In other news today...
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@heterodox Well. That's going to cause quite a fight. Kennedy was the epitome of an unreliable vote (for both sides), so replacing him with a "reliable" vote changes the balance of the court. That will make the upcoming midterm elections even more...volatile...than usual.
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@benjamin-hall I will have infinitely more respect for President Trump if he replaces Kennedy with a centrist instead of a conservative.
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@pie_flavor this may edging on garage territories, but why? The status quo is not an inherently good thing, and no Democratic president would be expected to do the same was the situation reversed.
Control of the SC was a major reason many, if not most, conservatives voted for Trump.
Also consider that Republican justices tend to settle to the left, so they end up more moderate than they initially claim to be.
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@benjamin-hall I know they wouldn't do the same. Hence the 'respect'. But maintaining a balance in the SC is a good thing. I would much rather have many terms of a balanced court instead of half those terms with a conservative court and the other half with a liberal court (which is what happens - if it tips too far one side, people will get sick of it and tip it to the other side. That's most of why Trump was elected). If we could just permanently have a conservative-leaning court, that'd be great, but that's not what's going to happen.
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The smoke from this one is turning the valley that it is above into something that looks like it is filled with mist, and the smoke is very easily smelt in at least central Manchester. There might be bigger fires in the history of the world, but this is definitely not a small one. (I'm not surprised there's a blaze; it's been mostly dry since last autumn, and very dry indeed for the past few months.)
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@tsaukpaetra said in In other news today...:
This. Everything is relative to me, since I am my own point of reference. Everything else (including myself) is moving relative to me.
I see you are a Rhinocentrism apologist.
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@pie_flavor said in In other news today...:
But maintaining a balance in the SC is a good thing.
I think that the sort of balance you're calling for is awful, for the record. This isn't exactly a political divide (though a respective political divide certainly exists). It's really about fundamental respect for the Rule of Law.
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@pie_flavor said in In other news today...:
@benjamin-hall I will have infinitely more respect for President Trump if he replaces Kennedy with a centrist instead of a conservative.
Do you believe that's in any way likely to happen?
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@boomzilla said in In other news today...:
This isn't exactly a political divide (though a respective political divide certainly exists). It's really about fundamental respect for the Rule of Law.
Well, it kind of can be a divide, when different groups interpret the same law different ways. Though that's probably more to blame from bad or vague wording of said law, or new situations the law wasn't technically created to cover, than the judges themselves.
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@dkf said in In other news today...:
There might be bigger fires in the history of the world, but this is definitely not a small one.
Hmm...maybe for your part of the world.
The blaze covers 3.7miles (6km) of Saddleworth Moor and has been raging since Sunday night.
That converts to less than 3,000 acres. Not very big.
But if you're not used to that sort of thing it can be quite shocking.
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@boomzilla Like I said: A conservative court will be nice, but such things tend to lead to a liberal court farther down the line. Stability is better.
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@masonwheeler No. But a man can dream.
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@zecc said in In other news today...:
@tsaukpaetra said in In other news today...:
This. Everything is relative to me, since I am my own point of reference. Everything else (including myself) is moving relative to me.
I see you are a Rhinocentrism apologist.
Ah, mine is a little closer to the brain stem than that. :P
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@pie_flavor said in In other news today...:
An all-conservative court will be nice, but such things tend to lead to an all-liberal court farther down the line.
It's hard to see how the one follows from the other when Supreme Court justices aren't appointed via the democratic process, but rather in a highly indirect manner. Replace "court" with "Congress" and I could see your point, but as written... I'm not so sure.
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@masonwheeler One reason to vote for a president is who they'll pick for the SC, and that one reason could be the tipping point in an election.
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@benjamin-hall said in In other news today...:
That will make the upcoming midterm elections even more...volatile...than usual.
Yeah, this is going to change the whole election season.
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@heterodox it will turn all the things up to INT_MAX. That'll be the main effect.
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@heterodox Not if he gets it done quickly.
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@boomzilla LOL
The department called it “a straight-up felony” and added “it’s rude.”
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@dkf said in In other news today...:
There might be bigger fires in the history of the world, but this is definitely not a small one.
@boomzilla said in In other news today...:
The blaze covers 3.7miles (6km) of Saddleworth Moor and has been raging since Sunday night.
That converts to less than 3,000 acres. Not very big.
Another day in California...
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@pie_flavor said in In other news today...:
@heterodox Not if he gets it done quickly.
Well, seeing as the Senate's involved, good luck with that.
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@dkf said in In other news today...:
Manchester... very dry
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@hardwaregeek said in In other news today...:
@dkf said in In other news today...:
Manchester... very dry
They haven't laughed in ages!
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@e4tmyl33t said in In other news today...:
@m_adams All they'll need to do is take all the sheep from Wales to soak up the water if any gets in.
But, but... I thought all sheep in Wales were already soggy for, you know reasons...
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@timebandit said in In other news today...:
Does wildfires cause cancer?
Actually, they probably do increase the risk, smoke inhalation and so on.
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@m_adams said in In other news today...:
@e4tmyl33t said in In other news today...:
@m_adams All they'll need to do is take all the sheep from Wales to soak up the water if any gets in.
But, but... I thought all sheep in Wales were already soggy for, you know reasons...
Eww, no, ass rot is not good at all...
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@tsaukpaetra What do donkeys have to do with it?
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@scarlet_manuka said in In other news today...:
@tsaukpaetra What do donkeys have to do with it?
Everything.
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@tsaukpaetra said in In other news today...:
@m_adams said in In other news today...:
@e4tmyl33t said in In other news today...:
@m_adams All they'll need to do is take all the sheep from Wales to soak up the water if any gets in.
But, but... I thought all sheep in Wales were already soggy for, you know reasons...
Ew
we no, ass rot is not good at all...FTFY
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@boomzilla I love those assumptions. Consider a frictionless perfectly spherical missile in a vacuum...
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@timebandit said in In other news today...:
@dcon said in In other news today...:
Another day in California...
Does wildfires cause cancer?
They had to cut some more trees to make labels like "this forest may cause cancer".
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@djls45 said in In other news today...:
London moves ~215 miles in 20 minutes, due to the earth's rotation. Washington, DC moves ~270 miles, because it's at a lower latitude.
This is breaking my mind.
You need a frame of reference, since space doesn't have an absolute origin (that I know of); the Earth itself being the natural choice.
And naturally the Earth does not rotate in relation to itself. So how is it that the missile — the trajectory of which both starts and ends on the surface of the Earth — is affected by the Earth's rotation?
On the other hand, if you take the sun as the reference, the Earth is moving...
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@pie_flavor said in In other news today...:
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/27/reuters-america-judge-halts-california-plan-to-require-glyphosate-cancer-warnings.html
Im-fucking-possible. The State of California being wrong about what causes cancer?Well, to be fair, they were just following the conclusion of the WHOIARC. And they didn't know because the guy who was supposed to tell them differently didn't:
Reuters reported in June that an influential scientist was aware of new AHS research data while he was chairing a panel of experts reviewing evidence on glyphosate for IARC in 2015. He did not tell the panel about it.
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@zecc
Well, once the missile gets into space, it's not being rotated by the Earth. So it has to chase after / account for the Earth's rotation in figuring out where it needs to plunk down.
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@zecc said in In other news today...:
And naturally the Earth does not rotate in relation to itself. So how is it that the missile — the trajectory of which both starts and ends on the surface of the Earth — is affected by the Earth's rotation?
(Psst-- once it leaves the atmosphere, the air won't drag it along with Earth's rotation anymore.)
Play some Kerbal, you'll get it.
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@zecc said in In other news today...:
You need a frame of reference, since space doesn't have an absolute origin (that I know of); the Earth itself being the natural choice.
And naturally the Earth does not rotate in relation to itself.The Earth is not a point. If you take the centre of the earth as your reference frame's origin, the points on the surface very definitely do rotate with respect to it. If you take one point on the surface as your origin, you are now in a non-inertial reference frame (because your reference origin is rotating around an axis; this kind of movement is not something you can wish away with relativity) which introduces its own weird effects, but even so any point that's not on the same or opposite latitude as you will still trace out an odd kind of orbit.
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@blakeyrat said in In other news today...:
Play some Kerbal, you'll get it.
It's on my To Buy list.
@izzion @blakeyrat @Scarlet_Manuka My rational brain understands this up to a point, but it's...
this kind of movement is not something you can wish away with relativity
and
any point that's not on the same or opposite latitude as you will still trace out an odd kind of orbit.
..I'm having trouble wrapping my Earth-bound primate lower brain around.
The key insight it that this is all about inertia (which is always relative to Self) rather than relative movement to some arbitrary point of reference.
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@luhmann no, the extra taxes we're going to pay to make it look like we have ÂŁ350 million a week to spend on the NHS
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@zecc The fundamental principle of (special) relativity is that you can't distinguish between inertial reference frames. However, this doesn't mean all reference frames are equal; the word "inertial" is important in that first sentence. Basically this limits you to saying that frames moving with a fixed velocity with respect to each other are equivalent. Under general relativity there is also an equivalence between a constant acceleration and a constant gravitational field.
But neither SR nor GR allows you to make an equivalence between a non-rotating reference frame and a rotating reference frame. In other words, rotation is not a mere illusion that you can ignore by changing reference frames; it is a real thing. If you use a rotating reference frame then the laws of physics change (notably, new centrifugal and Coriolis forces appear, as referenced a few times in xkcd). From this you can determine the rate of rotation of your reference frame; this is the idea behind the Foucault pendulum.
Now you are quite welcome to use a reference frame anchored at point A on the earth's surface, and indeed this is how we all live our daily lives; on a human scale the non-inertial forces imposed by the rotation of the earth are normally insignificant. When we travel on the ground or in the air, we're essentially moving relative to a medium that itself is rotating along with the earth (the atmosphere gets dragged around too), so we can mostly ignore the whole issue. But for ICBMs, which travel outside the atmosphere for a significant part of their flight time, it's very important to take the rotation of the earth into account.
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@jaloopa said in In other news today...:
I thought we were using the Brexit
dividenddeficitto hire a big ship and tow us into the Atlanticas an excuse for more austerity?FTFY ^.^
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@boner said in In other news today...:
I don't remember that scene in the books. There was a unicorn in Philosopher's stone wasn't there
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@scarlet_manuka This conversation has given me a renewed respect for all the people responsible for putting objects in geosynchronous orbit.
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To clarify, I meant the conversation about inertial reference frames, not the one about farting unicorns.
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I can totally imagine putting a farting unicorn in geosynchronous orbit to be one of Elon Musk's life goals.
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@hardwaregeek said in In other news today...:
@dkf said in In other news today...:
Manchester... very dry
Yep. Usually the chance of things burning round here is a good match for zero, but the weather's been unusual for the past year or so. Even when a decent named storm passed through earlier this month, it produced virtually no rain AIUI, and that's really strange. Plenty of drying wind though.
The problem with moor fires is that they tend to involve deep burning peat, and that means that putting them out is really difficult. They don't spread as fast as a forest fire, but they just don't like stopping and you can't see where the actual fire really is at the moment as it is quite possibly under the firefighters' feet. There might also be some coal seams up there under the peat bogs too, and they're even harder to put out (they'd be narrow things that have never been economic to mine).
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@dkf said in In other news today...:
There might also be some coal seams up there under the peat bogs too, and they're even harder to put out (they'd be narrow things that have never been economic to mine).
Yep. As in everything, America has to go bigger.
The Centralia mine fire is a coal seam fire that has been burning underneath the borough of Centralia, Pennsylvania, United States, since at least May 27, 1962.
At its current rate, it could continue to burn for over 250 years.
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@mzh said in In other news today...:
@dkf said in In other news today...:
There might also be some coal seams up there under the peat bogs too, and they're even harder to put out (they'd be narrow things that have never been economic to mine).
Yep. As in everything, America has to go bigger.
The Centralia mine fire is a coal seam fire that has been burning underneath the borough of Centralia, Pennsylvania, United States, since at least May 27, 1962.
At its current rate, it could continue to burn for over 250 years.
Nature one-upped America on this one, 2 billion years ago and it ran for hundreds of thousands of years: