BaalChatzaf

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BaalChatzaf last won the day on February 21 2020

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About BaalChatzaf

  • Birthday 08/24/1936

Profile Information

  • Interests
    mathematics, physics, alternative energy sources.

    I am also involved in preparing recorded books for blind and dyslexic folks.
  • Location
    Currently residing in New Jersey, the Bad-a-Bing State.
  • Gender
    Male

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    Robert J. Kolker
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    not looking
  • Favorite Music, Artworks, Movies, Shows, etc.
    Music: Mozart, Bethoven. Movie: Casablanca. Favorite Philsopher: David Hume
  • Description
    I am retired, but far from inactive. A day without a twenty mile bicycle ride is a day without joy.

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  1. Bullshit. Cirrus clouds persist for hours on end. The water trail from a jet is made of the same stuff as Cirrus Clouds. H2O in a solid state which occurs shortly after gaseous H2O condenses into liquid H2O. All the nasty gasses are invisible. SO2, NOx CO2.
  2. Zero g over the long term is fatal to humans. Our bodies evolved to function in a one g environment. In zero g the bones start to decompose.
  3. Tyndall's Experiment was brilliant. He got his results before Boltzmann discovered the mechanism of gas heating. We really did not understand black body radiation until Planck using Boltzmann's statistical approach figured out what happens. When Tyndall did his experiment in 1859 no one know how gases could absorb and re-radiate heat. To fully understand this we need the photoelectric effect and Compton effect. This were not established until the 1920's. Tyndall was really way ahead of his time.
  4. I wrote "Our rather cramped and biased point of view cannot give us any idea of what life would be like in a place where carbon based life has evolved. " edit that to becom e "Our rather cramped and biased point of view cannot give us any idea of what life would be like in a place where carbon based life has NOT evolved. "
  5. Wait until next February. That will change. During the winter it gets very cold in the Arctic.
  6. Natural Selection (the principle) will lead to organisms tuned the the physical characteristics of their environment. If physical conditions on another planet are much unlike the conditions on earth (the conditions in which and to which we evolved) then beings in such an environment could be very different from us, even if they are intelligent. It so happens that the only livable place we know is our very own Earth here in our very own solar system, so we have no idea of what different sorts of livable environments elsewhere in the cosmos might be like. Our rather cramped and biased point of view cannot give us any idea of what life would be like in a place where carbon based life has evolved. Ba'al Chatzaf
  7. correct. Humans evolved to live in one g of gravitation. A ten month trip to Mars even with daily exercise will wreck the bodies of the crew. Then a two year stay at 3/5 G and a zero G ten month return will make the mission to Mars a suicide mission. Missions to Mars require an entirely new propulsion system. Until the happens the only off planet missions we can handle are trips to the moon (three days or less) and limited stays on the Moon. The gravitation problem must be addressed before we earthlings become a space faring race.
  8. Yes. Consider this. A north pole, Polar Projection map and a sout pole Polar Projection map. Two planar maps covers every point on the surface of the earth. If you don't mind losing the poles a Mercator Map will do you just fine. Of course sizes and shapes are distorted. Size and shape is faithful only near the equator and vastly distorted (enlarged) near the poles. The poles themselves are lost.
  9. No corners for a sphere. There is no way of flattening a sphere in the same way one can flatten a cylinder. However the surface of a sphere has the property that any local region on the surface can be made topologically equivalent to a plane.
  10. Eristothenes of Alexandria. He curator of the Great Library of Alexandria. He calculated the circumference of the earth on the assumption the Earth was spherical (almost right -- the Earth is an oblate spheroid). See https://www.windows2universe.org/citizen_science/myw/w2u_eratosthenes_calc_earth_size.html to see how he did it. His imethod was simple and elegant and required only basic geometry and proportions. It also did not require telescopes. Eristothenes got the circumference to within 5 percent of the modern value.
  11. Aristotle and his followers were not empiricists. They did not see testing as necessary. As long as their arguments made logical sense they were convinced of their correctness.