brainpicker

How about we live in a democracy? Or absolute power corrupts absolutely?

I dunno, I mean it seems kind of strange to jump to a conclusion that a dark patch of which you know nothing about should be immediately classified another "universe." I think there is enough that we don't understand about our ownuniverse right now that we shouldn't really classify things that we see as from another "universe" or another from "dimension". I mean, its probably safe to assume that are universe is not uniformly distributed, for all we know this could just be the biggest void patch in our galaxy. Sort of like a galactic desert. Jumping to conclusions is not really following the scientific method.

I think the more interesting question is what is the purpose of human life. Obviously, we are something different then your average life form, i.e. we have free will and concious thought. We aren't simply trying to survive, but are trying to answer questions such as this. Every action we take has some purpose or goal, and therefore doesn't our life have some purpose or goal? Usually when you do something, the motivation is that you are doing either yourself some good or someone else. You learn to make yourself knowledgable, and excersise to stay in good health, and so on. To me it seems the purpose of life is to better yourself and those around you. Maybe this is just following evolution. When you look at humanity as a whole, you can tell we are still evolving. Not so much physically, but mentally. The amount of knowledge mankind has gathered over thousands of years is pretty ridiculus, and its not going to stop anytime soon. I once had a discussion with my professor about the "goal" of evolution, and we decided that at least on a planetary scale, the goal of evolution is to create a species that is capable of leaving its own planet. This is the concept of species preservation. Someday Earth will come to an end, and although its billions of years from now, sometime it will happen. And in if that time we are still stuck here, well its the end for us. So therefore, we have to gain the knowledge necessary to do this, otherwise we are simply a doomed race.

Hey everyone, I'm new to the forums, this my first post. I'm working on building an electric power generator using rotating magnets. I'm trying to work every thing out on paper before I start building, but I'm struggling with the equations. Say I have a three magnets of arbitray strength rotating within a solenoid with arbitrary length and amount of coils. What equations specifically would I use to calculate the amount of electricity this system could produce? I assume the speed at which the magnets are rotating matters, as well as what material the wire in the solenoid is made of, say I'll use copper. I know this has something to do with Faraday's Law, and magnetic field strength, but I can't seem to boil down the equations to something simple enough to work with. Any advice or referrals to informational websites would be greatly appreciated!