Recent content by Thecla

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    B Do Magnets Emit Harmful Radiation?

    It may not emit radiation, but I would not want to walk into a 10,000 Gauss field.
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    I What Is the Counterintuitive Probability in the Bag of Balls Problem?

    Let me quote from the paragraph on page 167 of " Bernoulli's Fallacy" by Aubrey Clayton which mentions this problem: " In a little known paper in " Transactions of the Actuarial Society of Edinburgh(1891)",though,Chrystal explained that his objections were to Bayes' theorem itself because he...
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    I What Is the Counterintuitive Probability in the Bag of Balls Problem?

    In Aubrey Clayton's book" Bernoulli's Fallacy" which documents the conflict between frequentists and Bayesian interpretations of probability, he describes a problem that was proposed in the 19th century that gives a counterintuitive result. The Problem: "Infer the state of a bag of 3 balls...
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    I Discovering the Truth About Antares: From Young Red Supergiant to Blue Giant

    The most recent issue of Sky and Telescope had an article that 100 years ago most asrronomers thought that red supergiants like Antares were young stars and that as they aged they joined the main sequence and became more like the sun. Today we consider blue giants like Spica and Rigel as young...
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    B Creating Log Tables: Briggs' 400-Year-Old Accomplishment

    The winters in Scotland must have been long cold and dark for in the following years Briggs created the log of trig functions(sines, cosines, and tangents ) to the one hundredth of a degree also to 14 decimal places.
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    B Creating Log Tables: Briggs' 400-Year-Old Accomplishment

    I haven't used a log table in a long time and the one I used in High School went from 10 to 99 with four significant figures for the logarithms. I wondered how did Briggs create a log table 400 years ago? How did he find the logarithm of 7(base 10)? I looked around the internet and You Tube and...
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    B Who was the first person to recognize the stars as very distant suns?

    The first person to realize the night sky is filled with stars similar to our sun was a great leap in imagination. Cassini in 1672 measured the sun distance by parallax measurement of Mars so I assume he knew. But you didn't have to know the solar distance to speculate that the stars were more...
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    Small yield of tactical nuclear weapons

    Uranium fission bombs have explosive power ofabout 10 000 tons of TNT. I understand that you can't make a uranium bomb with explosive power of 5 megatons of TNT brcause of the critical mass of U-235. Similarly you can't make an atomic fission weapon with explosive power of 10 tons of TNT...
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    B Proof of the existence of atoms

    It is said that some physicists doubted the existence of atoms in 1900 until Einstein proved their existence a few years later. Did Mendeleev's creation of the periodic table in the 1870s already prove the reality of atoms by giving the known elements atomic masses?
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    I A Bayesian question of choosing a white or black dog

    An excellent article on Bayes and Bayesian statistics was found on Houston Public Radio.https://uh.edu/engines/epi1876.htm The problem is in the first 2 paragraphs of the article.. I will summarize: Your wife and her friend went out and got you a white dog for your birthday, and you wonder...
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    B Probability of eating one egg with salmonella

    I think everything is clear now. Thanks. I did count the dice problem of getting one six(only 36 possible outcomes). I certainly did not want to make a a table with 20000 eggs and start counting those possibilities.
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    B Probability of eating one egg with salmonella

    I like your answer FACTCHECKER. But why isn't the probability of eating only one egg with salmonella 1/20000 +1/20000-(1/20000)(1/20000)-(1/20000)(1/20000). That is subtracting the squared term twice. Regarding AMUTARRAsSAMYAK I am asking for only one six not at least one six. For only one...
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    B Probability of eating one egg with salmonella

    ln Will Kurt's Kurt's book "Bayesian Statistics The Fun Way" he gives a problem at the end of a chapter " Raw eggs have a 1/20,000 probability of having salmonella. If you eat two raw eggs what is the probability that you ate a raw egg with salmonella." The online answer he gives: "For this...
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    I Question about the Hubble Constant

    I don't understand. If it were larger in the past, why do astronomers say that the expansion is accelerating. Shouldn't this mean the Hubble constant is increasing?
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