kimmy

Normal force. I know that's what you meant to say, but you're wrong. Normal force is exerted perpendicular to a surface against anything that is pressing against it. If you have a spring pushing against a wall, the wall exerts a normal force against the spring. A fridge door exerts a normal force against a magnet that is pressing against it. a metal beam on your roof will exert normal force downward on a magnet that is pressing upward against it. "Normal force on a vertical surface is zero" is a nonsensical statement, because it makes no references to what force is being applied against the vertical surface. Normal force due to gravity would be zero. Normal force due to a stick leaning against a wall is not zero. If a spring is pushing upward against your ceiling, your ceiling exerts normal force straight downward against the spring. If a magnet is attracted upward at your metal ceiling, your ceiling is applying normal force straight downward against the magnet. Bonus point: "Normal" is a mathematical term meaning a vector that is perpendicular to a plane. In the term "normal force", "normal" is not a synonym for "regular". I know what you meant, and again you're wrong. The magnet is pushing upward against the surface of the beam, and the surface of the beam exerts normal force downward against the magnet. All the forces balance to zero: Magnetic force (upward) = Weight (downward) + Normal Force (downward) I work in residential construction; I suppose that by internet credentials standards, that makes me an "applied physics expert in the field of civil engineering." Regardless; my credentials aren't the issue. I have all the qualifications necessary to point out that you're wrong. A grade 3 kid is qualified to point out basic addition errors; any highschool graduate is qualified to point out the errors in basic physics you're making. On the contrary; I'm doing just fine. The only thing I'm finding to be a struggle is attempting to communicate with someone so impermeable to information (that's the only way I can think of to phrase that without getting warning points...) "Practical" isn't a concept that has scientific merit. "Empirical" has scientific merit. Empirical evidence is obtained in verifiable, repeatable experiments that test a hypothesis, whether you consider it "practical" or not. No; Mr McCutcheon's idea isn't a theory in the scientific meaning of the word. Mr McCutcheon's idea represents the difference between a "theory" and "an idea that somebody came up with while puffing on a bong full of high-quality chiba-chiba." The irony here is hilarious. -k

That is really the only reason I keep going. I know that there's no reaching you, but I am hopeful that I can at least show impressionable youths like Gosthacked that your wacky theories just don't hold water. I'm doing it for the kids. This is correct. This is incorrect. It does not take energy to keep the atoms aligned with the magnetic field. Energy is applied to align them. That energy is stored as long as the magnetic field remains. When the magnetic field is removed, that energy is released as kinetic energy. There is no "normal state" for those atoms. There is a state which stores the lowest potential energy, and that is the state that those atoms will arrive in. While the external magnetic field is present, the lowest potential energy is in the state where the atoms are aligned with the magnetic field. Any atom that is not in line with the magnetic field can lower its potential energy and increase its kinetic energy by moving to line up with the magnetic field. When the external magnetic field is removed, the conditions change and the atoms are no longer in the state with the lowest potential energy. They will find a new orientation that reduces their potential and releases it as kinetic energy. There's no need for Relativity to attempt to explain magnets; it's explained by ordinary classical laws of motion. Relativity explains why the magnet stays on the fridge entirely well simply by the fact that ordinary classical laws of motion are a subset of relativistic laws of motion for the special case where (v/c) is negligibly small. Ta-da, that's how relativity explains why the magnet explains on your fridge. I'm not getting coaching from Bonam on this; merely emotional support. My coaching on this subject came from Mr Herzberg, my grade 10 physics teacher. -k

Understood, and in Detroit's case that makes sense. They need to get people from Grosse Pointe to spend some of their disposable money downtown. I mentioned it because sports owners often present the case in misleading ways. "The (Coyotes, Thrashers, Oilers, etc) generate $50 million of economic activity for this city! Does this council really want to cost the economy of this city $50 million?" But the $50 million will still get spent, it's just a question of where and how. Trying to divert that spending into a depressed area makes sense... if it actually works. Are people really going to want to stick around Detroit to have a beer after the game? I am also curious. Perhaps Pliny feels that "the Blacks" have been drawn to Detroit as if by, say, ... a magnet. -k

Sports stadiums are often touted as a way of generating economic activity. However, that view has come into question recently. The methodology of these studies is a little suspect. They tend to make claims along the lines of "20000 people will be down-town on game night for 41 home games each season. On average, each of those people will spend X amount of dollars in the area, generating economic impact of $X * 20000 * 41." However, that tends to be simplistic and optimistic. Firstly, because it assumes that the people spending the money would just leave it at home under a mattress if the stadium didn't exist. But those people would most likely spend that money on other things. It would me more accurate to say that a sports arena diverts economic activity than generates it. It takes disposable income that might be spent in the suburbs, and gets it spent around the arena instead. That's not a bad thing if you're trying to revitalize your downtown, but it shouldn't be looked at as free money in the overall metro economy. For the most part that's money that came out of some other business's pockets. Secondly, because it assumes that people will actually spend that money. In lots of cities, it's probably true. In Ottawa or Edmonton (to name 2 examples I'm familiar with) it's not true. In Ottawa, the arena is in the middle of nowhere. In Edmonton, the arena is in the middle of the hobo part of town. In either of those places, there's no economic activity being generated around the arena, because after the game, people jump in their cars, get on the freeway, and drive home. Which brings us to Detroit. Is Detroit's new arena going to be in a place where people are going to hang around and spend money after the game? Or is it a place where people are going to jump in their cars and drive home after the game? Most of Detroit, in its current state, isn't going to be a place where people are going hang out after the game. People will need a reason to stay. These studies showing how awesome a new sports arena will be for the local economy are usually sponsored by the sports team owners and arena developers. They should be viewed with a healthy dose of skepticism to say the least. -k

There are only 700,000 people living within Detroit city limits, but there are about 4,000,000 living in the Detroit urban area. Comparing Detroit to Winnipeg is ridiculous. (if one used the same criteria, Vancouver is also smaller than Winnipeg, because only 600,000 of the Vancouver area's 2.5 million people live within Vancouver city limits.) There are many affluent municipalities all around the Detroit area. The region has many well-off people... but very few of them live within Detroit's city limits. Here is a map that charts the Detroit region by income. Blue represents flat broke, pink and red represent wealthy; grey is average. Detroit's city limits are shown in dots. Almost everybody with even average income is outside the city limits. All that grey around Detroit isn't unpopulated area; that area is all populated, it's all suburbs like Dearborn and Warren. (bonus points: compare the blue areas on this map with the previous map I posted, depicting racial demographics of the Detroit region.) -k

I think those are reasons why Detroit was hit harder by the flight of the middle class to the suburbs than many other cities that experienced the same thing. I didn't say they were causes. You asked why Detroit experienced this while other cities prospered. Those are actually two different questions. Detroit wasn't the only city that faced it; many others did too. Why did other cities prosper and Detroit didn't? I think geography is a factor. There were many causes of "white flight"; some rational, some irrational, some a result of misguided social engineering, some a result of natural evolution of society. The arrival of automobile culture and freeways was a big factor in freeing the middle class to live farther from work (in a sense, Detroit was crushed to death under the wheels of irony.) Also, I have read that Detroit was one of the major destinations for black people fleeing the Deep South. I think you're laying it on a little thick by putting it all at the feet of "social engineering". When the middle class left city limits, Detroit faced plunging property values, plunging tax base, rising urban poverty, unemployment, rising crime, which became a vicious circle. It's not so much a matter of the remaining residents of Detroit failing to adapt to the "knowledge economy", it's more an issue of anybody who can afford to leave, leaves. If some Detroit resident does get a decent job, they're going to move to one of the nearby municipalities too. There's lots of prosperous municipalities in the Detroit metropolitan area. -k

On Bit Torrent... personally, I downloaded the first season of Game of Thrones. I loved it so much that I bought a boxed set for myself, gave another boxed set to friends as a gift... they bought season 2 (as did I) and also gave season 1 as gifts to 2 of their friends who also later bought season 2 on blu-ray. So that's at least 8 boxed sets that have sold as a direct result of one person watching their show via illegal downloads. Further I think that the show wouldn't have captured nearly the amount of buzz and attention it has if it were not for illegal downloads, and I think that has probably put a large amount of money into HBO's coffers. Game of Thrones has become a vastly popular and valuable franchise for them, and there's no doubt in my mind that filesharing played a big role in creating it. On NetFlix original content: I have been hearing a lot of buzz about "Orange is the New Black", another NetFlix original series, based on (I gather) a semi-autobiographical book of the same name about a yuppie woman who finds herself in prison for a crime she committed when she was much younger. I've been reluctant to jump on the Netflix bandwagon, but if they're producing quality original content, that might be what changes my mind. On the future of TV... I think the high-quality programs being brought forward by the cable channels make regular network TV pretty pointless. And I think NetFlix has figured out the distribution model. I think that network TV has one foot in the grave. I don't know where this leaves things like local news. -k

This seems vaguely related, so I'll post it here: If your local Sears is anything like mine, it sucks. The Sears here in Kim City looks as if it was damaged during flooding and nobody bothered to clean it afterwards. Water-damaged ceiling tiles, carpets that have worn through, counters and tables that look like they haven't been updated since the 1980s. Looks a lot like Zellers looked a month before Zellers closed their doors for good. I haven't bought anything in Sears for about 2 years, but I walk through it to get in to the mall. I thought maybe this was just here in Kim City we're a little out of the way. But apparently, this is a widespread thing. Lots of Sears stores apparently suck just as much as my local Sears. And there's a reason why: in 2005, Sears stopped spending money on capital improvements, as well as selling stores on valuable real-estate, to raise their profits. Profits increased! The stock price rose! For a while... then it started plunging because sales dropped and they ran out of real-estate to sell. In 2007, to prop up the stock price, they decided to put all the money it used to spend on maintaining its stores into buying its own stock. That worked for a little while too. Stock buy-backs halted the price plunge in 2007, and caused price jumps in 2008 and 2010. But now the stock price is lower than it was in 2005 when they embarked on this strategy, and they've got a bunch of dilapidated stores and sold off their most valuable real-estate. http://finance.yahoo.com/news/why-sears-stores-suck-under-191203648.html I would not be very surprised if the people who came up with this strategy sold large volumes of their own personal stock at times coinciding with the big stock buy-backs. Anyway, this is an example of a company boosting its stock price by shooting itself in the foot. Once again a company causes itself long-term damage for short-sighted reasons. -k

Lots of cities experienced "white flight". It was from what I have read quite a wide-spread phenomenon during the 1960s and 1970s. I recall hearing (on a radio show detailing the history of the famous CBGB bar) in that areas of New York City transformed from popular areas to slums in the space of just a few years. One reason Detroit may have been hit particularly hard is that it's surrounded on all sides. It's southern edges are of course bounded by water and the border. All the other sides are bounded by other municipalities. When people left for the suburbs, they were leaving Detroit, period. (in contrast with places like Edmonton, for example, where you can move to the suburbs and still be within the city limits and be paying city taxes. Ottawa had this problem a while back; people lived in suburbs to pay lower taxes while commuting to work in the city and using city infrastructure. Ottawa annexed all of its suburbs a few years back, I believe.) Here's a breakdown of Detroit and surrounding suburbs by demographics (from the 2000 census)... red dots represent white people, blue dots represent African-Americans. See if you can guess where the municipal boundaries of Detroit are from looking at the red and blue dots: (bonus points if you can spot the municipalities of Hamtramck and Highland Park, wholly encircled by Detroit.) Pretty graphic, huh? -k

With that over with, hopefully we don't have to hear any more about this kid for about 18 years, or however long it takes him to get into his first Royal Scandal. (bets? I'm thinking probably Tweeting a picture of his abs, or drinking in public.) -k

Michigan's Justin Amash is a Republican who actually believes in small government. Amash just sponsored an defense appropriations amendment, intended to defund NSA mass collection of data. The amendment was narrowly defeated in a vote, 217-205. Amash's amendment received support from both parties: 94 Republicans, 111 Democrats. The amendment was fiercely opposed by the Obama administration. White House spokesman Jay Carney: "not the product of informed, open, or deliberative process"? "the need for a reasoned review?" WTF, Jay! You mean like the "informed, open, deliberative process" and "reasoned review" that spawned this massive surveillance program in the first place? -k

False. A small contact area can generate lots of friction if the applied force is strong enough. If the magnet won't roll down the fridge, it would still slide if not for friction. Erroneous. Normal force is *always* perpendicular to a surface. You're obviously confused because the fridge door surface is perpendicular to *gravity*, so would provide no normal force in opposition to *gravity*. However, the fridge door surface in the situation we have described is not opposing gravity. It is opposing the magnetic force of the magnet. You've once again failed to grasp the basic concepts of physics that you're attempting to debunk. Isn't it true, Pliny, that you hadn't even heard of Normal Force until I linked to it last week? Isn't it the case that you're just using terms like "normal force" so that you can pretend you're fluent in this subject matter? Incorrect. Again you don't understand normal force. As I mentioned, you're completely wrong about normal force. And all of this is just ridiculous and riddled with errors. And what does "praciticality" mean in this instance? Are you using the word "practicality" as shorthand for "makes sense to Pliny"? Being an electrical engineer doesn't necessarily mean he's good at mechanical analysis or relativity or quantum mechanics or anything other than connecting resistors and diodes together. We had a 9/11 crackpot here on MLW a few years ago who demanded that we treat him as an expert on the subject of structural collapse of large buildings because "I'm an engineer". After some prodding it turned out that he was a DSP engineer. Crackpots love to inflate credentials. James Fetzer was "a theoretical physicist". Barbara Honegger was "a Pentagon colonel". This notion that Mark McCutcheon is actually a physics messiah whose theories are being suppressed by a global cartel of physicists who are too scared of his truth is heading down the same path. McCutcheon's own webpage makes ridiculously wrong statements about the physics he's claiming to debunk. There's only two possibilities: either he doesn't know anything about the subject, or he does know the subject but he's making a bunch of false statements because he wants to sell books to dumb-guys. (have you got your copy?) What are his credentials? I don't care. If a guy like you can spot flaws in this theory, that's saying something, because let's face it, you're not exactly James Clerk Maxwell. Of course I passed. I'm curious about your use of the word "regurgitated". Is it "regurgitated" because it's information that you don't like? If somebody uses highschool math to solve some problems, do you scoff and them and say "bah, you just regurgitated your instructional materials"? First you (and McCutcheon) cited this professor as an example of somebody who was doing research to explain the great mystery of magnets. And now that I've pointed out that she's not doing the kind of research that you (and McCutcheon) claim, all you have to say is "bahh, she's part of the international physics cartel that's afraid of the truth about magnets." Typical. You've decided that modern physics is of no use because you, Pliny J. Smith, don't understand it? Is that what you're saying? Is it "authoritarian" because people who understand physics are telling people like you and McCutcheon that you don't know what you're talking about? This word "practical" again. What criteria are you using to decide whether modern physics is "practical"? It takes energy to alter their alignment initially. It doesn't take a continuous application of energy to maintain that alignment. "Practically" once again meaning "in a way that makes sense to Pliny", obviously. -k

Sure, but laying all at the feet of the auto industry just doesn't work. It probably started with "White Flight" decades ago. -k

Actually she is putting the bankruptcy proceedings on hold because the Michigan state constitution prohibits retirement benefits from being curtailed. -k

If "the Big 3" were more successful and more people worked for them, it would just mean that more people would live in Detroit's suburbs. Most people who can afford to leave Detroit leave. That's not the fault of "the Big 3" or the UAW. Detroit has many successful and prosperous satellite communities. Those communities exist because people work in the Detroit region but they sure don't want to live in Detroit. Entire neighborhoods have just vanished. Schools, hospitals, municipal services, law enforcement, just vanished from areas of the city. Homes just boarded up. People left and couldn't sell, so they just walked away. It's kind of like Chernobyl, except instead of nuclear radiation, it's just urban decay. -k

Really, Squid; we do have gun control threads elsewhere in the forum. Why not take this stuff there? -k

I know, right? What's next, women doctors? A negro in the White House? She's perfectly competent but it's still a PR exercise? Because if it weren't a PR exercise they'd pass over a perfectly competent woman and find a while male to fill the role? -k

That is the only comment in this thread that matters. People trying to make Detroit's bankruptcy into some kind of referendum on the automaker bailout do not understand the reality of the situation. The reality of the situation is that everybody who can afford to has left Detroit and moved to its suburbs, leaving Detroit itself with a fraction of the tax base it used to have, but massive financial obligations to keep up.

If this is a good verdict, then this is a bad law. -k

It's the motivation of the prosecutor in question, not the motivation of the criminal. If a white woman had fired a warning-shot to scare off an abusive white husband, do you think it's likely that she would be charged with a crime that would result in a mandatory 20 year sentence? I think it's a reasonable question. I find it astounding that anybody, regardless of race, was charged with such a crime for firing a warning-shot, especially in a state where "stand your ground laws" are in effect. It's mind-boggling. That prosecutor is truly scum. I don't know how she can sleep at night. I suspect she probably tells herself the same thing Carmen Ortiz does. -k

To put that number of private contractors in perspective, GM employs 212,000 people, Ford employs 164,000, and Chrysler employs 65,000. More Americans working for private security contractors have Top Secret clearance than work for the Big 3 automakers combined. Doesn't it concern you that "security" is now apparently a bigger industry in America than building cars? I find that astounding. But secondly, there's a reality that most of us learn in elementary school which is that the more people you tell your secrets to, the less likely they are to stay secret. If one out of every 222 Americans has Top Secret security clearance... that's an awful lot of people who have access to your secrets. It's not a surprise that Top Secret information got out; it's a surprise that it doesn't happen more often. (and who is to say it doesnt? We know about Snowden because he did it very publicly. Would we know if somebody else at Booz Allen Hamilton with access to classified information was selling it to China or wherever?) I think the sheer scale of the security industry makes it highly optimistic to assume that these secrets will stay secret. Snowden had only worked for Booz Allen Hamilton for a few months, and he had access to information that is apparently "a threat to national security". If that's how the security industry works, isn't the security industry itself a threat to national security? -k

The attractive force between the magnet and the fridge acts perpendicular to the plane of the fridge. It doesn't keep the magnet from moving parallel to the plane of the fridge. If you put a round magnet on your fridge, it will roll downward due to gravity. No friction. If the magnet is on your fridge door, the up-down forces are gravity and static friction, and the east-west forces are magnetic attraction and Normal force applied by the hard surface. The east-west forces balance each other, the up-down forces balance each other, and the net force is zero so the magnet does not accelerate in any direction. If the magnet is stuck to a piece of metal on the ceiling, there are no east-west forces, and the up-down forces are magnetic attraction (upward), gravity (down), and normal force provided by the hard surface (also down). Upward force equals the sum of the downward forces, and again there's no acceleration. We needn't get into any bizarre tangents to settle this fridge magnet issue. Reminder, the idea that this fridge magnet is generating perpetual energy was your example of an anomaly that can't be explained by current physics. But in fact it's easily explained by current physics and there's no anomaly at all. His own webpage indicates that he just doesn't understand basic concepts of physics, like the difference between force and energy. The examples he provides, like the fridge magnet, prove it. He claims he's debunked ideas that he clearly doesn't even understand. So yes, it would be a waste of time. Would you read a health and fitness book written by Rush Limbaugh? We don't need relativity to discuss the fridge magnet. That's easily resolved by kinematics that the rest of us learned in grade 10, based on rules put forth by Isaac Newton centuries ago. If you're referring to the quote McCutcheon offers from Dr Markova, you'll notice it doesn't say what Mr McCutcheon wants you to believe. Dr Markova is not trying to figure out how your magnet sticks to the fridge, or resolve any "anomaly" about perpetual sources of energy. She is researching the quantum mechanical properties of materials with the idea of developing new types of magnetic materials. If you look at her long list of research publications, you'll find that she's particularly interested in carbon-based molecules that have magnetic properties. Not a single publication in this list relates to the idea that magnets are violating the law of conservation of energy. As has been explained a number of times, in science the word "theory" doesn't mean a wild-ass idea that somebody has. A theory is a hypothesis that is tested and validated through empirical evidence. Relativity and gravity are theories that have been tested and validated and can be used to predict new phenomena. Mr McCutcheon's inflating universe doesn't meet any of these qualities. You keep insisting that the magnet is expending energy on an ongoing basis. What form does that energy take? Energy can't be created or destroyed; whatever energy you think that magnet is expending must be going somewhere. Where? There's no motion, no change in temperature, no change of state, no radiation being generated, nothing. You are right about one thing: it does take energy to align the poles of the molecules to the magnetic field. But that is not an ongoing expense of energy. It does not take energy to keep those molecules aligned, it only takes energy to align them in the first place. This energy is applied when the magnet is physically brought to the fridge. While the magnet is on the fridge, it exists as potential energy. And when the magnet is taken away from the fridge, it is released as a very miniscule amount of kinetic energy as the molecules move on their axes to resume an orientation with lower energy. -k

I'd like to again mention that there are 1.4 million people, including 483,000 private contractors, with Top Secret security clearance. Surely, if this information is so vital to US security, it shouldn't be be in the hands of such a huge number of people. This article points out that the enormous growth of the US security industry has made leaks more likely, and that the cost of doing background checks alone for security clearances is over $1 billion a year. -k

The ones posted in this thread are hardly an exhaustive list of incidents caught on video, and one can only wonder how many incidents occur that aren't recorded on video. You might think we are looking at a needle in a haystack, but it might also be the tip of an iceberg. The author of the book I've mentioned, Radley Balko, indicates that SWAT team deployments have gone from about 3000 per year in the 1980s, to 50000 in 2005. Surely that dramatic of a rise indicates a change in the way police are doing their business. -k

lolwut Where, in particular, have us "Johnny-come-lately constitutionalists" taken a crap on the constitution? -k