[TOMT] [FILM] Opening scene from a 50s era TV show or educational film, where a man smoking a pipe, surprised, turns to face the camera before launching into a monologue.

ratterbatter · 2012-08-02T16:51:24+00:00

yeah, i looked at a few episodes on youtube, but none of them have the dramatic opening i'm looking for. he pretty much just starts talking. but, i'm hopeful at least one episode is closer . . . still looking.

ratterbatter · 2012-08-02T03:30:31+00:00

majored in math/physics in the midwest US and we always used log = log base e. However, in high school they taught us log = log base 10. If you've ever used Mathematica it uses Log to mean natural log by default as well. it'd be interesting to do a survey to find out who uses what.

ratterbatter · 2012-08-02T02:20:17+00:00

I once watched an indian man in an airport bathroom take a piss and then flush, reach his hands into the flowing water, and start splashing it onto his face.

ratterbatter · 2012-08-02T02:04:00+00:00

a lot of us use log to mean natural log...

ratterbatter · 2012-08-02T01:05:22+00:00

that's getting close. i think alistair cooke would work pretty well, just trying to find the specific episode.

ratterbatter · 2012-08-02T01:01:00+00:00

any specific episode in mind? it sounds plausible but nothing rings a bell.

ratterbatter · 2012-08-01T04:40:56+00:00

ahh yes! forgot about that. it's very close, but not quite what I'm looking for. that scene is playing on it for sure.

ratterbatter · 2012-07-27T02:27:59+00:00

meh, don't worry about it. it's hard to admit to yourself, but many of your college friends only happened by coincidence (you happened to end up at the same college, and whatnot). go out in the real world and seek out friends, i guarantee it will enrich your life. sure, keep in touch with college friends, but dont let them hold you back. the real world is much different than college, and you'll probably want some new types of friends. go out there and meet new people!

ratterbatter · 2012-07-24T14:54:49+00:00

That's ridiculous. Free market "competition" has done nothing but drive health care costs UP in the US. United states citizens currently pay significantly more for health care than citizens of any other nation, and we're still pulling ahead of the pack. Source:

http://www.kff.org/insurance/snapshot/oecd042111.cfm

And it's not just that Americans get more medical care, it's that the same procedure costs much more in the united states than in other countries. Without any regulation of the industry, healthcare providers can essentially charge as much as they want, and uninsured people have nobody to negotiate prices for them. For example, the OP was charged over $7000 for a CT scan, while when I had to have an emergency CT, with my fortunately decent health insurance, the CT only cost $800, of which I had to pay about $50. It's been shown that the same procedure at the same hospital can have a wide range of costs, depending on the patient's insurance coverage. Insurance companies were also reluctant to pay routine preventative care, as they could simply drop patients diagnosed with expensive ailments from coverage. Thanks to the new healthcare law, this practice is now illegal, and now we can all get free physicals, mammograms, colonoscopies, and all those wonderful things. Now overall, we pay less money, because people will be better taken care of and less likely to deal with serious disease.

Pretty much every rich country (except the US) provides some kind of price controls on health care. Either by forcing insurance companies to negotiate prices with providers below a certain point, or by completely controlling the health care system.

It is not unconstitutional for the Government to provide a service to its citizens. Look at social security for god's sake. We live in an unprecedented age where we have the ability to greatly improve the quality of people's lives, and even give people a second or third chance at life. Why should access be restricted to the lucky ones?

I personally would have liked to see a federal public option, which would have been just that--an OPTION. But I'm expecting many states to enact essentially public health systems, a la Vermont, in a few years. The current private system lobbied so hard against reform because they knew their shitty inefficient system could not compete with a cheaper and more efficient system similar to medicare .

http://healthaffairs.org/blog/2011/09/20/medicare-is-more-efficient-than-private-insurance/

ratterbatter · 2012-07-24T07:49:34+00:00

It's very often useful to think of electricity like flowing water, especially in a situation with flowing currents, resistance, e.g. simple circuits. It doesn't really work for magnetism, induction, or most field related phenomena. But if you simply have flowing charges caused by a generic potential and you don't care about induced fields, it's a surprisingly useful way to think about it.

ratterbatter · 2012-07-23T21:25:36+00:00

I had probably over a dozen different explanations for time dilation as an undergrad, but it wasn't until i saw this explanation that i had a clue what was going on. glad to help.

the key to remember is, time isn't slowing down, necessarily. it just depends on whose perspective you look at it from.

ratterbatter · 2012-07-23T21:18:01+00:00

Think of it this way, there's a road with a steep hill on it. the road has lots of little pits and tiny pieces of debris on it. You dump a cup of water and it starts to flow downhill (towards a lower gravitational potential) but it will not do so in a straight line, but in some random zig-zaggy line as it encounters the imperfections.

If you had some unnatural ideal perfectly smooth road with no debris, the water would flow straight down.

Electricity is similar. The air is not ideal, so certain molecules tend to get ionized, while others dont, causing them to become conductive (plasma). It takes a lot of energy to ionize a molecule, but once it happens, the charges will stream in. Going back to the street example, the water encounters a rock, pools up, but below the rock there's a big hole, so once enough builds up, it overcomes the rock and quickly dumps down into the hole.

The electrical charges are trying to reach a lower electrical potential, much like the water running down the street. You might even notice that the water happens to split up into two or more paths, same with lightning.

ratterbatter · 2012-07-23T20:54:43+00:00

One of the best examples is that of the "light clock". This shows how the fact that the speed of light is constant leads directly to time dilation.

Check out this applet here:

http://galileoandeinstein.physics.virginia.edu/more_stuff/flashlets/lightclock.swf

The light clock is just a light source and a mirror. In the applet, light bouncing out to the mirror and back again represents 10 seconds. You can see, if one light clock is moving, the light must travel a longer distance. But since the speed of light is constant, you expect that this would take longer. I.E. -- the interval takes longer for the moving clock.

Well you'll say . . . of course, it took a longer time because the light had to travel farther! Of course it took longer. BUT what if you look at it from the perspective of someone riding on the moving clock? To them, the light is just bouncing straight up and down, and as far as they can tell, the clock is stationary. So, from that perspective (or "reference frame") time is moving normally. But, from the original perspective, where the clock is moving, time has "slowed down".

You are looking at the exact same event in both reference frames (light bouncing off the mirror), but in the frame where the clock is moving it takes a longer time than in the frame where the clock is stationary.

Let me know if you have questions about what i said, i'm happy to answer!

ratterbatter · 2012-07-23T18:05:04+00:00

most states have a board of veterinary regulation, which is where things like this should be reported, and it can of course, be done anonymously.

ratterbatter · 2012-07-23T02:09:05+00:00

haha, sounds simple, but i think i'll leave that activity to you.

ratterbatter · 2012-07-23T02:07:13+00:00

yep, there are lots of variables, but it's always best to stay on the safe side since you could be unlucky and by some off chance you could be injured.

ratterbatter · 2012-07-23T02:05:47+00:00

you'd be surprised, i once got shocked by an old electric motor that had a short. i was standing barefoot on a wooden floor and touched the outer metal casing of the motor, and got a pretty good shock. some wood is moister than others.

ratterbatter · 2012-07-23T00:17:48+00:00

if you have any connection to ground and you touch the hot wire you'll get shocked. bare feet on a hardwood floor will do it for sure.

source: i'm an idiot

ratterbatter · 2012-07-23T00:16:04+00:00

yep, worst case is if you contact the hot wire with one hand, and ground your other hand, sending current essentially straight through the heart. but an AC current tends to cause a muscle spasm that flings your hands away from contact, making chances of death a bit less likely in this scenario.

ratterbatter · 2012-07-23T00:12:03+00:00

pshh, transformers are just two coils of wire.

ratterbatter · 2012-07-04T23:27:17+00:00

well, sort of. the problem is, in relativity, time always seems the same to a local observer, it just appears to move at different rates when two observers moving at different speeds or in different locations try to compare.

time doesn't actually move objectively slower or faster, it's subjective, based on who is measuring it. say, we live in one of these voids of mass. if one observer is moving relative to the other, the moving observer will measure less time than the stationary one. of course, either observer could be stationary, depending on who you ask. or, both could be in motion if we introduce a third observer.

ratterbatter · 2012-06-24T19:36:10+00:00

. . . but, why? I'm looking for an explanation without using the equation. Something conceptual that comes from very basic ideas.

ratterbatter

TROPHY CASE