Are the ads the cause or the effect, though? And she's also not terribly specific about what social ills this trend is bringing about. Anorexia is on the rise but not catastrophically so. General vanity and self-consciousness aren't really anything new - and here, again, they never tell us what an idealized image of female beauty is costing us. I'm not unsympathetic but if we're supposed to be doing anything about it we have to really decide what exactly the problem is.

He's basically playing with word here so you can agree or disagree with whatever interpretation you prefer. I think his basic premise is that a fortunate man gets to go and do what he's passionate about each day, whether that's the same thing every day or something different. The punishment comes when the things you do become who you are and there's nothing else for you to do even if your passions change. A person without direction is very unlikely to become anything in that sense and that is his reward. A person with more direction in their life runs that risk and that's their punishment.

>> ^Winstonfield_Pennypacker:

The abolition of Income Tax and the instution of some sort of Fair Tax is the only solution we need here. Ultimately speaking though, what really needs to happens is a reduction of the U.S. Corporate tax rate. The whole "Tax cuts for the Rich" argument the neolib left always makes is pure bunk. The progressive income tax has set things up so that the top 10% are paying 60% of the taxes, and the bottom 50% are paying only 5%. The only taxes left to cut ARE taxes on "the rich", because they're the only ones paying federal taxes any more.


Look here and here. The richest 20% pay 65% of all federal taxes but earn 55% of the pre-tax income. The bottom 60% earn 26% of income and pay 15% of taxes, so the swing isn't huge. Not to mention the fact that the mean income of the bottom 20% is below the poverty threshold for a three person household (I'm not sure how a three person household is supposed to get by on $17k).

I agree. A hydrogen balloon would have exploded almost instantly once catching fire. Here the boom doesn't come until the balloon is nearly gone and is likely an electrical explosion.
>> ^shuac:

Looked to me like the balloon itself, the paper-like material, was the thing that caught fire. And the explosion was caused by contact with the power transformer. Therefore, it probably was helium.

To McBoinkens:
The 4th dimension didn't play into what they are saying directly but it is inseparable from the physics. I was merely pointing out that you were taking their language regarding 'shape' and 'flatness' too literally. Your point regarding reworking of our understanding of gravity is a perfect example. The real question addressed by this video is what is the overall curvature of the universe? The local behavior will be dominated by the local distribution of mass, but what shape does it take asymptotically as you move away from local sources? It doesn't require a re-working of our current theory of gravity and is, in fact, inextricably tied to it. If gravity is related to a bending in the manifold of spacetime than what is the background geometry of the universe? Is it flat or something else? Their analysis did involve the fourth dimension (time) because you can't separate it from any discussin of gravity (or physics in general for that matter). The microwave radiation they measured travelled through both space and time to arrive at the satellite acquiring the data. In that way, it is a measure of the spacetime that it travelled through along the way and they use it to determine the basic geometry of the universe.

To dannym:
I didn't think it was dumbed down that badly. In fact, I thought it was quite well presented. Here again, the curvature they're measuring is the baseline for the universe at large. There are a number of reasons to expect the universe to be flat; not the least of which because it's the most intuitively pleasing. The point is if the universe has a mean curvature to it than that curvature is everywhere including right in front of your face. They aren't measuring the curvature of some incredibly distant point but looking at the most ancient radiation within the universe and the distribution of it to determine the basic geometry of all that is.

>> ^Mcboinkens:

>> ^crotchflame:
It isn't misleading. He's just using the best language available for a popular description of the issue. The universe's mean density determines directly the curvature of the spacetime manifold; so it isn't so much describing shape as geometry. A triangle's still a triangle in a curved spacetime but the geometric properties (sum of the angles) changes. 'Flat' as we think about it doesn't work terribly well in describing a 4-dimensional manifold but still accurately describes the flat spacetime as being one without curvature - or asymptotically Euclidean.
>> ^Mcboinkens:
Misleading. He is saying density is directly related to shape. What exactly qualifies as flat in the view of shapes? That implies that the Earth if flat too. I have a feeling there is quite a bit of debate about the process used here to determine it is flat and not saddled.



I don't se how the 4th dimension even played into their analysis. It's not like they measured time through density. It seemed to me like they were trying to describe the observable 3 dimensional literal space as flat, which is why I thought it was misleading. If they were saying spacetime was flat, I disagree even further because that would completely screw up our current theory of gravity as a function of spacetime. Which is fine in itself, but not without coming up with a replacement for that idea first.


>> ^dannym3141:

I get the feeling this is dumbed down to the point where it can be argued about - maybe the real information is indisputable. But anyway - this might be completely unrelated, but i was shown today by my maths lecturer that if you're "infinitely" far away from a curve, you're equidistant from each point on that curve, so a curve is actually a straight line.
Maybe i didn't follow the video well enough, but it seemed to show a satellite looking out at a section of the sphere we draw around ourself and label "the earliest radiation". How can we look at a surface that is billions of light years away and tell whether or not it has curvature? And if i assume that we CAN see a difference in distance to see whether it's flat or not, surely our error margins are comparatively so large that we couldn't state either way for certain?
I'm going to assume that it's visually extremely hard to demonstrate the principle visually, and that ^ isn't the point.

Your points are both well made and entirely pointless regarding the video. I say that not as an insult but as someone who sees things much as you suggest. The crux is, though, that the same can be said for all of science together. The dissecting of space into abstracts of meaning is no different from any other abstraction that people do. The trouble is, and where I think your description is too simple is that the abstraction and the dynamics are one in the same. The geometry they're trying to get down to in the video here describes the base dynamics of gravity throughout the universe. In that sense, it isn't just a structure applied to the universe by human minds but something fundamental. Describing gravity as a curvature in space time could be considered a human abstraction (like the electromagnetic field or the wave function in quantum mechanics) but the issue of whether the mean gravitational background of the universe is flat or not goes beyond that. Just like the mass and charge of the electron. It's a fundamental; it is the dynamics, the flow.


>> ^GeeSussFreeK:

More over, what is it say it isn't changing or is due to change, or is always in a state of flux. There might be some other more fundamental rule governing that overall shape...or what if the same isn't consistent through the galaxy. And is shape something you need to confine to matter and not the container in which mater is in? If both have a shape, and ones shape is affecting the others shape, what does shape even mean anymore. Is the shape the thing you have, or is it the thing you have after the thing above you is taken into account. What is shape?
My metaphysical interpretation of the universe is non-dimensional. Space having depth, IMO, is a result of the minds interpretation of the details of the universe. While the elements (heheheh) of Euclid's geometry are completely sound, and thus, trying to talk about the shape of the universe as humans experience it will be a question that has an answer, it doesn't answer the more important question, does existence itself have dimension. In the same way that I don't believe color is a property of light, I think you can reduce space and time (though time gets interesting) to an experience of minds.
Even without my own metaphysical framework built up, all interpretations of space (lines, squares, rays) derive their existence from one essential element, the point. A point has no dimension. A line is essentially a collection of dimensionless points. It is not necessary to interpret them as something with dimension. For example, y=x. Algebra, in general, allows for a dimensionless explanation for the interaction of points. Y=x doesn't have to look like anything, per say, for it to be solved in algebra. While humans will retain the contextual information of space and shapes when working for algebra, those are interpretations that correlate back on the human reality. In other words, much akin to a computer program, the universe could (and I believe does) operate without a property of space. Space is a result of minds in the same way monitors construct visual images from a computer. Both are interpretations of dimensionless data.
Seeing in spaces helps us be better hunters, but as that confers to the ultimate truth of reality, I am less certain. The real story might be less about space and gravity, but the overall governing dynamics which exist as a simple set of seemingly arbitrary rules. The reality of the universe might be very closely understood as a computer program or a very sophisticated algebra expression.

It isn't misleading. He's just using the best language available for a popular description of the issue. The universe's mean density determines directly the curvature of the spacetime manifold; so it isn't so much describing shape as geometry. A triangle's still a triangle in a curved spacetime but the geometric properties (sum of the angles) changes. 'Flat' as we think about it doesn't work terribly well in describing a 4-dimensional manifold but still accurately describes the flat spacetime as being one without curvature - or asymptotically Euclidean.

>> ^Mcboinkens:

Misleading. He is saying density is directly related to shape. What exactly qualifies as flat in the view of shapes? That implies that the Earth if flat too. I have a feeling there is quite a bit of debate about the process used here to determine it is flat and not saddled.

Who said it was impossible? Or even difficult for that matter. Your sketch just flipped what I already said. You can make the pieces fit together perfectly in the first configuration - in fact, the whole puzzle is supposed to be constructed from a single sheet. It then doesn't fit together perfectly in the second configuration but is close enough to look like it. You seem to have made things fit in the second configuration leaving small gaps in the first. It works just as well but seems more difficult to me.

it's quite a nice animation, by the way.

>> ^ForgedReality:

>> ^xxovercastxx:

>> ^crotchflame:

Just to show you guys this shit is not as impossible as you seem to want to believe, I mocked this puzzle up in Photoshop real quick and animated it. In my model, there are VERY slight gaps between some of the pieces. This is due to the fact that the shapes have to be very precise because of the importance of their proportions in relation to each other. The horizontal and vertical parts of the L-pieces get their widths and heights from the differences in width and height between the two larger pieces. It's pretty logical, but hard to execute, which could account for the person in the video having apparent difficulty making the pieces fit together right.
http://img188.imageshack.us/img188/9252/puzzle1.gif

Actually, if you look at the template for the puzzle, the area is initially perfectly filled - the guy just made bad cuts. The trick is that the L-pieces are slightly longer at their base than the narrower quadrilaterall; they have to be wedged back into the puzzle space for the second configuration which creates the extra space. The triangle at the top is a true triangle as the cut is just a straight line, so it's a slightly different illusion than the missing square puzzle.
>> ^Payback:

>> ^ForgedReality:
>> ^Payback:
Ok, I thought this was going to be an illusion... Kept waiting for the bigger piece to end up the same size as the smaller one.

Exactly my point. People downvoted my comment because they're dumb, I guess.
The angle cut allows the differently sized pieces to swap places, and changing the configuration of the two L-shaped ones creates a gap. OOOH SO MYSTERIOUS.

Well, a bit mysterious. The total area inside the bounding box doesn't change, and the pieces fill it, so the sum of their areas would seem to be the total area of the bounding box. You shouldn't be able to "rearrange" the pieces to create a largish hole, because no matter what you do, the sum of the areas of the pieces remain constant and seemingly equal to the area inside the box. The first arrangement is obviously not perfectly filled, and the second one moves those errors to one square area.

I hate to sound as dickish as this does, but it's Beethoven's 5th piano concerto being played by Alfred Brendel - it isn't Brendel's concerto.

>> ^coolhund:

>> ^crotchflame:
>> ^coolhund:
What I learned from all these questions and discussion (not only this one) after 20 years is that atheists tend to be far more fanatic and totalitarian about their view than agnostics.

What about the agnostic atheists?
I've heard so many people say this and I still have no idea what a fanatic atheist would look like.

There are many different forms of agnosticism and atheism. But as long as someone calls himself atheist, its far more drastic than someone who calls himself an agnostic.
Also agnostics tend to be far more tolerable of religion, because they acknowledge that religion is a part of the human race and you simply cant imagine what would happen (or would have happened) if people wouldnt believe in anything bigger.
But a lot of atheists are pretty totalitarian. Religion is bad, needs to be exterminated, caused billions of deaths, you name it.


Agnosticism is a statement on the nature of knowledge while atheism is a statement of belief (or non-belief); the two don't seem like different points on some scale of religiosity to me. You can be an agnostic Christian as well as an agnostic atheist. Saying you're not sure doesn't say anything about what you believe since any sensible person would say that they're not sure.

I simply object to labelling a non-believer as a fanatic because it implies that they're holding to some belief without critical analysis and no such prescription can be attributed to atheism. An atheist that is completely intolerant of other people's beliefs isn't a fanatic he's an asshole. Anyone who claims that the pope is infallible on the other hand is a fanatic. I've never personally met an atheist that fits your description, though.

Atheism doesn't reject a belief in 'something higher.' It's a non-belief in Jehovah, Zeus, Thor, etc. I can experience the numinous while still insisting that the theistic description of a personal God is incorrect.

>> ^coolhund:

What I learned from all these questions and discussion (not only this one) after 20 years is that atheists tend to be far more fanatic and totalitarian about their view than agnostics.


What about the agnostic atheists?

I've heard so many people say this and I still have no idea what a fanatic atheist would look like.

>> ^Deano:

Er what? It's got MRI equivalent radiation levels? You can't bring metal near it? MRI machines have very high radiation levels, far greater than x-rays. Not sure about this at all. It looks cool though.


MRI doesn't have any radiation. It has large static magnetic fields and radio waves - that's not what most people would term radiation. It's very powerful but hasn't been shown to have negative effects like x-rays (which are an ionizing form of radiation).

I wonder how it took them 7 years to develop what appears to be a pair of large permanent magnets with some shielding. Probably costs a fortune too.

There's something very relaxing about this; a man doing something very simple but doing it incredibly well. Like the zen of ironing...

>> ^RedSky:

One of my favourite classical pieces.


Mine as well. An absolutely brilliant composition.