Crash Course is awesome. Continuing in the tradition of PBS educational programming, Discovery (before it was all about Bounty Hunters etc.), and History (before it was nonsense about aliens), etc.

Nearly 10 minutes of information that was almost entirely new to me, very entertaining, and *felt* like I was only watching for 2-3 minutes. These guys know their craft!

Limeys getting it right.

Thanks for the link and info there. The video didn't present any of the more damning stuff from that -- just said that the company was under criminal investigation. Without that kind of evidence from former employees etc., I was worried about that being a witch hunt... But it certainly looks like there's easily enough basis to start an investigation.

Good to know -- thanks again!

Cells have no "purpose"?

I think that depends on how you define "purpose". I don't think humans (or other animals / organisms) have any particular intrinsic purpose. At least, nothing granted to us by a higher power or outside influence or whatever. We assign purpose to ourselves, and to other fuzzy-boundary collections of things. Things that are "alive" exist to use energy, move, reproduce, etc. Things that are "tools" exist to be a preferable means of accomplishing some task. Etc.

If any of those things have "purpose", certainly cells can have a "purpose" as well. Neurons exist to transfer bio-electric currents. Rod and cone cells in our eyes exist to react to light in general or particular wavelengths of light.

I don't think that we have any physical or intangible soul that serves as the core of our being. We have cells, organs, and organ systems that make up a "meat computer" that provides us with consciousness (a word that we invented, but which describes a fairly concrete idea), and I would argue that consciousness is the closest thing that we have to a "soul".

At some point, if we can create a machine that emulates / replaces the functionality of all those cells, organs, and organ systems that are responsible for consciousness, and copy a snapshot of the states of all of that in an organic being (like us) into a mechanical counterpart, then ... yeah. I think that machine would be the organic being that it was a copy of, in a far more meaningful way than Henrietta's cancer cells are "her".

Somewhat disappointed that he didn't include my personal favorite argument against Pascal's Wager: conflicting faiths.

Instead of a 4-cell chart (2x2 from believe/don't believe and god exists/doesn't), the chart should arguably be a LOT bigger. Plenty of individual branches of Christianity will tell you that *their* specific brand is the only one that will get you into heaven. And that's just relatively minor distinctions -- different sorts of Protestants, or Protestants vs Catholics, etc. We haven't even got to Christianity vs Judaism vs Islam -- all of which fall under the "Abrahamic" umbrella -- but very few Christian faiths think that Jews or Muslims are just as eligible to enter heaven as they are (or vice-versa). From there you can get to things as disparate as Hindu vs Ancient Egyptian vs Zoroastrianism, and everything else.

With that sort of chart, it is just as easy to say that choosing to believe in the *wrong* god could possibly be associated with a more negative outcome than washing your hands of it and going Atheist. Maybe I chose to believe in Ra the Sun God when Zeus ends up being the one true deity. Come to find that Zeus, as it turns out, tolerates people who don't believe in him as long as they don't believe in one of his competitors (like Ra). Therefore I get a lightning bolt to the keyster and a trip to Hades while my nonbeliever buddy gets a ticket to Elysium.

Of course it's all a load of bollocks, but if your argument is a load of bollocks (like Pascal's wager) you don't get to complain when somebody flips it on its head and uses it to argue the exact opposite...

I dunno. I'd say the vast majority of government works adequately, at least at first, but over time that tends to slip as people get more and more apathetic about closely scrutinizing it.

I'd say the video is saying precisely that -- things tend to go to hell, get wasteful, and people get disillusioned with government in general (like bobknight33) when government actions aren't continuously and fairly assessed.

You said that people notice it when government doesn't work. I'd say that Trump's rise, and the division in the Democrat party / support for Bernie Sanders are pretty strong bits of evidence suggesting that a LOT of people are noticing that the government isn't working the way they want it to...

I remember studying algorithm time complexities, where ideally the time complexity of an algorithm is a polynomial function -- like O(n)=n^2, or even O(n)=n^100. Most things that seem really hard at first are exponential, O(n)=2^n or whatever. *IF* somebody gets a brilliant stroke of inspiration, those exponential time complexity algorithms sometimes get tweaked to become logarithmic, like O(n)=log(n).

But almost never does a problem that seems really hard at first (exponential) get some brilliant solution that makes it jump into easy (polynomial).

I think we get so caught up in the abstract concepts and semantics that we tend to overlook what seems like common sense: some problems are simply harder than others, with no "magic bullet" solution. So, I think that P is almost certainly NOT equal to NP. But that quote around the 10 minute mark puts that in a pretty eloquent way that is easy to understand even to the layman -- a trait which is entirely too uncommon in academia.

BUT, I must admit that the few occasions when I studied an algorithm that seemed like it obviously couldn't get any better than exponential time complexity, only to be shown a brilliant outside-the-box solution that brought it down to logarithmic time complexity definitely taught me some humility. So, you never know.

Interesting. Does that account for the limits of the human body in terms of (long-term) exposure to G-forces from all that acceleration?

I'm sure we could use nukes to propel a craft to very high speeds very quickly, but I'd wager that limiting the acceleration to human tolerance would require that to be spread out over a much longer span of time.

A quick google search suggests that nobody really knows exactly how much we could handle in terms of long-term exposure to acceleration G-forces:
https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/6154/maximum-survivable-long-term-g-forces
(apparently the highest load we've ever tested on humans is 1.5G for 7 days -- without doing any math I'd wager we'd need a lot faster acceleration than that for a lot longer span of time to get to even 1/10th of c)

...Ummm... Yes?

In the same way that "every scone produced in England *HAS* to be radioactive" (because scones are made from flour, eggs, and other ingredients that contain C14). Or, I could say "Queen Elizabeth discovered to be radioactive", because she is organic (in the Chemistry sense, meaning "containing carbon"). Or, you know ... EVERYTHING organic is "radioactive"; humans, animals, food, trees, etc. etc.

It seems very click-baity to draw attention to a US law that all alcohol must come from plants / organic (again, Chemistry rather than Hipster definition) sources by claiming that all US-made alcohol "must be radioactive".

Thanks for that, makes me feel better about getting them confused since the terminology is semi-fluid.

Seeing the disassembled Wankel engine in the video should have clued me in that that was NOT what was used in the P-47, which had lots of big cylinders for pistons radiating around a central point, hence the "radial" designation.

It (the video) was very helpful for figuring out how the chambers and path of the parts work in comparison to a piston engine, which is quite interesting even for someone like me who really only understands the rudiments of either design. Live and learn!

Whoops -- I screwed up.

P-47 had a *radial* engine (with pistons), but not a *rotary* engine.

So I guess I was reading too much into the advantages of rotary engine coinciding with the advantages of the P-47.

I'll leave my post above unedited and own my brain-fart, but I hereby own up to being all wet and wrong about it!

***update -- I was wrong about P-47 having a rotary engine, confused *radial* with rotary. Other than noting that mistake here, I'll leave my original comment unedited below (in which I draw erroneous conclusions based on that brain fart):

@eric3579 and @newtboy -

I was also quite interested in the "advantages" question. My grandfather was an armorer on P-47 "Thunderbolt" aircraft in WW2, and I knew that rotary engines were used in those.

Both of your answers tie in to the strengths of P-47s during the war. They were considered very reliable and resistant to damage (sorta like a WW2-era A-10; they could take a beating and make it back home). And of course, in internal combustion powered aircraft, power to weight ratio is even more important than in automobiles.

So, I'm sure that some of those strengths were at least partially due to the use of a radial engine. Not entirely, because other things in the design played a big role also -- like the fact that the P-47 engine was air cooled, so it didn't need a radiator system. As I understand it, comparatively light damage to a liquid-cooled aircraft like a P-51 that happened to damage the cooling system could disable or force them down for repairs... Not to knock the amazing piece of engineering that the Mustang was, but for sheer ability to take a beating and stay in the air, the Thunderbolt may have been the best US fighter in the war.

I agree with most of what he says.

Get rid of the electoral college? YES PLEASE. I was amazed that there was pretty close to zero push to scrap the system after Gore "lost" to Bush. Not even from Democrats. And it (popular vote winner not winning the electoral college) has happened FOUR times! Why wasn't there HUGE blowback in each of those instances, especially in 2000? Hell, why isn't there consistent resistance to this indefensible "system" ALL THE TIME? Instead, people periodically get reminded about it and say "wow, that's pretty fucked up ... meh".

Have primaries settled by actual VOTES instead of weird-ass caucuses / conventions / delegates / "super"delegates, etc.? Undoubtedly better than what goes on now.

Get rid of the senate? Nah. The house is good for being a reasonably-accurate division based on population, which is a good thing. But, there are some issues where regional concerns are better addressed by equal representation per state (farming, manufacturing, business, tourism, etc.). It has the unfortunate side-effect of making a "rogue" senator that does things against what their constituents want worse than in the house, but I think that is a good argument for term limits (possibly *term* limit, as in one and only one) but not scrapping the senate entirely.