Would Someone Please Explain Relativity to Me?

Don’t marry your sister or first cousins.

Open your window an inch or so to create a partial vacuum. The egg casing won’t be disturbed so be prepared to repeat as necessary.

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1) ALL the egg casings? What about the rodent nests?

2) Tammy is the one who deserves the award; it never makes sense to me when the CLIENT gets nominated, though that happened to me when the mu.nu design was fresh–and I’m not sure it was the site design, either. I think it was the Rion Vernon cartoon. This one isn’t as sexy, but it looks a lot more like me.

3) Would you settle for a Rolling Stones logo? Just as tacky, just as “1970.” But somehow grungier.

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I did nominate you for several awards before your new design appeared. Like Best Parenting Blog. That’s how to handle parents, right? And the client always takes the bows for my work. It has to do with the money and the good sense they showed in choosing me and guiding my hand along the way. Even if I never heard from them.

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I need to know how it affects the probability that the tiny moth inside my car will eventually leave the Cruiser if I open the windows.

It affects the probability proportionally to

1-√(v²/c²)

where v is the relative velocity between the moth and the car. If the moth is moving at 5 cm/sec, this is around 0.9999999998 — in other words, about 2 parts in 10 billion.

And what that experience might be like from the moth’s point of view.

A whole lot like when the car is stopped.

The wind moving into the windows, though, probably cause it a lot of trouble.

And when, BTW, did we stop using paratroopers for our regular armed forces…?

What you mean “we”?

[Comment moved from the thread at the Mu.Nu site, somewhat belatedly; this thread will, of course, be just a bit out of order. –ed.]

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Respectfully ma’am,
Schroedinger is your man. I was being a little humble. We use the equation frequently in sailboat racing, to determine a variety of probabilities.

In fact, scientists are using a modified version of the equation to determine probabilities for rogue waves.

Below is an e-mail I sent to my sailing buddies, after watching a show [and finding the transcript] on rogues, which aired on one of the Discovery networks this fall.

“Text of transcript of show about rogue waves I told you about…note the underlined part…10 waves over 26 meters…that’s over 84 feet folks…then, after this piece, note the next, below.

NARRATOR: Both the Caledonian Star and the Bremen were fortunate to survive, but their experiences challenged everything known about freak waves. There are no currents or local conditions to cause rogue waves in the South Atlantic. According to traditional theory such waves should be incredibly rare, yet here were two within days of each other, so what was going on? Science mobilised every technology to solve the mystery. Using a new radar satellite Suzanne Lehner of the German Aerospace Centre began searching for freak waves around the globe.

DR SUZANNE LEHNER (German Aerospace Centre): Now with these radar images you can really see the individual waves. You can see wave lengths, wave directions, wave grouping.

NARRATOR: The European remote sensing satellite travels across the ocean using highly sensitive radar to get a detailed picture of the sea’s surface. it can pick out individual rogue waves from anywhere in the world.

SUZANNE LEHNER: What we get is an image like this one. This is actually the radar image with the highest wave we found on all of our 30,000 images we analysed. This is a 30m wave here. The high crest followed by very low trough.

NARRATOR: This is exactly the size of wave which hit the Bremen and the Caledonian Star, the sort of wave that science said was practically impossible and in just three weeks’ worth of data they found over 10 such huge waves out in the deep ocean.

SUZANNE LEHNER: What you can see here is this highest wave we found of about 30m – that is colour-coded in red. The next highest waves here are about 27m high waves colour-coded in orange. We find another high wave here in the North Pacific. This is again kind of 26m high wave here. We did not expect to find in this limited amount of time so many of these extreme wave events.

NARRATOR: If the satellite data is right it looks as if freak waves occur in the deep ocean far more frequently than the traditional Linear Model would predict. The question is: why? The answer seems to lie in a completely different branch of science. Al Osborne inhabits a strange mathematical world where almost anything can happen. It’s the bizarre non-linear world of quantum physics. In this world objects appear and disappear according to one remarkable equation, the Schrödinger equation.

AL OSBORNE: The Schrödinger equation, quantum mechanics, we have TV programmes called Quantum Leap and so on and so forth so we all think we know something about that equation. There’s a version, however, modified, that describes deep water waves.

NARRATOR: Osborne is one of the world’s leading wave mathematicians. For 30 years he has been obsessed with the theoretical wave described by the Schrödinger equation. The equation describes a theoretical water surface where huge waves can suddenly leap up out of nowhere, where for some reason normal waves become unstable and grow huge.”

Next, some later commentary about and from the good Dr. Lehner:

“Dr Susanne Lehner of the German Aerospace Center (DLR) discussed her reprocessing of a two-year archive of ERS-2 SAR wave mode data to retrieve extreme wave heights as well as conventional sea state parameters.

“At the moment the assumption is the North Atlantic to be the most dangerous region, while our reprocessed ERS data indicated good candidates may also be the North Pacific or the Southern Ocean where the waves can be very strong.”

So, that’s a rate of about one every other day, and the Northern Pacific is a “good candidate” to be the “most dangerous region.”

You guys be careful out there…
love ya,
mike”

So, as you can see, Schroedinger just might be your man.
Respectfully,
Mike

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