Science!! Fucking magnets, how do they work?
- Thread starter Flunklesnarkin_sl
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Guest, it's time once again for the massively important and exciting FoH Asshat Tournament!
Go here and give us your nominations!Who's been the biggest Asshat in the last year? Give us your worst ones!
Alex
Still a Music Elitist
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Ukerric
Bearded Ape
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Probably caught from the same sources; don't remember seeing that one.
(I tend not to follow John Oliver regularly. Most of the late news commenters have gone to shit these days...)
khalid
Unelected Mod
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Interesting article in the Guardian....
Should we wipe mosquitoes off the face of the earth
Interesting article and will definitely use some of its points to troll some PETA friends of mine in the future.
Should we wipe mosquitoes off the face of the earth
Interesting article and will definitely use some of its points to troll some PETA friends of mine in the future.
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I thought this conversation was beyond enlightening. This guy is right up my alley.
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They never used the word Emergence but I sort of feel like that was what they were talking about.
I loved the definition and description of intelligence using the Rubix cube analogy.
He says a rubix cube can be solved by using pure randomness. However, statistically speaking, it might take 10 quintillion years to arrive at the solution. Randomness will get there eventually, of that we can be sure. But it will take a very long time.
Alternatively, someone might apply a formula to the cube. But if that formula is too simple, such as: "Always turn the furthest Rightmost section once downward", then all you would accomplish is to turn that section in a downward motion forever. You would just rotate that once piece in the same direction for all eternity and never arrive at the solution. You have done worse than chance. You have done something axiomatically stupid.
But if you apply a slightly more complex or descriptive set of rules, you can always solve the cube in 20 moves or less. That is an axiomatic act of intelligence.
To describe in detail each move to solve the cube, by describing its current state, to its next state, by describing where all the individual colors of each individual square are and in each turn describing in detail what to do next. Or you could more elegantly just apply a formulae to it and the solution emerges.
It's like the description of the flocks of starlings in Dawkin's book, The Greatest Show on Earth. For those who haven't read it, he talks about flocks of starling birds. They are striking:
He talks about a computer programmer he knew from Oxford who was trying to model this in a simulation. He was struggling. He could model it...kinda. But it was always obvious that his models were imperfect. He was close, but he couldn't finish it. They just didn't look right. When he finally figured it out, he did so by realizing that his approach was wrong. He was trying to model the flock. Instead, he modeled the bird itself, and its behaviors, set up some basic parameters, and then just cloned that one bird. He set those parameters of behavior lose in his simulated world and voila, he had a flock of starlings.
There has got to be an elegant way to describe the flock of a human brain. Time for me to study Turing and von Neumann I guess? I'm too busy with Islam and horticulture this summer. Turing will have to wait. Still, I loved this podcast. Really got me thinking.
I loved the definition and description of intelligence using the Rubix cube analogy.
He says a rubix cube can be solved by using pure randomness. However, statistically speaking, it might take 10 quintillion years to arrive at the solution. Randomness will get there eventually, of that we can be sure. But it will take a very long time.
Alternatively, someone might apply a formula to the cube. But if that formula is too simple, such as: "Always turn the furthest Rightmost section once downward", then all you would accomplish is to turn that section in a downward motion forever. You would just rotate that once piece in the same direction for all eternity and never arrive at the solution. You have done worse than chance. You have done something axiomatically stupid.
But if you apply a slightly more complex or descriptive set of rules, you can always solve the cube in 20 moves or less. That is an axiomatic act of intelligence.
To describe in detail each move to solve the cube, by describing its current state, to its next state, by describing where all the individual colors of each individual square are and in each turn describing in detail what to do next. Or you could more elegantly just apply a formulae to it and the solution emerges.
It's like the description of the flocks of starlings in Dawkin's book, The Greatest Show on Earth. For those who haven't read it, he talks about flocks of starling birds. They are striking:
He talks about a computer programmer he knew from Oxford who was trying to model this in a simulation. He was struggling. He could model it...kinda. But it was always obvious that his models were imperfect. He was close, but he couldn't finish it. They just didn't look right. When he finally figured it out, he did so by realizing that his approach was wrong. He was trying to model the flock. Instead, he modeled the bird itself, and its behaviors, set up some basic parameters, and then just cloned that one bird. He set those parameters of behavior lose in his simulated world and voila, he had a flock of starlings.
There has got to be an elegant way to describe the flock of a human brain. Time for me to study Turing and von Neumann I guess? I'm too busy with Islam and horticulture this summer. Turing will have to wait. Still, I loved this podcast. Really got me thinking.
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Araxen
Golden Baronet of the Realm
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I suck at match but it looks interesting..
Mathematicians finally starting to understand epic ABC proof
Mathematicians finally starting to understand epic ABC proof
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Sentagur
Low and to the left
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Lithose
Buzzfeed Editor
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So that EM drive? Looks like it may have a bit more evidence soon.
The post was deleted, so we'll see. But here is the explanation. (Some posts from the Science thread on it.)
Unruh radiation exerts on an accelerating body. At very small accelerations, Unruh wavelengths become so large they can no longer fit in the observable universe. When this happens, inertia is quantized.
Basically, when something is accelerating (speeding up in one direction or changing direction at the same or higher forward velocity), in it's own frame of reference, it will get warmer.
This change in warmth is (in simplified terms) "blackbody radiation". The longer the wavelength of BBR, the "cooler" the radiation.
What the article seems to be saying is that because the acceleration imparted by the microwave radiation is so immeasurably small, and because the wavelength of heat it would generate would be physically impossible in this universe, instead of that acceleration being expressed as an increase in warmth (BBR), it becomes "quantized" as a change in the object's inertia (the object gains "movement"/"push" in a certain direction).
Ostensibly, doing this at a high frequency would manifest a measurable change in inertia/acceleration.
An ELI5 answer.
Take a cheap calculator and divide 1 by 9, then multiply the answer by 9. A good calculator will give 1 as the answer, but a cheap/old one will give 0.9999999... This is because the calculator has to stop writing the decimal at some point and may not realize that there are more digits after the last 1. Another example is waiting a very large number e.g. 123,456,789 as 1.23456108. This is relatively accurate for most purposes, but 123,456,789/1.23456108 is 1.000006390940902, so a slight error is introduced. If you are running a program that keeps using these slightly rounded numbers over and over again, the errors build up exponentially until they become noticeable. This drive seems to work by sending out radiation with a wavelength longer than the observable universe, which means that what would usually be heat becomes a small bit of momentum. We've apparently found a way exploit a similar effect in the real world.
Essentially the black body radiation from the microwaves has a wavelength so long it can't fit into the universe--so it can't quantize into heat, thus it quantizes into inertia. Makes you wonder about whether we're living in a simulation, no?
The post was deleted, so we'll see. But here is the explanation. (Some posts from the Science thread on it.)
Unruh radiation exerts on an accelerating body. At very small accelerations, Unruh wavelengths become so large they can no longer fit in the observable universe. When this happens, inertia is quantized.
Basically, when something is accelerating (speeding up in one direction or changing direction at the same or higher forward velocity), in it's own frame of reference, it will get warmer.
This change in warmth is (in simplified terms) "blackbody radiation". The longer the wavelength of BBR, the "cooler" the radiation.
What the article seems to be saying is that because the acceleration imparted by the microwave radiation is so immeasurably small, and because the wavelength of heat it would generate would be physically impossible in this universe, instead of that acceleration being expressed as an increase in warmth (BBR), it becomes "quantized" as a change in the object's inertia (the object gains "movement"/"push" in a certain direction).
Ostensibly, doing this at a high frequency would manifest a measurable change in inertia/acceleration.
An ELI5 answer.
Take a cheap calculator and divide 1 by 9, then multiply the answer by 9. A good calculator will give 1 as the answer, but a cheap/old one will give 0.9999999... This is because the calculator has to stop writing the decimal at some point and may not realize that there are more digits after the last 1. Another example is waiting a very large number e.g. 123,456,789 as 1.23456108. This is relatively accurate for most purposes, but 123,456,789/1.23456108 is 1.000006390940902, so a slight error is introduced. If you are running a program that keeps using these slightly rounded numbers over and over again, the errors build up exponentially until they become noticeable. This drive seems to work by sending out radiation with a wavelength longer than the observable universe, which means that what would usually be heat becomes a small bit of momentum. We've apparently found a way exploit a similar effect in the real world.
Essentially the black body radiation from the microwaves has a wavelength so long it can't fit into the universe--so it can't quantize into heat, thus it quantizes into inertia. Makes you wonder about whether we're living in a simulation, no?
Tuco
I got Tuco'd!
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Oh, and their 1 mN / Kw is super small compared to what others reported:
Experimental Results - EM Drive
Experimental Results - EM Drive
Tuco
I got Tuco'd!
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Lithose
Buzzfeed Editor
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Yep, it's dumb. But It's how all energy is created, really. Quantum tunneling is really dumb too, it almost sounds like some bullshit someone programed in so nuclear energy and larger atomic elements could exist while "normal" physics still functioned.
The idea that BBR could translate into intertia at random intervals if its too small for the universe to translate its energy into heat doesn't sound anymore odd to me than elements forming randomly because the exact location of a proton isn't set, and there happened to be a bunch of them really close together. In this case its inertia forming randomly because the wave couldn't fit, and it happened to be in a situation where heat was supposed to be created.
If they are right, yes. Someone else also said what could be happening is where they are dealing with such small numbers they are pushing off the quantum "wash" of things that appear and then disappear. Either way, the engine, if it is real, seems to exploit the weird shit that happens in dimensions we can't measure.
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Cad
scientia potentia est
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Well, once they understand the phenomenon they could presumably build much more efficient drives, hopefully. The first piston engines didn't have much horsepower either.