My guess is that in order for the two bodies of water (the main body and each droplet) to coalesce, their molecules have to agree on a resonating frequency. When there is no other interference, the droplets take on the frequency of the larger body almost immediately. Since the main body is resonating at a frequency above normal, the droplets can't "catch up", and so bounce and wobble along, trying to achieve equilibrium with the larger body, and failing.

Just a guess.

They establish a natural equilibrium with their environment, but you humans do not.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'silo, collapses, freaky, weird, balance, equilibrium' to 'silo, collapse, weird, balance, equilibrium, demolition' - edited by xxovercastxx

Tags for this video have been changed from 'silo, collapses, freaky, weird' to 'silo, collapses, freaky, weird, balance, equilibrium' - edited by calvados

For what it's worth ChaosEngine, KnivesOut's comments are pretty frustrating to read. One bad assumption after another, seeing things that are not there.

Anyhow, I also want to know if there are any good arguments for having an even male/female ratio in any profession. Is it possible that the best scientific community consists of an unequal distribution of the sexes? If so, wouldn't forcing an equilibrium be detrimental to scientific progress?

There's no question that social pressures and stereotypes are preventing great female minds from entering scientific professions. Professions should be gender neutral. Unfortunately, campaigns towards this end have no chance against what media teaches our youth every day.

>> ^KnivesOut:

It is... because your imaginary friend said so? Care to extrapolate a bit?>> ^shinyblurry:
Yes it is



I don't believe the Almighty has spoken on the matter, but since it is an arbitrary definition, I will arbitrarily declare that Pluto is indeed a planet. It has three moons, an atmosphere, and 75 years of precedent. I also support the original Draft Resolution 5 for GA-XXVI: Definition of a Planet that was presented at the IAU Planet Definition Committee in August of 2006:

A planet is a celestial body that (a) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, and (b) is in orbit around a star, and is neither a star nor a satellite of a planet.

Pluto qualifies as a planet according to this definition. And if this complicates matter because of bodies like Eris Sedna, Pluto should simply be granted an exemption.

If things are not in HW equilibrium, then NonRandom events are likely to be taking place based on calculated critical values. Observed versus expected if assuming randomness. Good video!

>> ^gorillaman:

Is happiness really a worthy aspiration? Should we be fulfilled?
Given the realities of our world, isn't the ethical and socially conscious attitude one of hatred and perpetual rage?

What, like a kind of emotional self flagellation?


Surely the ethical thing to do is to improve the wellbeing/happiness of those around you. Does hatred or rage at the world, however justified, do anything but poison your best intentions?

my $0.02c

also- from wiki "The Stoic philosopher Epictetus posited that the greatest good was contentment and serenity. Peace of mind, or Apatheia, was of the highest value; self-mastery over one's desires and emotions leads to spiritual peace. The "unconquerable will" is central to this philosophy. The individual's will should be independent and inviolate. Allowing a person to disturb the mental equilibrium is in essence offering yourself in slavery. If a person is free to anger you at will, you have no control over your internal world, and therefore no freedom."

That was absolutely great! He just turned equilibrium in on itself, to be what he thought was fair I am sure! I am sure most people got what he was doing, but it is such a great tactic, it is worth explaining in long form.

So this game theory is based on 2 things:

If you choose steal you can either get everything, or nothing
If you choose split you can either get half , or nothing

In this, it is always the better proposition to steal, the risk is the same with a better pay off. It is of course, the more morally dubious because you (until this guy) need to lie in a believable fashion that you will choose split even though you plan to steal. This is the basis for may different game theory zero sum systems. The genius here is the double tactic. He is actually taking ALL of the risk (afforded him, as he is going to choose split) and only risking half of the reward, but on the reverse notion that he is going to steal when he is actually going to split. He is trying to get the fair outcome by convincing the other person the only fair outcome that could possibly happen is for him to act in the fair way ( split ), because he is planning on scorching the earth. This tactic is much like King Solomon's baby tactic, only the man who really wants the prize money will choose to go along with this plan. The person whom is here for spite will cause them to loose it all, so he placed all his chips that he was a good man, and since he was, the baby, in this case 6 large ones was his. This is an absolutely brilliant way to solve a zero sum gain where you take all the risk of the liars position with only half the reward. Thanks for the share, and sorry for the over share, this was just really exciting to the logic side of maaa brain!

Neither of those descriptions above really describe what happens in terms of heating/cooling.

You put a cold stone in a warmer drink. The cold stone will take energy away from the drink until they have reached the same energy level, or temperature.

Then they'll both warm up based on the air temperature.

Same as ice... it absorbs the energy from the drink, making it colder, until it (now water) has reached an equilibrium with the alcohol.... then it too will just warm up to air temperature over time.

So, yeah, the only difference is that you have diluted alcohol vs non diluted.

@bcglorf, I've skimmed through this conversation, and I think that this is the most succinct expression of your position on global warming:
>> ^bcglorf:

Rapidly cutting CO2 emissions before we have the replacement technology in place would be costly, not just financially but world history shows big financial impacts generally spill over into violent impacts. Battery technology is getting very close to making electric cars that are superior in every way to their gas guzzling brethren. I truly do believe that the enormous CO2 contribution made by burning gasoline is rapidly on it's way out for purely economic rather than environmental reasons. Another reason I don't feel the need for panic.
As I stated above, I am NOT being a skeptic in declaring that H2O dominates the greenhouse effect. It is the uncontested scientific fact.
I am NOT being a skeptic in declaring that H2O's role in climate models and forcing/feedbacks is very poorly understood. It is an uncontested scientific fact, some models even disagree on whether to assign it as a positive or negative feedback.
Think about those two for a good long while before thinking everything Al Gore said should trump peer reviewed science.


I think John Cole still has the perfect description of the conservative/denier shtick on global warming:

You know the drill: global warming isn’t happening, if it is happening then it’s not caused by human behavior, if it is caused by human behavior then we can’t do anything about it, if it is caused by human behavior and we can do something about it, then that something is too expensive, if it is caused by human behavior and we can do something about it that is not too expensive, then that something is not what Democrats are proposing. And Al Gore is fat, he flies too much, look at his electricity bill, and sometimes when he goes somewhere it snows there, which is very ironic.

Now, to your credit, you have executed this script in a more thoughtful, reasoned, honestly skeptical way than most do, but ultimately you're following it to a tee. Hell, you even made a swipe at Al Gore along the way.

I think this comment of criticalthud's is pretty much speaking to why I posted the video in the first place:
>> ^criticalthud:

and I would add:
we have a psychological issue at hand.
the human species thinks it's entitled, and it's OUR planet. We think we're special.
This kind of psychological issue hides reality from us.
We have shown ourselves to be very poor stewards of the planet. How many species have we wiped out? How else have we affected our environment? What sort of poisons have we created, what scale of trash heap? Mindlessly fattening ourselves.
This makes me think it is quite likely that we are the frogs in the slowly boiling water.
So, we can argue about this and that, and whether our governments should act. But in actuality, it is up to each and every one of us to stop being energy and consumer gluttons, feasting during the oil orgy.


Human psychology isn't wired properly for dealing with things like climate change. We have trouble with making connections between our actions in the here and now, and consequences to people elsewhere in space, and in time. We're also weird about our assessment of risk. Some people are deathly afraid of flying, but have no problem driving around in a car, even though driving a car is vastly more likely to result in your death than flying on a plane.

The science isn't certain on exactly what's happening, but then science isn't certain about anything. Everything has a fucking error bar on it. We won't be certain it's gonna kill the human race until the human race dies. We won't know it's not going to be a big problem until it's already stopped...and it's showing no signs of stopping on its own.

Environmentalism at its most basic level is about trying to lessen the impact humanity is having on the natural systems we rely on for the basic necessities of life. It's about not felling forests, not poisoning our water, not blighting our soil, and in this case, it's about trying to get people to stop giving a big fucking shove to the equilibrium of our atmosphere when we don't know exactly how it works (and what we do know suggests doing that could possibly be very bad for us).

The basic disagreement here is about what our default position should be in the absence of certainty. Mine is that we should be humble, and curtail our CO2 emissions rather severely. Yours seems to be that as long as the science isn't yet 100% definite, we should just ignore the problem and just wait until scarcity of coal and oil pushes us off them.

every nation acts in what it perceives to be its own self interest... it's a given

i think it's impossible to give an example of american intervention that has 'turned out well'... well, because it's impossible to say how it would have turned out without said intervention... and history never stops

maybe at some point in the far future, after we've all destroyed ourselves, some alien race will arrive and piece together the entire history of humanity

at that point, perhaps, they'll be able to gauge right and wrong definitively... but i doubt it -- moot point for us anyway

alien #1: "wow, those humans were messed up! why didn't they listen to ron paul?"
alien #2: "well, at least their wiping themselves out did subsequently allow the tadpole-squirrel race to evolve in peace on this planet..."
alien #1: "yeah! grytzlaak the great of the tadpole-squirrel people did go on to bring ultimate equilibrium to the entire universe!"
alien #2: "yup! i love you, dude..."

do competing ideologies cause suffering? absolutely

would a single, global ideology alleviate suffering? maybe, but what a boring world we'd live in

They seem to miss the point that it doesn't matter if god blessed Job more in his latter life, what matters is that a kind and loving god felt the need to prove something to the devil by letting the devil destroy that man's life. Who cares if god was right, it is a jerk thing to do, and not the actions of a god who loves his children.

God wasn't proving anything to Satan, He was acting as a Judge. Satan is like a prosecuting attorney in the court of God. Satan brought Job to trial by laying a false accusation against him, and Job was tested and tried and found innocent.

If that was a human dad who let some people in to destroy his children's lives they would condemn him, it is their dual standards. They let god get away with stuff they would find reprehensible in humans simply because some blokes thousands of years ago picked Jehovah out of a local pantheon and promoted him to the top spot. If they are young Earth creationists, they somehow ignore the part that says the Earth doesn't move and that the heavens move around it.

The problem with this analogy is that you're comparing God to a human being. God isn't like a human dad, he is God. He deals in matters of life and death, matters which extend to every human life. He is the sovereign King and Judge over this world. It is His job to bring judgement, and to decide the course of life. He is the only one who could.

I also see that you're misinterpreting I Chronicles 16:30. It's fairly clear it is saying that nothing is going to move the Earth off its course, not that it doesn't move.

Despite cultures being over 6,000 years old, trees being over 6,000 years old, not to mention stars billions of years away, somehow all that was put in place by God to full the wise and make the believers rely on faith... again a jerk move. It is like the dirty cop who plants evidence against an innocent man, but here it is god so it is okay.

This idea that God plants evidence is a myth, and the people who perpetrate it are the same kind of people who think that Satan rules in hell. No one has a handle on distant starlight; it is a problem with big bang cosmology, check out the "horizon problem". Tree ring dating, much like radiocarbon dating, is predicated on unprovable assumptions, such as a constant rate of growth. The specific trees you are talking about have been proven to grow multiple rings per year in drought conditions and in other circumstances. You say that there are cultures that go beyond 6000 years but its funny that written history only begins around 4000 years ago.

It is also funny that written history begins with advanced civilizations that suddenly spring into existence out of nowhere. You would think if we had been around for 100k years after evolving, there would be 100k years of history, cities, civilizations, etc..but it isn't there. It is much like the cambrian explosion where every major animal body type suddenly sprang into existence into the fossil record. All the major families, orders, classes, and phyla can all be found there, which turns darwinian theory on its head. Which is why they came up with "punctuated equilibrium", which is theory that explains that the reason there is no evidence for transitional forms in the fossil record is because reptiles laid eggs that would sometimes hatch birds. This is also known as the hopeful monster theory.

They ignore the documented evidence of copy errors made in the Bible while it was a written piece, let alone the errors that would have cropped up while it was a verbal tradition. Who cares if the story of the woman at the well doesn't appear in any copies of John, or the commentaries on it, for hundreds of years after the earliest copies of the book, it is there now, which means god wanted it there.

There is greater manuscript witness for the New Testament than any other historical document. The accuracy and integrity of the copies is proven, with over 24000 manuscripts for the NT alone. We can see from the earliest to the latest there is very little discrepency. The same is proven for the OT, when the dead sea scrolls were found. There was virtually no difference in copies with over thousand years between them. In regards to the woman at the well, I have failed to find any controversy about it.

And the hundreds of other biblical texts that were existed when the books of the bible were picked were not discarded for the social/political reasons they appear to have been ignored, but because the books that are there now are the only ones god wanted, and those guys were divinely led to pick just those ones... of course the Catholics or the Protestants have it wrong since their versions don't match. Still, it many cases, save for the King James only crowd, it is okay to use newly found, more reliable texts in modern translations, but still ignore other texts found at the same time.

There isn't any conspiracy. The texts you are referring to were either written by pagans, the gnostics, or were always known to be heretical. Feel free to bring up any examples and I will show you works that have been thoroughly discredited from the outset.

I look at shame during my blind faith period. I would point out all the typical talking points, and get angry at those who challenged what I perceived as the truth. I was never a young earth creationist, but would still point out the stupid things even old earth creationists like pointing out, not caring that those points have been disproved over and over again. I went from Republican to Libertarian and would get mad at the lazy out of work people on welfare and the poor for believing the lies of the liberals and the Democrats, thinking if only they would educate themselves on the truth, they would see the Republicans and Libertarians were their best hope.

It sounds like you were raised in the faith and only believed because of what other people told you. Then, when your faith was challenged by the unbelieving secular world, you fell away because you had no foundation.

Then I did something, I opened my mind. I started watching the sources of information. They said in church and on right wing media that the Constitution doesn't say "separation of church and state" and that comes from a letter by Thomas Jefferson, true enough, but then they said that if you actually read that letter, you'll see that he was talking about keeping the government out of church affairs not the other way around. And I repeated that for years. Then, during my awakening, I actually read the letter in full context, I read the original drafts, and I realized they lied. He clearly was talking about keeping the church out of government. I also read the bible critically for the first time, not just accepting the traditional meaning. I saw Jesus as a man who hung out with the sinners, and cared about the poor and sick, and keeping what belonged to god just to god and what belonged to the government with the government.

Even the most unkind and biased analysis of the founders intentions will be forced to conclude that they intended to found this nation on biblical principles. Do you think our freedoms being based on unalienable rights granted by our Creator are just mere words? Or are they the foundation?

this nation was founded not by religionists, but by christians, not on religion, but on the gospel of Jesus Christ

Patrick Henry

You are correct about one thing. The church is completely apostate, and has strayed far from the teachings of our Lord. You cannot frame Jesus as a mere man, however. He claimed to be God, the judge of the living and the dead, and the Savior of this world.

All things 100% opposite of what the church, the Republicans and Libertarians seemed to be promoting. I noticed how the bible in Genesis call god...well, god, and then in Psalms, the exact same word is suddenly translated as Angels, because it talks about how god lifted us up to be level with him, and that won't do, we are below god and with the angels... and more and more I noticed that while we are not Jesus, we are equal heirs, and equal children, which doesn't take away any of the majesty, but again pointed to deception on the part of the church leadership. I then noticed other biblical contradictions, and started studying the origins of Christianity and how similar it was to much older religions.

Perhaps you missed these passages?:

Romans 8:17

And if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ; if so be that we suffer with him, that we may be also glorified together.

Galatians 4:7 So you are no longer a slave, but a son; and since you are a son, God has made you also an heir.

No, we are not Jesus, but we are co-heirs and sons. Again, there isn't any conspiracy. As far as the translation of Elohim, this has led to many errors. Check out http://www.gci.org/God/Elohim2

How the Israelites, while in captivity in Babylon, would have known about the Babylonian god of the harvest who sacrificed himself and resurrected... and boy this seems to be a reoccurring theme among ancient pre-Christian religions, a god, sometimes mono-theistic, sacrificing himself for mankind...

Sounds like you've seen Zeitgeist, which is filled with actual bald faced, blatant lies. For example, it makes a connection between Jesus and the various sun gods by drawing a parallel between the word "son" and "sun". The problem with this connection is that they are only similiar words in the English langauge, and not in the langauges of the time. The connection between Jesus and the so-called dying and rising gods in paganism has been thoroughly debunked. Watch:



I went to a pagan service with an open mind and had the same deep, spiritual, emotional connection that I had at the most charismatic of Christian churches... and things started clicking, this whole thing... is fake.

It's no wonder that you had the same spiritual experience in charismatic churches as you did at pagan rituals. That's because they're fueled by the same spirit, which is *not* from God:



I read more, became more educated, and realized the deep and purposeful misleading of the faithful, and my switch became complete. Now I get angry at the Republicans and Libertarians and the religious leaders who keep their flocks in ignorance, while making them think they are free thinking people by controlling the information and encouraging a wrong view of the information that is there..

Even if by some miracle I came to have faith in god again, I could never go back to church again. The lies and nonacceptance of potent truth is just too much. They don't even believe what Jesus himself taught, which was love and compassion, the modern day church is the Pharisees that he campaigned against

Friend, what you never realized is how true this verse is:

Revelation 12:9

And the great dragon was thrown down, that ancient serpent, who is called the devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world—he was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him.

Just as 2+2 has an innumerable number of wrong answers, there are uncountable lies and deceptions, half-truths and myths about Jesus Christ. They are in the church and they are outside the church. All you've done is just go to the other extreme but you still have no idea who Jesus really is.

What you've missed is that to know Jesus is God is to know Him personally. It isn't merely believe what the bible says, it is to invite Him into your heart, to mold you, to change you, and to accept His Lordship over your entire life.

You're right about one thing. To be restored to faith in God would be a miracle, because faith is a gift from God. If you want to know the truth, then ask Him. Pray to Jesus, invite Him into your life, and ask Him to show what the truth really is. Once you know He is everything that He claimed to be, the rest will sort itself out.

>> ^RFlagg:believe what Jesus himself taught, which was love and compassion, the modern day church is the Pharisees that he campaigned against.
</preaching to the choir time

Hey, it's equilibrium!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CeHrq_Fs1vk

>> ^marbles:

>> ^crotchflame:
BUT this came at the cost of a more serious threat of deflation and bank runs, which you can easily argue is much worse.

That's a false argument. You can't have deflation without first having inflation. And your argument is well we have to suffer inflation otherwise we might suffer deflation. That's illogical. Deflation is mostly good for us and bad for banks. Deflation would mean lower food and commodity prices. When a bubble pops, it's essentially canceling out that bubble's expansion of the monetary base. The realized inflation in prices is caught in an imbalance. If left to a natural correction, prices would fall and reach an equilibrium. But the government and central bank usually step in with a monetary solution to "stabilize" the economy. This is just horseshit excuse to keep the inflation from the bubble and pass on the cost to the tax payers.


Netrunner's already pointed this out, but this is special pleading. You say that prices go up and down in the market with a fixed currency, but that's not inflation because inflation is expansion of the money supply. You're saying that inflation only happens under a fiat system, therefore a fiat system is the only way we can have inflation. It's not very interesting. Inflation can only be measured as an aggregate of general prices, like the billion prices project. If all the prices are going up, that's inflation; down, that's deflation. Arguing which came first is a chicken and egg question.

The rest of what you say doesn't address the link I gave to why deflation is worse.