Recent content by Archosaur

This is awesome. Thanks very much for pointing me to the Beta distribution - this is exactly what I was looking for. I made a python function that calculated frequency and "credibility" (1 - width of 95% credible interval) for O observations in N trials up to 100, because I was curious what a...

In experiment A: I observe an event 2 times in 2 trials. In experiment B: I observe an event 100 times in 100 trials. In both cases, I calculate a frequency of 100% In both cases, I calculate a 95% confidence interval of (1, 1). But intuitively the result of experiment B is "stronger" than...

Good question, me-from-5-months-ago. In fact, this question is even more pertinent today, considering that this mediocre thread has been sporadically active for... roughly 9% of my life. *Sigh*... see you all in another 5 months.

Hume is definitely not joking (though his use of the word "ought" is interesting). At the core of this quote (and its context, quoted above) is the "is-ought problem," which made Hume famous, woke Kant from his "dogmatic slumber," and is still taken very seriously by philosophers today. The...

Right. In order to do something like a flip, you start with angular momentum and tuck your legs so your angular velocity increases. You can't jump straight up and then do a flip, or even land on your stomach.

Good questions. The colors you're seeing are blue and yellow because they have the highest and lowest wavelengths (respectively) in the particular "white" ambient light of your surroundings. As for blue being more dominant on the top and yellow being more dominant on the bottom, I suspect...

It looks like we have a winner! Good call, Davinstewart (and welcome to Physics Forums). Chromatic aberration is based on the property of light that says that different colors bend different amounts when they go through the same lens. So, white light can be separated into different colors...

Yes. Welcome to Physics Forums.

The letters will have long since become too mushy to read. :wink: In all seriousness though, you are asking a legitimate question. It's true, randomness depends on scale, and on our scale, it's all but not there. However, the universe is a good example of a "chaotic system," which is one in...

How fast is your fan spinning? It could be red/blue shift. </joke>

This is certainly not what is happening when cats flip over. You would not be able to have any net change in the position of the office chair (or stool or whatever) if it weren't for static friction, which is decidedly missing from the mid-air environment. Similarly... Though I don't have...

Yes, "cats", the animal. Not some jargon or acronym you haven't heard of. I have a question about angular momentum and cats. Cats are pretty famous for always landing on their feet. I imagined that they accomplished this by manipulating their angular velocity by distorting their body in...

Yes. An object that floats in air will also definitely float in water. However, airplanes do more than just "float". "Lift" is something separate from the buoyant force. This is what really keeps planes in the air: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernoulli's_principle

If I could just jump in here before the hammer falls... Denken, when you think of magnets in terms of energy, think of it sort of like gravity. Sure, something can gain energy by "falling" toward a magnet, but there can be no cyclical process unless the object is "picked back up," which takes...

I think the question makes perfect sense. It's absolutely possible to boil water by lowering pressure. I don't know where your confusion is coming from, jarednjames. Hahaha, just kidding.