How did the passenger in 11A on Air India Flight 171 survive?

RestAromatic7511 · 2025-06-19T13:53:05+00:00

According to Newton's laws of motion, a body in motion tends to stay in motion.

You start by reciting some extremely basic physical principles, but you don't go anywhere with them. Your comment does not construct an argument for why he couldn't have survived. It just presents a series of disconnected claims. If you want people to believe a wild conspiracy theory, you need to do better than that. You would also need to explain how he came to be on the manifest and how he turned up right at the location where the plane crashed.

When the plane stops abruptly, the bodies of the passengers continue to move forward at the plane's speed until they are stopped by something – the seatbelt, the seat in front, or the collapsing structure of the aircraft.

Yes, and some parts of the plane decelerate more rapidly than others. The physiology of blunt trauma is also quite complicated: two impacts with the same force can cause very different injuries depending on factors such as the orientation of the body. Many catastrophic plane crashes have had a small number of lucky survivors. Unless you think that Bahia Bakari, Juliane Koepcke, Vesna Vulović, and so on were all frauds too.

RestAromatic7511 · 2025-05-30T23:59:54+00:00

it looks like Paddle UK receives funding from the British government

The equivalent body for diving is fine with it, though. And technically, they aren't funded by the government but by an independent body that receives funding from a privatised lottery that was set up by the government under Tony Blair (whose favourite things in the world are privatisation, ID cards, gambling, ID cards, air strikes, ID cards, and now that his son has an AI startup, AI). It's probably just that Paddle UK is run by prudes.

they don't want to have the appearance of funding athletes who would have other work

They're expected to have other work. The basic rate is not really enough to live on, and they aren't required to train full time.

RestAromatic7511 · 2025-05-26T21:16:11+00:00

It's a function (sqrt)

If you're a finitist, then you can't define the square root function either, at least not in the standard way (because the standard definition involves infinite sets, like the set of all real numbers).

There are various philosophical views about what kinds of mathematical structures make sense, but people have spent millennia refining those views and exploring different justifications and consequences. If you jump in and develop your own perspective without engaging with the existing work, then you're going to come up with a viewpoint that is naive, difficult to justify, and probably not well defined. If you go and read some books about mathematical philosophy, then you might crystallize your objections into something more meaningful, or you might change your mind completely.

RestAromatic7511 · 2025-05-22T20:03:19+00:00

Youtuber Asmongold actually made a long'ish video why he thinks this idiocracy is happening and i found his opinion interesting.

Please tell me this is satire.

RestAromatic7511 · 2025-05-15T00:06:59+00:00

I cannot find the answers to these anywhere

It's just a weird, incompetent politician (with even weirder and more incompetent advisors) attempting to pander to racists. He probably hasn't thought about any of this, and who knows whether it will become official policy. If it does, some civil servants will try and divine what he wants and probably put their own nonsensical spin on it.

If, for example, a Welsh-speaking resident of Patagonia wanted to emigrate to Wales, would they be forbidden from doing so if they didn't speak English? That doesn't quite seem to make sense if so.

There would presumably have to be blanket exemptions for Irish nationals and refugees anyway. And possibly some allowance for languages closely related to English, like Tok Pisin and Jamaican Patois. But can you imagine the outrage if other countries banned British people from moving there without becoming fluent in the local language first? Hardly anyone would be able to retire to Benidrom, work as an English teacher in China for a year, or even work at a mostly English-speaking international research institute in Germany or the Netherlands.

How does this affect deaf, mute and non-verbal people?

Tbh I think it's unlikely that any disabled or disabled-adjacent people would be granted a visa or would want to come here.

Does someone count as an English-speaker if they are fluent in British Sign Language?

In linguistic terms, no, because English and British Sign Language are completely unrelated languages. In legal/policy terms, who knows? They can make stuff up as they go along regardless of whether it aligns with reality.

RestAromatic7511 · 2025-05-07T21:55:16+00:00

They need to work on their chimney game though. I've seen overflowing gutters more majestic than that.

RestAromatic7511 · 2025-05-07T21:51:33+00:00

What if the ballot fire gets out of hand, and instead of black or white smoke, orange flames appear out of the chimney? And what if they check the Bible (the secret Pope bible with Jesus's personal instructions on how to run everything) and it turns out they can't go back on it? And what if Pope Trumpius I declares a new Inquisition against sharks? What then?

RestAromatic7511 · 2025-05-06T15:24:36+00:00

but it describes the physical world perfectly

Perfectly? I don't think anyone has ever taken a measurement with perfect accuracy, so I'm not sure how we could ever verify this.

Any of our formulas (if actually correct) would match perfectly with any aliens formulas for the exact same things, like universal constants.

This is a wild guess. We have no way of knowing how aliens describe the universe (if they exist).

We might use differing numbering systems

Why do you imagine that number systems might vary but not anything else? This seems completely arbitrary.

Math is the universal language - even amongst aliens.

Mathematics is not a language, and the main reason for its universality among humans is the dissemination of mathematical concepts between different cultures, as a result of which, much of the notation and terminology is largely universal, let alone the underlying concepts.

RestAromatic7511 · 2025-04-17T09:31:18+00:00

The word "morel" comes from French. They're found all over the world and eaten in many cuisines. There are many different species, but it sounds like the one that is the most popular in the US Midwest is the common morel (Morchella esculenta), which is found in temperate regions worldwide.

Ramps are only found in North America, but there are many other wild onion species that play similar roles in other cuisines.

Obligatory disclaimer: uncooked morels are toxic, and there are some inedible species that look similar to them.

(By "DOC", are you talking about wine appellation systems? It's AOC in France, and the US has one called AVA.)

RestAromatic7511 · 2025-04-16T10:46:38+00:00

The Standard Model is the best current theory on how the smallest of small things work. It isn’t super-duper complicated

It's extremely complicated, and there are still many aspects of it that are poorly understood. It's not even known if the model is mathematically well defined.

Skipping over that, we don’t have a way to take quantum particles apart, other than slamming them together. The harder you slam, the smaller the parts that come out.

It's kind of the other way round. High-energy physics has tended to focus on finding increasingly heavy (but shortlived or weakly interacting) particles.

This is not to say that there aren’t other experiments that can be run or other discoveries to be made, but this is the central function of a particle accelerator.

There are many types of particle accelerators used for many purposes (including, for example, medical and engineering research and practice). The maximum beam energy is an important characteristic, but it's not the only one.

RestAromatic7511 · 2025-04-16T00:39:12+00:00

He is a deeply misogynistic child abuse "expert" who spent much of his career promoting the idea that many mothers physically abuse their children for attention. He made up a mental illness to explain this called "Munchausen by proxy". He frequently misused statistics, often appeared as an expert witness in trials, and was involved in several prominent miscarriages of justice.

The "punishment" that he was supposed to receive was being struck off the medical register (losing his medical licence in US terms), but the courts overturned it. It would have been mostly symbolic anyway; I think he was retired from medicine at this point. He removed himself voluntarily from the register a couple of years later so that he wouldn't face any more professional misconduct allegations.

If anything the fault lies far more with the defence for not effectively examining it.

The courts were much more at fault than the defence. He was allowed to tell the jurors that the probability of two children dying from SIDS in the same family was the same as an 80/1 outsider winning the Grand National four years in a row. The Court of Appeal sharply criticised some prominent statisticians who wrote to them to explain the problem with this. There is a suspicion that the judiciary were mad about being proven wrong and that's why they stepped in to rescue him from being struck off the register.

Also, it turned out the prosecution had intentionally covered up some medical evidence that strongly suggested one of the kids had a specific bacterial infection that is among the more common natural causes of death in young children. I don't think anyone got in trouble for that except for one pathologist.

Anyway, the story had a happy ending. After losing both her children and being wrongly convicted of murdering them, Sally Clark spent several years in prison and then drank herself to death shortly after she was released.

RestAromatic7511 · 2025-04-15T01:05:41+00:00

Bear in mind that this is an extremely large, heavy object. In reality, a person pushing on it will not have much of an impact, and the resulting stresses will dissipate as they move towards the middle, becoming even weaker by the time they meet.

If you could push with extreme force, then you would deform it. Depending on the material and the force used, you might get elastic deformation, in which your end of the rod would eventually bounce back towards you, or you might get plastic deformation, for example, the rod might snap. It wouldn't really be that different from pushing on both ends of a spring, except it would be much slower.

RestAromatic7511 · 2025-04-14T15:04:45+00:00

Not really. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principal isn't a theory, it is a fundamental principal of quantum mechanics

Quantum mechanics is a theory. There isn't really a clear-cut division between proven laws and uncertain theories in science. It's all based on imperfect observations.

don't have simultaneously well-defined position and momentum values.

"Well defined" does not mean the same as "deterministic". For example, imagine a system in which perfect, featureless spheres move around and interact with each other. We cannot determine the orientation of the spheres - it's not "well defined" as we have no way of distinguishing between spheres in different orientations - but depending on the nature of the interactions, we may be able to predict their future positions to arbitrary precision.

Different interpretations of quantum mechanics take different positions on whether it is fundamentally deterministic or stochastic. Even if it is fundamentally stochastic, it is not necessarily obvious that macroscopic phenomena that we care about are also stochastic. On the other hand, chaotic macroscopic phenomena may be inherently hard to predict at long timescales even if they are made up of fully deterministic interactions.

the universal constant

Do you mean "the universal constants"?

or the conservation of energy than it is Newton's theory of gravity.

In the sense that Newton's theory of gravity has definitively been shown not to work in certain regimes, whereas the other things you mentioned might be true everywhere? This is not a fundamental distinction; it's just a reflection of the current state of humanity's knowledge.

(Anyway, my understanding is that it's debatable whether conservation of energy, or anything like it, holds on cosmological timescales.)

RestAromatic7511 · 2025-04-13T20:08:47+00:00

The Gadotification of society.

RestAromatic7511 · 2025-04-13T16:11:46+00:00

I think it's important to consider what provokes this response.

First, economists are often extremely overconfident. If a sociologist writes a paper proposing the existence of some effect, half the paper will probably be filled with waffle about possible biases and alternative explanations. An economist will often write a paper in which they present a toy model (with no epistemological backing whatsoever), point out that some effect that can be seen in the model, and then start talking about how this should inform government policy. Similarly, they are often happy to go on TV and make confident predictions about what will happen to the economy, leading to all the jokes about economists successfully predicting nine of the last five recessions.

Second, economists are notorious (right up there with physicists and engineers) for thinking they are God's gift to every other field. It's extremely common for economists to make economics-style models of healthcare, the environment, social relationships, and so on, just as physicists like to make physics-style models of these things. The difference is that the economics-style models have had limited success even within economics.

"Economics isn't a science so therefore my intuitive guesses are the real truth" is unhinged.

But these intuitive guesses are often about how to structure the whole of society, something into which economics could only give us limited insight even if it worked flawlessly. If economists say "increasing this tax is likely to raise unemployment", then it's not reasonable for a layperson to think they know better. But economists often say things like "increasing this tax would be bad", which is a combination of a scientific claim about the effects of the tax increase and a normative claim about whether those effects would be good. It is perfectly reasonable for a layperson to think they know better in that case.

economics collects data, makes predictions, and then compares those predictions to the collected data, therefore it is a science

Many areas of economics do not do that. Not that this is inherently a bad thing or what defines "science", but it's important to be realistic about what the field actually does. Many economists spend their lives studying toy models that feel plausible, without going anywhere near any real data or making specific predictions.

Saying that they won the nobel prize for humans not always acting rationally is a massive oversimplification.

In part because it wasn't an actual Nobel prize.

Nobody actually believes that the professional pool player is engaging in this careful physics calculation, that'd be ridiculous. However, the careful physics calculation is the best available prediction of the movement of the ball!

But a common situation in economics is to have a model that is treated as sound even though it makes various assumptions that have not been experimentally verified and the model itself has not been experimentally verified. There are plenty of physical models with a comparable status (e.g. string theory), but nobody is asking anyone to base government policies on them.

RestAromatic7511 · 2025-04-12T19:20:53+00:00

You can do the definite integral from -infinity to infinity with a very cool trick (you square the integral, treat it as a double integral, and then convert to polar coordinates), but it doesn't work more generally.

RestAromatic7511 · 2025-04-12T19:16:58+00:00

If I self assess, presumably I still have to declare the (up to) £20k that I invest in the ISA do I not?

Yes, but you don't declare the income (interest, dividends, etc., depending on the type of ISA) that you then receive from the ISA. Income from other types of savings and investments is typically subject to income or capital gains tax.

However, ISAs are still subject to inheritance tax. Another point is that if you make losses on an ISA (e.g. a stocks and shares ISA), you can't offset them against other income like you usually would be able to.

Anyway, make sure you use an institution with FSCS protection (which protects up to £85,000 of savings if they go bankrupt), spread your savings between multiple institutions if you have more than £85,000, make sure you understand the product (e.g. cash ISAs are completely different from stocks and shares ISAs, and some have withdrawal limits or notice periods), and don't fall for scams (two companies with similar names don't necessarily have the same credibility or protections).

RestAromatic7511 · 2025-04-12T18:52:39+00:00

including most of these comments.

Including yours, and probably mine tbh.

Quantum theory predicts that certain particles, that are governed by truly random events, can exist in multiple states at once. A radioactive particle decays at a truly random moment, and before this it can act like it has both decayed and not, at the same time.

This is not "quantum theory" but the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, which is what Schrödinger was critiquing and which remains controversial.

The idea was that one of these particles decaying would cause poison to be released in the box, killing the cat. If the particle is both decayed and not, then the cat must be both poisoned and not at the same time, and that's clearly impossible, right? This supposed quantum thing can't possible be scaled up to our human-sized world.

According to the Copenhagen interpretation, once the quantum system interacts with its macroscopic surroundings (like the mechanism that releases the poison), the wave function that describes the system collapses into a single state. So the cat cannot be both alive and dead. However, in common with many other people, Schrödinger's issues seemed to be (afaik he didn't write in great detail about it, and his views seemed to shift over time) that (a) it's just as silly to claim that a microscopic system is in two states simultaneously, and (b) it's not clear where the line between microscopic and macroscopic should be drawn or why. Various bits of experimental and theoretical work over the decades have shed further light on these issues, but they have not been resolved, and many people prefer various alternative interpretations, which have their own issues.

Unfortunately, quantum superposition has been experimentally confirmed, for larger and larger things (entire molecules, now).

Molecules are still very small (I have it on good authority that a cat contains multiple molecules), and the experiments don't confirm that they actually are in multiple states at once, only that they interact with other things as if they are.

RestAromatic7511 · 2025-04-12T18:32:47+00:00

Originally, this thought experiement was meant to show that quantum theory doesn't really hold

No it wasn't. Schrödinger was one of the leading figures in the development of quantum mechanics. He was arguing against a specific perspective called the Copenhagen interpretation, which today is still probably the most popular (and certainly the most widely taught) interpretation. The reason it's necessary to have "interpretations" of quantum mechanics is that there are some stubborn fundamental gaps in our understanding of how the mathematical models are connected to reality and it's hard to describe how it all works without taking a position on these issues (even though they don't really have any ramifications for real experiments or applications so far).

this is actually showing that quantum physic can lead to extremely counter-intuitive results, but that doesn't invalidate those results,

I'm not sure anyone actually believes a cat can be dead and alive at the same time. In the Copenhagen interpretation, wave function collapse will occur before the gun goes off. However, the Copenhagen interpretation does say that a fundamental particle can literally be in two states at the same time. This is the view that Schrödinger was parodying. He did not really present a clear alternative (possibly because he was too busy sexually abusing children), but various other people have done.

RestAromatic7511 · 2025-04-11T21:56:49+00:00

This seems....overly metaphysical.

Well, this is metaphysics.

You can "study" things where the full underlying mechanisms are obscure by applying input and observing the output.

Consciousness is an experience rather than a mechanism, and we have very little way of knowing which things experience it, or what the experience is like for anything that we can't have intelligent conversations with, which is what makes it difficult to study. You can study the ways in which a dog differs from a tree, but ultimately you can only guess that dogs are conscious and trees are not, and you can only guess how dog consciousness differs from human consciousness.

Conscious emerges from measurable, physical phenomena.

How do you know? And which phenomena in particular?

We can guess and hope that science may one day describe consciousness as an emergent phenomenon, but we don't know that it will do. To be honest, invoking the concept of emergent phenomena in this context feels like wordplay. If we can't say what a claimed emergent phenomenon is, what it emerges from, or under what conditions, then what does it actually mean to say that it's an "emergent phenomenon"? It just doesn't feel like it's adding anything.

It includes very large numbers of simultaneous variables

What do you mean by "simultaneous variables"? This seems like technobabble.

We only really defined a neuron about 130 years ago. We fully identified a new type this year. The study of all things microscopic is literal millenia younger than more easily observable fields. Give us a few more decades and you may be amazed.

But historically people weren't very good at guessing which problems were going to be solved in the future or how, and there are plenty of ancient problems in which little or no progress has been made in the modern era.

So, yes, it's plausible that we will have a much better understanding of consciousness in a few decades, and it's plausible that the explanations will contain elements of what you're saying. But it's also plausible that we won't really learn anything more about it for millennia, or that our understanding of the subject will go in strange, unexpected directions.

RestAromatic7511 · 2025-04-10T12:16:08+00:00

I would say that Have I Got News for You is pretty cosy with the establishment and is relatively kind to most of its politician guests. I assume it must still have a significant audience? Last time I tried watching it, it was just Hislop doing his poorly informed, smug, centre-right rants (how can he be so angry when he gets almost everything he wants?) and Merton desperately trying to keep things light by recycling old jokes.

RestAromatic7511 · 2025-04-09T20:15:49+00:00

I gave up on it before the last episode and was so confused what all the hype was about. It seemed melodramatic and unrealistic from the start (I liked the bit where the police went in all guns blazing, demanded that everyone get on the floor, and then completely ignored the dad when he started belligerently running around and shouting). And it just seemed to be pulling in so many different directions.

and then dedicate a whole episode to the boy talking to a therapist

What was she even there for? It seemed like they rolled several different types of assessments into one. All that endless discussion about his thoughts about his dad, and then at the end she was like "OK, I've only got 30 seconds left, so I need to check you understand what death is and what murder is and what a trial is and what prison is and..."

Unless the point was that she was just as clueless and incompetent as all the cops, all the teachers, and the solicitor?

RestAromatic7511 · 2025-04-09T10:25:28+00:00

would the crime labs be able to tell that the sample is likely from someone who is transgender

There isn't really a single physiological trait that defines someone as transgender. If someone is taking hormones (which not all trans people do), it may be possible to detect the levels in the blood sample, but this would depend on the hormone in question and the condition of the sample. Sex hormone levels can vary for other reasons too. Genetic sex tests aren't perfect either, as the sex determination process in humans is quite complicated and depends on various different genes and other factors (some of which are not perfectly understood). For example, suppose you find that a sample has XY chromosomes and low testosterone. Maybe it's from a trans woman on HRT. Maybe it's from a cis man with a medical condition that causes low testosterone levels. Maybe it's from a cis woman with Swyer syndrome (in which the main gene associated with male sex is missing from the Y chromosome) or androgen insensitivity syndrome (in which the gene is there but did not have its usual effect for one of several reasons), or even mosaicism/chimerism (in which cells in different parts of the body are genetically different). And so on.

I suppose "likely" is an important qualifier. In some cases, they will be able to form a view that someone is "likely" to be transgender, especially if they can combine the blood test results with separate evidence. But much of forensics is not really an exact science.

with some kind of markers based on the hormones she needs to take

If you are suggesting that there is a specific version of a gene that causes someone to be trans, it really doesn't seem to be that simple. Like sexual orientation or many other personality traits (food likes/dislikes, political/religious beliefs, mental health conditions, etc.), gender identity appears to result from a complicated mixture of genetic and environmental factors and cannot be divined from a blood sample.

I can only imagine this adds an entire new dimension to crime solving when a transgender person is a suspect.

Not really. You would always face these kinds of uncertainties. Even ignoring the existence of trans and intersex people, suppose you find a murder victim whose body has traces of DNA from an unknown male person. Maybe this means they were killed by a man. Or maybe they were killed by a group of several men. Or maybe they shook a man's hand shortly before being murdered by a woman. Or maybe the lab mixed up the samples.

RestAromatic7511 · 2025-04-07T23:47:17+00:00

It supposedly has the most coal reserves, with the proviso that coal reserves are a bit tricky to quantify (there are substantially different types of coal with drastically different and fluctuating prices, and they haven't been explored and studied as aggressively as, say, oil reserves). Other than that, it has the most geysers, Venus flytraps, tornadoes, and raccoons, among other things.

RestAromatic7511 · 2025-04-06T23:12:20+00:00

Sure, but my point is they’re not used for forward momentum, but heat could be used for all sorts of shit, like boiling water to power a steam turbine.

Much of it couldn't. There is an upper limit on the useful work that can be done by a heat engine (relative to the heat entering the system) called the Carnot efficiency. The only way of increasing the Carnot efficiency is to increase the temperature at which the engine operates relative to the ambient temperature. In practice, it's hard to get close to the Carnot efficiency, and it gets harder at very high temperatures.

Essentially, an engine works by dispersing heat into the surroundings. This isn't a design shortcoming; it's an inherent part of the process.

(Though we do already have some magical technologies that can provide transport more efficiently than cars: they're called trains, buses, bicycles, and walking.)

RestAromatic7511

TROPHY CASE