yeah
sin(x) = x - x^3/3! + x^5/5! ...
sin(x)/x = 1 - x^2/3! + x^4/5! ...
if x is zero, then sinc(0) is just 1
just thought that was kind of neat, I'm just now learning this kind of stuff, they didn't focus on the basics of calculus when I was in sixth form (age 16-18), just applications
actually, I'm not sure what you're asking, or even if you're talking to me
[QUOTE=Turnips5;33217792]the only reason he's lucky is because something good happens for that one ticket
there's no similar expectation for being born.
[editline]10th November 2011[/editline]
argh, not to mention the awful use of "basically zero" on that image
nearly as bad as "almost infinite"[/QUOTE]
What do you mean something good happened to the ticket'
I'm currently looking at superconductors and I find it hard to believe that they have a resistance of [I]exactly[/I] zero. Doesn't this mean they have an efficiency of one?
[QUOTE=MountainWatcher;33219638]What do you mean something good happened to the ticket'[/QUOTE]
I mean, something good happens if you get the winning ticket
there's no comparable unique benefit for being you
[editline]10th November 2011[/editline]
I mean, there are general benefits and penalties that apply, but the probabilities associated are much larger chunks (e.g. being born in a western country or in the third world)
And yet, they fit your definition of unique benefit.
I like the graphic. I've always loved thinking about my existence that way. If you drew out a tree diagram of every event in history ever, my existence would be the end of one enormously, unfathomably long tree, with a probably so small that, from a distance that allowed you to see the tree diagram as a whole you probably wouldn't even be able to distinguish my line from the others.
And, sure, you could pull the ol' anthropic principle out of the bag and say, "yeah, but it was equally as likely that it'd be any other of the probability branches and any other one of those hypothetical people could be here today - they'd be as equally amazed by it," but the thing is... it [i]wasn't[/i] any of them. It was me. And that's... insane. There's a probability that you can roll a die 50 times and every time the same number will come up, but that never fucking happens.
[QUOTE=sltungle;33224788]There's a probability that you can roll a die 50 times and every time the same number will come up, but that never fucking happens.[/QUOTE]
Yeah, but being born is more like rolling a die 50 times and getting 50 completely different numbers
it's just as highly improbable as any other combination and yet not in any way special
maybe science has just destroyed my soul and removed my capacity to love and feel
[editline]11th November 2011[/editline]
[url]http://www.naturalnews.com/032359_The_God_Within_documentary.html[/url]
I actually find myself going on natural news more and more when I feel like laughing at stupid shit
[editline]11th November 2011[/editline]
[quote=Natural News]That our world's top physicists such as Stephen Hawking fully embrace the frightening belief that human beings have no consciousness, no minds and no free will is a gigantic warning sign that the human race must not follow "science" blindly to its own self destruction.
"Science" has led us down the path of nuclear catastrophe, the depletion of natural resources, the chemical saturation of our agricultural lands and the ongoing collapse of food pollinators such as honey bees and bats. "Science" has irradiated our bodies, drugged our children, polluted our spaces with electromagnetic cell phone broadcasts, contaminated our water supplies and impoverished our genetic future with the incessant burden of DNA-damaging chemical contamination. "Science" is leading humanity to its own destruction while promising progress. "Science" has become the modern-day justification for the advancement of evil -- the destruction of life on our planet for the sole purpose of furthering a corporate or political agenda (at the expense of protecting life).
Science has become evil, in other words. Through its lack of empathy and its failure to recognize the existence of the mind, it is carrying out agendas that go far beyond mere "crimes against humanity" and border on the demonic. In the name of "science," life is being destroyed across our planet, and yet, astoundingly, those poison pushers who profit from it proclaim that they are the saviors of our world! "People will starve if we don't grow genetically modified crops," they cry. Yet at the same time they refuse to let a farmer in India save his own seeds from one generation to the next. They have refused him the natural right to plant his own crops, year after year, without paying royalties to the monopolistic evil corporation that has used scientific genetic engineering to cause seeds to self-terminate after one generation.
This is a template of absolute evil, carried out in the name of science. And it is being conducted by truly evil human beings who are quite literally psychopathic in that they have no capacity to value the lives or experiences of others. They are the demons who roam our world, destroying everything in their path while attacking those who dare to protect life. These demons must either be transformed or destroyed if we hope to have a sustainable future of life on our planet.[/quote]
this is borderline physically painful to read
ARGHHHH
[B]STUPID PEOPLE[/B]
You can replace 'science' with 'humanity' in large portions of that article.
In fact it makes 10x more sense if you do.
i.e. its our own self-destructive tendencies not science that is causing our downfall
Also since when do we force farmers to use genetically modified seeds, least of all the self-terminating ones? In fact India, the very place the article claims farmers are being forced to use it, has banned the use of self-terminating genetically modified seeds, [URL="http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=32582"]and they did it in 2005.[/URL]
Stupid article...
[QUOTE=Turnips5;33225273]Yeah, but being born is more like rolling a die 50 times and getting 50 completely different numbers
it's just as highly improbable as any other combination and yet not in any way special
maybe science has just destroyed my soul and removed my capacity to love and feel[/QUOTE]
A lot of those die rolls would be equal in terms of how many of each number you got, just not the ordering. If you grouped the probabilities in terms of what you got, and not when you got them, the odds of getting certain outcomes become a lot higher than the extremes of, "all rolls are 1," "all rolls are 2," etc.
[thumb]http://media.riemurasia.net/albumit/mmedia/lp/8kv/hggt/3175/870491345.jpg[/thumb]
it's so beautiful.
[editline]11th November 2011[/editline]
I wish i could read the text though.
Don’t listen to Nikola Tesla alone. We suggest…
“THE NIKOLA TESLA”
1 oz. Tears
1 oz. Nordic Mist
10 oz. Vodka
Combine in shaker and strain into cocktail glass. Serve. Garnish with wedge of watermelon.
Garnish with a tesla coil
All drinks should be garnished with a tesla coil
The Carl Sagan should be garnished with cannabis.
[editline]12th November 2011[/editline]
Billions and billions of cannabis!
What's your guy's opinions on the nemesis theory?
[editline]13th November 2011[/editline]
[url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemesis_%28hypothetical_star%29[/url]
How are you supposed to go about working out the gravitational potential energy of a system knowing just the two masses, and that the distance r between them can considered to be infinite?
[editline]13th November 2011[/editline]
wait, I think I'm asking a meaningless question
[QUOTE=Turnips5;33261243]How are you supposed to go about working out the gravitational potential energy of a system knowing just the two masses, and that the distance r between them can considered to be infinite?
[editline]13th November 2011[/editline]
wait, I think I'm asking a meaningless question[/QUOTE]
Gravitational potential energy would approach 0. I'm sure that's what you figured out when you said it was meaningless?
[QUOTE=sltungle;33265943]Gravitational potential energy would approach 0. I'm sure that's what you figured out when you said it was meaningless?[/QUOTE]
Yeah
I was just looking at the formula for it, U = -GMm/r, and wondering why the fuck it went to zero as r went to infinity, unlike the approximation mgh in Earth's gravitational field
am I right in thinking that if you put r equal to the earth's radius, you could use U = -GMm/r to give you the energy gained by an asteroid of mass m falling from an infinite distance straight towards the Earth as it hits the radius?
I want to know how fast the asteroid will be going when it enters the atmosphere for this modelling question I'm trying to do (I do realise the radius of the Earth is not the same as the radius of the Earth with its atmosphere). I'm fairly certain that's right, now I think about it.
[QUOTE=Turnips5;33266000]Yeah
I was just looking at the formula for it, U = -GMm/r, and wondering why the fuck it went to zero as r went to infinity, unlike the approximation mgh in Earth's gravitational field
am I right in thinking that if you put r equal to the earth's radius, you could use U = -GMm/r to give you the energy gained by an asteroid of mass m falling from an infinite distance straight towards the Earth as it hits the radius?
I want to know how fast the asteroid will be going when it enters the atmosphere for this modelling question I'm trying to do (I do realise the radius of the Earth is not the same as the radius of the Earth with its atmosphere). I'm fairly certain that's right, now I think about it.[/QUOTE]
I know that equations that have to do with potential energy, or voltage, or anything like that only work when the two objects are 'close to one another in relation to their size'. I think one of my lecturers told me a good rule of thumb... something along the lines of if the object is any further than 10 radii away forget about it... of course I'm probably completely misremembering that, though.
I'm not sure if there's any real, well agreed upon distance at which you should stop using formulas to do with potential, but you DO need to stop using them eventually, because you obviously don't have much gravitational potential energy towards Jupiter from Earth, and current isn't going to want to spontaneously flow between a positive charge in the Andromeda galaxy and a negative charge here in the Milky Way.
It all depends on the boundary values of the problem. Generally potential is set to zero at infinity, but it could really be anything.
[editline]14th November 2011[/editline]
Since it's a gradient you can always offset it by a constant and keep the same gravitational field.
[QUOTE=sltungle;33266441]I know that equations that have to do with potential energy, or voltage, or anything like that only work when the two objects are 'close to one another in relation to their size'. I think one of my lecturers told me a good rule of thumb... something along the lines of if the object is any further than 10 radii away forget about it... of course I'm probably completely misremembering that, though.
I'm not sure if there's any real, well agreed upon distance at which you should stop using formulas to do with potential, but you DO need to stop using them eventually, because you obviously don't have much gravitational potential energy towards Jupiter from Earth, and current isn't going to want to spontaneously flow between a positive charge in the Andromeda galaxy and a negative charge here in the Milky Way.[/QUOTE]
I understand, obviously mgh isn't going to work where the distance between the asteroid and the Earth is huge, which is why I'm using U = -GMm/r
That's okay then, as my approximation only needs the asteroid to fall from a place where the force is almost zero to the atmosphere of the planet, so basically its potential is going from zero to U.
If I put the radius of the earth (+ atmosphere) into the equation, then I'm calculating the change in potential energy of the asteroid as it falls from a huge distance to the Earth's atmosphere, so I can equate that decrease in PE to an increase in KE and find out how fast it's going.
that makes sense to me.
Yo people of science, I need some serious advice about the Single Variable Calculus course I'm taking.
So the thing is, I'm like 5 weeks behind the schedule due to a job offer that I accepted.
Now I wondering if it's possible to catch up or basically finish the course in a month by studying by yourself, or should I give up and focus on my work instead?
Where is the class currently in the course?
why does "do a brief plan for the experiment" always get translated as "write five pages" by my brain
[QUOTE=Mr._N;33278766]Where is the class currently in the course?[/QUOTE]
Taylor series and differential equations.
I did "pre-"calculus at high school so I have some basic understanding in differential equations, integrals and so on. Although the taylor series is something completely new.
[QUOTE=Swebonny;33275154]Yo people of science, I need some serious advice about the Single Variable Calculus course I'm taking.
So the thing is, I'm like 5 weeks behind the schedule due to a job offer that I accepted.
Now I wondering if it's possible to catch up or basically finish the course in a month by studying by yourself, or should I give up and focus on my work instead?[/QUOTE]
I taught myself single-variable calculus. It wasn't too hard. I don't see any reason why you couldn't.
[editline]14th November 2011[/editline]
[QUOTE=Swebonny;33279006]Taylor series.[/QUOTE]
What a coincidence, that's where my analysis class is
Anyone know of a good geology mini-docu series?
Watching entropy increase in my lava lamp is neat.
The longer it remains turned on the hotter it gets, the hotter it gets the more energetic the wax gets, and the more energetic the wax gets the more blobs is breaks into. The entire system goes from this ordered, solid chunk of matter, to many, many blobs of energetic liquid floating about, colliding and breaking apart (and, occasionally, joining together again).
When it first turns on there's maybe, at most, 3 blobs of wax floating around at any given time. At this point there's about 10 at any given time!
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