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Ask HN: What scientific phenomenon do you wish someone would explain better?

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Re: Ask HN: What scientific phenomenon do you wish someone would explain better?

#691

Post by jddj »

bronzeage wrote: post #659
jddj wrote: post #640

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be my intuition too. But if you go down almost any "this crisis won't cause inflation because..." rabbit hole on hacker news, you should see multiple unopposed claims that defaults lead to deflation through the destruction of money. I'm pretty ignorant in this field, and usually I've been a day or so behind the posts (missing the window to press for more information), but I feel like there's definitely som…

The difference is that it's the liquidation process from defaults that causes deflation, not the defaulting itself. Without the liquidation process, if you assume defaulting had no consequences, that's indeed inflation - as everyone is allowed to create money without consequence.

Thanks. I think this point has made it a lot clearer.

So sure, the loaned money might still be in the system in some naive sense, but value has been destroyed in the asset price? Suddenly a lot less money buys a lot more asset and that's where we find the deflation.

If I borrow 1M for an asset in good times and can't pay it back, the creditor gets the asset and probably gets a good portion of that 1M back. If that same scenario plays out in bad times and my whole street defaults on the same asset at once, there's a resulting fire sale and far more value is destroyed (including being wiped off neighbouring, non-creditor-owned assets of the same type) than money added by leaving the loan sloshing around somewhere else in the economy.

Re: Ask HN: What scientific phenomenon do you wish someone would explain better?

#692

Post by mncharity »

satori99 wrote: post #383
mncharity wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh my that facepalm dreadful. Thank you! That gives me a new high-water mark for misleading biomolecular visualization computer graphics content. Snagged a copy. When most everything is unmoving, it's "obvious"... well no, not to students, but... there's no pretense of doing anything other than stitching together an extremely selective set of "snapshots", to tell a completely bogus narrative of smooth motion. Here it…

Well, OP did say "even if it's impossible to understand" so if it is in fact in any way misleading, then my lawyers assure me that I may claim the full privileges of a contextual get-out-of-jail-free card for linking to it, and am hereby fully absolved of any intellectual harm caused to any and all individuals who may have viewed it.

Ha. I've wondered if increasing embarrassment might reduce long-term stable misconceptions in education content. Like astronomy texts getting the color of the Sun wrong. Or wing lift discussed elsewhere. But making textbooks liable for intellectual harm... wow. What might the internet, media, politics, thought and conversation look like, if we were all liable for negligent intellectual harm?

Re: Ask HN: What scientific phenomenon do you wish someone would explain better?

#693

Post by yters »

cambalache wrote: post #438
yters wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's essentially the same kind of explanation as 'god did it'.

I dont know if you are being serious, but if you are, Dawkins books are pretty good (The blind watchmaker,or the Ancestors tale).

I will have to check them out, but I remember being unimpressed with the table of contents. Looks like it will be more handwaving.

Re: Ask HN: What scientific phenomenon do you wish someone would explain better?

#694

Post by vmception »

mistermann wrote: post #489
vmception wrote: post #202

Has someone that thought they were taking LSD ever turned into a permanent schizophrenic zombie or in a mental institution, or is it all urban legend. If someone that didn't know they were predisposed to mental illness, is it applicable to dismiss their experience in order to maintain how safe LSD is? If any of this is true, are there any sources aside from "my friend's friend's brother took too much and now he is...…

> But when nobody knows what they're actually getting because it doesn't exist in a legal framework , then it muddies the whole experience. Trust (knowing the chemist directly, indirectly, ...) in specific individuals > a largely unknown (but known to be imperfect) system, for many people anyways. Obviously this isn't practical for the not well connected, but it's all we got for now. But as for your question, I've se…

yes this is my current predilection, but I can also concede that there are limitations in getting the truth of the matter.

even in this very thread there is someone that has been in the mental hospitals and seen problems "with their own two eyes", but is unwilling to name names as part of a code to remove any social/legal/professional consequence for themselves or the "crazy" people there

Re: Ask HN: What scientific phenomenon do you wish someone would explain better?

#695

Post by jhylands »

Light, a mixture of why a thing is the colour that it is? As well as why reflection would be angle of incidence is angle of exit.

My current understanding of colour is that the colour of an object is defined by the ability of the electrons in the compound jump different energy levels. I don't know if that in itself is enough to result in all the colour we see.

My current understanding of reflection is that because of wavyness of light when lots of light gets absorbed (to my understanding a single photon exciting a single electron to jump some amount) and reemited (the electron falling back down) together the light ends up forming that angle pattern. Under than understanding single photons don't bounce in the same way rays of light do?

I don't know how correct either of those understandings are, but my understanding has been put together from so many places and I've never heard any source explain either like that so I don't trust they are correct.

Re: Ask HN: What scientific phenomenon do you wish someone would explain better?

#696

Post by gavinray »

vmception wrote: post #680
kharak wrote: post #602

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Holy. That sounds intense, to say the least. A part of me likes to experience this, even though you made it abundantly clear, that it did not have a positive impact on your life.

"ego death" is a common aspect of acid trips and the experience seems to come down to your willingness to relinquish control. this reads like what was described. if you were to look up that term you'll see others that will feature similar features - with or without pain, with or without worry. not having a reliable way to know exactly what you took can amplify the anxiety, when your brain starts filling up with serat…

Yeah, I think it entirely had to do with my inability to relinquish control and "just let go". Although in this context, that was literally what felt like the fight to survive, instead of "being chill". Ego death commonly is either the most horrendous or most nirvanic thing depending on how readily someone gives in.

> when your sense of self has been obliterated and the next moment you are in the body of another mammal lost and confused in the forest for an entire lifetime before being transported back into your body and only a minute has gone by - but your trip is to last another 9 hours, should you fight it?

There was a lot of this, during that out-of-body-period. I existed in multiple places/points in time at once as different people of various ages/genders/nationalities and then occasionally as animals, and lived entire simultaneous lifetimes. At one "time", in places + times A, B, C, D as different living things. Really does a number on your sense of self for a bit, heh.

Re: Ask HN: What scientific phenomenon do you wish someone would explain better?

#697

Post by pixelmonkey »

bunya017 wrote: post #656

Asynchronous programming With the addition of async to django core, I felt its time to finally learn the concept. I first took interest in async early last year when I re-read a medium post on Japronto; an async python web framework that claims to be faster than Go and Node. Since then, I've been on the lookout for introductory posts about async but all I see is snippets from the docs with little or no modifications…

The first couple of paragraphs of the documentation for asyncore, the module in Python's standard library that implemented the machinery for async IO all the way back in 2000, has a great description of what async programming is all about. Here it is:

https://python.readthedocs.io/en/latest/library/asyncore.htm...

'There are only two ways to have a program on a single processor do “more than one thing at a time.” Multi-threaded programming is the simplest and most popular way to do it, but there is another very different technique, that lets you have nearly all the advantages of multi-threading, without actually using multiple threads. It’s really only practical if your program is largely I/O bound. If your program is processor bound, then pre-emptive scheduled threads are probably what you really need. Network servers are rarely processor bound, however.'

'If your operating system supports the select() system call in its I/O library (and nearly all do), then you can use it to juggle multiple communication channels at once; doing other work while your I/O is taking place in the “background.” ...'

Re: Ask HN: What scientific phenomenon do you wish someone would explain better?

#698

Post by strgcmc »

scld wrote: post #684

Time dilation with regards to the "no absolute rest frame" in physics. The famous twin thought experiment where one gets in a spaceship, accelerates away from the planet, turns around, and comes back. The twin that stayed on earth is old and the traveling twin is young still. On one hand, I know that time will "pass differently" for each twin....but why is it the twin in the spaceship that ages less? Why isn't it tru…

You're in luck my friend, the Wikipedia article does a rather nice job of describing just this "paradox": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_paradox

> In physics, the twin paradox is a thought experiment in special relativity involving identical twins, one of whom makes a journey into space in a high-speed rocket and returns home to find that the twin who remained on Earth has aged more. This result appears puzzling because each twin sees the other twin as moving, and so, according to an incorrect[1][2] and naive[3][4] application of time dilation and the principle of relativity, each should paradoxically find the other to have aged less. However, this scenario can be resolved within the standard framework of special relativity: the travelling twin's trajectory involves two different inertial frames, one for the outbound journey and one for the inbound journey, and so there is no symmetry between the spacetime paths of the twins. Therefore, the twin paradox is not a paradox in the sense of a logical contradiction.

There's multiple explanations included to resolve the "paradox" from different lines of argument; I particularly like this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_paradox#A_non_space-time_...

Re: Ask HN: What scientific phenomenon do you wish someone would explain better?

#699

Post by sideshowb »

caf wrote: post #663
jddj wrote: post #636

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've wondered the same thing lately whenever someone here posits that defaults cause the destruction of money. I'd love to see this properly explained, because it definitely has a counter intuitive ring to me.

It works like this: imagine we create some new Bank. Customer A deposits his life savings of 1 million hackerbucks. Now our Bank loans out 50,000 of those hackerbucks to Customer B. It does this by crediting her account with 50,000 hackerbucks, but notice that Customer A still has 1 million in his account - so now there's 1,050,000 hackerbucks in apparent existence - we've created 50,000 hackerbucks from thin air. If…

Thank you for clarifying.

So the bank's speculative asset loses value: I struggle to see this as money being destroyed as it wasn't actually money, it was an asset with a price attached to it which has now changed. In contrast to money sat in your bank account, the price was never redeemable (you couldn't go spend it on beer) unless you used that asset to get the debtor to pay you back (or convinced someone else it was worth buying from you as a speculative asset). You might as well say money is destroyed when share prices tumble. Maybe this is the point of such arguments, to make the case that money is no different to any other asset, but we don't tend to treat it like that in reality. Or do we?

Re: Ask HN: What scientific phenomenon do you wish someone would explain better?

#700

Post by strgcmc »

onionisafruit wrote: post #675
JabavuAdams wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That interview is so good! What a dick, but what a teacher!

What I see at the beginning of that video is somebody who doesn’t want to spend the energy answering a complex question. Then, in the process of dismissing the question he gets drawn in and can’t help himself from really getting into it. I don’t know anything about Feynman beyond vaguely associating his name with science, but watching this makes me want to seek out more from him.

You're in for quite a treat then. It sounds like you might have more of an interest in his technical work and scientific contributions and teaching materials (of which there is plenty, and of high quality), but personally I quite enjoyed this book of his as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surely_You%27re_Joking,_Mr._Fe...!
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