urzu_seven

urzu_seven t1_jegv1rg wrote

When it comes to defining whether the meaning of a word is valid or not yes, absolutely you can’t have a “stricter” definition because it’s a binary operation. Either the definition is valid or it’s not.

Battery as a single object is a valid definition. It is, to use your language, strictly valid and just as strictly valid as other accepted and used definitions.

You are, ironically, confusing definition of words, with definition of situations.

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urzu_seven t1_jegu3yd wrote

Imagine you are standing in one spot wearing roller skates. On your left is a 250 lb NFL lineman. On your right is a 50 lb child. They each begin pulling on you in opposite directions. Which way will you go?

The universal expansion is like the 50 lb child, gravity is like the 250 lb lineman. At distances smaller than galactic clusters, gravity wins.

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urzu_seven t1_jegpzu9 wrote

I know it doesn’t mean “I’m going to arbitrarily ignore other definitions of the word to focus on an outdated and/or narrowly used definition”

Again the use of battery to denote a singular object is well established and 100% valid. You can’t ignore the most common usage to try and create a false oxymoron. That’s like saying “Well if you ignore all the points the other team scored, technically I won, even though the final score was 100-1 then”.

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urzu_seven t1_jegp2fk wrote

Again no, strictly speaking he is not. Layman’s terms are just as valid. They do not stop having meaning just because someone uses a term in a technical fashion in a different manner. The usage of the term battery to refer to a singular item is not remotely an oxymoron. It’s a well defined, well understood, broadly used term that is fully consistent in how it’s used.

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urzu_seven t1_jeeblo7 wrote

In a periodic tiling you can take a copy of the original tiling and slide it some combination of left/right and up/down such that it will look exactly like the original tiling. The most basic example is to imagine an infinite sheet of grid paper. If you slide it around you wouldn’t be able to tell whether you are looking at the original or the copy. This is called translational symmetry.

In an Aperiodic tiling you can’t do this. Such filings do not have translational symmetry. You might be able to find sub patterns that look like other sub patterns but if you try to map them to each other you’d find that the tiles around them eventually don’t line up. There are many such tilings.

What’s unique about “the hat” is that it’s the first time an aperiodic tiling has been made using a single shape. The first aperiodic tiling used thousands of different shapes. And before now we’d been able to find multiple aperiodic tilings using as few as two shapes. But this is the first one which uses just a single shape. And to make it even more interesting it was found not by a professional mathematician but a hobbyist (though he did work with two universities to prove the shape he used was, in fact, capable of aperiodic tiling).

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urzu_seven t1_jedo7ql wrote

>You are assuming language is logically consistent, it is not.

You declaring something to be true (or not true) does not make it so.

Nor does the paradox (it is a paradox btw, you don't get to unilaterally define what a paradox is or is not and the above is definitely accepted as a valid paradox) depending ALL language being logically consistent, it is, in fact that language can express logically inconsistent statements that allows paradoxes.

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>You are assuming logically consistent systems are also complete, they are not.

This has literally nothing to do with the original statement OR the comment you are replying to.

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urzu_seven t1_jddbua3 wrote

Very few diagrams of the solar system are strictly accurate for a reasons.

  1. The relative size of the planets + the sun are just too different from each other. The sun is 285 times as wide as Mercury, the smallest of the 8 (It should be 9, I still love you Pluto) major planets.
  2. The distances between them are massive and if drawn to scale would never fit on a single page while still allowing you to see all of the orbits.
  3. Most diagrams are 2 dimensional representations and the planets actually orbit in 3 dimensions.

While the major planets (and many other solar system objects) orbit the sun in roughly the same disc they aren’t all doing so on the exact same plane.

Put another way of you were to look at our solar system from the “side” such at the earth stayed “flat” as it rotated around the sun, ie it never appeared to move up or down, the other planets would NOT do the same. As they orbited they would appear to go above and below the line drawn between the earth and the sun by as much as 7° in the case of Mercury. The Earth-Sun orbital plane is called the ecliptic and it’s one reference point we use when talking about orbits, because we live on Earth so it’s convenient to do so. But it’s not the ONLY reference plane you can use.

For example, you might already know that the Earth is tilted relative to its orbit around the Sun, but did you know the Sun is tilted too? I’d we drew our plane relative to the suns equator instead of the sun Earth orbit, earth would appear to move above and below this imaginary plane by more than 7°! In fact Mercury, the planet with the greatest variation relative to the Earth/Sun plane (the ecliptic) is the one that varies the least relative to the Suns equatorial plane.

There are other reference planes too. You can make one based on the orbit of any object around the sun. Or you can find the average of all the planets and weight it relative to their mass. That particular plane is the Laplace invariable plane.

So why don’t they all orbit on the same plane? Because planetary system formation is messy! Everything (well almost everything) in our solar system started out as big dust cloud. Not everything was moving in the same direction but overtime as objects collided and gravity pulled things together their average radial velocity ended up in roughly the same direction. But roughly in solar system scales leaves a bit of room for variation. Collisions over time perturbed the orbits (and rotational angles) of different planetary bodies.

Take Uranus for example. It’s spinning basically on its side (90°) relative to its orbit! That means one of its poles points roughly in the direction of the sun.

Meanwhile Venus is spinning backwards relative to the other planets, which probably means it got flipped over at one point due to one or more collisions.

And on top of all that, despite what it may look like the planets don’t orbit in perfect circles either but in ovals. Earths distance from the sun varies between 147 and 152 million km over one orbit (one year). Little Mercury varies between 48 and 70 million KM in its rapid orbit (88 earth days). And poor demoted Pluto has an even greater orbital variation over its epic 90,560 day “year” coming as close as 4.4 billion km and getting as far away as 7.4 billion km. Meaning during part of its orbit it’s actually closer than Neptune. This lasts about 20 years and the recent recent occurrence was from Feb 1979 to Feb 1999. Unfortunately you’ll have to wait for about 230 years for it to happen again, so if you were born after Feb 11, 1999 you missed it.

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urzu_seven t1_jd6tm8j wrote

Time is not a human construct. Time exists whether we do or not. The labels we choose are constructs, but the underlying passage of time still occurs, whatever we label it.

Further some things, such as a year, are defined by external factors, namely the Earths orbit around the Sun. This does not change with the existence of humans. It is a known quantity. The orbital periods of other planets are indeed different, but thats not what is referred to by "a year", which is why you have to qualify in circumstances where thats what you want to talk about.

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urzu_seven t1_jd6tds4 wrote

Yes and no.

Yes (mostly) - the time, in absolute terms that the earth takes to complete one lap around the sun has been close to the same. Orbital period is determined by an objects distance from the sun. The Earths average distance from the sun has been basically the same since its formation, meaning its orbital period has been the same.

No - We typically measure years in number of days (roughly 365.25 right now) it takes for the Earth to complete one orbit. While the overall length of orbit in say, seconds has not changed, the number of days it takes HAS because the Earths rotation is slowing down. Billions of years ago it probably took less than 20 hours for the Earth to complete one rotation, aka one day. So the number of "days" in the year was greater, as each day was shorter.

So in raw time, yes, its basically the same. In terms of how many "days" it took? No, it used to be longer.

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urzu_seven t1_jd2vsmw wrote

There’s a few reasons

  1. They gather data about you and use it with their other products to target more ads.
  2. They have paid versions of these services (for institutions and individuals) as well, which means they already have to build and maintain them. Adding a more basic, free tier likely costs than a fraction of what they make from paid users.
  3. They hope it will entice you to upgrade to the paid versions.
  4. They hope to take market share and users away from their competition and even if it costs them money they make it up elsewhere.
  5. They want you to use more of their services both because of the reason I mentioned in item 1, but also because it makes it more likely you’ll buy their products like Google Home, Android phones, Chromebooks, etc. because they can more tightly integrate those services in with their devices and offer better experiences.
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urzu_seven t1_jabb5qy wrote

The difference is you made a false assumption that 1 month = 4 weeks. This is only true for ONE month (most of the time, hi leap years!) February. Every single other month has 2-3 more days which makes up the difference.

  • Jan: 4 w + 3 d
  • Feb: 4 w + 0 d (1 d in leap years)
  • Mar: 4 w + 3 d
  • Apr: 4 w + 2 d
  • May: 4 w + 3 d
  • Jun: 4 w + 2 d
  • Jul: 4 w + 3 d
  • Aug: 4 w + 3 d
  • Sep: 4 w + 2 d
  • Oct: 4 w + 3 d
  • Nov: 4 w + 2 d
  • Dec: 4 w + 3 d

Totals: 48 w + 29 or 30 d = 52 w + 1 or 2 d

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urzu_seven t1_j7yb2oq wrote

The word genetic was coined in the early 1800's (circa 1830) by Scottish philosopher and historian Thomas Carlyle and head that meaning of "pertaining to origins". Darwin used it similarly to refer to biological origins. Although the exact mechanisms and details were not discovered until later, the idea that plants and animals pass on traits has long been known, its what farming and animal husbandry have been based on for millennia. Darwin was simply expanding on that idea to apply to more substantial change over a greater time period. The invention of the word gene and its connection to genetics came later, by almost a century (circa 1910), with the word genetic already having been in use.

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urzu_seven t1_j4zbbyc wrote

FYI the difference in "." and "," isn't a Europe/US difference. The UK also uses the decimal point "." as do most English speaking countries along with former British colonies such as India and Pakistan. Additionally Most of East Asia also uses the decimal point, including China, Japan, the Philippines, Thailand, and Malaysia. Indonesia and Vietnam are the exceptions in that region. Most of Central America and the Caribbean does too, with Cuba and the Dominican Republic being exceptions (plus a few of the smaller islands and overseas territories of European countries).

Additionally, due largely to English's influence on their development, most major computer languages use the decimal point (and don't use thousand's separators at all). Some computers and programs CAN handle input as text that uses the decimal comma, but its not universal.

Long story short though, in English you're better off using the decimal point to avoid confusion.

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urzu_seven t1_izccq9n wrote

You don't even need a theoretical blanket to do this, just a hot/humid enough environment. When the air is hot and humid enough that evaporative cooling no longer works human bodies can no longer dissipate heat and bad things start happening. This is called the wet-bulb temperature. Basically when the wet bulb temperature (thermometer whose measuring point is covered by a pocket of water) is equal to the dry bulb temperature (thermometer in open air) it means the air is fully saturated. A human in the shade with unlimited water could not survived more than a few hours when wet bulb reaches 35 °C (95 °F).

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