ribuck

I think most buddies are potential friends. You start by hanging out with them and having fun. If you and your buddies go through difficult circumstances together, the emotions help you to bond as friends. That's the way it works for males anyway. In days gone past, the bonding experiences would have been something like the near miss when you were chased by the sabre-tooth tiger. Nowadays they can be something like the time you got caught out by the storm while you were hiking, and you only just made it back to the car before the rescue helicopter was called. The shared experiences don't even need to be negative ("difficult"); they just need to be emotionally powerful. Striving together for a common goal would count, for example. In today's bland society it's less common to have the experiences that bond buddies into friends, but it can still happen.

You can understand this situation without needing to consider inertial frames at all. Your example is only symmetric during the outward journey. Consider what happens when the outgoing craft reverses direction at the far end of its journey. Immediately this craft sees the light waves from earth piling up "doppler-style", and sees things happening faster on earth. But it's not symmetrical for the guy on earth: he doesn't see the change yet. He doesn't see it until he receives light waves that came from the spacecraft after it reversed direction! So the earthbound observer sees the spacecraft guy moving slowly for more than half of his elapsed time, which nicely accounts for the space traveller arriving back to earth younger than his twin that he left behind. From a mathematical point of view it's easier to work with the inertial frames of reference rather than with the doppler shifts, but the overall result is (necessarily) identical. I wish someone had explained this to me when I first learned relativity at high school, as I find it much easier to interalise this way.

Yes we have.

No need to reel. The phrase is just a convenient short-hand for the following: 1. The government borrows from those who choose to invest in its treasuries/gilts/etc. 2. The government spends the borrowed money. 3. When the repayment (of principal plus interest) falls due, the government either borrows even more, or... 4. The government makes a repayment by forcefully taking money from future taxpayers. The net result is that the money spent on today's entitlees is taken by force from others in the future. That's why it's colloquially referred to as "borrowing from the future".

Monopoly is great! I've been playing it a lot recently with my teenage kids. Playing it as a quick-moving 45-minute game has made all the difference, compared to how I played it as a child (taking the whole afternoon until all the players except one are bankrupt). How about a game that works broadly along the same lines as monopoly, but where each player takes a different role (investor, speculator, politician, banker, bureaucrat, shopkeeper etc) and the incentives and rewards are different for each role? A "balance" implies that it's en "either-or" situation. Why not make the key to success be the fact that individual competition happens to be the best possible form of social cooperation?

It's stealing. Borrowing from the future means that the (violently-enforced) repayment obligation will fall onto our children and their as-yet-unborn children. With their permission, it would be borrowing. Without their permission, it's stealing.

If you want to produce high quality videos, you still don't need to spend $2500. First, set up some good lighting. Bright, and somewhat diffuse. Second, make sure the sound is good. Nice and clear, without echo. Third, make sure that your visuals are simple and bold. Your formulas should be readable by someone who is watching on their phone. Fourth, write a great script. Keep it accurate, focused and interesting. Fifth, deliver it with enthusiasm. Those five things are not expensive. When you've got those things right, you can produce your first few videos. After that, the hard work begins. You need to promote your work until you have your first subscribers. Only then, when you have some subcribers, is it worth even thinking about spending big money.

It took me a few years. Most of the time, when we learn something new we just need to add some more knowledge to what we already know. In the cases of relativity and quantum mechanics, however, we first need to let go of many assumptions which pervade our daily lives but which do not generalize to all situations.

No, and no. I'm not prepared to work through the maths in a forum, but the equations can be found here. The example they use is for a spaceship moving at 80% of the speed of light and travelling from the earth to a star 4 light-years away then returning to earth. Upon return, ten years have passed on earth, but only six years have passed aboard the spaceship, and indeed the people on the spaceship will only have aged six years.

Why don't you start more simply? There are plenty of people making money on YouTube with the video camera in their smartphone, using free software on their PC. That way, you'll be able to get a feel for the income potential of your math videos, before you spend $2500.

Pretzelogic, the Hafele-Keating experiment has been repeated many times since 1971, with variations to test all of the serious objections that have been raised. All subsequent experiments have agreed with the predictions made by the Einstinian equations. With today's precision clocks, it's no longer even necessary to fly a clock around the world. Time dilation can be measured even at 20 miles per hour. Furthermore, time dilation due to changes in gravity (from General Relativity) can be measured by lifting one clock less than two feet above the other. But to do the experiment without flying, you need extremely expensive equipment. You asked for ways that you could verify relativity yourself without "blindly accepting" the word of others, and you can do that by taking a clock on a flight. You might not want to spend a thousand dollars on a precision clock, and a couple of thousand more on an air fare. Fair enough! But you could do this, if you didn't want to "blindly accept" experiments that have withstood extensive criticism. Oh, by the way, papers such as the one you cited by H.E.Retic ("Heretic") aren't worth reading. Whenever you see a paper with a trolling subtitle like "The Disastrous Intellectual War on Common Sense" you don't need to read it. Just save your time. If the paper is wrong, it's a waste of time to read it. If the paper is right, there will be non-trolling papers that say the same thing more rigorously (and more readably, because they're sticking to science without appeal to emotion). So either way it's a waste of time to read H.E.Retic's paper. You could measure the difference between high tide and low tide. It far exceeds what the tidal range would be without considering relativistic effects. But you would either need to work through several pages of equations yourself, or would need to "blindly accept" the equations provided by others. On the other hand, you can take a lab clock on an aeroplane and see that it loses time compared to the one that you left behind on the ground. You don't need any equations to see the time difference. Here's a geek who bought some surplus cesium clocks and took some of them on his family's camping trip up in the mountains. When they got back home, the clocks that they took with them showed that they had lived 22 nanoseconds more than their neighbors had during that week! From the article:

The relativistic effects have equations with denominators of c2 (where c is the speed of light, so c2 is a very large denominator). Therefore, we don't notice relativistic effects in our ordinary lives, where speeds are very slow compared to light. But it's certainly possible for an ordinary person to measure relativistic effects. You can measure the speed of light very accurately with ordinary lab equipment (one way uses an oscilloscope). By verifying that the speed of light doesn't vary with direction of movement (e.g. when the earth is moving in different directions through space) you can demonstrate to yourself that there is no universal frame of reference ("ether"). You can borrow two precision clocks, and take one of them on a round-the-world plane journey. It will come back running around 200 nanoseconds slow compared to the one that you kept in the same place. This is the Hafele-Keating experiment, which was first carried out in 1971. If you are a programmer, you can obtain an open source GPS receiver. Comment-out the lines that apply the relativistic correction factors (due to acceleration of the GPS satellites). Re-install the firmware, and the GPS readings will not be correct. Put back the relativistic corrections, and the GPS readings are correct. The first two experiments require you to hire or borrow a piece of lab equipment, and the second requires you to buy a circuit board and download some software, but by doing these experiments you absolutely can verify for yourself the existence of time dilation and the absence of an ether.

Where will you find an uninhabited island that is not part of an existing state?

Come on people, of course they are all actors. The whole thing is scripted. Look at how it is filmed. See how many different camera angles there are? See how some of the shots are clearly taken from moving cameras? The place was a film set. See how the reaction shots are separately filmed from the action shots? Think how many more cameras would be needed to capture those if it was all being filmed in "real time". Notice how the camera operators already know what the reactions are going to be, and zoom/pan accordingly. It's not a prank. It's a choreographed promotional video for a movie about the paranormal.

Could an ancap Kickstarter could offer anything more than Kickstarter offers? Isn't Kickstarter, by its nature, already a good example of a voluntary business model?

These are great! What's the source?

The assumption of science is not attacked. In this example, the "objective testable reality" is that the speed of light in a vacuum relative to the observer is always the same. Source, please! There was one experiment recently that seemed to suggest faster-than-light neutrinos, until they discovered a loose electrical connector. An electrical reflection from the end of the connector was affecting the timing, and it turned out that the neutrinos had not exceeded light speed after all.

You're still looking at this in a Newtonian way. In the Einstinian way, which agrees with experimentation, the measured speed is 300 for the guy shining the light AND simultaneously for the guy in the spaceship who is seeing the light. When the guy in the spaceship accellerated (relative to the guy on the moon), his time slowed down and his ruler got shorter, so that he sees the light moving 300 of his measuring units in each of his seconds, and so does the guy on the moon who is shining the light. We can reliably measure time dilation and length shortening in the lab and outside it too. There's no way I can explain relativity in sufficient detail within a forum post, but you absolutely need to understand the theory of relativity before you can criticize it.

Whoa there. I applaud your curiosity and original thinking, but you need to understand the theory of relativity if you are going to criticize it. What you describe is actually a thought experiment grounded in Newtonian (i.e. pre-Einstein) physics. Your thought experiment, as you described it, relates purely to the visual perception of the clock face and has nothing to do with time itself. Einstein's theories (which are 100% mathematics and 0% thought experiments) are simply equations that accurately describe experimental observations, and which have also been shown to have predictive power for future experiments. Elsewhere, you mentioned "ether" (a framework of measurement through which light travels). However, experiments from the 1800s have repeatedly demonstrated that there is no ether. Furthermore, experimental observations show that light (in a vacuum) always moves away from a source at the "speed of light" (approx. 300,000 km/second), and always arrives towards an observer at the same "speed of light", even if the source and observer are moving towards or away from each other! This is a truly remarkable observation. At "everyday" speeds, Newtonian physics is a good-enough approximation, but Newton's laws simply don't describe what happens at higher speeds. Suppose you are on the moon and you shine a light towards a spaceship that is moving away from you at 200,000 km/s. The light moves away from you at 300,000 km/s, so Newton's laws say that the light will approach the spaceship at 100,000 km/s (as seen from the spaceship). But this is not what happens: the light meets the rapidly-moving spaceship at 300,000 km/s. Einstein discovered (i.e. worked out) a set of equations that described the observed behavior. His equations show changes in time and distance at high relative speed, and also the equivalence of mass and energy (the famous E=mc2 equation). These ideas, although mind-blowing, turned out to accurately reflect large-scale phenomena. His later work, the General Theory of relativity, extended the math to cover all types of accelleration including acceleration due to gravity. I encourage you to read more about the theory of relativity. At the very least, you need to understand what relativity says about acceleration and clocks before you dismiss it. It's not productive for you to be criticizing relativity based on a misunderstanding of it. A great place to start is the Relativity FAQ, which is written in very approachable language.

Children and tourists pay sales tax but have no representation.

In the 60s and 70s, lots of people were HiFi afficionados. They were always checking technical specifications, and comparing sizes of speaker cabinets etc if they visited a friend's house. Back then, the right equipment could make quite a difference. But then the compact disc arrived, and good electronics got cheap enough that the difference no longer mattered to most people. Sure, there are still the nuts who pay $300 for gold-plated speaker cable, but most people nowadays just aren't that bothered about extreme HiFi. So gear-whoring can sometimes fade away.

Silk Road already had competitors, and I guess more will spring up as a result of this publicity. If you want to see the guy, here is a YouTube video of an interview that he did a year ago with one of his high school buddies. The interview is unrelated to Silk Road, but at 33:51 the other guy asks him "What are you going to do over the next five years?". Ulbricht looks extremely uncomfortable, because he can't admit that he's running a billion dollar clandestine business that will shape his next five years (and the rest of his life, now that he's going to be in the slammer). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xh68DDUYVPM

If we are using a car analogy, it needs to be an applicable one. Suppose I saw your car, or perhaps you even gave me a ride in it. I then went back to my garage and built a similar one. A copy of yours. Have I stolen the car? No. The author still has the story.

What an interesting post, darkskyabove. I'd never thought about JS Bach that way before, but I totally agree with you. Metal gradually came into prominence, but in my opinion all of its elements were already there by the time the Masters Apprentices released Buried and Dead in 1967. Black Sabbath solidified the genre a few years later. The mainstream classifies Buried and Dead as being "only" Progressive Rock though. It was the first 45rpm record I bought as a child, and caused some consternation to my parents at the time. Oh, I can't agree with that statement at all! Dissent has always been an important part of music. Shostakovich's music embodies dissent against Stalin (1920s to 1940s). In the late 1950s, "Jazz, with its emphasis on individuality and personal expression, became the lingua franca of dissident Soviet youth" (source). The anti-establishment musical Hair premiered in 1967. Bob Dylan's songs from the early 1960s fuelled the civil rights movement, as did those of Joan Baez. The early 1960s "was an era where jazz and politics were one and the same and music was not simply the soundtrack to dissent, it was the instrument of change" (source). In the early-to-mid 1800s, the anti-slavery movement embraced abolitionist songs. William Brown's 1848 songbook includes titles such as "Ye Sons of Freemen", "Jefferson's Daughter", "Are Ye Truly Free?" and "Fugitive's Triumph".

Well, yes, by that definition every phenomenon is a universal phenomenon. But what does that buy you? What additional knowledge or insight is gained by knowing that something is within the set of possible things in the universe?