Recent content by davilla

Although it's honestly not something I know much about, it might be of interest to you to know that there is a doppler shift in the cosmic background radiation. I don't believe this tells us anything about position, but it might indicate motion or something else like proximity to a black hole. I...

It took me a little while to wrap my head around circularly polarized light, or more specifically how this can be done "passively". Wikipedia didn't do much help until I found the article at Polarizer, if any of you were wondering how the new 3D movie technology works. My first question is...

Neutrinos have mass... insignificant mass, we are told, as their speed is so near that of light we can't even observe the difference. On the other hand, there are a lot of them. Every year the Sun produces something like half a tredecillion neutrinos, if my math is right. Depending on the mass...

I said what's called "dark energy" should probably just be called "dark mystery". I never said dark matter wasn't matter. And you're accusing ME of strawman? I don't know what that means. To me energy is the capacity to do work. Does gravity have energy? I wouldn't have thought so, and if...

Oh, thank God! For the past day or two I thought for certain we were all doomed. Thank you for your reply. I think I'd rather be hurled out into intergalactic space than pulled into the event horizon. On the other hand, watch what you wish for, right? Couldn't this be explained more simply...

Frankly I agree with you. This dark matter/dark energy nonsense fits the universe to our flawed explanation of how it works, assuming the laws and making preposterous conclusions, rather than finding a simple explanation for how the universe actually does work. The mistake we are making is...

Wow, I think you just proved that math is evil. Okay then, there must be a hole in my sketchy "proof" somewhere. I've tried to reformulate it more formally and I'm hitting a stumbling block in that, whereas I used a proof by contradiction above, I can't assume that a characterization of...

Yes, "neither provable nor disprovable" is equivalent to "independent of the axioms". It was my understanding that, at least in some cases, it's possible to prove that A is in that categorty, that the axioms plus A are consistent if and only if the axioms plus not A are consistent, which...

I understand the connecion between "constructions of mathematical systems" and computability by Turing machines, or at least I did back in the day, but the connection between that and Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem isn't so clear or immediate. Incompleteness is indeed a strange thing, maybe...

The sum of three children's ages is x. The product of their ages is y more than the product of their ages this time last year. What is the sum of the squares of the children's ages? x*x + 2(1-x-y)

Moreover than that, we don't know that they speek English. For a negatively stated question such as "Aren't you a god?" some languages would have you answer differently; in French, in fact, there is a different "yes" answer to such a question. In Mandarin, a yes/no question will be answered with...

Sorry, I don't remember how to solve Diophantine equations off the top of my head. Anyways, where's the brain teaser?

The formula is correct. I can't believe that, in coming up with the problem, I subtracted one from the factors of 2^blah instead of adding one. You may have found two solutions instead of the lone one I had expected, but thankfully it turns out there is some solution after all.

I said "something like that" because I was writing from memory. Anyways I labeled a different angle as x. If that's true then I'm convinced there is a right angle in the figure, resulting in even more symmetry. Working backwards from my presumption there are at least seven formulas that, if...

There should be a pattern. The more interesting is the constructive proof of the formula. That's it.