oh, and for extra fun, if you're walking your bike that makes you a pedestrian. Are you allowed to get off your bike and walk it across the street where a pedestrian would be allowed to do so but a vehicle would not?

5. all of reality is a dream or something alike

Consciousness is how we manufacture our own reality. Not everything that we see happening actually does (or did), but we reconstruct things into a sensible narrative to fill in any gaps in what we know.

As for what we are, I'd say it would be best described as a combination of information and processing power. We are built from a biological body but there is no reason I can see why we couldn't trade for a silicon one. We're not just information because otherwise we'd be frozen in time.