On Terrible Parenting Creating A Generation Of Screen Addicts
@skahammer That "parents who check and constantly use smartphones" quote doesn't seem to have any connection to the rest of the article, which is just about the idea that parents need to keep their kids from spending too much time in front of screens, not that what the parents do on their own time will influence the kids to imitate them. It's not clear if the psychologist in question even said something like this, or if this is just typical tabloid reporting by the Daily Mail. In fact there's a fair amount of research based on adopted children that suggests that short of abuse parenting doesn't really influence kids much at all, and that the similarities between parents and kids are almost entirely due to shared genes rather than parenting style--see this article or this book.
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On Dumb Questions I’ve Had For Science
@Freelance_Physicist Good point, but I had thought you were saying the speeds would need to be equal with your comment "it takes as much rocket power to leave the Solar System as it does to fall into the Sun", was I taking you too literally? 67,000 miles per hour is about 29.95 km/sec, still less than the escape velocity for the Sun's gravity at the distance of Earth's orbit according to the chart I linked to, 42.1 km/sec. Of course traveling away from the Earth will bleed off some speed due to Earth's gravity so you may need to start with an even higher speed. Then again, realistically you can use gravitational assists from other planets to help with both escaping the Solar system (as with Voyager, which used Jupiter and Saturn's gravity to increase its speed) and with crashing into the Sun (as with this planned mission to send a probe into the Sun, which will use repeated flybys of Venus to build up speed), so if you take that into account it would reduce the needed initial speed.
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On Dumb Questions I’ve Had For Science
@Freelance_Physicist The sun is a million times larger than the Earth. You could toss the entire Earth into the Sun and nothing much would happen (to the Sun, that is). The real problem is that it takes as much rocket power to leave the Solar System as it does to fall into the Sun.
How do you figure? If you have enough rocket power to achieve escape velocity from the Earth, and your trajectory is aimed straight at the Sun, won't gravity pull you the rest of the way into the Sun? Whereas to escape the Solar System you'd need to achieve the escape velocity for the Sun's gravity at the radius of Earth's orbit, which is higher than the escape velocity for the Earth at the Earth's surface according to the chart here.
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On Dumb Questions I’ve Had For Science
@riotnrrd Also, if it's possible to send objects or signals faster than light, then it should also be possible to send objects or signals backwards in time, unless the theory of relativity is thrown out the window--see the tachyonic antitelephone for details. So that's a fairly good reason to bet that it isn't possible.
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On Dumb Questions I’ve Had For Science
@riotnrrd As a clarification, your signal would be red-shifted (and so it would seem slowed down) if you were heading away from the Earth, but if you were heading back towards the Earth, your signal would be blue-shifted and you would sound all chipmunkey.
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On Americans Starting To Be All, "Wait, What's Going On With The Weather?"
it is only an online poll
Doesn't that basically make it 100% bullshit as far as assessing the opinion of the American public in general? The group of people who view and respond to a given online poll isn't at all representative of the overall population, and people often try to game online polls by publicizing them in some forum where they know most people will share their opinion.
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On Do Super-Intelligent Dinosaurs Roam Space? One Scientist Thinks So
@Vulpes There's actually kind of a mini-genre of sci fi devoted to this concept.
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On Talking To Lena Dunham About Being A "Girl"
@deepomega You really thought her offhand commenting about the apartment not looking so nice in person meant she was seriously arguing she wasn't privileged in real life? That seems pretty uncharitable, maybe you're looking at her too much as a symbol of something you have a problem with, "oblivious privilege" say. Which makes me curious why you think you would have to "argue" with her about privilege and self-awareness--what are these arguments you've already decided you would have with her, perhaps related to what you didn't like about Tiny Furniture?
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On Question-Begging
@Hello Salty@twitter According to this book petitio principii means something more like "assuming the initial point to be proved", not just "appeal to principle". It means you're using a type of circular reasoning where you're assuming from the start the thing you're attempting to prove (usually in some kind of implicit, non-obvious form), and using that assumption in your proof of that very thing. So "if the Bible says it, it must be true" is not really a "petitio principii", but "it says in 2 Timothy 3:16 that everything in the Bible is inspired by God, and God would never lie to us, so everything in the Bible must be true" would be, because the person saying this is implicitly assuming that the premise "it says in 2 Timothy 3:16 that everything in the Bible is inspired by God" implies "everything in the Bible is inspired by God", which doesn't really follow unless you assume everything in the Bible is true to begin with.
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On Terrible Parenting Creating A Generation Of Screen Addicts
@skahammer That "parents who check and constantly use smartphones" quote doesn't seem to have any connection to the rest of the article, which is just about the idea that parents need to keep their kids from spending too much time in front of screens, not that what the parents do on their own time will influence the kids to imitate them. It's not clear if the psychologist in question even said something like this, or if this is just typical tabloid reporting by the Daily Mail. In fact there's a fair amount of research based on adopted children that suggests that short of abuse parenting doesn't really influence kids much at all, and that the similarities between parents and kids are almost entirely due to shared genes rather than parenting style--see the article at www.gladwell.com/1998/1998_08_17_a_harris.htm or Judith Rich Harris' book "The Nurture Assumption"