16321

Technology / Re: Energy losses, Thermodynamics and Efficiency

« on: 30/09/2013 22:43:05 »

Entropy.

As energy moves around a system, it becomes less potentially useful and entropy increases.

Imagine you have a million dollars. You can offer this to a group of people in exchange for their labour to make something you want. Say you employ a thousand people to build a posh yacht. Now each of them has a thousand dollars and you have a yacht. The amount of money hasn't changed but now nobody can afford a yacht.

16322

General Science / Re: Will technology increase social divide?

« on: 30/09/2013 22:29:41 »

Some 30 years ago I was headhunted by a company that made confectionery. Pleasant chat about applied physics (uniform heating of viscous fluids etc) and programmable machines, then a tour of the factory. My interviewer said "We have 800 employees on this site and we make n thousand packets of sludge a day [names and numbers changed to protect the innocent]. We'd like you to double the output and reduce the workforce to 10 in 3 years." 

Politicians talk about employment. Businessmen talk about profit. Not the same thing.

Even where people are employed, technology is not necessarily a Good Thing. When I was a lad, we hired gangs of big blokes to swing pickaxes and shovel dirt to make foundations, drains and roadways. Nowadays we can shift the same stuff quicker, cheaper and more accurately with a JCB driven by a little girl. Males are superior to females in only one respect - upper body strength. That is now redundant, but 50% of the population can't gestate or lactate, so what on earth are men for?  I think we will go the way of veal calves in the next century, unless the law changes to permit designer babies.

On the other hand there's no doubt that the mobile phone has revolutionised the developing world, and in a good way.
 

16323

Technology / Re: Will fracking bring down UK energy prices?

« on: 30/09/2013 19:00:29 »

Why should anyone reduce retail prices? The retail suppliers are marketers only - they have no interest in exploration, production or transmission, so they all pay pretty much the same unit price for the stuff they resell since all the producers supply all the resellers through a single grid. Whatever comes out of the ground will be subject to a ridiculous "renewables levy" so that wind farmers can make a profit even when they are not generating electricity, and the retailers are all multinationals with no interest in local competition anyway.   

And to justify their greed, they will quote our dear Chancellor who just today explained how important it is to mend the roof while the sun shines - in other words, stack up as much profit as you can whilst the stuff lasts. 

16324

New Theories / Re: Destined for Something Greater

« on: 30/09/2013 09:31:39 »

Sounds like a recipe for disaster.

"renewable" = unreliable. That's physics. Or unaffordable - that's economics.

Fusion power was "5 years away" 50 years ago, "10 years away" 20 years ago, and "20 years away" last year.  Blue shift or dead duck? Either way, it doesn't look like converging to a solution to any practical problem.

Teeming population a good thing? Not to the average commuter in London or Mumbai, nor to the politicians who have to find ways of occupying the growing numbers of unemployed to prevent them rioting or breeding even more unemployables. Fact is that we don't need more people, and anything you don't need is a burden, not an asset.

Changing lead into gold would be fun, but it would depress the value of gold and seriously upset the world's economy, which is to some extent dependent on the unforgeability of noble metals. What happens when you screw with the economy? More unemployment or war. 

Do we really want to live for ever? If there is no end to life, there's no reason to do anything today - tomorrow will be OK. And who wants 150 years of being unemployed?

The only positive hope from all this is that common sense will displace religion, but there's a lot of money and firepower behind the peddlers of superstition, so it won't be easy. 

And the one thing that unlimited free energy will certainly do is to raise the temperature of the planet (damn physics again) to the point that everyone complains and blames everyone else. Face it, they are doing it right now, despite a complete lack of evidence!

My hope is that humanity will control the one thing that is entirely within our control - the human population. With about one fifth of the present population we could live well and sustainably for as long as the sun shines. By getting rid of religion we could take a rational and humane approach to suicide and allow professionals to deliver a painless death to suffering humans, just as we insist on doing for all other species. The best song that was ever banned by the BBC was "Live fast, love hard, die young". It should be everyone's motto. 

16325

New Theories / Re: Length Contraction and Time Dilation Contradict the Constancy of Light Speed

« on: 29/09/2013 23:34:17 »

This is not a theory. It elucidates a logic/mathematical error. There are no experiments. There are no predictions.

And there we have a problem. Experimentally we find that the predictions of einsteinian relativity are correct, so any mathematical derivation that shows otherwise, is wrong.

No need to go into the maths at all. As in all other aspects of science, from fundamental particle physics, through chemistry and mesoscopic engineering, and right up to astronomy, if it doesn't predict what actually happens, it is wrong, and it is up to the person who derived the "proof" to find out why because the rest of us have more profitable work to do.

16326

Just Chat! / Re: New Science Website

« on: 29/09/2013 20:02:00 »

What is "ask a scientist"?

Pretty much what it says on the tin. A forum where people who don't know or don't understand something can get authoritative information or a rational explanation. Not a discussion forum nor a billboard for new ideas (or even genuine discoveries). If each thread begins with "how does X work", "how can I calculate Y", or "what is the value of Z in imperial units"  it could be a very useful resource for teachers and students, and a good challenge for the respondents to explain their subject in lay language.

16327

New Theories / Re: What, on Earth, is The Human Consciousness?

« on: 29/09/2013 19:48:27 »

Don Q

Are you, or have you ever been, a scientist?

16328

Physics, Astronomy & Cosmology / Re: Would we be taller in space?

« on: 29/09/2013 18:12:08 »

I was also thinking about aging people.  Many adults loose an inch or so in their later life.  Perhaps more. 

This is principally due to pressure desiccation of the intervertebral discs, stooping posture, and compression insults to the vertebrae - all because we fight gravity. If you drink plenty of water under zero gravity you will grow a bit. Things can happen very quickly: a military pilot acquaintance pulled 11 g  momentarily to avoid a collision and shrank nearly 2 inches in half a second - his prescribed rehabilitation program consisted of lying down and drinking weak beer until he regained an inch, and he eventually returned to active duty with a slightly shorter dress jacket.   

16329

Plant Sciences, Zoology & Evolution / Re: World population, will it be going up, or down?

« on: 29/09/2013 18:00:23 »

I don't think there are circumstances beyond "our" control here. Making babies is (or should be) a voluntary process. The trick is to find something more profitable or less harmful (I can't think of anything more enjoyable) than making more babies than we can feed.

War is a fatuous means of controlling populations. At most, you might kill a few million per year, but mostly fit young male adults - the very people who are useful to society and not responsible for the problem. All-female armies might solve the problem by having fertile females kill each other, but I can't think of any species that does this on a large scale. Disease does a much better job, and mostly kills the very old and the very young, at no cost to society and without the material and political disruption of war.  Alas, civil engineering has almost eradicated such useful plagues. 

My solution is for the state to offer all females a simple bribe, say £500/$1000 or whatever fits the local economy, every 6 months, if they are not pregnant. No child benefits or state support for mothers, and the bribe is withdrawn after the first child is born. Then the only women who will have babies are those that can afford to feed them. Not a direct control or coercion, but a market choice that will probably have the desired effect. Once the population has reduced to say one fifth of the present level (at which point the UK, at least, could be indefinitely sustainable at our present standard of living) , we can tweak the bribe a bit until we breed at the replacement level only.   

16330

Physics, Astronomy & Cosmology / Re: Is a photon a monopole?

« on: 29/09/2013 17:40:26 »

Point taken. Sort of.

To my mind a gravitational monopole is signed, in that the divergence of its field is always nonzero, but I'll admit that, unlike sci-fi writers, I can't think of anything with the opposite sign.

16331

Plant Sciences, Zoology & Evolution / Re: World population, will it be going up, or down?

« on: 29/09/2013 16:25:23 »

The seeming consensus those days is that it will go down, as we seem to making less babies.

But life expectancy A is increasing pretty much everywhere, and age at first pregnancy B is also increasing. If B increases year on year, the apparent birthrate decreases, but if A increases faster than B, the total population increases, even if the surviving birthrate per female (rather than per year) remains constant.

16332

Physics, Astronomy & Cosmology / Re: Is a photon a monopole?

« on: 29/09/2013 16:08:47 »

We use the term monopole to denote something with a signed property (charge, magnetic field) and (usually) an opposite. Hence a magnetic or electric monopole has meaning if not existence. But what is the signed property of a photon? What does an antiphoton do?

16333

Question of the Week / Re: QotW - 13.10.09 - How many people can the earth support?

« on: 29/09/2013 16:02:49 »

How many mouths can an average corpse satisfy and how many corpses can we expect per day?

Most people eat roughly their own weight of "live" meat (i.e. including skin, bones etc) each year. You can expect only one sixtieth of that weight of human corpse to occur naturally, so "long pig" is a treat rather than a dietary staple.   

16334

Physics, Astronomy & Cosmology / Re: Discuss: What Do Rockets Push Against in Space?

« on: 29/09/2013 10:01:31 »

Re "they aren't" - that referred to "90% righthanders."

So here's my twopennorth on that:

The number of lefthanders has been increasing over the years, and is now around 20%. Lefties have some advantage in sports and interestingly, lefthanded CEOs earn 10 - 20% more than their dextral counterparts.

Nature doesn't usually do 10% (genetics generally works at the 50% or "very rare" levels only), and there's no reason to suspect that sinistrals are more fertile than dextrals. So we have an interesting question!

My theory is that so much of the human brain is taken up by bipedal walking and language, that half of us are genetically incapable of being ambidextrous. Our bodies are not exactly bilaterally symmetrical (they can't be!) so just as blood usually circulates in one direction through the heart (with about 0.1% of the population reversed - see above), those of us with the genetic defect tend to righthandedness whilst the other 50% have a choice. Clearly society is not going to disadvantage half of its members by being lefthanded, so the social norm, including which hand you eat with, how you tighten screws, etc, is rightist.

If you look at professions where handedness is immaterial, it seems to me that a lot of creatives and abstract thinkers are lefties. 25% of the Beatles, and the one who wrote most of the songs, was a leftie, continuing gthe tradition of Bach (certainly CPE if not JS) Beethoven, possibly Mozart (more likely fully ambi)  and Rachmaninov, just to mention a few. Very few violinists are lefthanded, but that may be due to having to share music and play in close proximity to their fellows - a leftie bow is dangerous and looks bad on stage.       

Given a free choice, a fair proportion of ambidextrals will fall in line with the rightists because that makes life easier, but as society and particularly primary school becomes more tolerant of leftism, so the number opting for that stance will increase. Hence the trend towards 25% leftism.

50 years ago a few of us looked at fellow students. You could draw a sort of subjective spectrum from pure maths on the left via science, engineering and languages to history and theology on the right, and sure enough we found that more than 25% of maths students, and less than 10% of historians, were left handed.

It would be interesting to compare the statistics of people who do similar but subtly different jobs. If my hypothesis is strong, you'd find plenty of lefthanded jazz musicians and very few leftie orchestral players. There's very little room for original thought, creativity or plain cussidness in flying, but I wonder what is the fraction of lefties  among fighter aces compared with commercial pilots? 

16335

Technology / Re: Discuss: Can a Mobile Phone Unlock a Car?

« on: 28/09/2013 23:51:06 »

Damn keyless entry and ignition! I have to take this blob thing out of my pocket to press the button, then I get into the car and there's nowhere to put it, so it rattles around on the dashboard or in a door pocket until I get out, and I can't find it. Now the great thing about a key is it's on a ring with my house key and anything else I might find useful, and there's a neat place to put it in the car so I know exactly where it is. And it's one less battery to go flat. The screaming frustration of having a dud battery or a message "key code not detected" just adds to the sheer pointlessness of this ridiculous invention.

16336

That CAN'T be true! / Re: Were the Lunar Rovers faked?

« on: 28/09/2013 12:47:49 »

The astronaut selection process sought out professional pilots with an engineering background and many hours of incident-free flying, not barnstormers. Test flying is about attention to detail and cautious approaches to the design specification of the machine, not shaking it to bits and parachting out of the wreckage.  There was even a bias against bachelors on the grounds that married men were more interested in coming home than in impressing anyone with their bravado. Learning to drive half a ton of scientific equipment over rough and slippery ground is part of many expeditions on this planet.   

16337

New Theories / Re: What, on Earth, is The Human Consciousness?

« on: 28/09/2013 12:38:33 »

The science delusion = the materialist dogmatic belief system dominating in science, or scientism :

Piffle. Science is a process of systematic unbelief. Isms are anathema to science.

16338

Physics, Astronomy & Cosmology / Re: Discuss: What Do Rockets Push Against in Space?

« on: 27/09/2013 23:03:51 »

some kind of pinky-greyish brown - sort of ape colour; nothing; because you are tired; sonar; yes; they aren't - I'll explain some other time; very; ah, that's interesting!

16339

Question of the Week / Re: QotW - 13.09.24 - Is there a safe way to consume tobacco?

« on: 27/09/2013 22:54:29 »

How did we get so far off of tobacco?

because everyone knows it is dangerous, so discussion is pointless

I hate the idea of censoring things that give people enjoyment... but do people truly enjoy smoking?

since it is voluntary, pointless, expensive and dangerous, one must assume that those who do it derive some pleasure from it. Like skiing.

16340

Technology / Re: Are there any good programs to help me keep my appointments?

« on: 27/09/2013 18:04:54 »

Still seems like a lot of hard work and hardware to replicate what you probably already have in a portable and reliable form.