Simon of Classical Values:
And why do people hate science so much? Well it is hard to understand and requires a lot of complicated math and difficult concepts. I’m pretty good with that sort of thing. I understand Einstein but the math is beyond me.
In a related story, I had a torrid affair with Gisele Bündchen but I never met her.
While this post may be pointless, it moves certain other posts further down the page. AT THE SPEED OF LIGHT!!!
… Because I can’t stop myself: ConFURvatives!
The name of this community really describes it. ConFURvatives are Furries who are conservative, right-winged, republican, or even just Christian.
Unlike other political communities that often have constant arguing between liberals and conservatives – ConFURvatives is strictly for conservatives and is not for liberal/conservative debate, but rather, conservative discussion. Membership is moderated to insure the group stays 100% right-wing. The reason for this is to eliminate flaming of conservatives – since being one in the furry fandom isn’t the easiest of things to be.
Makes Red State kind of redundant.
September 30, 2008 at 4:57 pm
And I am very wealthy,
but for my lack
of money.
I’m pretty sure that’s what Relativity is all about,
that,….
and ponies.
September 30, 2008 at 5:09 pm
I wonder if either the author of the article or the author of the post ever considered the paradox of making, even in the abstract, this argument while writing on a computer and posting it on the Internet.
September 30, 2008 at 5:20 pm
Under the ConFURvative charter this blog entry qualifies as a flame. Teh Editorz is hereby banned from the ConFURvative website. Teh Editorz is asked to cease and desist with their flaming behaviour, or shall suffer such consequences as the law at this time (or wherein such time as the ConFURvative Party gains power and may prosecute this act as a war crime as an Act of Sedition and Giving Comfort to Teh Enema.)
Teh Editorz, you have been warned. There are some lines that shant be crossed.
Sincerely,
Klingon Pornstar
PS When the ConFURvatives finally gain power, I will, although you have already a Death Sentence for this crime, lobby to have you hanged, drawn and quartered a second time for your relentless harrassment of myself.
September 30, 2008 at 5:54 pm
I understand Economics, but cannot read graphs.
September 30, 2008 at 6:12 pm
I am good at math, but I just don’t get that algebra stuff.
September 30, 2008 at 6:43 pm
Sarah Palin iz aware of all noozepaper tradishuns: http://www.americablog.com/2008/09/cbs-palin-cant-name-one-single.html
September 30, 2008 at 7:01 pm
Plushies with a diploma.
September 30, 2008 at 8:06 pm
- since being one in the furry fandom isn’t the easiest of things to be.
It seems you blend in with so many other ordinary things.
And people tend to pass you over ’cause you’re not standing out like flashy sparkles in the water- or stars in the sky.
September 30, 2008 at 8:18 pm
Wet blanket alert.
Einstein actually explained the core concepts of the theory of relativity in a series of very accessible essays-no complicated math necessary. That’s probably what this Furry is referring (refurring?) to.
September 30, 2008 at 8:19 pm
Cigars are awesome!
September 30, 2008 at 8:21 pm
This may seem like an obvious question, but what the fuck is a furry?
September 30, 2008 at 8:23 pm
Do any of these confurvatives dress up as moose? Because it would be a really bad idea to let their freak flag fly with Palin around.
Just saying.
September 30, 2008 at 8:24 pm
Furries are the most perfect creation of the internet age.
September 30, 2008 at 8:31 pm
I’m 61 and would have no brain if I weren’t ConFURvative.
September 30, 2008 at 9:07 pm
Furries are like Necro-nympho-xeno-pedo-beastipiliacs, except for the underage dead alien part.
September 30, 2008 at 9:08 pm
furries?
Jeeez who gives a fuck?
moroons
September 30, 2008 at 9:20 pm
Obviously, Simon doesn’t know that Sam Cooke was black.
September 30, 2008 at 9:32 pm
Wait… furries have their own wiki, WTF
http://furry.wikia.com/wiki/WikiFur_Furry_Central
September 30, 2008 at 9:37 pm
Furries are people who like to dress in funny animal costumes and have sex. Or read shitty comics about anthrophomorphic animals having sex. Or have sex with animals while wearing funny animal costumes. They are the scourge of SF and fantasy conventions, making the average fan look “normal” by comparison.
Skunk fuckers, the lot of them…
September 30, 2008 at 9:41 pm
pointyallover:
Or is it? Simon says he’s “pretty good with” “complicated math” and then goes on to say that “the math is beyond me”.
Perhaps it’s like The Editors having a torrid one-night stand with Gisele Bündchen — he’ll be pretty good with her, but in the end she’s still beyond him.
– bi, International Journal of Inactivism
September 30, 2008 at 9:44 pm
Wouldn’t furries be the most purrfect creation of the Internet Age?
September 30, 2008 at 9:45 pm
Furry fans were a subgroup of comic book geek, focused primarily on anthropomorphic cartoon animals — the so called “funny animal books”. With the success in the mid-80s of the excellent adult comic “Omaha, the Cat Dancer” (“A certified knockout!” said Harlan Ellison — no shit!), it was soon learned that every silver lining has a cloud, as the fandom became more sexually oriented and eventually attracted perverts and weirdos.. Like Cigarskunk.
Some of these perverts are known to believe that they have animalian souls (usually wolves or other cool creatures, almost never aardvaarks or lemurs) and some of them (yech) dress up in what are basically mascot costumes to have hot, sweaty, uncomfortable sex.
Yes, that’s right. The Furry fandom is the one and only pathetic nerd subculture that can actually increase one’s odds of having sex. (I guess it’s because wearing a piece of carpet with a cartoon fox head attached can hide a whole lotta ugly.)
All of which is hilarious.
September 30, 2008 at 10:08 pm
I just … had no idea there was fursecution of conservatives going on. No wonder white Christian males can’t get anywhere in our society — their fluffy tails keep getting in the way!
From what I know of furry fandom, all of which I’ve learned from Fandom Wank posts, it’s not liberal so much as it’s … well, about people who wear animal costumes to get each other off, and that tends to lend itself to the kind of closeted freakazoid behavior at which modern Republicans excel. So I’d think there’s be a healthy amount of crossover already OH MY GOD I JUST WAY OVERTHOUGHT THIS.
Gonna go wash down my evening meds with cheap tequila BRB.
A.
September 30, 2008 at 10:09 pm
“Well it is hard to understand and requires a lot of complicated math and difficult concepts.”
The concepts of science are very simple — say, the closer you get to the surface of the earth, the stronger the earth’s gravity pulls at you — but the math to describe the resultant orbital mechanics can become very complex. Interestingly, relativity has both simple concepts and (relatively) simple math, including the famous E=mc^2. Even the formula for the compression of an object in direction of travel is not too tough.
There’s something worse than ordinary comic-book geekdom? Now that’s a concept I don’t want to learn about!
September 30, 2008 at 10:39 pm
One of the CSI episodes exploring kink did the furry people.
September 30, 2008 at 10:50 pm
Because nothing is more conservative and true to traditional values than wanking to cartoons of skunks with tits and ass.
September 30, 2008 at 10:56 pm
(shrug) Stupidity is an *American* trait.
September 30, 2008 at 11:04 pm
Oh, sweet baby Jesus, I read ““Omaha, the Cat Dancer” at a glance as “Obama, the Cat Dancer” and while I don’t know from furries, I know enough furry to flinch.
September 30, 2008 at 11:09 pm
Of course there’s something worse! Oh my god, you’ve never seen the geek chart, have you? Read it, quick! Your life could depend upon it!
http://www.brunching.com/images/geekchartbig.gif
September 30, 2008 at 11:16 pm
Obama, the Cat Dancer, eh? That’s truly a terrifying thought. (Omaha is an exotic dancer at a nightclub, hence the title.)
September 30, 2008 at 11:31 pm
@#2: Keep in mind, the internet doesn’t require any understanding of how it works beyond how to run a web browser to use it. Relativity isn’t quite so forgiving. That said, lots of people take non-calculus physics in high school or college; can they be said to understand physics even though they didn’t go into the deep end of the math? Can those who have had the calculus version be said to understand physics when they’ve never studied tensors?
All that said, the vision of 2 aging neocons in mascot suits fooling around is more than my mind can take. Bartender, a round of your harshest brain bleach, and make mine a double.
October 1, 2008 at 12:35 am
Editors, please please PLEASE go undercover as a conFURvative and report all of your findings to the loyal readership of this blog, posthaste.
I smell the beginnings of a newer, better strip than the already legendary Keyboard Kommando Komics — that smell being an amalgam of Cheetos, fear of black people and fermented sweat inside a high school mascot costume.
October 1, 2008 at 1:02 am
This whole conFURvative thing brings new (and disturbing) meaning to that trademark line from The Editors:
“…these rats aren’t going to fuck themselves”
October 1, 2008 at 1:27 am
I’ll I know is that when Bugs Bunny dresses up like a lady I feel funny in my pants.
October 1, 2008 at 2:58 am
I made some Unicorn repellant once, but I think I made it too strong.
October 1, 2008 at 3:10 am
Here is a link to a furry vs. Klingon bowling contest that took place in Atlanta a couple of years back.
The Klingon’s kicked ass, of course.
Didja know Atlanta has at least 300 self identified Klingons?
And no one has censused the furries…
October 1, 2008 at 3:28 am
Not to rain on the har-de-har parade here, but one of the main reasons it took Einstein more than ten years to go from the specific to the general theory of relativity is that he was, relatively speaking*, really, really bad at math.
In fact, Einstein got most of his general-relativity math from his much more mathematically adept friend Mercel Grossman (who got him that job as a patent clerk, way back when), and from tensor calculus luminary Tullio Levi-Civita, who was in the generous habit of not only pointing out errors in Einstein’s math, but also helping to fix those errors.
* relative** to other theoretical physicists. He was still a lot better at it than your typical modern-day “I’m pretty good at math” politics blogger.
** Of course the pun was intentional. If you can even call it a pun, for the love of god.
October 1, 2008 at 3:52 am
To be fair, it’s possible.
My wife’s a mathematician who does and teaches fluid dynamics and I’m a simple musician who only took college alegebra. I can’t understand a bit of what she does, but in another difficult area of maths, combinatorics, I’m pretty good with all the major concepts.
I can also understand that Simon at Classical Values is a nincompoop.
October 1, 2008 at 3:55 am
I am tired of Einstein being discriminated against just because he liked to dress up in a badger costume.
Even today they are discriminating against this poor woman simply because she liked to dress up like a cow, chase children, block traffic, and pee on neighbors’ porches.
At least she had the dignity to show up at her hearing in proud cow dress.
—————————–
I am still really, really sorry I had to hear about any of this crap. This is the continuing evil side of the internet.
October 1, 2008 at 4:05 am
Got here from Eschaton. I feel as if I have to defend my furry friends somewhat. :) As with any other subculture, the grand bulk of ‘em are pretty nice, pretty normal people. They just really like funny-animal comics (of all kinds, not just the kinky ones, said the non-furry who follows several himself) and do a lot more elaborate costumes than most of us ever will. Yeah, some of ‘em are trying to get laid… and some of ‘em are married with kids, and some are single and not looking, and, and, and.
(For an utterly safe, family friendly, and freakin’ hilarious furry comic, check out Bill Holbrook’s Kevin and Kell.)
Because of the by-necessity (hell, by definition) accepting nature of the subculture, the notion of conservative furries makes my head go ‘slodey. But then, I’ve never figured out Log Cabin Republicans either.
October 1, 2008 at 4:17 am
Re 34:
Pedant alert. (sorry – I’ve spent a long time on Einstein, and must rise to his defense, not that he needs it).
Einstein was not really bad at math relative to other theoretical physicists — certainly not in 1905-1915 period. He was not great relative to real mathematicians. He sought help from Grossman in 1912-1913 after learning, probably from Max Born, of the problems raised by considering issues of special relativity in the case of a rotating disc.
The implications of that case suggested that the geometry required to discuss field equations of gravity had to deviate from Euclid’s — and Grossman led him to Riemann’s geometry.
Now non-Euclidean geometries were well known among serious math types of the day…but had not had a physical interpretation yet. Einstein was not behind his colleagues.
There’s more — the Hilbert-Einstein interchange in 1915, for example — that makes the same point: E. knew math very well for a physicist.
That would change after 1925, or so, and in later years he tended always to work with a mathematical assistant — but during his peak period of productivity, he was pretty good.
Tom Levenson
October 1, 2008 at 4:20 am
People don’t like being mocked. That’s *why* there’s so much mockery. Thus, a conFURvative community, while a little surprising, makes perfect sense.
If you can’t manage empathy for furries, I hope thinking about them at least gives you better understanding of the people who think you’re ridiculous and can’t shut up about it.
October 1, 2008 at 5:12 am
Hell I thought it was the theory of Relatives at Tea: you never have enough food for your relatives at tea.
Never.
October 1, 2008 at 5:20 am
Gaaahh…I’ve been able to watch Pam Oshry videos for longer than that furry bowling one.
October 1, 2008 at 5:20 am
Cigarskunk should love it. After all, it must be lonely beneath that rock he was told to crawl under.
October 1, 2008 at 5:59 am
Or is it? Simon says he’s “pretty good with” “complicated math” and then goes on to say that “the math is beyond me”.
Right. And at least for Special Relativity, the only math that’s required is some straightforward algebra and arithmetic. The math behind Special Relativity is well within the grasp of your typical precocious high school student.
October 1, 2008 at 6:09 am
This fits very well with the libertarian with the kitten head posted below.
October 1, 2008 at 6:10 am
Why don’t these people just find themselves a nice cheap glory hole and save themselves the dry cleaning bill?
October 1, 2008 at 6:24 am
I wonder who the officer who decided to photograph that woman with her cow hat on was?
October 1, 2008 at 6:35 am
Just to point out that it would actually be possible for posts to scroll down a screen faster than the speed of light; I seem to dig up from memory that 1) if you had a sufficiently powerful projector and a very large screen a long way away from it, the credits at the end of a movie could be made to scroll arbitrarily fast and 2) this was erroneously believed by at least one Welsh physics teacher to be a good way to explain the difference between group velocity and phase velocity.
October 1, 2008 at 7:13 am
Wingnuts have minds? I thought they operated on the basis of unorganized neural ganglia.
October 1, 2008 at 7:18 am
…that smell being an amalgam of Cheetos, fear of black people and fermented sweat inside a high school mascot costume.
What is known, in layman’s terms, as “victory.”
October 1, 2008 at 7:38 am
[...] Sarah Palin break a tie in the Senate? Sure, bring it on — right after Obama keynotes a ConFURvative convention … in a skunk [...]
October 1, 2008 at 7:58 am
Einstein’s math isn’t even all that hard–just hard to reconcile to our common-sense view of reality.
And Omaha the Cat Dancer really is excellent stuff.
October 1, 2008 at 8:21 am
Dennis Kucinich is a Democrat.
Joe Lieberman is a Democrat.
“Furry” is like “Democrat” — a term of such diverse association it means almost nothing.
October 1, 2008 at 8:30 am
So you accept soi dissant ‘Christians’ as being christian (small ‘c’ intended). Most of the muslims I know are way more christian than the general run of ‘conservative Christians’. BTW, most of the atheists I know are more christian as well. Of course I am referring to morality rather than doctrine.
October 1, 2008 at 8:48 am
This is either laughably pedantic and naive or plain spot on, but here goes:
E=MC2. I asked a guy at a bar twenty-five years ago, guy who presented himself as, um, smart:
“What DOES E=MC2 mean?”
He eyed me scornfully, then said, “Energy Equals Mass times the Speed of Light Squared.”
“Yeah, but what does THAT mean?”
The Big Duh resonated throughout the barroom noise like silence releasing all the noise it’s Einsteinian mass contains.
Guy didn’t know. Who does?
After half a bottle of pondering, I gave my newly arrived at answer:
Take a pencil. Point it at your forehead. Release, in a straight line, all the energy comprising the mass of that pencil. That would move that pencil through your forehead at 186Kmphx186kmph.
Yes, I know it’s impossible to travel faster than the speed of light, or even to accelerate a pencil to the speed of light.
But that IS what the equation says, period. It IS a linear equation, yes?
I have yet to meet a physicist or physics grad who could sit still with that. They all said the equivalent of, ‘Yes but that’s wrong.’
Which, written as an equation, might look like
Yes=Wrong.
To understand a thing does NOT require one ‘do the math’. I’ve known many people who can do the math but can’t translate those results into UNDERSTANDING, something they can git in their bones, settle in their gut, and turn into a verbally comprehensible expression even to themselves.
I suspect that the word ‘counterintuitive’ became more than an obscure dictionary listing as books touting Einstein for the Layman proliferated.
We (almost all of us, that is) do not understand math beyond the stuff we (hopefully) mastered by 6th grade. We (almost all of us, that is) do not understand algebra or calculus, which is why it is so hard to teach to folks who want to *understand* but so easy to teach to quote/unquote geeks who like to follow blueprints to their conclusion. They internalize procedures, yea, even in a way they ‘understand’ insomuch as they can pick the proper procedure by which to extract an answer, but they cannot externalize it into something understandable beyond rote: ‘do this to get that’.
This is not to say that some of them haven’t attained a ‘gut-level understanding’ of these things, but these gut-level understandings REMAIN gut-level. When they attempt to articulate this understanding, that they’ve acquired somehow, into logical step-by-step verbal expression, what comes out is mostly: BURP!
Yet every function in mathematics is translatable into simple verbal terms like inversely proportional, and these verbal terms can be explained via visual geometry. I’m not saying ‘geeks are automatons’. No. Geeks are awesome and bright no more nor less than, um, non-geeks.
I have never read an explanation of relativity, with or without math at lower or higher levels, that explained relativity except by at some point degenerating into one of two inadequacies:
a) now do these equations. see? you get Einstein’s number
b) so, the amount of energy actually in a Mars Bar is equivalent to twenty gazillion 60-watt light bulbs.
Never have I seen the two bridged completely. I have seen, rarely, given aspects of relativity explained in a way that bridges the two so one can get it in yer bones, but never the string of concepts that are presented these days as Classical Einsteinian relativity (that quaint old creature).
Hawking, that “Great Explainer”, does far better, ironically, with quantum issues than basic relativity. And he does nothing with the opening salvo, E=MC2 but say, in so many monotone words, ‘That is why atom bombs make such big booms’.
It is one of my grander When I Grow Up I’ll Have a REAL Penis That Talks Pretty fantasies to write a book that accomplishes real visceral, intuitive, yet mathematically manipulatible understanding of this thing called
relativity which is, I think, a subset of genealogy?
Meanwhile. point that pencil-holder somewhere else. And be very careful unwrapping Mars Bars.
October 1, 2008 at 8:52 am
P.S. I suspect that within not too many years, the ability to immerse in interactive multimedia will create media that CAN explain relativity in a way that doesn’t cause one to immediately start scratching one’s head. In other words, explanations that aren’t the equivalent of mental lice.
October 1, 2008 at 9:07 am
Take a pencil. Point it at your forehead. Release, in a straight line, all the energy comprising the mass of that pencil. That would move that pencil through your forehead at 186Kmphx186kmph.
Yes, I know it’s impossible to travel faster than the speed of light, or even to accelerate a pencil to the speed of light.
But that IS what the equation says, period. It IS a linear equation, yes?
No. Dude, if you have released all the energy, you don’t have the pencil anymore.
October 1, 2008 at 9:23 am
Correct. You have a beam of energy (if the abstracts of a linear equation can be fully collimated).
Also: you would no longer have a forehead.
It’s like porn. Porn is audio-visual but most of sex is tactile. One translates athe A/V into sex at the, um, gut level.
Understanding is getting your rocks off.
October 1, 2008 at 9:24 am
Also, you still have the ‘pencil’, but now it is the pencil entirely in its energy form.
Tomorrow: What IS a Pencil?
October 1, 2008 at 9:27 am
If I’d said: the effect would be EQUIVALENT to that pencil moving through your forehead blah blah blah, would that be more viscerally intuitively accurate?
That’s what I MEANT to write.
October 1, 2008 at 9:52 am
What I’m wondering* is when there are cultural touchstones like Catherine the Great, Pepe LePew and Fritz the Cat, why do furries credit some very obscure comic as the source of their meta-beastial fetish? I’m sure Einstein would know, but unfortunately, it’s been mathematically proven that he can no longer speak to me in this dimension.
*Not really
October 1, 2008 at 10:08 am
Catherine the Great? WTF? For one, that’s a myth. For two, that’s a whole different animal. (LOL) The alleged horse was very much not a talking anthropomorphic cartoon-style horse person. Which is apparently a serious turn-off for the majority of furries…. Anyway…
Pepe Le Pew was cool, but I doubt many people masturbated to him.
Fritz the Cat? Funny, but while most furry fans probably watched it, it really didn’t make much difference.
The whole rise of the “erotic” furry thing began in the late 80′s, right after the publication of Omaha. Unlike Pepe, it was a very sexual comic, and unlike Fritz, it was mature and well-written.
… and Omaha was hardly a “very obscure” comic at the time. Virtually every serious comic fan knew of and read it. Some of us just on the strength of Ellison’s recommendation. (The guy gives out cover blurbs about as freely as other people would give away their kidneys. If it’s got his name on the cover, it’s damn good.)
Among the furry fans, it was a “must read.”
October 1, 2008 at 10:14 am
Um, it depends on what you mean by ‘explanation.”
If you mean, internally consistent and accounting for most phenomena, it’s pretty easy.
Space and time are not separate, but are a single thing called space-time. So are matter and energy. Mass bends spacetime, so that gravitation and acceleration are the same thing. Which means that the mass that generates gravity and the energy that generates acceleration are the same thing, right? And the constant factor in allthese equivalences is the speed of light.
Got that? Good.
If, on the other hand, you mean something that jibes with everyday experience, forget it. To our consciousness, space and time are about as different as you can get. Trying to think of time as spacelike leads to cartoon panels with big clocks and 1957-1947-1347 marching along. And thinking of space as timelike–how do you even start? Likewise matter and energy. (likewise particle and wave, but that’s a different kettle of fish). The math works. It explains stuff.You can use it. But it’s not common sense .
And if you expect a complete explanation, that won’t work as well. By what mechanism does matter convert to energy? No idea. Why the speed of light? No idea. Why is the speed of light the speed it is? No idea. Why are there three spatial dimensions and one temporal one? No idea. What actually happens when two partticles collide? How is momentum transferred? How is charge transferred? What is the difference between positive and negative charge? No, no, no, no idea. (There are some fun speculations–but a lot of them redefine the enigmas as other enigmas.)
Relativity is a theory consisting of a bunch of equations explaining how things behave. They’ve been tested, anf they work pretty well.
If you want to make the leap from the way things behave to the way things are, be my guest. However, there’s Immanuel Kant standing over there, shouting, “You’ll never make it!”
October 1, 2008 at 10:41 am
kl – sorta. Don’t think of the c as a velocity, because it’s an impossible velocity, and if you get at all close to it things get complicated. It’s just a number; square it, multiply it by the mass of the pencil, and you get a term with units of energy – eg, if the pencil weighs 10 g, it could theoretically be converted into 900 TJ of energy, which is, ballpark, the amount of energy produced by a nuclear power plant in a year. Give or take a few powers of ten which I probably dropped somewhere. Anyway, it’s a buttload.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_relativity
Otherwise, I suppose it’s possible, for certain values of “understand”, to understand relativity without any mathematics, although it is a mathematical theory developed from mathematical theories in order to give quantitative results. You hear about mathematical prodigies who “feel” their way through these things instead of doing symbolic manipulation like the rest of us, so maybe he’s one of those people. Perhaps he “visualizes” 4-D rotations in non-Euclidian space really easily, but (so ungenerously!) I doubt it. I suspect he Netflix’d “Cosmos” and decided he knew it all.
October 1, 2008 at 11:04 am
Noooooo!
We already know how fast it can go: c puts the upper limit on that. Transform all your pencil’s mass to energy and it will move no faster than c, ever. There will be, technically speaking, a shitload of energy moving that fast, though.
October 1, 2008 at 11:17 am
Best thread ever: A discussion alternating between Einsteinian physics and a clique of sexual deviants known as “Furries.”
As they say, Allahu Akbar.
October 1, 2008 at 11:23 am
Cosplay Waterloo demands no less.
October 1, 2008 at 11:55 am
“Otherwise, I suppose it’s possible, for certain values of “understand”, to understand relativity without any mathematics”
Excuse me for implying (if I did) that relativity could be understood without understanding the math. What I mean is that an understanding of relativity that can be shared by ‘the average person’ requires a transformation of math into concept and concept into math in a way that a person CAN equate with their perception of reality.
It CAN be done. My pencil analogy is an example of a movie one can play in one’s head that can convert “pencil weighs 10 g, it could theoretically be converted into 900 TJ of energy, which is, ballpark, the amount of energy produced by a nuclear power plant in a year” into a visual form a human being can directly relate, and accurately so, into a process they thoroughly understand (projectiles/velocity/released energy). And thereby understand the difference between the two, begin to understand WHY a pencil can’t go that fast, why relativity define certain limits that Newtonian mechanics didn’t (although NewtMechs might imply them, such as in early premonitions of black holes).
You get enough of such Wham-O! analogies properly sequenced in a hierarchically arrayed exposition of the results implied by relativity, and the counterintuitivity that strangles most persons’ understanding of relativity in a way that is real-life meaningful to them is hugely overcome.
It’s hard to do, which is why being a successful theoretical physicist is so rare a creature. They have to explain it to themselves in a way their ‘gut’, i.e., their (how shall I say?) physically *valid* imagination, can get itself around and thereby ask meaningful what ifs.
Genuinely applicable gedanken don’t grow on trees. Maybe in furry crotches but not on trees.
October 1, 2008 at 11:57 am
“Noooooo!
We already know how fast it can go: c puts the upper limit on that. Transform all your pencil’s mass to energy and it will move no faster than c, ever. There will be, technically speaking, a shitload of energy moving that fast, though.”
We already fixed that misspeaking on my part. Sarah Palin helped. She’s cute in an otter suit.
October 1, 2008 at 12:37 pm
You found the ConFURvatives! Awesome! I’ve been mocking them for years.
I’m a furry, and I’d like to point out that the vast majority of us are happily liberal. I mean, it makes sense that we’d be a pretty open minded lot, right? So please don’t judge us all by that odd little group within a group.
October 1, 2008 at 12:41 pm
Long ago people imagined an entity capable of truly understanding Einstein without mathematics. They named it God.
October 1, 2008 at 1:19 pm
We like Wings and we like Nuts, but we don’t like Wingnuts. Go figure. And go poop.
– http://tubbotwins.wordpress.com –
October 1, 2008 at 1:34 pm
No, I was addressing general objections. Sorry, that was unclear.
Given that the real-life usefulness of relativity to most people is zero, I’ll agree. I’m all for edification, and popular science reading is a fine way to keep people out of gangs and off drugs, although I think the level of “understanding” it provides can be measured by the number of “General Relativity encourages moral decay!” editorials, or “the LHC will explode the world!” hysterics, or dorm room conversations about how quantum mechanics comes from Hari Krshna, one is subjected to – not much, and most people have a strong desire to change the subject to something sexier. See also: Gregg Easterbrook’s career. The truth about relativity is that it is very dense and difficult, and people who understand it in any meaningful way (so, definitely not me) have generally spent a long time working at it, esp. the math bits.
Of course, some people understand things differently, and some people have sixteen brains, so what do I know. But it sounds to me like saying “I speak Spanish, except for the words.”
October 1, 2008 at 1:56 pm
Even though presentations of S.R. can be made which are light on the math, the original derivation in Z. f. Physik is, to me, incredibly concise, elegant, and, dare I say, pretty decent mathematics. Based on variational calculus (a variation of the second kind, I believe. But then I’m not a mathematician.
October 1, 2008 at 2:01 pm
Of course, GR is a whole different kitten in terms of math. OTOH, the main deal with the Brownian motion paper and the photoelectric effect paper was really neat thought experiments in the former and lateral thinking (or: ‘taking the quantum seriously’) in the latter.
So maybe there’s a point in there somewhere.
October 1, 2008 at 2:08 pm
conFURvatives? i’m speechless. color yourselves bookmarked. strange, skewed, cracked blog you got here. me likee.
October 1, 2008 at 2:12 pm
I’ve practiced explaining furry porn to my toaster. Other than a few burns on my part, it’s going well, and the beaverskin cover makes my toaster look awes.
(Beaverskin cover? Did I make a pun? Lard help me.)
October 1, 2008 at 2:14 pm
“me likee.”
And I love the ambiguity of identity in your avatar. Which one of you’s the furry?
October 1, 2008 at 2:16 pm
>> Which one of you’s the furry?
laughing my man-teats off, i assure you. that would be me on the right, not-my-dog on the left, and an actual chew toy where our worlds collide. regards, dave
October 1, 2008 at 3:16 pm
Fuck it, I’m creating a LJ account and going in undercover. My fursona is the GOP elephant and I’m ready to lay my massive conservative schlong on these suckas. Who’s with me?
If not us, who?
If not now, when?
October 1, 2008 at 3:27 pm
I hear that for a little guy, Lieberman’s hung like a donkey. Ask him?
October 1, 2008 at 3:28 pm
It would be irresponsible not to? My furry friends?
October 1, 2008 at 4:36 pm
I think you can have a perfectly good understanding of general relativity (and many other concepts in physics) without a detailed understanding of the math. And in fact I think that understanding the math does not mean you understand relativity (or whatever else).
Understanding and verification of mathematical correctness are very different things. They might be related – they certainly are if you are trying to explain something new to someone else, or to make predictions to compare against experiment – but oftentimes they are not.
And the people saying that the math for relativity is easy appear to all be talking about special relativity, where the math is pretty easy. The math for general relativity is not easy at all. Luckily, you can (or at least, you may be able to) understand the essential ideas of curved spacetime without much of the math.
October 1, 2008 at 4:37 pm
Also, I like furries. They’re cute and generally quite sweet and nice and admittedly pretty nutty but then who among us can honestly claim that we don’t have one or two beliefs or habits that, if shared, might be equally problematic?
Er, apart from me. I am pure as the driven snow.
October 1, 2008 at 5:42 pm
But without the correct mathematics these “Confurvatives” could miscalculate the apocalyptic “Dark One” to be mere dark matter!
October 1, 2008 at 6:16 pm
Where to start? Wear to end?
e=mc2, eh?
Your pencil, por favor.
“Lead” length.
“Wood” cover.
“Cadmium” color.
“Rubber tip” at teh tip.
“Aluminium collar” close to teh tip.
This is our nice yellow pencil you need to sharpen, eh?
When you expose these elements to relate-ivity
they can bowl up and make a (big) flash to us.
The Al gives thrust & the Cd gives direction.
.
October 1, 2008 at 7:15 pm
http://periodic.lanl.gov/elements/48.html
October 1, 2008 at 7:20 pm
here, too!
http://www.mendosa.com/fluke.html
.
October 1, 2008 at 7:24 pm
*sigh*
E=Mc**2
You can convert the mass of the pencil to a shitload of energy.
You cannot accelerate the pencil to the speed of light with that shitload of energy.
You can’t pump enough energy into anything with mass to accelerate it to the speed of light – with relativistic frames, the concept doesn’t make sense. That’s what all the guff about time dilation and space distortion means. From my perspective, it just gets closer and closer but never *quite* there, and from the pencil’s perspective it’s the centre of an increasingly distorted universe.
Conversely, in a vacuum, all energy moves at the speed of light. For everyone.
October 1, 2008 at 8:43 pm
Conversely, in a vacuum, all energy moves at the speed of light. For everyone.
I would suggest that bad news travels even faster than that.
October 1, 2008 at 10:09 pm
I would suggest that bad news travels even faster than that.
The heart of science is experiment.
Did anyone reply to your theory before you posted it?
October 1, 2008 at 10:16 pm
Distance formula in space-time:
D^2 = x^2 + y^2 + z^2 – (ct)^2
This has always freaked me out because it means that light travels 0 distance in spacetime no matter how far it goes in our perpective.
October 2, 2008 at 7:36 am
Only idiots hate furries.
No exceptions.
October 2, 2008 at 8:34 am
So… distance travelled is all a matter of perspective? Sounds like a recipe for chaos, my friends. We need a common reference point, and thank the Lord we have one in America.
October 2, 2008 at 8:47 am
“*sigh*
E=Mc**2
You can convert the mass of the pencil to a shitload of energy.
You cannot accelerate the pencil to the speed of light with that shitload of energy.”
*sigh* We’ve already been through several of these sighs, begininning with mine in my first post:
‘Yes, I know it’s impossible to travel faster than the speed of light, or even to accelerate a pencil to the speed of light.
‘But that IS what the equation says, period. It IS a linear equation, yes?’
I’m feeling an itch for some healing internet incivility.
October 2, 2008 at 8:50 am
“This has always freaked me out because it means that light travels 0 distance in spacetime no matter how far it goes in our perpective.”
Cool, eh? In disproving the existence of a background cosmic aether, Einstein providing something even better: a cosmic aether that travels so ultimately, definitively, and commandingly fast that it stays still even as it moves faster than anything can.
Heil light!
October 2, 2008 at 8:52 am
yeah that’s the ‘time’ formula – how long it takes you as measured by you in ‘light units’ to get ‘there’. If you are light, it takes no ‘time’ at all. Negative values are presumably (timelike) that you could have got there by now, or you will get there just by waiting a second, and positive values meaning you would never have got there by ‘now’ (spacelike).
October 2, 2008 at 2:43 pm
OK, color me one of those Joe Sixpack Einstein wannabeers who wants to go from 2+2=4 to E=MC2 while still using my fingers — for what, I won’t say — but anyway, if that pencil could be converted to pure energy, what kind of energy would it be? Electromagnetic? Some kind of strong or weak nuclear force? Would it be like light and exist as both particles and waves, or like Schroedinger’s cat and not decide what it is until we observe it in the split-second before we are plasmafied? How would it act upon conversion? Expand in all directions simultaneously, all being 3, 4, 11 or n dimensions? Answer me that, hunh?
October 3, 2008 at 1:04 am
The techno industrial eurotrash may scoff at their baby black hole before it retreats to the center of the earth.
But the apocalypse to come will vindicate my faith!
October 3, 2008 at 6:26 am
good point jubal8. Since SR is closely tied with Maxwell, and indeed is incorporated into QED, it is tempting to say ‘electromagnetic’. But since ‘mass’ is mostly conferred by the Higgs interaction, maybe not. Yet, if they are all unified, then what difference does it make. Indeed, when you collide two electrons at relativistic speeds, you get a whole slew of particles, in various flavors, with cross sections for their production often closely predicted (or at least consistently predicted — i.e. some constants are variables in one experiment, but the same values you arrive at in the first experiment work to predict the results of different experiments) by the Standard Model.
In other news, I congratulate the Editors fur having found the furtive hideout of the legendary, often busted, often refurbished and regenerated gang of degenerates that is the FFF (FurFuxFrenz; Why, that could even be the domain of the Majestic Golden Porn Dragon of the East and South!
October 3, 2008 at 10:18 am
So is this E in the equation the exact same thing as what was present in the yocto-instant after the BB, before the emergence of the QGP out of the… uhhh… E?
October 3, 2008 at 2:35 pm
That would be the mass of everything that is, I guess.
Hard to see exactly what the normalization conditions are there, since we can’t take a box out to large values of length, then, can we?
Yet the mass of the whole universe makes some sense to some physicists. I dunno. I don’t go in for that stuff. {as also in: dontcha need an observer somewhere? and just where is he supposed to be standing, or sitting? maybe in “de Sitter space”? — a little joke there}.
And what with the cosmological constant and all, I am none too sure it makes sense even to them, any more.
October 5, 2008 at 2:03 am
Hmmm… perhaps I subconsciously misinfurred my meaning, resulting in further entanglements between my Big Bangs and famous furbies like Minkowski and Levi-Civeta. Think I’ll hop into my deLorentz and get the flux outta here before somebody puts a cap in my acitor.
October 25, 2008 at 10:34 am
[...] a vibrant new electoral coalition in time for 2012. Time Cube Guy, Chuck Norris, Pedobear and the conFURvatives will form the new “base”. Around them we could collect Tron Guy (transhumans), Peter [...]