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As long as you are mobile under your own power (including the ability to wake yourself up when your body tells you to), it's very unlikely that you'll cause yourself real injury this way.

See this: Ever wake up to a numb, dead arm? Here’s what’s happening. (source: Vox, discussing with Mayo clinic Neurology researcher Dr James Dyck)

Briefly:

- the tingling is nerve compression, not constricted blood flow

- you will spontaneously turn or wake up if your body senses that your nerves have been compressed too long, and before damage is done.

- the tingling pins-and-needles is your nerves coming 'back to life' after compression by spontaneously firing, not an indication of damage.

Finally a science question that fits my knowledge!

TL;DR: I think it wouldn't be terribly useful, and if you wanted to do something like this for a SETI@home setup, you would do better to collect machines that are recently discarded.

Making a cluster out of the old computers like that would be pretty awful. One of the last Pentium 4s made was sucking down 115 Watts. That was for a single core with 2 threads and 2MB of cache. You can fit 2 Ryzen 2400 chips in that power envelope. That gets you 12 cores with 24 threads and 32MB cache. This is a bit of an extreme example, but it's to demonstrate that there is an upper limit to the worth of dumpster diving for hardware. Eventually your power bill will be eye wateringly large for very weak compute. Sucking down those coal powered electrons. Even on a clean power setup, you will be much better served with modern commodity parts to consume less power.

You would also be restricted in what problems could be solved. Usually if you're throwing a problem at a cluster, it's because the problem is too big to solve on a beefy work station with multiple GPUs. To that end, your cluster needs top end networking hardware. Low latency and high bandwidth. The cluster of left over computers will probably have 100mb Ethernet nics. That is on the far opposite end of what you want.

Now, if you're looking make better use of modern hardware to volunteer it for a cluster, check this out. https://boinc.berkeley.edu

Kilimanjaro has a lot of villages on it. I've lived in Tanzania and climbed mount Kilimanjaro, and you pass through them and a ton of farms on the way up. Most of the people who live there are from the Chagga tribe. Here's a link I found in less than a minute of searching:

https://www.climbmountkilimanjaro.com/about-the-mountain/the-chagga/chagga-origins/

And here is a book about how tanzanias socialism experiment devastated them:

https://www.amazon.com/Hunger-Shame-Malnutrition-Poverty-Kilimanjaro-ebook/dp/B00ABLE3P6

It's easier to do with shaped molds. That's how we have square watermelon and Frankenstein's monster pumpkins. If you want more plant based single use plateware and cutlery, I think we'd have more success in developing trees that can grow exponentially faster.

That it doesn't get enough funding as it should.

While people are comfortable paying multi-million salaries to elite athletes and sportsmen, interns have to starve in scholarships and beg for funding.

I’m not implying that those people don’t deserve the money they earned. Just that science is being neglected and bastardized, when it is almost the sole reason for humanity’s current level of prosperity.

If not, ask Wilson and his science machine.

Footnotes

Don’t Starve / Klei Entertainment

The Harvard Classics were compliled for this exact reason. The president of Harvard at the time stated that (paraphrasing) it was possible to get a full liberal arts education from a book shelf five feet wide. Someone challenged him to compiled the books that had to be on there, and he came up with the Harvard Classics. All the books are public domain so you can download them all at once http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Classics

http://www.openculture.com/2014/03/the-harvard-classics-download-all-51-volumes-as-free-ebooks.html

I'm not sure this question is particularly scientific, but this seems like a good answer:

>The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else.

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence

If you've got spare computing resources (old android phone, old laptop, or computer that's always on) - you could run BOINC (volunteer distributed computing with projects focusing on attempting to solve cancer/aids/ebola/malaria, mapping the milkyway, cracking enigma codes).

If you are worried about electricity costs, you can run Gridcoin alongside BOINC to be rewarded for your contributions to individual BOINC projects.

There are distributed computational projects that you can run on any normal computer (if you have permission to keep the CPU near 100% continuously). Check out BOINC (which is an umbrella project for SETI and others) and Folding@home if you're interested. Of course, these don't really involve you doing anything - they're pure computational grunt work, so probably not the sort of thing you had in mind.

Random google result: https://codepen.io/birjolaxew/post/cracking-captchas-with-neural-networks

It really depends on the difficulty of the captcha. While a neural network can beat a shitty captcha with ease, hard captchas like recaptcha sometimes are even difficult for humans to solve. Also, some captchas have migrated to image recognition etc.

Sounds like techbro nonsense. I'm just a layman so I'll refer you to phd comics, which has a great issue on why there will never be a cure for cancer

https://tapas.io/episode/58081

The sun is fine. Jupiter is 1047 times smaller than the sun.

There's no easy way to predict what it would do to the inner solar system. You'd need some sort of elaborate n-body simulation to answer that even approximately.

I was in the same position as you and I ,too, had to learn it all on my own. A great starting point is a series of lectures called, Theory of Evolution: a history of controversy, that should be found in your local library. It does a great job of setting up how the theory came together and the basic evidence for it. Next, I would move onto some of Dawkins' books like, "Climbing Mount Improbable", though I have heard that he has other ones that are better written. After that it comes down to which questions you want answered, and looking for those more specific books. Beware of youtube simply because there is so much hogwash out there that "sounds legitimate" but really isn't.

I would end with saying that Carl Sagan's book, The Demon-Haunted World, Science as a candle in the dark, was really explosive to how I interacted with the world in general and how I could re-view the "science" of my upbringing. This book will also work as a handbook for any searching that you might do online when looking for solid scientific sources.

Good luck and have fun!

Agree about Carl Sagan. This book is especially designed to help people develop a healthy, knowledgeable skepticism. It's also everywhere in PDF form as well, I believe.

You may wish to consider some science podcasts too. Bill Nye has a podcast, as does Neil Degrasse Tyson. Those are good for people less knowledgeable about science. Plus you can listen on the go.

> The problem is neutron embrittlement

http://moltensalt.org.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/references/static/downloads/pdf/ORNL-TM-6002.pdf

Neutron embrittlement and cracking of the Hastelloy-n was resolved by the addition of a small amount of niobium.

>To be cheaper than coal, MSRs have to last longer than 15 years.

I would suggest you read:

Thorium Energy Cheaper Than Coal

https://www.amazon.com/THORIUM-energy-cheaper-than-coal/dp/1478161299

Robert Hargraves teaches energy policy at Dartmouth.

Robert Hargraves graduated from Brown University (PhD Physics 1967)

Yes, drilling mud is a critical component of any large scale drilling operation and it was used in the Kola borehole.

Again though, at those temperatures (365˚F/180˚C) and for a borehole with a fairly small cross sectional area I suspect that drilling mud wouldn't be enough to keep everything sufficiently cool. I also suspect that keeping the mud pressurized would present a whole host of challenges.

If any drilling engineers want to chime in feel free.

https://fold.it/

Fold-it is an interesting one. It's essentially turned the problem of predicting protein structure into a puzzle game. It made some news several years ago when it was successfully used to inform new discoveries about certain HIV proteins. I haven't kept up with it recently, but it looks like it's still going and still has puzzles available.

Like this but without the 'tail'

Demon Haunted World by Carl Sagan.

It really does a good job of explaining why science and critical thinking are important to society and why it is dangerous to reject them or to be ignorant of them.

https://www.amazon.com/Demon-Haunted-World-Science-Candle-Dark/dp/0345409469

Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! by Richard Feynman.

It is a very witty and entertaining collection of Dr. Feynman's personal anecdotes and reminds us that scientists are people just like everyone else.

https://www.amazon.com/Surely-Feynman-Adventures-Curious-Character/dp/0393316041/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1498402289&sr=1-1&keywords=surely+you%27re+joking+mr.+feynman

I'm not sure which ones most people would have heard of, but Zooniverse has a whole bunch of different projects that make use of humans' skill at visually identifying different patterns and types of objects.

I think Foldit is pretty well known, but it's a cool project which seeks to better understand the structure of proteins.

If I'm not mistaken, the size of the database would be at least on the order of tens of millions of terabytes for a global database, to give some perspective.

According to this blog, it took about 200 TB to store the genomes of roughly 2000 participants, which would extrapolate out to hundreds of millions of terabytes to store the world's human genome.

YMMV with clever compression or only looking at certain chromosomes etc.

She was numbed, and there was a partition to prevent her from actually seeing, but I assume she felt the tugging and such. From her perspective, it was just waiting. I'd have to ask to be sure, but I assume that they used epidural anesthesia, similar to how they do during some vaginal births.

[Pause for research]

WebMD's description matches what I've written so far. The woman is likely to feel tugging and pressure, but not pain. They're often conscious, but not always.

Bill Bryson - A Short History of Nearly Everything This is a very entry level book about science. Easy to understand if you don't have strong scientific background. Exists in Audiobook or Paper book

Alex Filippenko - Understanding the Universe: An Introduction to Astronomy, 2nd Edition More serious level.

There might be more books but those two are a very good start. Good lucks

and the book is old enough to be in the public domain! https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2488 the reading level is low, I think it's a kid's book, but I enjoyed it quite a bit as an adult a few years ago.

from what I recall, the whole setup depended on electricity which they generated from salt, somehow. Perhaps they incinerated the salt to boil water, produce steam, spin a turbine. the ship's propellers were driven by electricity if I recall correctly. and yeah, the food was all marine life, plants and animals. the ship had to surface once in a while for oxygen.

A parallel example is an increased risk of allergies in children who live in overly cleaned environments.

I can easily tell the difference between water temperatures that differ by only 1 degree Fahrenheit or so.

This article supports out the idea that people can distinguish some small changes in temperature and also details more about how temperature sensing works. It doesn't talk directly about absolute temperature sensing though. You should try and train yourself and see how accurate you can get.

http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Thermal_touch

It looks like the albedo (fraction of light reflected) of Saturn's rings is in average higher than the moon's (source : https://www.researchgate.net/publication/229353814_A_multilayer_model_for_thermal_infrared_emission_of_Saturn's_rings_II_Albedo_spins_and_vertical_mixing_of_ring_particles_inferred_from_Cassini_CIRS)

So if these rings were (scaled properly) around the Earth, they would probably occult most of other astronomical objects (except for the moon and Sun).

However, unless the rings are perfectly perpendicular to the planet's rotation axis, a part of the globe (the locations where abs(latitude)<angle of the rings would get an instant each day when the rings would disappear (because they are very thin and you would get exactly in their axis once every (sideral) day.

It might depend on what you mean by 'dimensions.' Why, for example, do you describe light (and what exactly do you mean by "light") as 3 dimensional? What does that mean, in this context? It's slightly off topic of 3-dimensional space, but this non-paywalled paper (not great, just relevant) explores a little bit about the arbitrary nature of descriptions and designations of dimensionality. In this case, they delve into the mathematics of why describing space-time in four dimensions is only useful in certain circumstances, and it is often more useful to use only 3 dimensions.

A shorter answer is that &quot;it's all philosophy.&quot;

I recommend trying out BOINC, which is one piece of software that you can install and then participate in any of a whole bunch of projects using that software. BOINC supports about 40 distributed computing projects.

I did the math on this for a novel I wrote.

If you run in the direction of the rotation, your weight will increase. If you run opposite the rate of rotation, your weight will decrease. If you manage to run the same speed as the rotation's tangential speed, you'll become weightless and can fly -- at speed. Just be careful. If you hit something or skim the ground and lose some speed, you'll tumble until you come to rest.

If you kick a ball in the direction of rotation, its arc will be shorter than if it was kicked opposite the direction of rotation.

If you throw something up, or jump up, it/you should land ahead of where you started. The smaller the diameter of the ring, the more pronounced this will be.

The effect from kicking something sideways to the spin depends on how high it goes.

The larger the ring/torus, the faster it has to go to simulate gravity.

There are several ring-diameter gravity simulation calculators on the web. I found them years ago, so don't have the links anymore, but they were fairly easy to find.

It gets really interesting when you put a ring sideways in a gravity field -- for instance, on the moon to create an earth-like gravity for people staying there. The floor has to be sloped to account for the spin plus the natural moon gravity. People running (or riding a bike) down the hall in opposite directions will both be leaning in opposite ways. To a stationary observer it will look like they should both fall over, but they don't.

The novel (All this is in the second part, on Luna)

https://www.amazon.com/MOONGAME-Thomas-Neal-Orland/dp/1946767026/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&amp;keywords=moongame+orland&amp;qid=1611794635&amp;sr=8-1

You should read Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition, a really awesome set of essays in the riveting John McPhee style, but covering slightly wackier topics than McPhee's preferred plate tectonics. The title vignette is about a chicken that was raised in a high-gravity centrifuge.

Good thing you're the type to have a bench power supply - 2amps at 2.5v isn't much current, but that isn't much mass to soak up the heat - and running it 24/7 near nothing but plastic makes me nervous. I know of one (and only one) good reason to build a circuit around a simple coil - generating heat. In my hobbyist opinion, your concerns are very much warranted - I would never run something like that outside a thoroughly fireproof container or when I'm not around. Probably fine doesn't sit well with me when you're hooking it up to the wall unsupervised.

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Some things that may be helpful - first, do the math early. Math's not my forte, but my gut tells me the actual EM radiation is going to be underwhelming. Which is fine, but as u/QuantumTroll said doubling down on methodology like sample size and readings is critical when the random chance is going to make a far bigger difference than the independent variable. Also, the topic is something judges (if your school does the full fair like mine used to) may know off the top of their head - and if the live coil makes any difference they might grill her on those details. Good science is in the methodology anyhow, the topic wins ribbons but the procedure gets the grade (and is the lesson your kiddo will hopefully take away from this all).

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Rather then a compass, if you need to measure the magnetic fields something like this that I just googled would be worth considering. Calibration and accuracy may be a crapshoot depending on the individual phone it's run on, but it'll give you numbers to work with.

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Taking pictures to use as a time lapse throughout the project could be a low-effort but impressive visual.

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Good luck to you both!

It would be plutonium-238, which is the wrong isotope for making bombs. It does contain about 72,000 Curies of radioactivity though. It can't kill me from across the room because it's an alpha emitter but if I inhale and of it then I'm dead.

2.1e-7 Curies of inhaled plutonium per kg of body weight is eventually fatal.

If an enterprising terrorist were to find this, powder it and spread it in a public area then they could cause quite a stir and kill a very large number of people. Death in 2,000 days - might take a while to notice something's wrong if the terrorists are subtle.

I cannot find the source anymore but I recently have seen a graphic in which it was clearly visible that while the number of people who get cancer dramatically increased over the last years, the amount of deaths due to cancer only slightly increased, so the survival rates are definitely getting better.

The average year of cancer depends on which type of cancer and also if there is a genetical preposition. For example the average age of patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) is roughly 70 years, and the average age of chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML) patients is 40 to 50 years old. If you have a (close) family member that developed cancer ~~early~~, say under 30, then your own risk is much higher.

Also your lifestyle influences your risk. The risk of lung cancer for smokers is 2,500 percent higher than it is for people who don't smoke.. The risk also differs between men and women.

Do you remember the trimaran Kevin Costner sails in Waterworld? I always wondered whether the vertical wind turbine would a) be practical and b) add roll stability due to precessional effects. Apparently Walmart sells these for a cool $400. I wonder whether this plus photovoltaics might keep a battery bank charged.

EDIT: This model is way too small, 350W is less than a half a horse which, IMHO, is super messy. Maybe something bigger? You mentioned you won't be using the sails, would the circumstances limit the wind energy you could gather?

Don't forget that everything is capacitively coupled to ground. Though it's a low enough capacitance that generally it doesn't affect things much, it's still there.

From the extended model I saw here, and using a 100pF capacitance between the body and ground, at 50kHz you're running ~5.3mA through the body even with standard grid voltage (170V peak)

This discussion begins with valuing ecosystem services so as to justify project budgets. There have been some efforts to that end ...

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_vis=1&amp;q=value+of+ecosystem+services&amp;hl=en&amp;as_sdt=1,48

The idea is controversial among academic ecologists because some view it as de-emphasizing the intrinsic value of existing ecosystems. Someone inevitably invokes "unintended consequences."

Bird volcalization is a very interesting topic to study in neuroscience. That's why the wikipedia article is very exhaustive.

The question how bird vocalization evolved is very difficult. There were probably evolutions on different scales. First the mechanism which makes it possible to sing songs had to evolve. Then there was an evolution between songs. I guess your question was targeted on the second level. There is literature on this topic, for example here, but I don't know the current status.

I feel like people who had health issues when younger would be more likely to be overly protective of their children leading to the "white room" effect. Which is basically an over active immune response (allergic responses and skin disorders) that results from not being exposed to pathogens(dirt) when younger when your immune response was developing.

Check out this article for a little better explanation:

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/07/16/537075018/dirt-is-good-why-kids-need-exposure-to-germs

Let's look at a related question first: Why not 300,000 km/s? That would have made a meter shorter by ~0.07%. By the time the speed of light was defined to be an exact value that was already an unacceptable deviation. It would have meant people had to adjust their scales, data tables and so on all over the world. Setting it to a specific value in meters per second was acceptable: The measurement uncertainty of the best measurements was about one meter per second, so decimal places would have been arbitrary anyway.

The same pattern can be found elsewhere. The Avogadro constant has been defined to be exactly 6.02214076E23/mol last year, the Planck constant has been defined to be exactly 6.62607015E-34 Js. In both cases the number of digits tells you how good the measurements were at the time the numbers have been made a definition.

Accordingly to this article: http://www.geekwire.com/2016/jon-spaihts-physics-interstellar-travel-passengers-movie/ the gravity was created by the spin of the ship and not by some special gravity generating engine. A quote: “The ship has to rotate about once every 80 seconds to produce 1 G" If that is correct, the pool scene is a stretch, as the gravity would linger until friction stop the spinning of the shipping. The screenwriter seems to acknowledge that the pool scene is not technically correct: “We’re approximately right in terms of the physics of a rotating spaceship. There are some niceties of Coriolus force and the transition from 1 G to zero G that maybe we’re playing a little fast and loose with on the screen, but some of that is just about the possibilities of production.” Anyway, my take is that it would take a while for the ship to stop spinning as friction should be close to null, there is no air resistance on the vacuum, so I can't think any scenario where gravity would fail that quickly.

You can do a lot of things: Buy a bike and stop using your car unless it is absolutely necessary and even then don't use it unless you carpool. Turn your heat down in the winter and turn it off when you leave your apartment. Don't use air conditioning in the summer. Become a vegetarian. Buy LED light bulbs for your apartment. Don't buy bottled water. Don't shower every day and when you do, make them short. For your remaining carbon, you could buy carbon offsets.

The average American's carbon emissions is around 17 metric tons of CO2 per year. Let's assume you are an average American and that you take all the steps above to reduce your carbon offset to zero. In 16 years (the time it will take, at our current usage, to release those 565 gigatons of carbon) you will have saved a total of 16 x 17 = 272 tons of C02. That's about 0.00000005% of 565 gigatons. Now lets assume you have 1500 friends on Facebook and that they are all average Americans and that you convince them to lower their carbon emissions to zero, also. 272 x 1500 = 408,000 tons saved. That's about 0.00007%. Let's say you convince every user of Reddit (43 million to do the same as you. That ends up being about 11.7 gigatons of CO2 or ~.02% of the 565 gigatons. If you did this, we wouldn't end up using up the 565 gigatons until ~~24~~16 years down the road instead of 16 years.

Now, I'm not trying to convince you to do nothing or that saving energy is useless. It isn't. All I'm trying to show you is the scale of the problem and why political action is required for this problem.

Edit: My math was wrong for a couple numbers. I had an extra factor of 16 in there. The new numbers are even worse.

I'm not an expert, but I found on wikipedia that we still have the gene, it is just inactive. I don't know of any medical operation to activate surpressed genes, but if the obesity epidemic goes on for thousands of years maybe it could evolve to become active in some people? I'm thinking this because:

> The function of GULO appears to have been lost several times, and possibly re-acquired, in several lines of passerine birds, where ability to make vitamin C varies from species to species.[7]

Also, if we knew which genes causes the GULO gene to be surpressed, maybe, just maybe genetic engineering could produce humans that make their own vitamin C?

Take it to /r/askscience for a real answer!

I recently did the $99 23andme DNA test for genealogy purposes, but the medical risks stuff is also interesting, and includes data about likely responses to certain medications.

Here's a screenshot of the Drug Response overview results I got.

If you or your children have some sort of rare disease, you could sign up for and get tested by 23andMe(Warning: Commercial entity). They specifically use consumer level surveys to help advance their research. Some of which has been published.

https://www.23andme.com/about/factoids/

http://blog.23andme.com/tag/publications/

Foldit! An ongoing problem in the biology and biochemistry world is the question of "Why do proteins fold into the conformations they do? How can we predict this?"

Foldit allows normal people to solve protein folding conformations in the form of a game, and its simple enough that a kid can do it, but challenging enough to slow an adult down and make them think.

And, as a bonus, you're doing the work and solving problems that a lot of the top scientists could not handle.

Game link: https://fold.it/portal/

A little bit of background information: http://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/gamers-solve-molecular-puzzle-baffled-scientists-f6C10402813

For a good hands-on demo, find a evolution game like boxcar2d, [Breve]() (a screensaver type), or any nuber of alternatives simply seeing it in action gives you a good feel of whats going on even without going into the specifics of genetics.

The current population of the earth is close to 7.3 billion(source 1 and source 2 taken off a google search). Wikipedia says 7 billion in 2012 so 7.3 billion is safe growth assumption for 3 years.

With that in perspective, we know that the living space per person is decreasing rapidly (0.06961 sq. km. per person in 2015 from 0.0888 sq. km. per person in 1995) and as such natural resources are dwindling as fuck. So we're in pretty sticky situation already.

We can never say that suddenly ~2 billion who died in wars and plagues are suddenly alive to bump the population to 9.3 billion.

Therefore the deaths data that you have linked to shows that there were some 'x' deaths and if we combine that factor to the normal(death due to natural causes) death rate of that time to get the real death rate we would see that the death rate would jump and birth:death ratio would be less than 1.

What we can see is the birth and death rates. A theoretical analysis with estimation(lots of it) shows that since the death rates would have not bumped up due to the unnatural death and the birth:death ratio would have remained more or less stable...

Which is a bad thing as the population may have resulted in say, 4-5 billion more than the current populations.

I'm lazy af but if you want the math I'll type it up or if you think anything is wrong just tell me.

Quick modelling in a friend's copy of Universe Sandbox reveals that at least 6 Earth masses would be required, I guess.

L4 & L5 are 60 degrees leading and trailing; 360 degrees / 60 == 6. Basic math ;-\ so it wouldn't be a rosette. didn't find a stable configuration, but I also had never fiddled with that software before.

See http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Quantum_gravity_as_a_low_energy_effective_field_theory

>I just picture little graviton particles pushing other particles twoards each other

That's certainly not how it would work. That's the old "virtual particles are real and pushing stuff around" myth.

As someone who was raised on Christian science, my advice is two things.

Let's start with how to grasp what is or isn't science with the book by Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. This book has changed so many minds it should be listed on the sidebar.

Next, the series that worked for me was "Theory of Evolution: A History of Controversy". I found it for free at my local library so don't think you have to pay for it. It isn't a hard science conversation, but more of a timeline of thought and the evolution of that thought for the past few thousand years. Provides a thought provoking set of lectures. Be careful though because I know it made me angrier and angrier the more I learned and realized how much I had been lied to.

Lastly, I would go to the local library and talk to a librarian. They can understand exactly where you are in your thinking and then prescribe a great book. Dawkins has a wide variety of books for different science levels so give him a go.

Here ya go! Exactly what we're talking about.

You can also buy something similar on Amazon.

You could dedicate software time to something like SETI or some other "crunch numbers for science" program.

(I'm assuming android because you mentioned India.)

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=edu.berkeley.boinc&amp;hl=en

Amateur philosopher here. Id say that what is bad is extremely subjective. Based on its use, it clearly has a wide range of definitions. It can go from "this milk is bad" to "Isis is bad". If youre going for absolute correctness, I could say that bad is the complete and utter absence of good, however I personally feel that this is a bit of a cop out. Now for some philosophy. As far as the ethical definition of bad, theres a couple of big schools of thought that have some answers for the question of "what is bad". The first place Id look is Kant's categorical imperative. He states that one method in determining whether or not something is bad is whether or not it could be "universalized" (or in other words, what if everyone did it). For example, if you run a stop sign, you would ask yourself, what if everyone ran stop signs? Obviously that would result in chaos and mass vehicular deaths, therefore since it could not become universalized, it is not something one should do.

A couple of other people who also answered this question were Mill and Aristotle, who are also worth looking into. They founded the schools of thought known as Utilitarianism and Nicomachean Ethics (respectively). The above idea belongs to Deontology, a school founded by Kant.

3rd year pursuing a philosophy BA, feel free to add or correct anything. Please dont kill me internet ideology nazis.

If the book doesn't have to be strictly about a scientific topic, but could be about a scientist, you should check out Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman by Richard P. Feynman. It's a great autobiography by one of the most important scientists of the 20th century, and it's hilarious. It's a bit longer than 200 pages, but it's a quick read.

My favorites:

• Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software by Charles Petzold

It's about how computers work, starting with logic gates all the way to a GUI. It was a difficult read, but really fun, and I came out feeling like I learned more than I got from a class on digital circuits.

• The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution by Richard Dawkins

Pretty awesome book of various aspects of evolution, how it's researched, and the different branches of taxonomy.

• How the Mind Works by Stephen Pinker

Got me interested in psychology.

• Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

Also a very good book on how we think.

• The Flying Circus of Physics by Walker Jearl

It answers hundreds of questions about physics that can be observed in everyday life, such as traffic jams, frequencies of candle flickers, bouncy balls, snow formation, flamethrowers, handedness of river erosion, optimum shaving speed, and lots of other awesome things.

I saw this at risk of leaning into allegory, but many psychoactive substances have the ability to scramble our information processing systems (psychedelics) or even “turn off” certain areas of the brain (dissociatives). On normal doses this results in sensory distortions and inability to correctly pattern match (both entoptic and eidedic, ie for external sensory input and internal objects like ideas and models) and one of the most common descriptions of the feel of a psychedelic experience is “I felt like a child again”.

But on high doses, these processing systems can become so disrupted they can completely shut down, which can lead to experiences completely unrelatable to every day experience. These peak experiences tend to have the same noetic qualities that I’d imagine a newborn infant (or any other unstructured mind) would have. If you’re interested in how the brain processes information and how perturbations or disruptions of this can affect your experience, I’d highly recommend the short but in-depth book by James Kent, Psychedelic Information Theory.

In my mind the most exciting thing about the burgeoning psychedelic renaissance we see today is the breakthroughs that are coming in the fields of consciousness and subjective experience, like you described. Lots of cool research being done. Robin Carhart-Harris’s “Entropic Brain Hypothesis” is another relevant topic for this thread, although it was very dense and hard for me to understand.

Thats really a nice point. Maybe airbnb experiences https://www.airbnb.com/experiences can solve some psychology problems. I think love and heart will be needed more than brains to solve these problems.

I've been watching this post's parent post go up and down, but nobody who's down-voted seems to be able or willing to cite or argue against it. I think it's because I mentioned white and black people in an evolution topic and some cross-section of people think it must somehow be crypto-racism. It's not. But I imagine people cringing that it must be somehow.

Those twitching over the issue of Human Biodiversity might want to read some articles about, say, Human Biodiversity, and then note that its on-topic for the thread... 8-)

Follow this link for a single Example of Scholarly Discourse on the subject of skin color as a focused specialization.

Hover over a weather station close to you, https://www.wunderground.com/wundermap

Click on the StationID, scroll down to the Solar Radiation graph and you'll see what you're getting. 1000W/m2 is pretty much the max, but 800W seems average for a sunny day

Relational Frame Theory has an answer to this.

TL;DR, it's more like the other way around: thoughts are made out of associations learned through emotional responses to consequences ("operant conditioning").

Longer answer:
We learn how to make the kinds of thoughts that involve words after we've learned to talk out loud. During that process, we also learn to talk silently to ourselves without moving our mouths. This kind of thinking is verbal behavior.

What is verbal behavior? When we're very young, we learn how to mimic the sounds being made by the adults around us. Eventually, we learn that a particular sound and a particular person/place/thing/concept are mutually associated with each other. We also learn ultra-complex networks of proxy associations. This way, we can use mouth-sounds to stimulate learned associations with things that are and aren't immediately present, even imaginary things.

So where do emotions fit in here? I bolded all the times I wrote "learned." Most of this learning that I'm describing is accomplished through natural or social consequences that encourage behaviors that work, and discourage behaviors that don't. These encouragements and discouragements, millions of them involved in learning language, are affect emotional responses.

TL;DR 2: Conditioning happens on the emotional level, language is learned through conditioning, thoughts are silent linguistic behavior. Thoughts are made out of emotionally-learned conditioning.

For a deeper dive into this.

> The time of electrolisysis can be a week, a month a year.

I wouldn't drink that wine after a week. You might throw up, and the bottom of the container will probably be covered in brown gunk from oxidised organic compounds that fell out of solution.

>the bottle is sealed. will h+ and o2 break the bottle due to pressure?

Most likely the pressure will force it's way out through the seals where the wires enter the bottle. You'll need to make holes for the wires to go through, then seal them with silicone sealant or some equivalent, which won't hold as much pressure as an intact bottle. So the bottle won't fail catastrophically, the gas will just start hissing out once the seals fail.

>h+ and o2 burn easily.. Is it dangerous?

Only slightly dangerous, getting more dangerous depending on how much space is in the bottle for the hydrogen/oxygen mix to build up in. If you jostle the bottle and the electrodes spark together above the water line, you could get an explosion. You'll also kill most cheap power supplies doing that, since they don't have short-circuit protection built into them. You need one of these if you want to seriously explore electrolysis without worrying that you'll kill your power supply by accidentally shorting things together.

https://smile.amazon.com/New-World-Mr-Tompkins-Paperback/dp/0521639921 is an amazing way to start visualizing this if you have trouble with the speed of light but eventually you'll start to see you can set c = 1 and go on full physics insanity mode.

Stephen Hawking's "A Brief History of Time" might be of interest to a philosopher. But understand that physics is a very large area of study, and that might be less basic than what you're looking for ... perhaps you can say more about what you're already familiar with and what level you're interested in. Something like https://www.amazon.com/Basic-Physics-Self-Teaching-Teaching-Guides/dp/111962990X/ might be useful to you.

It's obvious that no one in the media that are writing articles about the "science" are intelligent enough to understand the "science".

Read apocalypse Never

https://www.amazon.com/Apocalypse-Never-Environmental-Alarmism-Hurts/dp/0063074761

If you want something more in depth then there is the classic Perturbation Methods by Hinch or the book I own is Introduction to Perturbation Methods by Holmes. Both are more general than just multi scale analysis and a more complete textbook on perturbation methods/asymptotic analysis.

You might wanna check out Paul Davies book: the cosmic blue print It talks about how universe is self organizing and has some sort of built-in intelligence. There was another book I had come across which spoke about non human consciousness. Don't remember that one yet.

Survival means water, food, and shelter, more or less in that order depending how how dangerous conditions are. You can survive three weeks (possibly longer) without food, but you can't survive three days without water.

As with food, your body has enough salt to live for many days without needing more, so if your water is really limited the last thing you want is to taint it by adding seawater. Drink plain water, drink slowly and steadily, rationing as you can, and meanwhile use everything available to collect water to fill up your reserves. Fill every container, and then whatever else you can find that will hold some water, and then keep those out of the sun.

If you have no food and plenty of drinkable water, then at some point I suppose you'll feel the need to drink some sea water to get salt. Someone else mentioned pathogens in sea water but really in a survival situation that's the least of your worries. If you get hungry enough you'll eat anything that looks edible, and spit it out if it tastes bad. That's the kind of conditions humans evolved under, and we're pretty well adapted to stay alive even if we eat really noxious stuff. If you read survival manuals there's a process you can go through to determine if something is edible, first by smell, then rubbing it on your skin, then putting a little on your tongue, then ingesting a small amount, each time waiting long enough for any poisons to take effect.

If this kind of thing piques your interest, then &quot;SAS Survival Handbook&quot; is a classic. For it to be really useful you have to practice everything in there, but some people adopt it as a hobby, going out in the middle of nowhere and trying to survive with just a knife and maybe a few other tools, or with nothing at all.

Also see what local universities are offering. You can sometimes just sit in on some lectures for astro courses. also https://openstax.org/details/books/astronomy-2e provides more an intro to astro

https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Star-Formation-Derek-Ward-Thompson/dp/1107483522 this book also looks more advanced and has a some good reviews

It would help immensely to figure out whether physics is computable, i.e. non-circularly causal. Current understanding has it that any closed timelike path ("time machine") through spacetime will cause all manner of mayhem. Like, "Newtonian physics doesn't work" kinds of mayhem. Not just silliness like breaking the conservation of energy or momentum -- but really insane things, like being unable to predict the direction of a thrown baseball. For an exploration, read Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein's outrageous Legacy, by famous physicist Kip Thorne.

This is my hobby.

If you want to deep-dive into the line between them and the epistemology, I recommend this book . Each chapter is by different authors, some of them better than others (some are dense). I won't dive into the theories and nuance, because there's so many, but if you want to DM me I can send you some screenshots.

For an overview of the science for more practical applications, Do You Believe in Magic by Paul Offit MD is what you want.

Not quite what your asking, but one of the better science oriented show I’ve seen is ReGenesis, about a virologist traveling the world to stop epidemics. https://www.amazon.com/ReGenesis/dp/B0754HX215/ref=nodl_

https://weather.com/news/weather/news/extreme-rainfall-records-united-states

>For the ultimate 1-minute deluge, we head east to the state of Maryland.

>In just 60 seconds, 1.23 inches of rain fell in Unionville, Maryland, on July 4, 1956. If that rainfall rate had continued for an entire hour – it did not – the total would have been 73.80 inches. Not only is this a record United States 1-minute rainfall record; it's also the world record.

That's pretty much a solid sheet of water falling from cloud level.

Yeah, there is a natural cycle of ice ages and interglacial periods, and climate change has fucked it up. https://weather.com/news/climate/news/ice-age-climate-change-earth-glacial-interglacial-period

various species of insects use a worm screw to align both back legs so its jump projects it forward and not sideways

http://tinypic.com/usermedia.php?uo=adkBqYNLlttIztrsvdGCvYh4l5k2TGxc

http://tinypic.com/usermedia.php?uo=adkBqYNLltt6zi1MZemeaIh4l5k2TGxc

The best one I've seen is "The Art of Scientific Investigation" by WIB Beveridge. It's sort of a manual of "tricks and secrets of doing science," from a working scientist.

It's even free online via archive.org.

Something like that already exists, you can donate your CPU cycles to projects like "Folding@Home".

https://foldingathome.org/?lng=en-US

It's not Machine-Learning specifically, but it helps answers the question "what if everybody's computers were hooked up to make a supercomputer?" The answer is, you can solve some neat problems!

https://www.researchgate.net/post/Does_EM_waves_have_mass

Since I'm not a physicist. If something has energy, which is a property of matter it also MUST have mass. Perhaps not resting mass because photons don't exist at rest. If it does not then e=0mc2 which = 0 so there would be no energy but we know that there is energy so it must have mass.

Yeah, this is mostly true, but as a sort of caveat so that people don't get the wrong idea, plenty of hair DOES have, at the end of it, cells from the root. Also, while rare, the shaft of hair can have some DNA.

If you go to a barber shop and try to pull DNA from hair clippings, you're really unlikely to get many cells (I mean, maybe some dead skin cells, not likely to be nucleated anymore). But hair at a crime scene has a better than 0% chance of having some associated DNA from root cells.

Possibly. There's some evidence that people vaccinated for some strains of flu have some degree of resistance to other strains of flu:

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=influenza+vaccine+cross+protection&amp;hl=en&amp;as_sdt=0&amp;as_vis=1&amp;oi=scholart&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=kQSJUfzmF8LD4AORlIHoDA&amp;ved=0CC8QgQMwAA

I'm sure you want to keep the reason for this to yourself which is wise. I would. Just throwing out some ideas:

Usually the ozone layer is cited for stopping UV, not gamma.

Our magnetosphere protects us from cosmic rays. Then I looked up the difference and found this which tells me it is more complicated: https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-difference-between-cosmic-rays-and-gamma-ray-bursts-What-specific-particle-can-we-detect-on-earth-for-each-one

If you aren't set on using gamma I will say that Peter Hamilton, mostly in his Confederation series, cites MASERs being used. Don't know why but he tends to be pretty rational in the choices of such things.

Never mind a normal mug, what it has to compete against is a vacuum mug.

I was just recomended and read this book. It's great and addresses the common misnderstabnding oif psychology as being super soft and pseudoscince. Most people that think they undrestand psychology often go for pseudoscientific soft aspects of it, but this clears a lot of things up.

https://www.amazon.com/Think-Straight-About-Psychology-10th/dp/0205914128

Also, I know that the world of industrial and organizational psychology is working on getting a STEM classification from the US government. I forget all the details but there are two ways to get it certified as STEM. ONe I believe is the dept. of homeland security that uses career classification such as this for visa issuing purposes. In this case, STEM classification is for student visa purposes.

The other institution is one of the larger science groups that slip my mind. Both have slightly different definitions, but certain subdisciplines should meet their criteria. You have to keep in mind that psychology is very heavily statistically driven. It's a very quantitative field. And you are correct that with the brain becoming more and more measurable and important to the field it is going to continue in the direction of a hard science such as biology.

I kind of look at it as, "who cares?" To me, a bigger problem is that science, in general, is being denigrated.

I don't know if this helps, but psychology is the science for learning and teaching about other sciences. That's kind of cool and psychology can help design effective hard science learning programs.

phd comics has a great explanation

https://tapas.io/episode/58081

cancer isn't a specific thing, it's just a description of a series of things going wrong in a real nasty way.

Plug your numbers in here: https://www.omnicalculator.com/physics/orbital-velocity

Initial energy: -2.6497x10^33 J Final energy: -2.6105x10^33 J

So you'll ultimately need to add about 4x10^31 J. Note that the Earth will actually be going slower, even though you'll twice accelerate it forwards (because accelerating on one side of your orbit make the opposite side slower), isn't orbital mechanics fun?

Genes are information encoded in DNA (in the nucleus). This information is stored in sequential patterns of four bases (Adenine, Thymine, Guanine, and Cytosine) which are bonded together in the DNA. These are relatively simple compounds and a total synthesis exists for all of them, as does the ability to bind them together in any desired sequence (though longer sequences necessarily come with more challenge and cost).

In 2008, this was used to create a synthetic genome, which was then implanted in an existing cell.

We cannot create an entire cell from scratch yet, though, as that involves far more than just generating a genome -- all the molecular machinery that makes a cell function is needed as well. But yes, we can, in some circumstances, inject a synthetic genome into an existing cell.

This is the article I've been referencing. Full publication on researchgate. There are legitimate criticisms to twin studies looking for genetic markers of homosexuality though. But they all support that homosexuality is at least partially due to genetic factors.

1. That "fire pit" generates 1200 degrees. Apparently you have no idea what can be done with process heat like that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furnace

The first thing that town is building with their first furnace(s) is(are) a better furnace(s).

> Do you not realize how ridiculous that sounds?

You're the one that said it. I said the colony would be caught up in a generation.

> ...a full, industrialized, internet-connected civilization.

With a population of less than 50,000, working together, possessing the sum total of human knowledge in book form, on a virgin Earth, with a perfect plan. Not even hard.

> Come back when that guy makes even a radio from scratch.

https://www.wikihow.com/Make-a-Crystal-Radio

You may think there's black magic in your radio, but there isn't.

If you have the resources and technology to build a permanent orbital station then have what you need to start a colony on another planet for the most part. It would be easier, safer, more sustainable, and more practical to simply start a colony on mars than build a permanent habitable station in orbit around it.

For one thing such a station would entirely artificial and thus require constant observation and reconfiguration to ensure that habitability, it simply require far too much maintenance and resources to conduct such an environment artificially.

For another thing, the coriolis effect can be inconvenient and even lethally dangerous, causing a significant gravity differential between the head and feet leading to nausea, hypotension, dizziness, difficulty walking and running and headaches among other things depending on the size of the station.

But the the biggest problem for space stations by far would be initial establishment. Whether by mining asteroids or bringing the materials from earth the cost, and time consumption would greatly surpass that of small colony stater vessel that would only need to bring comparatively few tools and machines to create a simple self sustaining colony as opposed to the massive engineering challenge of devolping a functional spome.

On a planet, terraformed domes ranging in size would give access to seasons, abundant ore, gravity, rain, radiation sheilding, and soil of course not all of these are a given but could potentially be provided on a planet in terraformed domes.

Without having to manually produce and maintain a biosphere from scratch people could direct attention elsewhere, like colonial growth rather than sustenance. In short the'd have the potential to be significantly less effort, as well as safer and more permanent.

Also keep in mind humans are physiologically optimized to live on planets not in space stations.

Well now benchmarks have multi-core support so their score scales with that.

Now we may be able to push faster speeds but at the time the push towards multi-core was because we did hit a power/thermal limit.

http://superuser.com/questions/152011/why-multi-core-processors

Two rapidly improving areas are Machine Learning, and SLAM (Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping). Lots of people are working on getting robots to map and interact with a work using high-level commands, and for machines to be able to integrate lot of different data. Self-driving cars are a good example.

Here's an essay I wrote on Marine Robotics and their current limitations.

You might enjoy Finding Darwin's God

You might enjoy reading <Finding Darwin's God>(https://www.amazon.com/Finding-Darwins-God-Scientists-Evolution/dp/0061233501/ref=sr_1_1?crid=ZU2JPENHKA02&amp;keywords=finding+darwins+god&amp;qid=1640930275&amp;s=books&amp;sprefix=finding+dar%2Cstripbooks%2C59&amp;sr=1-1).

Yeah, do tell me: this Europe being frozen thanks to Siberian winds, we were warmed by some tropical wind system but it exhausting its source, and now the changing wind patterns bringing in a lot of cold air from North: this coupled with clear sky results in a warm day and cold nights, and in the next few days it will be transformed into cold days even colder nights.

Check out Windy, it is awesome to see: https://www.windy.com/

you can attack cancer cells with a gun or a blowtorch, the tricky part is attacking them selectively.

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this phd comics has a great description of what the challenges with cancer are

https://tapas.io/episode/58081

so there could plausibly be some type of cancer which has some marker, making it convenient to selectively target with something similar to a bacteriophage. but there is no general solution to cancer targeting.

I had a lot of success combining my noise-canceling headphones with https://mynoise.net/. Pick something that sounds nice to you, then tweak the EQ until it drowns out whatever was leaking through. The rain generators there are the best.

Hello, I'm a bot! The movie you linked is called The Princess Bride, here are some Trailers

where does that extra 2.5km/s go then?

btw, for the op, if the site im using is doing the math correctly, the free fall from 35786 km (geostationary orbit) takes 2701 seconds and would reach a velocity of 26.493 km/s which is considerably faster than any lower orbits reeentry speed. it would burn up like a meteor

https://www.omnicalculator.com/physics/free-fall

Most UV doesn't reach the retina, but something like 1% does. Cones can respond to as little as three photons per second. So if we had a cone that was maximally sensitive to near-UV, we could presumably see it without major changes to the cornea and lens.

I think you might be talking about the philosophical question of presentism vs. eternalism. It's usually thought that General Relativity makes eternalism a little more attractive, but that it's not conclusive. I think there've been good discussions about this on /r/philosophy and /r/askphilosophy.