Recent content by Chris Miller

Can vitamin K supplements reduce dietary considerations in stabilizing INR on warfarin? I understand a higher dose of warfarin would be required. But isn't vitamin K useful besides as a coagulant, and wouldn't dietary sources of K impact INR less with a 100-200 mcg daily base of vitamin K...

What bout the pandemic hasn't? Are the antibody tests more expensive than PCR? Sorry, no clue. I just googled, and got $38 for Covid-19 antibody testing at CVS.

@atyy, I've also heard of "happy hypoxia." People with very low O2 levels (like < 60%) but not under any duress. Not sure all 4 kids would feel nothing, no aches or pains or fatigue. Couldn't a simple blood test tell whether it was the adaptive or innate immune system (or neither) that fought...

Thanks @TeethWhitener for the informative response. Two grandkids (and a couple of their friends) all tested positive for Covid, but none had any symptoms at all. I wonder where their immune systems learned to recognize the virus.

It's my (limited) understanding that your immune systems responds to most (all?) microbial threats initially with aches and fever, i.e., that these initial symptoms are not caused by the microbe but by your immune system's activation. So what does it mean if one is infected and infectious but...

I'm a machine whose inputs I call reality. The context/source of this data is unknown. Does a simulation require a simulator?

It doesn't really explain the universe/existence any more than the creationist's God does. It just places the answer further out of sight by hypothesizing an unexaminable context. Nonetheless, it is attractive if only in the sense that whatever it all is is playing on the computer that is our...

@jbriggs444 Thanks for clarifying the terminology (assumed flat, confused by "convex"). Not related to my OP, but surprised there are finite regular polyhedra . What if the constructing polygons only have to be equal but not regular? Still some maximum number of some optimal shape that can...

@jbriggs444 Been looking at the icosahedron, which approximates a sphere tiled with equilateral triangles. Are there not polyhedrons composed of infinitely more uniform polygons that approach spherical? I was under the impression, from your clarification and examples, distortions could be...

All your replies to my questions and (misguided) conjectures are informative, and make me wish I knew more, understood more. @jbriggs444 Doh! Of course! Why didn't I see that? Six equilateral triangles with apexes at either pole meeting at the equator. Not a sphere, but the more you...

Thank you all. You've made it abundantly clear, and I understand, one cannot perfectly tile a perfect sphere with perfectly square tiles of any size. And not just squares, but any polygon? Or collection of polygons? But if locally immeasurable curvatures and distortions were permitted (say in...

@PeterDonis Again, very much appreciate your explaining in ways I believe I can (sort of) understand. Particularly, since my thread question here concerned the effect of Hubble expansion on near-c time dilation and length contraction. I see now that, as I sort of suspected, they're...

@PeterDonis Isn't that the same as saying, "there are distances over which you cannot at all approximate spacetime as flat"? Isn't the universe considered to be infinite, and so any finite distance would be infinitesimal in cosmological terms? How far, in your understanding, in light-years...

@Ibix I like your kitchen floor analogy. It sounds like you're saying relativistic effects wane over distance but never completely disappear, and so your "simplest choice" is always to some degree valid. @PeterDonis seems to say not, that there are distances over which you cannot at all...

Thanks for the concise answer. Had to look up "foliation." Seems almost synonymous with "unit of measurement" but not quite. I'm getting the feeling from your and other remarks here that time dilation and length contraction only apply in shorter distances where spacetime curvature is negligible...