Mark Foskey

@hebreworphan @TheStalwart If you think "made up" is a poor way to characterize distinctions like that, then I do have some sympathy to your POV. Sometimes people will belittle a tradition as being "made up" when in fact they all are, and very often in an explicitly conscious way.

@hebreworphan @TheStalwart There is a difference between rules taught in school that come from failed attempts to characterize effective writing and linguistic rules that evolved organically in speech communities. I think the OP is using "made up" to characterize that distinction.

Reading about linguistics has been really liberating. Ending sentences with prepositions will never again be something I’m concerned with. Turns out it’s totally made up, something arbitrary that only high school English teachers complain about.

@hebreworphan @TheStalwart Subject-verb agreement has been a part of the spoken language probably all the way back to Proto-Indo-European. Some rules for edge cases may have been made up by 18th-century writing pundits, but a lot of rules are passed down naturally and don't have to be taught in school.

@TheStalwart Almost all grammar and formatting is “totally made up.” Capitalization, punctuation, spaces between words, paragraphing, indenting, subject verb agreement, etc.

@SabeBrandMeats @TheStalwart I wish teachers would say, "The end of a sentence tends to stand out, so be aware that you have the option of rearranging it to have a word there that carries more weight than a preposition."

@TheStalwart It’s also very awkward when you try to work around this: “Who are you talking to?” Sounds much more natural than: “To whom are you talking?” The latter makes you sound like you’re trying to appear intelligent while no one ever notices the former.

@JeffLadish Oh, right, and you also didn't specify that you had to press one button or the other.

@JeffLadish You didn't specify, but everyone including me is assuming, that all the clones are facing the same predicament. (You did say they all have buttons, but not explicitly that the same rules applied to them.) And clearly randomizing is the right answer.

You find yourself trapped on an island with 99 identical copies of yourself. If you press the red button, you will certainly die. If you press the blue button, you’ll die if and only if at least half of the clones presses blue. What do you do?

@BecomingCritter Some day I hope we send probes to exoplanets and confirm or falsify these ideas, but that's probably generationsaway.

@BecomingCritter Maybe there's some weird non-organic process somewhere that can lead to a highly reactive atmosphere. But, by our best current understanding, "No life, no fire" is probably a good rule of thumb. 3/

wait is this true

@megagoose11 @IlyaHolt The fact is, you get different paths for different central force laws. 1/r^2 gives you the figure on the left, but 1/r gives you the figure on the right as long as the initial velocity is just right. You just have to do the math.

@IlyaHolt Why

I have a question, why are elliptical orbits like this and not like this

@Philip_Goff @JohnKubie I would go further and say it is not even a well-posed question.

@JohnKubie I agree it's not an experimental question

Which experiment will tell us whether mathematics is reducible to logic?

@maklelan @ericmetaxas Contrary to Metaxas, my view is that, if somebody says they are a Christian, then they are. And if they aren't, that's fine too. But it's a totally coherent religious position, consistent with a lot of Christian tradition, to view what she said as heresy. Even if she's right.

@maklelan @ericmetaxas In other words, most modern Christians take "the Bible is the word of God" to be an article of faith, whether or not the Bible makes that claim about itself. Maybe they interpret the claim loosely (as I do), but they typically aver it.

Anyone saying that the Word of God isn't the Word of God is not a Christian.

@bhavaytyagi I think that's pushing the analogy too hard. All people are saying is that natural numbers are built up from (in the sense of being products of) primes. That's it. You are right that the comparison isn't very informative, but that's fine.

Mathematicians call prime numbers the building blocks, analogous to atoms. I find this weird. In physics, building blocks have a smaller scale associated with them, while prime numbers are at the same “scale” as all other numbers. How do you think about this?

@xwanyex Well it seems like Medlock is merely advocating for property taxes, which is not a crazy position to have. His phrasing does tend to conjure up the scenario of your first paragraph though.

People sort of act like they live in a fairytale in which there’s a group of privileged land owners and then on the other hand the peasants who have been locked out. But in our country what happens is we buy land with money. You aren’t granted the privilege to use it. You buy it with money, like everything else. And the title transfers. You can save up some money and go buy some land yourself. High housing prices, notwithstanding, very large shares of the country are still homeowners. It’s not like this is an extreme minority group.

@MattBruenig @Sheesh_barak @TheStalwart @xwanyex OK, I agree that states enforce property rights, but what is the takeaway. Are you saying that’s bad?

@Sheesh_barak @TheStalwart @xwanyex Correct. One way of putting it is that you don't actually buy land. You buy a voucher that you can redeem with the state at any time to have it violently exclude others from it. This "violence voucher" is what is valuable. The land, absent a violent voucher, would trade for ~$0.

@Zedagain @dotkrueger Why do people assume the human lifespan is fixed? Far more likely that our descendants will live for thousands of years than that we will develop FTL or even relativistic travel.

@dotkrueger Generation ships cure every issue. Big enough for shields, big enough to seriously gain momentum with solar sling shotting, big enough to maintain communication, big enough to carry energy screens and proper ice armor that can be repaired and expanded for needs.

We're not going to travel beyond the solar system, according to Leonard Susskind. And neither are aliens, coming to visit us. We may not be alone, but we are stuck here for, essentially forever. 1. The nearest star is 4.24 light years away. The fastest spacecraft ever built would require 6,600 years to get there. 2. Surely we can just build faster spacecraft. The problem is to get to anywhere close to the speed of light, we need exponentially more energy. 3. Chemical rockets will just not work. Even fusion rockets won't work. Even 10% of the speed of light is not achievable. The Tsiolkovsky Rocket Equation prevents it. 4. Interstellar dust becomes hand grenades when traveling anywhere close to the speed of light. Ships break. 5. Space radiation will kill us over the time need to travel interstellar distances. Impossible to protect without massive shields, which require massive energy to accelerate and de-accelerate.

@RGregoryClark @mathelirium It moves faster over the top because the bulge on top pinches the air against the inertial of the layers of air higher up. The air speeds up kind of like a watermelon seed being pinched until it slips out of your fingers.

Ironically, because Bernoulli’s Principle is an actual physical law the mere fact the air moves faster above means the pressure is reduced there which will cause the wing to rise. Then the question is why does air moves faster above the wing?

It is often said that the lift on a wing is generated because the flow moving over the top surface has a longer distance to travel and therefore needs to go faster. This common explanation is actually wrong.