As happens every now and then, life had caught up with and overtaken me, so here's a list of ten of the things I've scribbled down on bits of paper but haven't got round to posting yet:
1. Charity shops. Not necessarily a sign of a street being run down but a way for landlords to get a tasty tax reduction while they hang around and wait until somebody else does something magical to 'rejuvenate the High Street'.
2. The Daily Mirror did a bit of proper journalism for once and it turns out that about forty per cent of social housing which was sold off is now in the hands of landlords, some of them large scale investors.
3. Dual carriageways - they are not necessarily ugly. Anybody who has been to Berlin or Paris knows this.
4. Why the search for the graviton is futile. The best explanation for "gravity" is that it is an effect caused by distortions in space-time caused by the presence of massive objects. It seems pretty inconceivable to me that a particle could flit between distant objects and somehow pull them together.
5. They did a really complicated experiment about ten years ago to measure the speed of gravity. Rather unsurprisingly, they concluded that it propagates at the speed of light. Surely, measuring it can't be that difficult? You choose find something which measures gravitational forces very accurately and point it at e.g. the sun, preferably having fired it into some sort of orbit round the earth first. If the strongest force appears to be coming from where the sun appears to be, then gravity propagates at the speed of light. If it point towards where you know the sun actually is, then it propagates faster and so on.
6. That Russian town Chelyabinsk which was hit by a meteorite recently will be well known to lovers of World War II "documentaries" as Tankograd, the place where they built all the T-34 tanks. Whether the meteorite was wreaking some sort of Godwin's Law belated revenge for the defeats on the Eastern Front remains to be seen. I use the term "documentaries" advisedly, as actually they are just pornography.
7. History Of The World Part One. I like reading history books, especially those with a grand sweep and wider view. My personal short list of such books, sorted in order of length of period covered is:
A brief history of time, Stephen Hawking
A short history of nearly everything, Bill Bryson
Guns, germs and steel, Jared Diamond
Progress and poverty, Henry George
History of the twentieth century, Martin Gilbert
The Onion: Our dumb century
1984, George Orwell
Yes I know that The Onion is satire and 1984 is fiction). When you're read them all, you'll notice certain parallels on which they pretty much all agree.
8. Cool idea for a computer game. It's about an evil games/console manufacturer which wants to control the whole population by tricking them into staying at home playing a certain game. You battle yourself through various levels and try and get in touch with other people on the same quest, and the final level is when your group of rebels gets to the mainframe and blows it up or something. A message then flashes up on screen "Congratulations. You win. You are free! If you've learned your lesson you'll go outside into the fresh air or tidy up your room or something."
9. Why the natural human desire to make A Quick Buck while pretending to have done otherwise is anti-capitalist. This has little to do with the much maligned "short termism". And there are plenty of people who slave their whole lives merely in order to get their hands on some of the Quick Bucks which they see everybody else making.
10. Class A and B drug users. I was at a talk by a nice young man from Release (who actually looks just like his own photo. He was even wearing the same hat, despite the talk was indoors) and he explained that there are two main classes of drug users. I'm paraphrasing and simplifying here, but Class A is people with no jobs, no families, no support system (from broken homes, ex-army and so on) who takes drugs to try and escape their miserable lives. Class B is people with jobs, families, support systems etc. who take drugs purely as a leisure thing to enhance their otherwise pleasant lives. If you are going to have sensible drug policies, it is more or less impossible to do right by both classes. He also said the drug rehabilitation and therapy is more or less a complete waste of time and money. If you take drugs to escape your miserable life, then you won't come off them until your life stops being miserable. If you take drugs to enhance your pleasant life, then the treatment is a waste of time anyway, as most such users are quite happy taking them and usually get bored with it and give up anyway.
Forbidden Bible Verses — Genesis 42:1-17
8 hours ago
9 comments:
8. is the plot of Spy Kids 3. Arguably, Portal/Portal 2 has elements of it, too.
On the others:-
1.Not sure when the "magic" will come along, but I can see various town councils acting like Cnut and trying to prop up town centres, despite the fact that demand will continue to fall.
2. Good spot
3. The road between Cirencester and Gloucester is rather nice to drive on.
9. Sometimes the buck is short-term. No-one was going to make long-term sales of Princess Diana memorial tat. But most businesses don't have much self-interest in trashing their business for short-term gain, as they want it to be saleable.
10. What many people don't grasp is that drugs, alcohol, gambling, food or sex are all safe pleasures in moderation, but are also used by people with mental health problems as a way to try and deal with their problems.
To deal with someone with an addiction, you first have to work out what their mental health problem is. Oh, and that also requires someone who actually wants to change, which is why drug therapy doesn't work - a lot of addicts are there as a way of avoiding a custodial sentence.
TS, re 9, making tat is not short termist.
You need to have a tat factory, a team of tat designers, good reputation with retailers for prompt supply of quality tat. One year it's Diana, then it's millenium, then it's golden jubilee, blah blah blah, there's a steady market for tat. And a lot of this tat is still on people's mantlepieces etc.
The full post, if I ever get round to posting is not about productive businesses (however ephemeral their output) it is about rent-seeking (the pretence that land values are capital or that government hand outs are income or investment).
Another idea, which you have touched upon recently, is how much of what is referred to as "investing" (buying things like shares, gold, wine, commodities and, of course, land) is actually simply speculation, but we don't call it that.
B, but everybody slags off speculators, I prefer the harder targets.
Mark, that's the irony of it, most of us are speculators, its just that we think we are investors.
B, to be honest, I've never really invested in anything, I've only ever speculated. But I do not expect government hand outs or bail outs, anybody's sympathy when it goes wrong or anybody's admiration when it goes right. That is what makes me different to the Homeys and subsidy junkies and the City of London.
I know I'm a little late responding to this post (it no longer even being on the first page) but I wanted to chime in on the topic of gravity, as it's always fascinated me.
I have studied Physics at University, and Relativity (General and Special) makes a lot of sense (even while requiring a certain amount of brain-twisting) - but I'm still not entirely convinced. This topic is one of the reasons why.
If you do the experiment you propose in 5, you'll find that your gravitometer (or whatever you want to call it) points at where we know the sun now is, rather than where it appears to be. Great! So then Gravitons (or whatever you want to call them) must travel faster than the speed of light, right? Well, not exactly. This would break the rules (no information can be propogated faster than the speed of light), and we can't have that.
There's actually another proof that the gravitational force can't be in the same direction as the apparent location of the sun. The mechanics of one body orbitting another (or more accurately two bodies orbiting the centre of mass of the system - In the Earth-Sun system, the Sun is sufficiently massive relative to the Earth that we can think of it as the Earth orbitting the Sun, but the Sun's motion is affected a little by the presence of the Earth) require that the attractive force be directed towards the centre of mass of the system. If the force is not directed towards the centre then the orbit cannot be stable. So if the Earth was actually pulled towards where the Sun was 8 minutes ago, then the orbit would degrade, and we'd not be here to have this discussion.
So we know that the Earth is being pulled towards where the sun is now, so Gravity must be significantly faster than light, right? Well not exactly... At the time the gravitons were emitted by the Sun, the Sun was moving at a particular speed and in a particular direction. Relativity tells us that the Gravitons carry this information to the Earth, so the Earth is not simply pulled towards where the Sun was, but towards where the Sun would have been had it carried on moving at the same speed and in the same direction. This doesn't take into account acceleration, but there's not really anything out there that could accelerate the Sun a significant amount.
This explanation does lead to a small discrepancy between the position that the Earth is pulled towards and the actual position that the Sun is currently at, but that discrepancy is so small that the orbits will still be fairly stable.
So those are the two positions available. Either gravity propogates instantly (or significantly faster than the speed of light, at any rate) or gravitons carry information about not only the mass and distance of objects, but also their velocity. It's not really simple to measure the difference between these two models (for want of a better term). I guess we might be able to conceive of a system where the orbitting bodies moved fast enough that the difference between the two possibilities was measurable, but we've not found one yet (and if Relativity is correct, such a system would not be stable anyhow).
RA: "If you do the experiment you propose in 5, you'll find that your gravitometer (or whatever you want to call it) points at where we know the sun now is, rather than where it appears to be. Great! So then Gravitons (or whatever you want to call them) must travel faster than the speed of light, right?"
Well, who did this experiment? I would not expect your "gravitometer" to point towards where the sun actually is. If somebody has done the experiment and this is what actually happens then it is clearly back to the drawing board for my amateur physics!
Surely, if gravity (however propagated) and light move at the same speed, you will find that the force appears to be coming from the same place as the photons are coming from? i.e. where the sun was 8 minutes ago.
[Your next para explains that the earth does not orbit around the sun but that the sun (and all the planets) orbit around some other point which happens to be the centre of gravity of the whole solar system at any one point in time. So the ideal place to do this experiment is somewhere far away from the planetary plane, preferably at a right angle to the sun. Separate topic.]
"if the Earth was actually pulled towards where the Sun was 8 minutes ago... "
That is my working assumption that this is the case.
I don't see why this leads to an unstable orbital path. These geo-stationary satellites are effectively falling towards the centre of the earth and they can stay up there doing that for years and years without crashing.
To all intents and purposes, the sun stays in the same position and the earth is constantly falling towards it, just like a geo-stationary satellite. Whether it is falling towards where the sun was 8 minutes ago or is now makes little difference.
As to gravitons, to my mind, they are complete and utter hokum, but my explanation why is a bit folksy.
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