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Reservoir No. 2 - Shade Balls

Fairbs says...

I saw this on the news last night and kept thinking about plastic particles from the balls themselves leeching into the water over time.

AeroMechanical said:

I assume this has all been thought out and tested, but I'm imagining these balls with a thin coating of water adhering to their surfaces, which quickly evaporates as the black balls heat in the sunlight and then turning over to replenish their coating and repeating the process forever possibly making things worse.

Is reality real? Call of Duty May Have the Answer

dannym3141 says...

A computer big enough to accurately calculate the position and properties of every "particle" (and ever decreasing subdivisions of energy and matter) would need to be the size of the universe in the first place. We can't even simulate enough particles in an n-body simulation to match the number of stars in a galaxy, let alone individual molecules, or shall we go further and say atoms, or further and say protons, neutrons and electrons? And that's for ONE galaxy amongst hundreds of billions in the OBSERVABLE universe... using only ONE force - gravity!

The guy has a great point about the Big Bang - a billion billion galaxies worth of matter and energy created in a split second from nothing? Doesn't sound like like the conservation of energy that is so fundamental to physics, right? But that's no reason to throw out hundreds of years of evidence and research which has proven conservation of energy to be true since then. The big bang makes the most sense given what we see today... if you want to propose a better theory, it has to make more sense than the Big Bang theory. Saying that the big bang doesn't make sense is not an appropriate starting point for a new theory, and doesn't lead to "so therefore we're in a simulation."

And it's not good enough to appeal to simplicity like @robdot is doing - basically saying that everything we see could very easily be an illusion for our benefit. That's an argument for God, in my opinion... just like how religious fanatics say "it was God's will for this to happen" we'd instead say "well, that's what the simulation wanted to show us" and call it a day. Furthermore if the manifestations of physical laws out there in the universe are illusions, they are at least consistent illusions that we can calculate and predict. And in that case, what is the difference to our lives whether we call it "reality" or "simulation" or "computer"? It it still what we always knew it was. If something created our universe and allowed it to run like a simulation, it is almost certainly intangible to us and for all intents and purposes meaningless too, because we can't touch, feel, see or understand it on any level.

This is one of the topics i asked of my favourite professor - how can we trust what we see if it could be faked, and what exists beyond our universe? His answer was, if i have to doubt what i see, i might as well not do anything at all, and if you want an answer to the second question talk to a philosopher. This is a philosophical discussion, not a scientific one. The scientific method doesn't care what you call the place you live in nor "who" we think "created" it. You can't hope to understand anything if you don't base it on the evidence you have. You certainly can't form a theory on the basis that all evidence is untrustworthy.

Homeless Guy Knowledge

dannym3141 says...

This kind of attitude is depressing. It's none of your business what someone does in their spare time when no one else is affected by it. There are functioning alcoholics turning up for work pissed, flying planes, driving buses, teaching children. But no, let's go after the guy who sits in his bedroom playing music with a joint. Let's prevent him from having a life, even if he is self medicating a mental illness. It serves him right - if he's got an illness, he shouldn't be using naturally occurring medicine like our ancestors have for thousands upon thousands of years, no! He should be paying hundreds of pounds to a big pharma company for a pill that they invented a few years ago.

The premise behind drugs testing people is based on many things i disagree with:
1) the spectacular failure of the war of drugs - not only has drug use increased in the timeframe, but it has ruined probably millions of lives, needlessly turning ordinary, hard working people into criminals for no good reason other than "we like this plant, but we don't like this plant, and now neither may you"
2) the origin of the war on drugs - which iirc from a well sourced and produced video on here recently was instigated by a vindictive racist who wanted to go criminalise things that were seen as "black people" pastimes
3) the bias of the war on drugs - where drugs associated with the poor and underprivileged are relentlessly pursued to the detriment of functioning happy families across the world, but drugs associated with rich white folk such as those boardroom jockeys who snort coke in the office bathroom, nah, give them an easy time
4) the american prison business - which demands a steady supply of low cost, low maintenance, low rights workers who have no choice in the matter
5) the spreading of disinformation through formal education/popular media, and lack of actual knowledge or experience of drugs - which has led to a generation of people who now firmly believe that the moment you inhale a particle of THC (or "inject 1 marijuana" to the uninitiated), your brain turns into a fried egg, and you immediately begin stealing, cheating, and peddling dangerous items to children

Some of the brightest and best humans were influenced and inspired by drugs. If i wrote a list of people that i had the greatest respect for and who i considered to have made a positive influence on the world, half of them would almost certainly be drugs users; and i mean scientists, writers and artists. Your philosophy is a detriment to society, but thankfully as the decades pass, there are less and less with that philosophy. I loathe being blunt, but there is nothing worse than someone who feels the need to dictate to others what they should and shouldn't do on the basis of what they personally do or don't approve of.

We might get about 90 years on this planet with a bit of luck - why the hell do the minority spend so much time trying to dictate to the majority what they do with that time? And why do the majority let them? What sort of control fetish is it that inclines people to want to do that?

This guy's life has been fucking ruined by your adopted philosophy towards drugs, and you offer to help him as long as he bends to your will? How magnanimous of you to stoop to gutter level to help a mere drug-addled cretin... I think he'd tell you to stick your job, he's overqualified to work under you.

KrazyKat42 said:

I would give this guy a job in a heartbeat. If he could pass a drug test.....................

Volcanic lightning during massive eruption

newtboy says...

Not fully understood by scientists?!? It's static electricity caused by all the particles rubbing together, simple, known for decades. It's the same way regular lightning is created, just with larger, heavier particles closer together in a volcano. What are they talking about?

watch uranium emit radiation

nock says...

Remember that Russian dissident who was killed with polonium? He died from internal alpha particle toxicity because his killers put it in his food. It's actually a good way to poison someone since alpha radiation is easily stopped by small amounts of tissue, thus collateral damage (such as to close personal contacts) is minimal. However internalization of an alpha source can result in severe local tissue damage.

watch uranium emit radiation

nock says...

I would never handle an alpha particle emitter without gloves. Imagine if a small piece came off on your skin and you scratched yourself or rubbed your eye or something.

Would Headlights Work at Light Speed?

robdot says...

Something that exists in our universe, is in our universe.if it's in our universe, then it's not another universe...
everything else you said is just conjecture.

You don't get to change the definition of the universe just to suit your needs or simplify it...I don't need it simplified..

The Universe is commonly defined as the totality of existence. This includes planets, stars, galaxies, the contents of intergalactic space, the smallest subatomic particles, and all matter and energy...

grahamslam said:

I'm not making up the definition, I'm stating my simplified interpretation of it, which by the way, doesn't counter anything you said.

You seem to think for other "universes" to exist, ours must have some physical boundary at the edge that we can observe. And crossing that would be the only way to get into another universe?

I'm simply saying that a place with a totally different set of physical laws, whether that resides in our universe, or we reside in it, can exist. We aren't able to rule that out.

There is also the possibility that another universe with the same physical laws can exist, but again, impossible to get to or observe.

Let's say I have a computer simulation of a world with no boundaries and AI lives in it. Wouldn't I then be able to duplicate that program, and run it on another disconnected computer? How would these two AI's interact with each other? Know about each other? Even if they are exact copies of each other? Yet inside their world, they have no detectable boundaries.

Let's say they figured out there was another "copy", it wouldn't ruin the physics of their world at all. It would just have to introduce to them the concept that something OUTSIDE their universe exists.

First Ever Photograph of Light as Both a Particle and Wave

mentality says...

Uh, Einstein won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1921 for discovering the photoelectic effect, and was not the first to propose the idea of wave-particle duality nature of light...

billpayer (Member Profile)

Stripping the paint off a car with a 1000 watt laser

HugeJerk says...

Right around the 1:25 mark, you can see that there is a vacuum hooked into the unit. You can see it sucking up the smoke and particles.

newtboy said:

That's pretty awesome, but I couldn't help but think that he's vaporizing paint that's known to be cancer causing, and not wearing a respirator. I wonder how dangerous that really is.

Ant-Man – Official Trailer

Mekanikal says...

I thought it should be about Hank Pym too. I never followed Ant-Man but if they are attempting to silver screen a relatively unknown Avenger, shouldn't it be some kind of origin story? Telling how Hank created his particle that allows Ant-Man? This almost seems like it should be an Ant-Man 2. Jumping this far ahead in the story seems to alienate people who don't know anything about this hero.

Pixel

jmd says...

Why would it have to track the dancers to be considered realtime? All my games are real time 3d, they certainly don't track me dancing, or doing much of anything really.

I think the term we want to use is pre-calculated. The particle movements were chosen before hand much like a motion capture, but the rendering is still realtime and thus thing like camera angles can be changed.

I was disappointed because I noticed the lack of true interaction, and when somethings the performers did would effect the particle effects while others wouldn't. That annoyed me even. We have years of tech to monitor actors in real time space, it may have taken a bit more work but this could all have been done with realtime interactions.

The Kalam Cosmological Argument

shveddy says...

Short version: Cosmology, particle physics, theoretical physics, etc... are elucidating fantastically complex aspects of our universe's beginning that we don't and probably won't ever fully understand. Some interpretations may indicate that there is some eternal process giving rise to the complexity we can observe. Therefore it's the Jewish war-diety from 3000 years ago that did it, definitely not Allah or Vishnu - that would just be crazy.

Using Science to Explain Homeopathy ;)

EMPIRE says...

You know what I like the most about these idiots? How, nowadays, to try to come up with some bullshit made-up theory about how homeopathy works throw around words like nano-this and quantum-that, as if the tremendous piece-of-shit quack who invented this entire idiocy 200 years ago, had any idea what nano-particles or quantum physics were.

Using Science to Explain Homeopathy ;)

Drachen_Jager says...

Doesn't this belong on the WTF channel?

I know that's what I was thinking through most of this.

E=MC2 is inaccurate anyhow, and even when the equation is fixed it still doesn't describe all types of particles at all velocities accurately.



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