fishfry

The vampire novels of Anne Rice explore the implications and downsides of eternal youth. In the beginning, the novels portray the condition as romanti...

I know virtually nothing of physics. Watch a lot of Youtube videos, that's all. Would not want to give any other impression.

It seems unlikely, as I and others have already noted. The only attributes a photon has are its wavelength and frequency (which are inversely related,...

I suppose light jiggles the electrons in a sofa in such a way that a sufficiently sensitive detector could tell. But I'm sure it's not possible in pra...

In what fundamental way is the sofa different from a photodetector in this scenario?

After which fact? Its wavelength can be measured by a light-sensitive detector like the one you carry around in your smartphone.

Isn't that just the wavelength or frequency of the photon?

We already do that. Each photon has a particular wavelength. We record the wavelength of a photon arriving at a digital sensor. That's how photography...

cYou're such a child at times. Red herring and all that. I asked you to name a country in which socialism has done better for its people in terms of h...

Well by gosh it's nice to have some agreement around here. :-) You know that's a great point. Even imaginary entities have real properties. What does ...

I believe that I lumped your response in with someone else's, and my remarks were probably aimed more at the other poster than you. So whose system do...

What happens if you lose your marbles?

Literally? You're insane. And what's happened to liberals, one of which I used to be, is a tragedy.

It was a drive-by counterexample to a statement that seemed to stand on its own without the need for the surrounding context. There was nothing pejora...

Of course. The truth value of a proposition always depends on the model. "5 has a multiplicative inverse" is true in the rationals, false in the integ...

Existential quantifiers are completely different. The statement "A purple flying elephant is purple, is an elephant, and flies," is true. It's vacuous...

I take this as a datapoint in favor of my thesis. Guth is a heavy hitter, a physics superstar in both the physics and the popular communities. He's a ...

I glanced at the SEP article on properties. Way above my pay grade, philosophy-wise. I haven't been following this thread, I only glanced at it, notic...

You say that like it's a bad thing. In which body part do you construct your arguments? Sorry couldn't resist that one. Can you remind me of the conte...

Purple flying elephants have properties. They're purple, they're elephants, and they fly. But they don't exist. Even nonexistent things have propertie...

Let me know if you find it, I'd be interested. There is no uniform probability distribution on a countable set. That is, there is no way to assign pro...

Web cookies? They can be used to analyze your clickstream, which gives clues to your mind.

You have a cake with a weight of 1 pound. You divide the cake in two pieces. Now you have two half cakes, each with a weight of 1/2 pound. Global weig...

https://i.postimg.cc/63sBKFKF/Screen-Shot-2021-02-16-at-8-25-26-PM.png

Ok that's fair. But if we are speculating, isn't it fair for me to point out some things that need to be considered? If the universe instantiates actu...

Right. They test the ability to get the answer that the examiner expects. Which of course measures a type of IQ but not creativity. It tests for confo...

Yes, and I'm saying they haven't thought through the consequences of that claim. I've heard the number 10^{500} "types" of universes, which is still a...

There's a polynomial that inputs 1 and outputs 3; inputs 2 and outputs 4; inputs 3 and outputs 7; and so forth. Polynomials are particularly simple ex...

When physicists use the word infinity they must mean something quite different than what mathematicians mean, else they'd immediately have to ask them...

Given any finite sequence whatever, it can be continued with absolutely any next number and fitted to a polynomial. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagr...

It's legal in my jurisdiction too.

As far as I can tell from the responses to my initial remark, the communists ARE posting. I truly wish that people longing for socialism/communism or ...

Sincerity. Once you can fake that, you've got it made.

Is the argument here that Stalin, who killed 40 million and enslaved and impoverished the rest; and Mao, who killed 40 million, were the exemplars of ...

Hasn't capitalism brought more humans out of poverty than any other system? I'm not defending the late-stage capitalism we have today. I mean in the 2...

Is this for me? Yes, as I understand it. Although of course we're talking about 4D spacetime or 10D string theory or whatever. There's more than that ...

Sure, what's a few excess third-world deaths as long as smug liberals can bash capitalism.

A good datapoint is Silicon Valley startup formation. A few smart people get together to start a company to "change the world," aka make life easier f...

Like a cat badgering you till you open a can of cat food for it? Cats most definitely imagine the near future. "Rub my tummy, human." "Feed me, human....

Ok so when you say "infinite," you mean something other than the mathematical definition. What then is your definition of infinite? If you just say "u...

Arghhhh people are confusing multiverse with many-worlds again. Multiverse is actually sensible, based on the fact that the age of the universe is fin...

My picky little mind is already plenty abstract as it is. What does it mean to venture beyond the abstract? You said that existence is infinite. We al...

There's a recent thread on the nature of probability, a notoriously tricky philosophical subject. Perhaps there are some clues there. Also I enjoyed N...

It's commonly accepted that the coin is fair if a long sequence of flips meets the usual tests for statistical randomness, which is your point and sev...

That's only because you're lumping all the "evenly spread" events together. There are far more of them. Whatever outcome you got was incredibly unlike...

Most crime is now committed by the political classes and the elites who support them. Hence it's not labelled or punished as crime. Treason doth never...

You watched the vid from 14:25 and not from 12:30? Conservation of energy is the first point he handles. The universe has whatever energy it has. At e...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTXTPe3wahc Most of the video is so-so, nothing new if you've seen the material before although I did pick up a new in...

Sean Carroll says nobody knows if MWI requires infinitely many worlds or not.

Lottery paradox. It's rational to conclude that you won't win, therefore you shouldn't play. But somebody must win. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lott...