About Lilting Missive

Flouting all Routing

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  what is the best way to eat fruit on the bottom yogurt?

  1 0 My grafting a squirrel tongue onto your human one. Great way to make sure the two seats next to you on the bus are always clear. Lilting Missive answered in Other-Food & Drink 4 months ago Answer, comment & read 7 more answers »

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  Has anyone had bad experience wearing Acuvue Advance Plus Contact Lenses?

  1 0 I've been using those lenses for about a year with no more problems than I've had with any other lens. Have you tried experimenting with different saline solutions? I use Opti-Free RepleniSH after experimenting with many. Lilting Missive answered in Other Health & Fitness 4 months ago Answer, comment & read 3 more answers »

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  0 0 The motors have all been in as dry of an environment as Seattle garages and basements can provide. They've certainly never been wet, and they've all been in a plastic tackle box the entire time. My guess is they'll be fine (they're black powder, after all), but I did want to let you know you'd be getting "aged" motors ;-) Lilting Missive commented 4 months ago

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  What type of rocket kit is best to enter/experience model rocketry?

  2 0 I have some Estes rocketry stuff I've been needing to get rid of for six years. Some of the motors are likely fifteen years old, but I'll give it away and all of the rockets should be totally flyable (you might want to replace the plastic parachutes). There's also a book on model rocketry that goes all the way from beginner stuff to building your own absurd stuff. I don't think you can PM on QuestionLand, but if you reply to this that you're interested we'll figure something out. Lilting Missive answered in Whatever 4 months ago Answer, comment & read 3 more answers »

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  What new unusual or non-standard new years resolutions are you making?

  1 0 To not buy anymore boring dress socks. Lilting Missive answered in Whatever 4 months ago Answer, comment & read 6 more answers »

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  Which came first- Time or Space?

  3 0 They're both recursive phenomenal categories (to borrow from and abuse Kant), so really your question is unanswerable. It is, however, a good question to ask as considering the relationships gives us a more nuanced view of those categories and the apperception we employ in moving through them. The question is similar to the question: what comes first, the outside object or the perception? No matter what level you look at that question (unless you're an objectivist), those two things are intractably wound around each other. You can't have one without the other as either is meaningless by itself. Time and space are similarly bound up with each other, with the added problem that they are part of a higher level set than questions about consciousness and matter. One may an illusion created by the other, they both may be illusions created by consciousness (or something else that also creates the illusion of consciousness, but that ladder does on forever, so let's stop there), or they might both be mechanistic meta-consciousness foundations of reality, like Newton thought. Sure, we have some fairly nuanced models for space, but there is obviously much, much more nuance to be discovered in the post-Quantum, post-Einsteinian physics we're a generation or two away from now. Our models of time are almost embarrassingly simple still, but then again we've only been probing the fluid and dynamic aspects of time for a century or so. So, for now it's best to just think of them as aspects of the same manifold (last Kantian phrase, I promise!), no more separate from each other than your brain is from your body. Remember that it really is turtles all the way down. Lilting Missive answered in Other - Science & Tech. 5 months ago Answer, comment & read 4 more answers »

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  What are the easiest ways to improve browser speeds?

  1 0 Install both a flash and ad-blocker plugin for Chrome (and Firefox while you're at it). I'm assuming this is an old Windows machine (like Win 98 or something); if it's an old Mac running OS 9 or earlier, you can put together a custom set of startup extensions which are limited to what you need to get online. If it's a Windows machine, you can find out what everything you see in the Taskmanager actually does, and whether it's something you can kill. Just plug "what is " into Google (no quotes needed, usually) and you'll get websites that describe all the weirdly named processes do. Lilting Missive answered in Tech Support 5 months ago Answer, comment & read 5 more answers »

• Comment on Lilting Missive's answer…

  0 0 Light has no mass, so it can travel at c (remember those two things are only correlated, we really can't say that light travels at c because it has no mass, or that the c is c because only things with no mass can travel at that speed). It would be be very easy, even with current technologies, to shine a laser that could reach one light year. We probably do it all the time when adaptive optic telescopes use a laser to "make" a star. There is actually a branch of SETI that looks for laser pulses instead of radio waves. Back to the actual question: if you fired such a laser out into space and then spun it, ignoring time dilation and the issues with information transmission being limited to c, and froze the 2 light-year diameter circle such that you had an omnipotent view of it, it would basically look like a yard sprinkler. There would be an expanding spiral of laser moving out from the origin point, however there only be one arm in the spiral, which would be one laser stretching all the way back to the origin. If you were spinning the laser at the rate of one rotation every several years or slower, the spiral would be quite open, and it would tighten as the rotational speed increased. Shooting a laser from an object moving at a large fraction of c is one of the issues Special Relatively solved (and above when I said General, I should have said Special). Intuitively, you would think that shooting a laser from an object moving at 0.5 c would result in a laser moving at 1.5 c, but c is the absolute upper limit for transmission of any kind, massless or otherwise. On the other hand, if you fire a laser from an object moving at 0.5 c, and the absolute speed limit is 1.0 c, then an observer on the object would see the laser only moving at 0.5 c. This becomes ever more of an issue if you imagine a spaceship moving at 0.9999999999999999… c; everyone on board would experience light into their direction of travel moving at an incredibly slow speed, while light moving the opposite direction would be moving at 1.999999999… c. Those figures get reversed if you take an inertia based view, rather than an absolute one. The answer is time dilation and Lorentz contraction, which occurs at relavistic velocities (relavistic just means speeds at which the importance of General Relatively become important, rather than classic Newtonian physics; it can be anywhere from 0.1 c or higher to the rather ponderous 17,000 mph geosynchronous satellites move at, depending on context). Time dilation is essentially a time differential; different observers at difference velocities see time moving at different rates. Lorentzian contraction is basically what happens to matter at relavistic velocities: it squishes. To return to the question of a spaceship moving at 0.99999999… c, the people onboard would live completely normal lives, with light doing exactly what they expected it to do on the ship, and this would be because their local time would have slowed way, way down AND their ship and they themselves would have contracted considerably (their Lorentz factor would be very high). An outside observer would see the ship and everyone on board much much shorter in the direction of travel than it would be at non-relavistic velocities go by. If someone onboard the ship fired a laser forward, to an outside observer it would indeed move away from the ship at a very slow speed, while a laser fired backwards would move away at nearly 2.0 c, which is not a problem because the laser is still only moving at 1.0 c from a stationary reference frame (there are plenty of galaxies on opposite sides of the visible universe from us that are moving away from each other at nearly 2.0 c). Now it seems odd that in the onboard reference frame light going backwards from the ship would be moving at 1.0 c. If their time is considerably slowed down and the relative velocities between them and the light beam from an outside reference are nearly 2.0 c, you might expect light moving backwards from the ship would appear to be moving at many magnitudes beyond c. But the crucial detail there is that when an onboard observer shoots a beam backwards, all the reflected light from the ship around it would also be moving at the same speed, so all information transmission would be moving at the same speed, thus relative to the ship's light the beam is moving at the same tiny factor of c, but time dilation for the onboard observers makes the laser move at c again. There are other weird effects that happen at large factors of c, but if just punch "time dilation" into YouTube you'll find all sorts of great videos on it. So my very long answer finally comes to the point: if you fire a beam from an already moving object, no, it won't go faster than c. Lilting Missive commented 5 months ago

• Comment on Lilting Missive's answer…

  0 0 For the curious, the maximum rotational speed would be about 0.1592 rotations per year, or rather 6.2814 years per rotation. The would hit c at approximately 0.15915494 rotations per year. Lilting Missive commented 5 months ago

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  While I've been told that there is no such thing as stupid question there are stupid people who ask questions. This may be an example of that.

  3 0 According to General Relatively, there would be no problem swinging such a pole at extremely slow speeds. by which I mean speeds such that the tip stayed well below relavistic velocities. However, there is a huge problem as soon as you start trying to move the pole at anything above this incredibly slow rotational speed. Such a speed would be in the order of one rotation every century. Say you start swinging it very slowly and then accelerate linearly. As the tip enters relavistic velocities, it will start increasing in mass. Assuming you can continue to accelerate the pole, the proportion of the pole at relavistic velocities will increase, so more and more of the pole will be increasing in mass. In addition, those portions that were already at relavistic velocities will accelerate towards c linearly, which means their masses will be increasing exponentially. So basically it will quickly take an insanely exponentially increasing amount of energy to keep accelerating the pole, as its mass would be increasing at an insanely exponential rate. Assuming no friction in the system, once you got it to a given speed, it would continue indefinitely (containing that huge amount of energy in the system), but the practical constraints on getting the pole moving at anything beyond that very slow rate mentioned above would be difficult. As far as maximum speed, assuming an infinite amount of available energy, of course you couldn't get the tip to move faster than 1.0c, or even to 1.0c, but you could get it asymptoticly close. The reason you couldn't actually get the tip to c is that an object's mass approaches infinity as its velocity approaches c, so even with an infinite amount of energy you could only get asymptotically close to c, not actually to c. More practically speaking, as there is no such thing as a perfect vacuum, you'd always have some friction in such a system, but that would only serve to further increase the amount of energy needed. Not a stupid question at all. Lilting Missive answered in Science & Math 5 months ago Answer, comment & read 4 more answers »

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