Recent content by sethz

It's not the length contraction that is most important in the horizontal clock (since reducing the distance tends to speed up the clock). The important thing is that the front mirror is receding from the oncoming light beam whereas the back mirror is moving towards it. The time to "tick" in the...

The effect would probably be swamped by other imperfections in the dice.

ragidandy: Your prof's use of the term "maximum angle" probably just refers to the fact that a real pendulum would not swing quite so much, so your calc would be a maximum possible angle for a given v.

For all we know, the brain's conceptual color spectrum could be extended by growing some new meat. It's an unknown, but the kind of peripheral thing that might in fact be simple.

You're right. I should have said "pure energy" in the sense of non-material energy (with no rest mass).

A real IQ test has hundreds of questions, takes hours to complete (usually over more than one day), and must be administered by a professional. And it's still crap (and I say that even though I got a very high score). The reason you're bored in school is because school sucks.

The retina is actually a part of the brain. The optic nerve is a nerve bundle containing more than a million nerve fibers.

I'm no expert, but here's my thinking on energy. The real experts can correct me. Energy is an abstract idea that takes many concrete forms: mass, momentum, heat, position in a field, etc. Energy has the property of being conserved. So if you add up all forms and let some time pass, then...

To see the right-angle triangle, look at the unit circle below in which a radius has been rotated counterclockwise by theta from an initial position pointing to the right. The blue line is the "opposite" side of the triangle, the red line is the "adjacent" side, and the black line (radius) is...

1. There's also the gate. The demon-box system does not violate the second law of thermodynamics because the demon must do two things: * observe the particles (recording/measuring) * operate the gate Both presumably generate entropy overbalancing any decrease. If recording (measuring)...

The v in the equation is not velocity, it's speed. Even if this speed is constant, the velocity is constantly changing because the direction is constantly changing. It is this change in direction (in the case of constant speed) that constitutes the acceleration. In that light, the situation...

The sin and cos of an angle are just the coordinates of a point rotated by that angle around a unit circle (sin is y, cos is x). The radian measure of an angle is just the distance traveled by that point around the circumference of the circle. So circles are basic to trigonometry, and the...