Proportions in the solar system. Most people know that Moon:Sun diameters is 400, and so is distances to Moon and Sun from Earth. That's why it eclipses Sun so well. But hardly anyone knows that this kind of proportions are almost everywhere in the solar system.
What scientific term or concept ought to be more widely known? (2017)
31–40 of 68 posts
Re: What scientific term or concept ought to be more widely known? (2017)
#32v = dx/dt If you are driving 5 miles across town (dx), and you average 25 mph (v), it will take you roughly 5/25 hours, or 12 minutes (dt) to get there. By driving 50 miles per hour, you get there in 6 minutes. Is it worth the risk to yourself and others (bikers and pedestrians) to save 6 minutes? If you are driving to work and it normally takes you 30 minutes to get there by going 60 mph (30 miles), then if you go 8…
You're saving 8 minutes both ways. That's seven days of your life back every year.
You seem to work too many days per year or have shorter days.
With 220 work days and 16 wake hours I think you would lose less than 4 days.
Re: What scientific term or concept ought to be more widely known? (2017)
#33v = dx/dt If you are driving 5 miles across town (dx), and you average 25 mph (v), it will take you roughly 5/25 hours, or 12 minutes (dt) to get there. By driving 50 miles per hour, you get there in 6 minutes. Is it worth the risk to yourself and others (bikers and pedestrians) to save 6 minutes? If you are driving to work and it normally takes you 30 minutes to get there by going 60 mph (30 miles), then if you go 8…
Work 100km. Driving 80km/h with little lane switching is 75 min. Going 150km/h also with little lane switching is 40min. Is saving 35 minutes worth it: absolutely.
Going faster than 130 km/h (85 mph) is not worth it in most cars because you can't recover the extra time needed to refuel due to higher fuel consumption.
Re: What scientific term or concept ought to be more widely known? (2017)
#34Am I missing something? This is a link to an article where a bunch of scientists and public intellectuals answer the question, and it provides all kinds of cool content, such as "impedance matching", and the notion that natural selection implies that our DNA can tell us about the environments our genetic ancestors lived in. Instead of reading, reacting, or engaging with any of those ideas, people are just directly re…
Quantum computing.
Re: What scientific term or concept ought to be more widely known? (2017)
#35Am I missing something? This is a link to an article where a bunch of scientists and public intellectuals answer the question, and it provides all kinds of cool content, such as "impedance matching", and the notion that natural selection implies that our DNA can tell us about the environments our genetic ancestors lived in. Instead of reading, reacting, or engaging with any of those ideas, people are just directly re…
I second this.
If you are here and have skipped the article, I strongly recommended it.
It is a fun and interesting read, and a jumping point for a bunch of rabbit holes I will probably end up wandering in this afternoon!
Re: What scientific term or concept ought to be more widely known? (2017)
#36Am I missing something? This is a link to an article where a bunch of scientists and public intellectuals answer the question, and it provides all kinds of cool content, such as "impedance matching", and the notion that natural selection implies that our DNA can tell us about the environments our genetic ancestors lived in. Instead of reading, reacting, or engaging with any of those ideas, people are just directly re…
As someone who learned about the electrical meaning of impedance matching in school, where impedance is a commonly discussed fundamental quantity in circuits (it’s the AC equivalent to resistance), I have always tried to avoid using the term outside of engineering circles to avoid confusing people.
This is the first I’ve ever heard someone deliberately apply it to a disparate array of phenomena but I have to say that, to me, the phrase makes sense in all those contexts and has a nice ring to it.
Re: What scientific term or concept ought to be more widely known? (2017)
#37Error bars to uncertainty of facts presented. Confidence. Sometimes I think the bandwidth/delay product is insufficiently appreciated but I can't quite say why. Db are widely misunderstood. And RMS. Without a reference, 2x bigger is meaningless. Likewise s/n ratio is misunderstood. Scale free can be OK, but usually not. People need to know that cells don't have walls and are not bags of liquid. At the scale we're tal…
What is wrong with the cell wall idea. Yes it is a lipid double layer, but it seems to separate the inside and outside quite well (you need all those channels to get stuff in)
As a complete layperson, I suspect osmosis may be a good counterexample. Channels react selectively to various compounds, but water can probably pass through the membrane more easily.
Wikipedia (heh) seems to support this idea, but my gosh is this all complex.
> Compared to ions, water molecules actually have a relatively large permeability through the bilayer, as evidenced by osmotic swelling. [...] Small uncharged apolar molecules diffuse through lipid bilayers many orders of magnitude faster than ions or water. This applies both to fats and organic solvents like chloroform and ether. Regardless of their polar character larger molecules diffuse more slowly across lipid bilayers than small molecules.
Re: What scientific term or concept ought to be more widely known? (2017)
#38The obvious counter argument to the genetic book of the dead would be that our genome, rather than being an append-only log of our evolution, is a snapshot of our current morphology that is constantly being overwritten.
There simply is no history because the overwrites delete what was there before. If we evolve wings then our arms=arms gene gets deleted and replaced with a arms=wings gene?
That is clearly not how Dawkins thinks of it but I wish he had explained why the genes-as-mutable-variables model is wrong.
Re: What scientific term or concept ought to be more widely known? (2017)
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
i.e. the scientific method As in, not this: https://youtu.be/RxyQNEVOElU
In more practical terms, yes you absolutely should trust scientists, and it's important to know the difference between an "appeal to authority fallacy" and "deferral to expertise". https://thelogicofscience.com/2015/03/20/the-rules-of-logic-...
Scientists are not in the business of making recommendations to lay people. There are other professions for that: doctors, lawyers, bankers, teachers, journalists etc. Scientists are mostly in the business of disproving the conjectures of other scientists.*
* actually grant-writing, but I’m not sure that counts either
Also, I’m pretty sure that the inclusion of “deferring to experts” in the accepted rules of formal logic would be a minority opinion among philosophy professors specializing in that area. “The fallacy guy” may not appreciate the irony there. It’s still a fallacy because it’s not logical in the strict sense of an argument (deduction from premise), regardless of whether it’s a good idea or not. It would only hold if the premise was that the “expert” source was an honest oracle, so without acceptance of that premise by both parties, the argument is erroneous.
Re: What scientific term or concept ought to be more widely known? (2017)
#40Am I missing something? This is a link to an article where a bunch of scientists and public intellectuals answer the question, and it provides all kinds of cool content, such as "impedance matching", and the notion that natural selection implies that our DNA can tell us about the environments our genetic ancestors lived in. Instead of reading, reacting, or engaging with any of those ideas, people are just directly re…
As someone who learned about the electrical meaning of impedance matching in school, where impedance is a commonly discussed fundamental quantity in circuits (it’s the AC equivalent to resistance), I have always tried to avoid using the term outside of engineering circles to avoid confusing people. This is the first I’ve ever heard someone deliberately apply it to a disparate array of phenomena but I have to say that…
Complete tangent here but I've noticed a form of impedance matching when I talk to certain people. I think it's a combination of natural cadence and information density or something, but there are some folks that I can effortlessly talk to and others where we constantly struggle with stepping on top of each other and/or seek clarification. It's a pairwise thing without a common cause that I can see. For example, I can see the folks that I struggle to talk with speak effortlessly with others as well. It's really odd.
But anyway to drive the point home I started calling it an impedance mismatch which makes sense to some and not others. :)