Ask a physicist anything. (7)

[Zippy the Wonderslug]

^ Was that quote from the movie Star Wars?

 

[Tuddrussell]

Fallout 3

 

[Zippy the Wonderslug]

Ooh. I so need to get that game.

 

[Zippy the Wonderslug]

I think that I once heard if you were to take a camera, point it directly to a television that displays a live feed of this recording, that you can somehow look into the spirit world.

What exactly would the tv be displaying in it's final output?

If you observed the television, would you be looking into infinity?

This doesn't seem possible if the camera is only recording at 24 fps.

Anyway, what are your thoughts on this?

 

[chris4243]

Also, going back to my previous question you responded on...

What would be the first thing that breaks down where there's nothing really left anymore...

Fuel, energy, or resources (food and stuff)?

Nothing will "run out" so much as become scarce and expensive, so rather than that we don't have any it will be unaffordable. The first things to go I think will be oil, fresh water, and arable land. But, fresh water is easy enough to make with a power source, and greenhouses and aquaculture are becoming more popular (at least for non-grains). And, oil can be made artificially using coal. Coal we have enough of for hundreds of years, long enough that it is more the carbon dioxide than the lack of coal that we will have to worry about. Uranium we have plenty of especially since if we use up all the good stuff eventually we'll go to breeder reactors that make much better use of it.

So what will we run out of? Unpolluted air and water, that's what. And ocean fish stocks, we won't so much run out of fish but we have horribly reduced their numbers -- since the oceans belong to no one, it's first come first served. And the fish are accumulating the mercury that has been escaping from our coal burning. And millions of species we will "run out of" (ie, make extinct) without even getting to study them.

 

[Wiccan_Child]

I think that I once heard if you were to take a camera, point it directly to a television that displays a live feed of this recording, that you can somehow look into the spirit world.

A film was made exploring that effect, called 'White Noise'. Good stuff, but wholly inaccurate. It exploits the human fetish with unusual events, idealisms of technology that lead to fascinating paradoxes: "Cameras show what they see. What if you stuck a camera in front of its own TV?" makes the fallacy in the first step: they don't show what they see. There are all sorts of interfering algorithms and finite (but non-zero) atmospheric effects. TV footage and cameras are built for standard filming events, but if you put them in recursive (and, thus, arbitrarily large) events, they won't perform as specified.

What exactly would the tv be displaying in it's final output?

If the camera was pointing at and solely recoridng the screen itself, the various negligible effects (blurring, atmospheric fog, etc) would amplify - effectively, you'd be seeing an image that was going through an infinite amount of air, dispersed over an infinite amount of space, all filtered an infinite amount of times through a very limited camera that can only record X pixels per second. This would limit the image to, at the end of it, a grey blur.

If you observed the television, would you be looking into infinity?

No, in the most ideal conditions there would be a recursive delay, eventually leading to the pixel limit. The TV screen would be reproduced on itself at smaller scales, until its pixels were larger than the next predicted iteration.

 

[chris4243]

I think that I once heard if you were to take a camera, point it directly to a television that displays a live feed of this recording, that you can somehow look into the spirit world.

An easier thing to do is to put a microphone to a speaker connected to it, that way you can hear the sounds of the spirit world. Either that, or continuously amplify any random noise. Though I imagine doing that with a camera would have a more interesting effect as the noise in one pixel could move to another and so turn into shapes rather than pixel-by-pixel gibberish.

 

[mzungu]

Here's a nice one for everybody to watch: The Core | Watch Free Documentary Online

 

[Naraoia]

Words are patterns of material that can be recreated using any sort of molecule. Smells and tastes are particular to single molecules - you can't recreate the smell of cucumber melon shampooed hair with anything other than the specific array of molecules that emanate from your girlfriend's head after application of said shampoo.

To do that, every phone would need a sufficiently large bank of every odour molecule that could conceivably be 'smell-texted' (smelted?), and since odour molecules are unimaginably varied, it would make the phone exceedingly large.

To 'text' a particular smell, you would need a way to be able to recreate at least the sensation of a very particular array of molecules (not just one, but several molecules in the right proportion). If you could do this by some other, effectively infinitely repeatable method, then you have a revolution on your hands.

Couldn't you use electrodes on/in people's heads and translate smells into little zaps to the brain? That gets rid of the chemical storage problem... though I'm sure the complexity issue is still there

Sorry, but I would prefer we didn't embrace a solution that includes considering women as second-class citizens.

 

[Wiccan_Child]

Couldn't you use electrodes on/in people's heads and translate smells into little zaps to the brain? That gets rid of the chemical storage problem... though I'm sure the complexity issue is still there

The problem is knowing what parts of the brain to zap, and they'd be different for each person, and they may well change over time.

 

[Naraoia]

see...
you finger isn;['t vroken.
i knew you scietists could do these things.
Now check out the research on Single Mothers and kids with sociopathic behavior and you will be doing us all a favor.

You know that you woul never agree with me now that you have taken the other side.But as a scientist, you OUGHT care about the Truth rather than winning here cross examing me.

I find it telling that it's always the single mothers you keep going on about. As if all those women knocked themselves up and left themselves to raise their kids alone. (And what about single fathers, anyway?) It takes two to tango, mister.

We're working on the Heisenberg Compensators. Once we've got that nailed, we'll have transporters (and replicators and holodecks, which all run on the same technology)

I don't imagine they'll be ready before Christmas?

Oh, and we're gonna hit the seven billion people population mark in two weeks

EDIT: That would be October 31st. There must be something spooky in store for the seven billionth child born on All Hallows Eve...

That's awesome.

The timing, I mean. The number is scary.

 

[Zippy the Wonderslug]

^ Congrats on your 5,000th post!

 

[Naraoia]

^ Congrats on your 5,000th post!

Haha, I didn't even notice. Gosh, I've been here a while!

 

[troodon]

I find it telling that it's always the single mothers you keep going on about. As if all those women knocked themselves up and left themselves to raise their kids alone. (And what about single fathers, anyway?) It takes two to tango, mister.

I can't speak specifically to the actual poster you're responding to, but generally when people talk about about the implications (societal and otherwise) of single-mother households their purpose isn't necessarily to scold just the mother for her actions.

 

[Naraoia]

I can't speak specifically to the actual poster you're responding to, but generally when people talk about about the implications (societal and otherwise) of single-mother households their purpose isn't necessarily to scold just the mother for her actions.

Generally, but cupid has a mantra about this sexually liberated matriarchy he imagines he lives in and how that's a bad thing. (And the "what about single dads" part would apply regardless, IMO.)

 

[troodon]

(And the "what about single dads" part would apply regardless, IMO.)

Well, again, I can't speak to this "cupid" fellow of whom you mention but I think most people mean "single-parent" when they say "single-mother", because in the vast majority of cases the single parent is the mother.

 

[Naraoia]

Well, again, I can't speak to this "cupid" fellow of whom you mention but I think most people mean "single-parent" when they say "single-mother", because in the vast majority of cases the single parent is the mother.

I wish people said what they meant, then. Like Wiccan did here. It can't be that hard, and it's one of those subjects where you probably will run into people who have learned to assume the worst.

(I know I get pretty worked up about this stuff. I don't want to get into quarrels with you, since you don't seem to be a sexist pig As to cupid dave, I'll let 'im speak for 'imself...)

 

[troodon]

I wish people said what they meant, then. Like Wiccan did here. It can't be that hard, and it's one of those subjects where you probably will run into people who have learned to assume the worst.

Yeah, precise phrasing is very important when one is talking about this kind of subject matter.

I'll go back to science threads now

 

[Wiccan_Child]

Well, again, I can't speak to this "cupid" fellow of whom you mention but I think most people mean "single-parent" when they say "single-mother", because in the vast majority of cases the single parent is the mother.

I find it's the other way around. When they say single mothers, they mean single mothers. Cupid dave displays a venomous sexist towards women, so I think it's quite likely indeed that he is blaming mothers, and only mothers. Single fathers? Saints of the Earth!

 

[Chalnoth]

I find it's the other way around. When they say single mothers, they mean single mothers. Cupid dave displays a venomous sexist towards women, so I think it's quite likely indeed that he is blaming mothers, and only mothers. Single fathers? Saints of the Earth!

And I don't think it makes sense to compare single mothers against single fathers here. Rather, it's single mothers against the guys who had sex and then left.