Unexplainable Questions

[The_Doc_Man]

I've been busy for some time and missed this thread. I'm going to toss in a few shots to hopefully contribute positively.

Earlier question about when playing something, sometimes you feel different and seem to be able to do no wrong because you are "in a zone." People talk about altered states of consciousness. Nobody knows exactly HOW this happens because we don't have a flowchart that translates neuron firing into conscious thoughts. However, it is an observed phenomenon that we can sometimes enter an altered state of consciousness in which our brains are focused on one thing to the exclusion of that little "random stream of consciousness" that we might more normally see. I.e. we are somehow shutting down our own self-imposed distractions.

As to computer games, I find that Fallout and Diablo (not to mention quite a few related games) are great distractions, but one of the best FPS games I've ever played is Morrowind (and its expansions). Not totally hack-and-slash because there are puzzles to be solved by investigation rather than beating some NPC to a pulp. I'm currently playing Civilization: Beyond Earth, which is a complex simulation.

As to the strategy of eating all your food at once vs. rationing - it would depend on what else you are doing because the body's metabolism does different things with food excess when you are and when you are not working physically. Storing up that extra food, sadly, is NOT a symmetric process in the long run unless you maintain a high level of physical activity. If you don't, the food gets stored as fat but when you are out of food, your conversion of fat to energy takes muscle tissue with it.

 

[Libre]

Why are planets and moons shaped as spheres?
If these objects were created by the Big Bang, and collisions with other heavenly bodies, wouldn't we expect them to be of random shapes - like the comets and meteors that we've observed out in space - kind of amorphous blobs? But no, at least OUR planets, and the sun for that matter, appear perfectly circular in a two dimensional perspective, and spherical in a three dimensional perspective.
WHY?

 

[ColinEssex]

Why is it necessary for American police to kill black people?

Col

 

[Frothingslosh]

Why are planets and moons shaped as spheres?
If these objects were created by the Big Bang, and collisions with other heavenly bodies, wouldn't we expect them to be of random shapes - like the comets and meteors that we've observed out in space - kind of amorphous blobs? But no, at least OUR planets, and the sun for that matter, appear perfectly circular in a two dimensional perspective, and spherical in a three dimensional perspective.
WHY?

Gravity. Above a certain mass, gravity compresses matter into a spherical shape.

Also, both Earth and the sun can be described better as 'flattened' spheres - neither is perfectly spherical due to rotation and the centrifugal effect. About the only thing I can think of that would be perfectly spherical would be the event horizon of a black hole, as it's determined by mass of and distance from the singularity.

Why is it necessary for American police to kill black people?

Col

While I realize full well that this is just another case of you using your raging anti-Americanism (man, you'd fit in well in Soviet Russa) to try to troll the Americans on the board, I can honestly respond with this:

Racism and being drunk on power. Power corrupts and all that.

 

[Galaxiom]

Gravity. Above a certain mass, gravity compresses matter into a spherical shape.

Exactly. In fact the official definition of a planet includes the body to be of sufficient size such that the gravity makes it round. Pluto lost its planetary status on this count.

 

[Frothingslosh]

Exactly. In fact the official definition of a planet includes the body to be of sufficient size such that the gravity makes it round. Pluto lost its planetary status on this count.

Actually, Pluto lost its status due to the addition of 'has cleared its orbit of other objects' to the requirements for planethood. As it's technically part of the Kuiper belt, it most decidedly did not meet that criterion.

 

[ConnorGiles]

Why are planets and moons shaped as spheres?
If these objects were created by the Big Bang, and collisions with other heavenly bodies, wouldn't we expect them to be of random shapes - like the comets and meteors that we've observed out in space - kind of amorphous blobs? But no, at least OUR planets, and the sun for that matter, appear perfectly circular in a two dimensional perspective, and spherical in a three dimensional perspective.
WHY?

http://www.livescience.com/32452-why-do-drops-of-liquid-form-spheres-in-space.html

I guess the same rules go for planets and so forth

 

[Frothingslosh]

http://www.livescience.com/32452-why-do-drops-of-liquid-form-spheres-in-space.html

I guess the same rules go for planets and so forth

No, not really. Gas, plasma, and solids don't have surface tension like water does, as surface tension is a property unique to liquids.

Stars are actually a rather interesting case. They're a mix of plasma and gas, and they are caught in a balance where the inward pull of gravity due to their mass is exactly balanced out by the outward push of all that radiating energy. (That's a simplification, of course, ignoring things like convection, solar flares, and stellar wind for the sake of simplicity.) There is quite literally no 'surface' to form tension.

And solids retain their shape until acted upon because, hey, solids!

 

[murphybridget]

Froth - we can eliminate low quality strings, or problems with the guitar's necks or bridges. Not only do I use very high quality strings (I play professionally), but and I've seen it over and over on many different instruments through the years. I've observed it very carefully and consistently and from empirical evidence, I'm convinced that the effect is somehow intrinsic to the string itself, and separate from the guitar's construction. I'd have to put the string on a tension gauge without a guitar and simulate the conditions I spoke of, while measuring the tension to prove it, and I haven't done that - but it continues to be a mystery to me.

It definitely seems like something inherent to the strings themselves. Your idea of using a tension gauge to test this sounds really interesting.

 

[Cotswold]

How can there be a His & Hers Uni-Sex hairdresser?

 

[GaP42]

What is the value of the square root of -1?
How is it that imaginary numbers are used in calculations that result in real world outcomes?

 

[The_Doc_Man]

How is it that imaginary numbers are used in calculations that result in real world outcomes?

Because in many cases the mathematical models behave themselves when we do use SQRT(-1) or i in the computation. My own favorite specific question is (considering that e and pi are both transcendental numbers), how does this happen? (Using the conventional operators - ^ as "raised to the power" and * as "multiplied by")

e^(i * pi) = 1

All it means is that we don't understand the correspondence between reality and those numbers yet, but we have empirically found that they work OK when computing things related to them. Empirical findings that aren't fully understood can still give good answers. The infamous Gas Laws were empirical first before we eventually derived them ab initio.

 

[GaP42]

Another one - it can be shown mathematically that 0.9 repeat - you know 0.999999 ... to infinity = 1, then there must be a similar infinite series that can be defined such that it shows nothing is something! ie 0 = a quantity (or reverse). Hmmm
(the series: 1 - 0.9 repeat).

Somewhat reminds me of quantum foam - space is not empty - quantum particles popping into and out of existence because ... random energy fluctuations, sometimes 0 sometimes not .. maybe.

 

[The_Doc_Man]

there must be a similar infinite series that can be defined such that it shows nothing is something! ie 0 = a quantity (or reverse). Hmmm
(the series: 1 - 0.9 repeat).

That is actually one of the series that converges at 0... the one that says "0=Limit(1 - 10^(-x)) for x=1-infinity" - and it is also a variant of the statement of Zeno's Paradox (which involves halving things indefinitely).

 

[GaP42]

That is actually one of the series that converges at 0... the one that says "0=Limit(1 - 10^(-x)) for x=1-infinity" - and it is also a variant of the statement of Zeno's Paradox (which involves halving things indefinitely).

Yes - these questions are quickly / easily answered by members with a computing and associated mathematical background. That concept of infinity is a ....
If the set of integers is infinite then the set of numbers whiich do not include integers is infinitely greater!

 

[The_Doc_Man]

It is true that there are "flavors" of infinity. However, infinity is like null. Once it works its way into your computation, it propagates (infinitely). If you try to compare two "infinities" the answer is usually not what you wanted, though if you are not using IEEE extended math modules, you actually CAN compare "infinities." That is because the non-IEEE math chips just use the largest possible number to represent infinity. The IEEE chips, on the other hand, have a separate "status" code that includes things like "this is not a number", "infinity", "this number has never been defined", and a couple of other possibilities.