Subject: Re: Sophistry 103 (was: I know that!)
From: moggin@bessel.nando.net (moggin)
Date: 23 Oct 1996 09:13:32 -0400
zeleny@oak.math.ucla.edu (Michael Zeleny):
>>>Thus spake Jacques Derrida:
>>> When I take, for example, the structure of certain algebraic
>>> constructions [ensembles], where is the center? Is the center the
>>> knowledge of general rules which, after a fashion, allow us to
>>> understand the interplay of the elements? Or is the center certain
>>> elements which enjoy a particular privilege within the ensemble?
>>> ...With Einstein, for example, we see the end of a kind of
>>> privilege of empiric evidence. And in that connection we see a
>>> constant appear, a constant which is a combination of space-time,
>>> which does not belong to any of the experimenters who live the
>>> experience, but which, in a way, dominates the whole construct;
>>> and this notion of the constant -- is this the center?
moggin@bessel.nando.net (moggin):
>> I'm afraid you're badly mistaken: Derrida didn't say any of the above.
Zeleny:
>I am afraid that you are correct. I have omitted the attribution of
>the above question to a Derridean sycophant. Not that apportioning
>boundless ignorance to two parties makes any difference in the outcome.
Your error is of commission, not ommission: you wrote, "Thus
spake Jacques Derrida" and proceeded to quote another person entirely
(namely Jean Hyppolite). This type of thing is frowned on, for the
reasons you demonstrate above.
Zeleny:
>>>As Sokal rightly says, "Derrida's perceptive reply went to the heart of
>>>classical general relativity:"
>>> The Einsteinian constant is not a constant, is not a center.
>>>
>>> It is the very concept of variability -- it is, finally, the
>>> concept of the game. In other words, it is not the concept of
>>> something -- of a center starting from which an observer could
>>> master the field -- but the very concept of the game ...
>>>(Derrida, Jacques. 1970. Structure, sign and play in the discourse of
>>>the human sciences. In The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of
>>>Man: The Structuralist Controversy, pp. 247-272, edited by Richard
>>>Macksey and Eugenio Donato. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press.)
moggin:
>> Here your attribution is half-right and wholly misleading. The
>>passage you quote comes not from the well-known essay, "Structure,
>>Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," as one would
>>expect from your reference, but rather from the discussion following
>>Derrida's presentation of that essay at the Hopkins symposium, "The
>>Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man," in the fall of 1966.
Zeleny:
>EXCUSE ME? Are you implying that having railed against the evils of
>phallogocentrism entitles Derrida to a special dispensation to issue
>inconsequential howlers, provided that someone else transcribes them?
>Hippolyte offers an egregious question. Derrida obliges him with an
>egregious answer. Sokal shows that both are blathering. Case closed.
I thought I was being quite explicit, but let me make it even
plainer for you, since that appears to be necessary. The howlers are
yours. You assigned Hippolyte's words to Derrida. You made it seem
as if remarks Derrida offered following a lecture came from his essay,
"Structure, Sign, and Play." You then added a sarcastic comment about
"Derrida's" learning and posted the stew to five different newsgroups,
with the expectation that the population of sci.physics would find it
especially delectable.
What does this show? First of all, that your claims to rigor
are unfounded. Secondly, that your criticism of Derrida begins with a
basic mistake: you're unable to correctly identify his work. If I'm
right to say you got your information from Sokal's hoax, as seems to
be the case, then it also shows that while you're eager to attack
Derrida, you've been reluctant to read him. And given your response,
it shows that you find none of these failings to be of any concern.
There's also the irony that I mentioned before: Sokal's hoax,
designed to unmask post-modernism, has served to expose the thinking
and scholarship of its opponents. You're merely the latest victim.
-- moggin
Subject: Re: Creation VS Evolution
From: paul.johnson@gecm.com (Paul Johnson)
Date: 23 Oct 1996 13:28:43 GMT
In article <326D8697.54DA@pilot.infi.net>, starway@pilot.infi.net says...
>
>John Robert Riddell wrote:
>>
>> In article <326990FA.5C29@primenet.com>, vanomen
wrote:
>>> [Pascal's wager deleted]
>> This a convincing argument. Are You Hindu? Buddist? Jew? Perhaps God is
one
>> of the ancient Gods that are no longer worshipped. What if we worship the
>> wrong one? Will we be punished for worshipping the wrong deity? Should we be
>> sacrificing babies to the Aztec Gods?
>> Please tell me which God you worship, and Why it is safer/better to worship
>> him and not one of the others?
>Comments from Jerry:
> As far as the individual is concerned all religions provide relief
>from isolation in death. The individual goes to the respective Kingdoms
>of Heaven and is absorbed by the group. EAch individual thinks he has
>achieved paradise. He thinks he has achieved eternal life. The self is
>lost into the collective. Time ceases to be.
And what is your evidence for this remarkable scenario? I don't recall
reading this anywhere before (even in the bible).
>Thus a split second in the world of the dead appears as eternity. The
>believers of all faiths happily fade into oblivion. Thus for most, the
>Kingdom of Heaven is a very short experience as we view the proocess
>from the outside.
Wow. Where can I view this process from? It sounds fascinating.
> NOw, the pit of hell is the same. [...]
> Choose your religion. If you choose none, then you have no collective
>to enter. You stand alone. Yet, in mercy you will be cast into hell and
>eliminated instantly.
But you just got through explaining how it seems like an eternity. Which is
it? And how is this merciful? It sounds like the mercy of a medieval court
granting me a quick death instead of a slow one (i.e. not very merciful at
all).
> Now, if you choose the Arrow of God from Moses to Jesus and choose
>to follow his path, then you are eligible to be reborn upon the new Earth
>as per Isaiah.
Hang on a minute! The original argument was from Pascal's Wager. The next
question was: which God should I believe in to win the wager? You are
bringing in stuff which will only be accepted by those who already believe
in your religion.
Of course the truth is that the Invisible Pink Unicorns will impale the
Christian Infidels during Rangnarock-a-rulong-a-rang-bang-boom. So you must
believe in the IPUs to be saved.
Paul.
--
Paul Johnson | GEC-Marconi Ltd is not responsible for my opinions. |
+44 1245 242244 +-----------+-----------------------------------------+
Work: | You are lost in a twisty maze of little
Home: | standards, all different.
Subject: Re: a falling penny
From: gunter@alpha1.csd.uwm.edu (David Gunter)
Date: 23 Oct 1996 13:49:01 GMT
Patrick Clark (kralcp@worldnet.att.net) wrote:
: For years my high school students have been telling me that if you
: drop a penny from the top of the Empire State Bldg, by the time it
: reaches the ground it will be going fast enough to kill someone.
: Is this true or is it just one of those beliefs (like the direction of
: the spin in an emptying toilet bowl depending on your hemisphere) that
: is not based on fact?
Pat,
It is an urban legend. You can check out the info on the web page
http://www.urbanlegends.com/science/penny_falling_impact.html.
(There's a few other science tales there as well.) In case you don't have
access to the web, here's what it says about falling pennies.
Ciao,
david gunter
http://www.mcs.anl.gov/people/gunter/
_______________________________________________________________________________
Date: Tue, 30 Apr 1996 09:24:33 -0700
From: Dave Wilton
Subject: FAQ Documentation: Penny Falling
My summary: According to Dennis Thompson (dthompson@lerc.nasa.gov),
safety testing at NASA's Zero Gravity Research Center in Cleveland
concluded that coins falling from a height of 510' in air achieve a
terminal velocity that is too low to seriously injure a person it
strikes, much less bury itself in concrete. Other more aerodynamic
objects, such as pens, can achieve a significantly higher velocity and
can constitute a hazard to people below.
The original post:
From: dennis.thompson@lerc.nasa.gov (DeeTee)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.urban
Subject: Re: death by penny falling from CN Tower
Date: 29 Apr 1996 14:26:40 GMT
Organization: NASA Lewis Research Center
It's about time I jumped in on this thread. Allow me
to introduce myself, I am the facility manager for
NASA's Zero Gravity Research Facility at the Lewis
Research Center in Cleveland.
The Zero-G is a 510' shaft into the ground. It
contains a vacuum chamber 20' in diameter in which we
drop test vehicles in a free-fall condition. While the
tests are falling the 432' drop distance, they are at
extremely low gravity (less than 1/1,000,000 G). It is
the lowest gravity man can attain easily, far lower
than on orbit (1/10,000 - 1/100,000 G), although for
only 5.18 seconds.
Our testing is done at vacuum, so there is no air
resistance. In this testing mode, objects drop
straight, with no tumbling, and no terminal velocity.
In air, however, there is a tremendous difference.
Unless the object is aerodynamically stable,it
tumbles. Every object has a terminal velocity in air,
and when it tumbles, the terminal velocity can be
quite low.
Since there are times when people are working at the
bottom of the shaft, safety is a great concern to us.
Access to the top of the shaft is restricted at these
times. For curiosity's sake,we have dropped things
like coins, pencils, etc, to observe the potential for
damage or injury.
Coins tumble rather well, and have a high
surface/mass ratio anyway. Their terminal velocity
seems very low as a result. When they hit, they bounce
several feet high. While no one has volunteered to
catch one, all agree that the impact might sting
pretty good, but there wouldn't be any penetration or
severe damage.
Pens are another matter. One particular solid
metal Parker ball point dropped like an arrow! It
steered to the side and missed our plywood target, but
shattered on impact. I can't put any quantitative
value on its speed, but it sure seemed to have the
potential for serious hurt!
By the way, the speed of the test vehicles reaches 166
ft/sec, about 120 mph, so that is the upper limit of
velocity for a 432' fall.
--
Subject: Re: Why is the sky blue?
From: bradham@panix.com (Bo Bradham)
Date: 23 Oct 1996 10:01:04 -0400
Tim Hollebeek wrote:
> rnh@gmrc.gecm.com writes:
>>
>> john baez (baez@math.ucr.edu) wrote:
>>
>> >>Yes, and if the shaft were *that* deep its field of view would be
>> >>so small you'd be lucky to see even one star, even at night!
>>
>> >Nonetheless, I've read in various reputable sources that one
>> >can see the stars in the day, this way. I haven't actually tried
>> >it, personally.
>>
>> But not sources sufficiently reputable that you are willing to cite
>> them, apparently.
>
>Yup. I've heard this one a couple times, and have a bit of trouble
>believing it. ...
>
>I've added alt.folklore.urban, in hopes they've heard this one before,
>and can provide some cites.
The afu FAQ has
F. Daylight sky appears dark enough to see stars from bottom of deep well.
It's been a long time since it has come up on the newsgroup,
though. And there's nothing about it in the afu archive as far
as I can tell.
Bo "which proves that there is a conspiracy to cover it up" Bradham
--
"You know there's something wrong with a thriller when you're more
afraid of the leading lady than you are of the axe-wielding psycho."
-- Tom Shales
Subject: Re: Numerical solution to Schrodinger's Eq
From: candy@mildred.ph.utexas.edu (Jeff Candy)
Date: 23 Oct 1996 13:56:44 GMT
Peter Salzman:
|> I'm working on a project to solve a one dimensional, time dependent
|> Schrodinger's equation with a potential that involves an integral.
|>
|> 2 /
|> d u | du
|> K --- + L| blah dr = -- K and L are complex.
|> dr^2 | dt
|> /
|>
|> I've never solved a PDE numerically. I was hoping for some good advice
|> on how to start. Specifically, I'd like to know what software is out
|> there that could do something like this.
|> c is preferable, c++ is do-able. I'll do fortran only if learning a new
|> language would be faster than writing my own c code.
|>
|> My first reaction was to try to do it on mathematica because I don't know
|> how to do complex numbers with c, and the results are easily graphable.
|> However, I hear that MMA is slow. I also heard that it loses precision (is
|> this true??) quickly.
Don't use MATHEMATICA. It should be easy to write a c code to solve the
problem yourself.
Because the time evolution of Schroedinger's eqn. is generated by a
unitary map: exp(-iHt), you want to use an algorithm which respects
this property. While there are fancy methods to do so, you should
start with a simple method as a benchmark. You can read
"Numerical Recipes", by Press, Flannery, Teukolsky and Vetterling
pages 640-642
If you start with u(x,t=0), with u -> 0 as |x| -> infinity, I don't
forsee any intrinsic difficulties.
Feel free to ask more specific q's if you're confused.
Jeff
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Jeff Candy The University of Texas at Austin
Institute for Fusion Studies Austin, Texas
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Subject: Re: Me thinks she doth protest too much (was: When Nietzsche ...)
From: moggin@bessel.nando.net (moggin)
Date: 23 Oct 1996 10:18:18 -0400
Silke-Maria Weineck :
>| >| >: > ... I'm sure Mati is much less fazed by this than you seem
>| >| >: > to be, for reasons still obscure.
Russell Turpin (turpin@cs.utexas.edu):
>| >| >: Silke, I am not phased by it at all. It is not a thread that
>| >| >: I have that much interest in following. Really. [...]
moggin@bessel.nando.net (moggin):
>| >| This is really Meg's job, but I'll lend a hand. Silke
>| >| is right: the spelling is "fazed." (Unless of course Russell
>| >| is alluding to the standard side-arm of the Enterprise crew.)
+@+.+ (G*rd*n):
>| >I've seen and heard "faced", as well.
nanken@tiac.net (Ken MacIver):
>| Only with too much to drink and then only as part of a compound
>| modifier.
Gordon:
>I've observed stand-alone usage, although I'm pretty sure it
>was derived from the compound you allude to. And this would
>be a likely etymon of _fazed_/_phased_.
Just to prove Mark O'Leary right ("Silke has for a while been,
along with moggin, a marker for a thread wherein any attempt to
advance the debate will be sidetracked into little word games,
etymological musings, philosophical conundra, the usual pomo morass"),
I went and looked it up. (Just awful, the way those pomos are always
using dictionaries.) Turns out that "faze" is a varient of "feeze."
That's a word I never heard before. It has or had a bunch of
different meanings (most of them regional, colloquial, or obsolete).
They include "to drive or impel;" "to turn (as a screw)," "to twist or
wind;" "to frighten;" "to beat or flog;" "a rush, impact, rub; also, a
short run before a jump;" and the relevant one for our purposes here,
"fretful excitement or alarm."
The term comes from the Middle English _fesen_, meaning "to
put to flight," Old English _fesan_, _fesian_, _fysian_, "to drive."
Not to be confused, the OED warns, with OE _fysan_ (ME _fusen_), "to
hurry." Some of the OED's best quotes:
"Zookers! Had I one of you zingle, with this twig I would so
feeze you!" (Massinger)
"Come, will you quarrel? I will feize you, sirrah." (Ben
Jonson)
"Advising you though you have fetched over your feaze, yet
look well eare you leape over." (Campion)
"If a man do but go back a little to take his feeze, he may
easily jump over it." (Tully)
"Wi' a lick o' sweet oil an' a feeze o' her hand." (Mather)
ObBook: _Webster's New International Dictionary of the English
Language_ (Second Edition).
-- moggin
Subject: Re: Spent Uranium in big jets.
From: wen@infi.net (W.E. Nichols)
Date: Wed, 23 Oct 1996 14:24:32 GMT
Anthony Potts wrote:
+On Tue, 22 Oct 1996, W.E. Nichols wrote:
+
+>
+> I would doubt if they were doing this unless the materials were Below
+> Regulatory Concern (BRC). These Low Level Wastes (LLW) are contained and
+> then buried. We are presently doing the same thing in the US. Except we
+> are doing/will do it in a 2000+ foot deep salt mine.
+>
+That is exactly my point, which I thought was inherent in my post. The low
+level dump releases negligible radiation in relation to the huge piles of
+granite, yet the populace go crazy over the dump, whilst ignoring the
+granite.
Here is what you said:
First of all, a low level atomic dumping site has been set up. This
involves burying things like plastic gloves, paper towels, lab coats, etc,
which have been used in a radioactive environment.
My answer was probably more of a nitpick. Most folks would surmise that the
waste is buried directly into the ground. My main point was that the waste
is contained first. The burial site is not your run of the mill dump site
either. BRC waste can normally be buried directly, all other wastes are
contained first.
Your concerns about radon release from the granite may be unfounded. There
are some recent studies that indicate radon may not be a hazard.
Nick
Subject: Re: Constancy of the Speed of Light--Purely Mathematical?
From: "Paul B.Andersen"
Date: Wed, 23 Oct 1996 16:28:16 +0200
glird wrote:
>
> In article Jan Bielawski wrote:
> >But I've just said that "synchronisation" is a defined notion.
> >Relativity does not need it, it is only stuffed in there to
> >increase its calculational power and one or the other particular
> >derivation uses it.
> To the contrary: Without Einstein-"synchronized" clocks, the
> relativistic equations won't work. Without E-synched clocks, the
> transformations cannot be reciprocal. Without using E-synched
> locally offset clocks of a given system - compared to one another
> in the direction of absolute motion - as measuring tools, no two
> differently moving systems could measure each other as Lorentz
> contracted.
> Einstein's "synchronization" is the sine qui non of relativistic
> mathematics.
>
I think you are right in the above. So what?
You make a big deal of how clocks are synchronized i SR.
The E-synchronizing is not a random addendum, it follows
from the two postulates of SR. No other way of synchronizing
the clocks would be compatible with the postulates.
(Or rather - no other way wich do not give the same result
is compatible.)
To say that SR "do not work" without something that follows
from the postulates is an obvious truism.
If I understand you right, you say that this in some way
makes SR circulary. That is nonsense. SR _is_ falsifieable.
In your absolute frame of reference, I suppose clocks show
universal time. If you have a number of clocks at rest at
different posistions in that absolute frame of reference,
those clocks must be synchronized.
How would you do that?
Paul
Subject: Re: Breakdown of Einstein's theories.
From: Doug Craigen
Date: Wed, 23 Oct 1996 09:03:48 -0500
David L Evens wrote:
>
> Ken Fischer (kfischer@iglou.com) wrote:
> : : Anthony Potts writes:
> : : >Well, I believe that diamond has a refractive index of around 10, and that
> : : >this is pretty much as high as it gets. This means that light in diamond
> : : >travels at one tenth of its speed in a vacuum.
> : Diamond has a "hardness" of 10.0, but I doubt if
> : the index of refraction is an integer number, hardness is
> : an integer number for diamond because diamond is the
> : hardest material known, and 10 is defined as the upper
> : limit, with corundum (aluminum dioxide?) being assigned
> : the number 9, and no other natural occurring elements
> : or compositions are above 9.
>
> The refractive index of diamond is almost exactly the same as that of
> pure water, which is pretty high but nowhere near 10.
Refractive index of diamond = 2.419
Refractive index of water = 1.333
*** Source: Optics, Second Edition (1990 Printing), by Hecht
published by Addison Wesley
- numbers cross checked with the CRC Handbook
And yes, the index of diamond is about a high as it gets for transparent materials.
|++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++|
| Doug Craigen |
| |
| Need help in physics? Check out the pages listed here: |
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