I don't know much about this particular instance, but in general seemingly esoteric math like this *is* useful, though sometimes the use isn't discovered until after the math problem is solved. Everything from studying how proteins fold to studying fundamental physics requires far out math like this.

I don't think this should be in nature, geek, or howto, because if the video was meant to be taken seriously then it is a bunch of crap. His talk of "projecting" brain "energy" onto the universe is typical mystical new age woo nonsense. This is just a special case of the fallacious idea that wishing for something hard enough will make it so. On his website he explicitly claims human brains have "psychic and telekinetic powers". This is bunk, it fits better in the EIA channel.

CO2 is also used for theatrical effects; when it sublimates it produces a white fog. CO2 is also used in fire extinguishers. Breath does not look like that because it is far less dense; CO2 freezes at -78°C, so when it sublimates it is very cold which allows a high density and thus more light scattering and thus a white fog appearance.

I think that's carbon dioxide, not smoke. Smoke or steam should rise, but the vortex of stuff in the video actually sinks as it moves towards the candle. So they didn't blow the candle out, they suffocated it.

this is crap, on multiple levels. that is, assuming its not a parody.

unfortunately, i dont feel like taking the time to articulate a full refutation of all the nonsense explicitly and implicitly included in this video, so i'll just say that airheaded materialism is a Bad Thing.

I don't buy it. I'm only 30 minutes into the video, but it sounds like Searle is making logical fallacies, with gobbledegook sprinkled in between. I had to look up his Chinese room thought experiment on wikipedia; it's a straw man argument. The system in his thought experiment is a program using a look-up table to pass the Turing test. While at least at face value it seems such a system would not qualify as consciousness, there are ways a program can reach a result besides looking it up in a table. His thought experiment doesn't show his look-up table to be the only way to pass the Turing test, and it doesn't address the consciousness of alternative ways of passing the test. And it doesn't follow that the non-consciousness of a look-up table precludes consciousness for other methods.

Dawkins seems to have made a mistake at around 13:00. He says to look at the Milkyway from an observatory or just from outside, then he says you'd see 100 billion stars(the number in a single galaxy), so he's clearly talking about stars in our own galaxy. But then he says the light from the closest stars started it's journey during time of the dinosaurs, and thats wrong. The light we currently see from the closest stars would have started it's journey less than a couple decades ago; the light from the farthest stars would still be less than 100k years ago. He couldn't have been referring to when the stars formed; that would have been before the dinosaurs. He also couldn't have been referring to the nearest galaxies as they are well less than 1M lightyears away. Seems like a big flub on his part, I wonder if it's the result of editing.

Googtube is talking out of his ass.

Just because an activity varies by ethnicity or geographic location and thus can be labeled as a part of one's 'culture' does not mean it must be on equal ethical footing with any other ethnicity's/location's activities.

In the 1800s it was American culture to enslave and treat poorly people of African ancestry. These women are not treated appreciably better. And I imagine there were Americans born into slavery who were complacent with it; for many people, realizing their current situation is unacceptable first requires experiencing something better.

And yes, women not being allowed to go topless in public is discriminatory and unfair; restrooms and dressing rooms segregated by sex, while perhaps not discriminatory, is goofy and caters to a minority with a juvenile fear of the opposite sex. (To see the absurdity, imagine a point in the future when the momentum of homophobia has dwindled even further, causing a perhaps significantly larger portion of the population to be bisexual. There would need to be three more bathrooms in addition to a Men's and a Women's. Gay men and gay women, and bisexuals would all need their own facilities. And the gays' and bisexuals' bathrooms could only allow one occupant at a time. All this just so nobody is seen stepping into or out of a stall by another who might find him/her attractive.)

wow, that is one hella cute singer

After watching that a number of times, it looks an awful lot like it's little kids on the sofa. In the slow-mo replay, right before they hit the fence, you can see one of the flying people is wearing short purple shorts and has a small scrawny leg flapping in the air. It's also mostly small kids standing on the right side of the track just before the sofa goes airborne. The sofa did not appear to moving fast enough to flip several full grown people through the air that many times. One of the people rushing to help at the very end looks somewhat dad-like. And a sofa racing event is awfully similar to a soapbox racing event which is a stereotypical kid thing.

anybody able to speak french and give a literal translation of the question? it has the word gravite in it, which looks an awful lot like gravity. a question about how gravitating bodies effect each other would be a lot less straight forward than one about orbits.

My physics kung fu is not as strong as I would like, but here goes.

According to relativity, space and time are part of the same thing, called space-time. Anything with the property of mass deforms the space-time around it, like a bowling ball sitting on a trampoline deforms the surface of the trampoline. That deformation of space-time is gravity; if you sit another object on the trampoline it will roll into the dent caused by the bowling ball. The effect the deformation has on time is that time passes more slowly the deeper you are in the dent. For Earth sized masses, the effect on time is small, but for something as massive as a black hole(a far, far deeper dent) the difference would be appreciable. You can imagine if the bowling ball on the trampoline was heavy enough and spinning fast enough that it would try to twist the surface of the trampoline around with it; black holes do this to space-time too. This is about where the explanation at the beginning of the video jumps in.

Due to the effect mass has on time, some proposals for a time machine suggest finding/making a wormhole, moving one end of the wormhole deep into the gravity well of a black hole(where time passes more slowly), then entering the far end; you would emerge near the black hole at some point before you entered. The distance into the past you travel would depend on the depth of the gravity well and when you enter the worm hole; if time at the black hole passes at 1/2 the normal speed and you enter the wormhole 10 years after the setup was put together, then you would travel 5 years into the past. However, the method suggested in this video does not appear to rely on the effect the black hole has directly on time and instead relies on the black hole's twisting of space somehow allowing you to violate the speed of light(relativity says nothing can travel faster than the speed of light: 299,792,458 m/s). How that translates into traveling back in time I'm not sure. I'm also not sure how you get all this using lasers instead of extreme mass.

I made an account here just this second to reply to Conan's post.

Lying and generally being ignorant does nobody any good, it does not even do your cause any good. If you dislike the fact that people can own guns, thats fine, but don't pull numbers out of your ass.

In the entire U.S., approximately 30,000 people die involving a gun per year. Of those, approixmately 12,000 are homicides, most of the rest are suicides, with accidental shootings and police shootings being a small percentage.

The majority of people that desire to commit suicide, or commit murder for revenge, gange violence, hate, fun, whatever, will do so whether or not they have access to a gun. If a country has outlawed guns, of course fewer people will die by a gun; that is obvious and in no way profound and in no way reflects poorly on guns.(If a country were to outlaw knives, fewer people would die by knives too). The metric that matters is the percentage of the country's population that was murder by a gun versus the percentage of total murders. But even then there are other factors that vary by country that complicate comparisons, such as the amount of heavey metals in the air/water/food.