Game Over for the Climate

uncleleo12 · 13 days

I agree that it is opinion, and it's also important to point out that the author is a highly respected climate scientist. If you're interested in science, go look up some of his published papers and articles.

nickdabear · 16 days

This is one of the fundamental misunderstandings in the way American government works. Check out the wikipedia page for representative democracy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representative_democracy#Characteristics

tigerbalmzz · 16 days

Spectral information refers to the way the ear can separate or otherwise interpret many different superimposed frequencies of sound that occur simultaneously. Temporal refers to the way the ear can interpret changes in sound that happen over time. Both of these are always going on at the same time, unless you are listening to a pure sine wave tone (contains only one frequency), or you have a pulse of sound that lasts for an infinitesimally short period (contains an infinite number of frequencies, actually).

P2000Camaro · 16 days

Compounds can undergo phase changes purely due to pressure change -- depending on their phase diagram. If you look up the phase diagram at water, you'll see that it will become a solid at about 10-100 thousand times atmospheric pressure, depending on its temperature. At these pressures, the crystal structure of ice is much different that the structure that occurs at normal pressures and low temperatures.

Phase diagram of water

AlbinoMongoose · 16 days

The particles can travel by diffusion -- which means the concentration of particles will want to become homogeneous throughout space -- so if released at one point in the room, they will slowly spread out until the concentration is the same throughout the room.

They can also travel by bulk air movement, like wind or convection. Turns out, diffusion is incredibly slow (it depends on the difference in concentration from one point to the other), and would probably take hours to reach you in a room with absolutely no bulk air movement. So you really can only smell a fart because there's wind, or other turbulent air in the room carrying the particles towards you.

prometheanbane · 16 days

Take two distant points anywhere in the universe, like the center of the Milky way galaxy and the center of some distant galaxy. Let's invent a coordinate system with the center of the milky way at the origin and the distant galaxy at some distance R. If we were to run time backwards, the distant galaxy will always be at R, but the distance between the origin and R will decrease. If we run this all the way back to the big bang, the distance will go to zero -- a singularity. But, this would work for any point R in the entire universe.

IAMAHungryHippoAMA · 16 days

I'll leave you to figure out how fast the earth is moving around the sun, but the sun is orbiting the center of the galaxy at about ~220 km/s (500,000 mph). I don't know anything about our galaxy's local motion relative to our galactic neighbors. But, the space itself between our galaxy and distant galaxies is expanding, "faster" than the speed of light, but I don't think that should count as a speed -- its just the definition of space itself is changing over time.

redditwork · 16 days

I'm guessing since the pressure of the mantle and outer core is great, magma would burst from the hole until the pressure is equalized -- or more realistically until the hole was plugged by cooled solid rock.

Javamonsoon · 16 days

The solenoids have inductance -- which acts to counteract the change in magnetic field after the current is cut off. The principle here is called Faraday's law of induction, if you want to look it up. A current is induced in the solenoid to counteract the change in magnetic field through the loops of wire.

I'm not an electrical engineer, but from a knowledge of basic physics, you basically have two options -- either reduce the inductance of the solenoid which you could accomplish by reducing the cross sectional area, or reducing the number of wire loops in the solenoid per unit length.

Or you could increase the resistance in the circuit, which would cause the current to die off more quickly (it goes exponentially). This would require a higher voltage though to get the same current.

Essentially, your current will go like e^-Rt/L, where R is resistance, L is inductance, and t is time.

CaptainOfTheKeys · 16 days

Right, potential energy, not kinetic. It's easier to think of it the other way around. Remember, the change in potential energy is equal to the negative of the work done by a force -- ie the integral of the force along some path. With a conservative force of course (like gravity or electrostatic), the work done and change in potential energy is completely independent of the path you integrate over. From here, since the potential energy is path independent, we can just write the integral in differential form to get an expression for force. This wouldn't work for a non conservative force, since the derivative of the potential energy doesn't contain any information about the path taken -- just the overall change.

HanZ408 · 20 days

accidents happen....

HanZ408 · 21 days

Hate to break it to you man, but your dad probably ran over the cat pulling out of the driveway, and made up the possum story to cover his ass.

midnight10 · 21 days

Not everyone agrees with the way our society operates. These people are called radicals -- if they didn't exist, our society would be exactly the same as it was 5000 years ago.

midnight10 · 21 days

If you don't believe in private property, you probably don't care about breaking other people's shit. Just sayin'.

highmr · 22 days

First off, most anarchists don't believe in the idea of private property. Second, they especially don't believe in corporate property. Most anarchists wouldn't see damage to a Wells Fargo window as hurting anyone, other than the powerful and oppressive institutions they aim to dismantle.

highmr · 22 days

The issue here is always the definition of violence. Anarchists wrestle with this. One camp proclaims that any act that could be viewed as violent by outsiders is violent, while the other camp refers only to violence specifically against another human being (not property damage) as being violent. This is something anarchists argue about all the time.

da_dope · 24 days

fuck yeah, the Bianchi identities. anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of general relativity knows that shit.

choganoga · 1 month

Yes, but these companies do only what is most economically feasible at the time (as they technically should), rather than what is best for our country/mankind down the road. For example, when we discovered over a "century's worth" of natural gas deposits under the eastern US, all the energy companies jumped in and invested considerably in gas -- even though this is in the grand scheme of things short-sighted, environmentally destructive, and does nothing to accomplish independence from fossil fuels or curb global warming. Money they could have invested into say, groundbreaking research on photovoltaics, was rechanneled into dirty gas projects. Additionally, most of the real research in renewable energy is directly government funded (whether by government run laboratories or by NSF grants to universities). Energy/tech companies would just put the final engineering optimizations onto government funded discoveries.

What I'm saying is, I wish the government would have take more of a leadership role -- as it has incredible control over the economy and what sorts of things people invest in. One day we'll regret jumping on finite gas reserves rather than investing in renewable energy research.

I agree that the oil companies can't be faulted for playing the game they're meant to play (making money), and they're damn good at it. But it's the government that sets the playing field and the rules.

choganoga · 1 month

We'd be much closer to that world without constant pressure and lobbying from oil/coal/gas companies to block renewable energy research, funding, and government mandates. I'm not really blaming the companies, afterall their only purpose is simply to make money selling fuel. I am disappointed that our government is unable to stand up to their influence and try to do something that benefits mankind in the long run.

choganoga · 1 month

Lol, we wouldn't need the charities if it weren't for those companies.

nativeofspace · 1 month

You can see that most of the current is just arcing through her face, and mostly through the air to get back to the wire. She didn't likely receive much current through the heart, but probably got some horrible burns.

Phartatron · 1 month

well.... to be fair, a religious person could argue that God created the laws of physics, which we have observed and described, so that gravity really is "intelligent falling".

clearly, science cannot disprove religion, they are completely separate. one could always argue that god put the observed rules of nature into motion.

ratterbatter · 1 month

Let the rebranding commence!

ratterbatter

TROPHY CASE

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