Thursday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Thursday, December 19, 2024
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30 comments
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a retired Professor of Political Science and former College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
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Relativity
“There was a young lady named Bright,
Whose speed was far faster than light;
She started one day
In a relative way,
And returned on the previous night.”
― Arthur Henry Reginald Buller
This limerick has been on my mind lately for some reason. I think it’s because it’s the one statement by a scientist that claims FTL travel is explicitly backwards time travel.
Whew, thank goodness it’s Thursday! I’m apparently dependent on the Open Forum of the day to keep my days of the week straight. 😉
Yesterday I formulated Kathy’s first law of restaurant closing hours: Restaurants effectively close at least 30 minutes before the posted closing time, often more than that. You can expect service if you sit down and order 30 minutes from closing time, but you run a high risk of people spitting in your food.
@Kathy:
There once was a fencer named Fisk
Whose pace was exceedingly brisk
So fast was the action
That by Lorentz contraction
His rapier compressed to a disc
@Kathy:
It’s reverse time travel in the sense that someone stationed at their destination would observe them arriving before observing them leaving their house to begin the journey
The really weird part is you’d see them pop into existence at the destination seemingly from nowhere, then split into two copies, one of which would walk backwards to their house and then disappear into it.
@Stormy Dragon:
Yeah, right. I saw Superman when he flew around the earth really fast and reversed an entire earthquake.
Who is faster, Superman or Flash? (I remember having serious arguments about this when much younger, back when comic books ruled.)
Steve
@Jax: And if you think it’s bad now, wait until you’re retired. I usually have no particular awareness of the day unless I specifically look. If my phone breaks, I may never again know what day it is.
Trump wants to eliminate the debt ceiling before Jan 20th, so that he can blow it up the next four years while also blaming Democrats for it:
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-calls-abolishing-debt-ceiling-rcna184820
Fani Willis has been disqualified from prosecuting the Trump case.
Nice piece to keep in mind as the DOGE guys get to work. This looks at differences in life expectancy, disability free years, and quality adjusted life expectancy. For the best off counties those numbers are 79.5, 69.4 and 64.3. For the worst off counties those numbers are 76.8, 63.6 and 61.1. When you look at the differences by race/ethnicity the differences are even larger. While I know Trump said they wouldn’t go after Social Security (SS), the guys in charge of this are incredibly wealthy so they dont understand a need for SS. I expect that they will avoid the outcry of cutting SS benefits but will suggest delaying the eligibility age, which is fine for people earning more money living in nice places as they largely have lives free of disability. However, if you are less well off you are lucky to make it to 65.
https://www.healthcare-economist.com/2024/12/18/inequality-in-health-outcomes-in-the-us-can-we-measure-this/
Steve
@CSK:
Likely to be appealed to the GA Supreme court, if upheld, another DA in another county will be handed this pile of crap. Then either they will review and proceed or decide not to continue the farce. What will be interesting is if they issue a detailed listing of the faults in the case if the choose not to proceed.
Sounds like another pre-emptive surrender by the GA Appeals Court.
@Stormy Dragon:
I’m working out a way to visualize FTL travel in normal space. It’s not easy for me. I’m basing it on how one perceives sound from a supersonic plane, which I’ve seen (on video).
@Michael Reynolds:
I think in theory Superman could affect the Earth’s rotation, because he would transfer momentum to the Earth. I don’t think he could make it rotate backwards, no matter how fast he moved, because his mass is tiny compared to Earth’s.
Even if he could, time would still move forward, of course. I thought the stunt was lame when I first saw the movie. I’d have believed it more had he alone gone back in time and changed things, whether he met his slightly younger self or not. Like J did in MIB 3.
@steve:
By definition, superheroes who can teleport are faster 😀
In the cartoons, and I assume in the comics, there have been inconclusive races between Superman and The Flash. I think they never finish a race.
@SC_Birdflyte: The circus always leaves town at the end of the run. The good news (???) is that a whole new circus is setting up. 😐
A link took me to this WaPo article* on the Permanent Daylight Savings Time / No Daylight Savings time kerfluffle and looking at the maps, I had a revelation: Our time zones run generally straight up and down the country, but the variation in sunrise is diagonal. If we changed the time zones to match the diagonal, it would reduce the worst of the extremes in each time zone. For instance, most of Idaho and Montana have their latest sunrise between 8:00am and 8:30am. But by moving the Pacific time zone to follow the diagonal, almost all of Idaho and more than half of Montanna would see that shift an hour earlier.
*No subscription needed. I cancelled my WaPo subscription when it refused to endorse, but it runs for a couple more months.
@MarkedMan:
You and me both. I was planning on amusing myself in the interim by making comments critical of WAPO. But they’ve changed their comment system and made it way less fun.
I had already decided to drop either WAPO or NYT. I read them both online in the morning for their long essays about news, then I read The Guardian to actually get the news. Having both is redundant. WAPO made the decision for me. I said all I’ll miss is their good cartoonist, Anne Telnaes, their humor columnist, Alexandra Petri, and their comment system. Now it’s just Telnaes and Petri. And I wonder how long they’ll stay at the Quisling Post.
Rand Paul has suggested that Elon Musk be elected Speaker of the House, saying “nothing would disrupt the swamp more” and noting the “joy” of watching the ensuing meltdown from the “uniparty” (the establishment).
Speaker of the House is third in line to the Presidency. Elon Musk was born in South Africa. I’ve asked similar iterations of this question before, but wouldn’t the fact that he’s disqualified from fulfilling a potential duty, no matter how remote, disqualify him from the position itself?
It’d be like selecting Jennifer Granholm as VP, if looking at this from the Dem side of things makes sense.
@Jen:
Rand Paul, like his cohort, will say anything to own the libs.
@Stormy Dragon: There’s incoherence between Trump wanting to spend to make himself popular and the Musk/JD Vance/Peter Theil oligarch’s mad quest to fulfil Norquist’s dream of drowning the US gubmint in a bathtub. Something’s gotta give.
Wouldn’t be the least bit surprise if a year from how the oligarchs found themselves in the same trash can as Bannon wound up in during Trump’s first term. A few SNL skits of Trump being the dummy in the room could probably do it. Sauron does not share power.
@MarkedMan: If we run time zones on the diagonal as you suggest, does that mean that we need a 5th time zone for the SW US, or does the Pacific time zone just become half again larger?
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
I hope the GQP makes DST permanent. Everyone loves sunrise mid morning, right?
The GQP reached an agreement that funds the government until March, and eliminates the debt ceiling until 2027.
Ideally, no Democrat should vote for this.
Realistically, whoever gets blamed for shutting the government over Christmas can kiss the midterms goodbye.
I’d propose my preferred solutions, but the blog owners have warned me not to.
@Stormy Dragon:
I got a momentary work clearing.
As I understand modern physics, that is to say not well, everything at all times without exceptions moves at the speed of light in spacetime. This means a high speed in space means a low speed in time, and viceversa.
Therefore exceeding (aprox.) 300,000 km/s should result in a negative speed in time.
I don’t think this means backward time travel. It may just be an impossibility, as no one has seen a massive particle moving even at the speed of light in space, much less faster. And we’re certainly not inundated with time travelers moving very fast 😉
@Just nutha ignint cracker: Perhaps. To be honest, I think the whole time zone thing became obsolete when the telephone became commonplace. China is as wide as the US and only has one time zone. It is 12:00 at the same moment all across the country. But way out west, they start their work day later. Makes perfect sense. Here, any state or company or school district is perfectly free to adjust their stop start times any way they want to, whether it’s by an hour twice a year or by half hour four times a year, or anything else. No need to change the clock, just change the start time. I’ve long thought having the Federal Government decide the local time is ridiculous.
@Kathy: There is a thing, perhaps you know about it, called a “closed timelike curve” which is a mathematical solution to general relativity which has a particle traveling through spacetime and returning to its starting point. Which looks a whole lot like time travel.
This is not experimentally verified.
However, I recently have encountered the notion that wormholes behave a whole lot like quantum entanglement – which means travel through them isn’t really possible, but some kind of influence or connection through them *is* possible.
The world continues to be stranger than we thought, even when we think it’s pretty strange.
@Jen:
I’m having a super rough day, but I’m pretty sure that the line of succession is set by statute and isn’t constitutional beyond VP. That would mean if someone in the line of succession has a disqualification they’d just get skipped as if they predeceased the president and VP. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was or wasn’t in the statute. Haven’t we had a couple of Secretary of States that were disqualified?
How that would play out in practice when you have a bunch of lunatics in the line of succession is anybody’s guess. Especially since it’s kinda axiomatic that if both the Pres and VP go down then the shit is full on hitting the fan and unless the people in the line of succession are willing to put the country ahead of themselves, we’re all fucko-d
@Jay L Gischer:
Vaguely rings a bell. Most realistic musings on time travel and FTL are Weird with a capital W. And not very practical.
“The universe is not stranger than we imagine, but stranger than we can imagine” (or words to that effect) JBS Haldane.
Regarding Daylight Savings time and Standard time, any solution will have trade offs. People at the western edge of a time zone will always have sunrise about* an hour later than those at the eastern edge. As has been pointed out, localities can set reasonable school and business hours based on the hours of daylight. But if we’re going to continue changing time twice a year, we really should revert to the shorter pre-2005 DST period, and align the DST start and end dates with those of other industrialized (mostly European) countries that set their clocks forward in late March and back in late October. By lengthening the US DST period 15 years ago, and having Canada follow suit, we now have several weeks a year in March and in October-November when London, Paris, Berlin, etc. are one hour less ahead of us than what we’re accustomed to—very confusing.
*Of course time zones are not exactly one solar hour wide, but there are many US metropolitan areas near the eastern or western edges of time zones.
@Beth: There is no Republican that will put their country above their party now.
As Mittens Romney said, the Republican party…..it is Magats.