/sci/ - Science & Math

Light is accelerated in the sense that gravity adds kinetic energy to it in the direction of the gravitational pull. It does not go any faster, as it's already going the speed of light, so the acceleration just makes it "blue shift" giving it additional energy.

>>3720818
Floors 95-97 would comprise about 45 feet. Try calculating the energy content of the top third of a skyscraper as large as the WTC having fallen 45 feet straight down, and then ask your self if any kind of steel skeleton structure in the absence of any concrete core (which none of the WTC buildings had) would be able to do fuck all to stop that momentum.

>>3717058
Most religions do not claim God is sentient.

>>3716995
It's not so much about the resources, as it is about the work needed to make those resources useful. Even with essentially unlimited resources people taken as a group will tend to starve instead of prosper if they can't get individual material reward for their individual actions.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=derivative+of+1%2Fsqrt%281-x^2%29

Click on "show steps"

That is not how people work. When their work doesn't serve their own self-interest, and people who do less work get more of the fruits of the works of others, people tend towards the bare minimum of work. When they can directly prosper by their own actions, they tend to maximize their efforts.

There are hundreds of historical examples. One of the best comes from the diary of William Bradford, governor of the Plymouth colony, on why they shifted from a communal economic arrangement to one based on individual property and individual profit.

I've got a deal for you, OP. I'll trade you TEN pieces of toilet paper for each dollar bill you can find to trade me.

>>3692453
That means it converges, which means you can always get to 0 with a finite number of flips, which means the mean is also finite.

I believe the answer is this.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=sum+of+%28%28n%2F2^n%29%29+from+1+to+inf
n=2, which means 4 flips is the average. This assumes I'm right that the probability of getting it in n pairs of flips is 1/2^n, which seems correct but I didn't prove.

>>3692375
I mean 1/2^n

the sum of 1/2^n converges on 1 over infinity, which means, eventually you'll get a zero. Since after two flips the probability is 1/2, the median number of flips is 2. Half the time you'll get it in 2, and half the time you'll get it in more than 2. But that doesn't give you the mean...

>>3692336
Sorry, yes I mean there doesn't mean there isn't.

The p of doing it in 2 flips is 1/2. The p of doing it in 4 flips (and not sooner) is 1/4. The p of doing it in 6 flips (and not sooner) is 1/8. So take the integral of 1/n^2 and find the N such that the integral from 0 to N is 1/2 the integral from 0 to inf.

>>3692266
>The problem I'm having, is that there seems to not be a 100% chance of obtaining zero in the first place.
There's not. That doesn't mean there is an average number of times you have to flip.

It doesn't measure the orbit of the sun around the galactic center. That is a 250 million year cycle, which is much longer than humans have been around. Rather, it measures the precession of the equinoxes, which is only a 26,000 year cycle, which can be observed by seeing what part of the milky way (or constellations) the sun rises through at a given equinox or solstice. They did it through observation over long periods of time.

>>3683415
BTW, ticker OIL follows the price of West Texas Crude. There's also ticker OLO which follows the price of the Deutsche Bank Liquid Commodity Index for oil. They're both vehicles called Exchange Traded Notes. This is the same way that most investors invest in gold, or else take a short position against gold with ETN's like GLD or DZZ. (I own that latter).

Because it's a pain and expensive to store. Instead invest in securities that reflect the price of oil by investing in oil futures, such as ticker symbol OIL. Put it in your IRA and wait. That's what I do.

>What is the size of the universe?
It's impossible to tell until we can measure the large scale curvature of space. Right now we just have a lower bound.

>(not to be confused with the observable universe that is approx 13.75 ± 0.11, I expect the universe is much bigger?)
in billions of parsecs? The radius of the observable universe is around 47 billion lightyears.

>>3677349
Yes, please get started with that.

>>3677398
If time is an illusion then space is as well.

For the aspies in the thread: The volumetric capacity of a trough is constrained by the fact that if you overfill it the water flows over the fucking edge.

>>3677257
yeah... so?

>>3677233
You have the important part backwards. For the observer, your trip would take 36 years, not 2160 years. So for you, your trip would take 36 years/60 = 219 days.

The volume is the cross-section area times the length over which that constant cross-section is extended.

So if you mean the area of the triangles times the LENGTH of the trough, yes.

I don't know, but the principle thing that salt does in tissues is to draw water from the low-salt area to the high-salt area. This could definitely cause some serious trauma to cells if you put concentrated salt in an open wound. It would kill a lot of cells due to extreme dehydration, and that in turn would trigger an inflammation reaction, pain being one of the effects of such a reaction.

Because they have none of the distinguishing features specific to the homo genus.