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(1x8)+1=9
(12x8)+2=98
(123x8)+3=987
(1234x8)+4=9876
(12345x8)+5=98765
(123456x8)+6=987654
(1234567x8)+7=9876543
(12345678x8)+8=98765432
(123456789x8)+9=987654321
Math is beautiful. Like most of us, I guess, I spent my teenage years receiving intense mathematical training and while I didn't entirely resent that, I certainly wasn't all jazzed about it either. ;-)
But as years went by and math became more and more important during my college years and then of course in my profession, I started seeing the beauty of it all. When 12 year old me was told that math is the ultimate language of the cosmos, I frankly couldn't have cared less. Now it's almost a religion to me. B-)
That said, I'm no expert...
Must say that's a really cool list you posted. Math is indeed beautiful. I should've been less stubborn in the past. I really rocked at it. until I went wrong.
@Thunderfinger, the laws of physics and the very basics of math do not depend on whether one uses the decimal system or not. One can add, subtract, multiply, ... numbers in binary, decimal, hexadecimal or still other systems and once you have those basics covered, the rest is pretty simple. We ourselves have taught our precious computers to perform all sorts of math with only 0's and 1's. Other beings, sufficiently advanced, might as well come up with a system we haven't even dreamed about. That, however, will not divert the truth from F = m.a or E = gamma.mc². ;-)
And to this day I regret my stubbornness, as better math's would indeed have helped me a lot in my professional career.
1) I completely understand your point. And that teacher made a mistake and failed at his / her job.
2) You're never too old to learn math. ;-)
3) I'm sure you're doing fine in your current job. :-)
yep, don't worry. actually, my analytical skills landed me this job. So you won't hear me complaining. As for learning maths, well, I do try to calculate as much as I can without a machine, which is good exercise.
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2015/03/science-doubters/achenbach-text
Why Do Many Reasonable People Doubt Science?
We live in an age when all manner of scientific knowledge—from climate change to vaccinations—faces furious opposition.
Some even have doubts about the moon landing.
A bit on the same topic, a joke on those people who are afraid of "chemicals":
Why indeed do people, even educated people, doubt that which cannot be doubted? I can think of a few reasons.
1) The lure of superstition
Science tells you Friday 13th is nothing special, black cats are just one variety of cats, having your picture taken doesn't mean losing your soul, fortune tellers are full of ..., holy water can't do a thing against vampires, vampires don't exist, after death our corpse will become bug food and so on. Even in the 21st Century, people, even the secular ones, have a desire to believe they are immortal, that people with supernatural talents walk among us, that we are constantly visited and kidnapped and probed and then put back by aliens and so on. Politicians and business folk consult fortune tellers a few hours before taking decisions that might affect us all, and if you're ill, some mystery water or spells will certainly do the trick.
Science destroys almost all of these fantasies by showing time and again that things don't work that way. Unlike children, who can be told that Santa isn't real, many adults struggle with the acceptance that in the end, we can't defy misery, death and the likes any more than an ant can. Being educated, apparently, isn't enough to be rational.
Surprisingly enough though, when science does provide a peak in the real "fantasy" world where some pretty cool things are possible, like black hole science, quantum physics and molecular genetics, the same people who believe Satan will get them if they have pre-marital sex suddenly smirk and shrug and laugh it off. These people are the same idiots who 500 years ago still claimed that Earth is flat because a round Earth is stupid, while happily burning a few witches.
2) Science attacks our feeling of being special, and yet it doesn't
Why are so many people much more comfortable with the notion of our Earth being a mere 6000 years old rather than 4.5 billion? Why is the vastness of space such an insulting thought to so many? Because it reduces our ego both in size and in time. We refuse to accept that the cosmos is too large for us to make long-distance journeys through it. We feel painfully insignificant next to the age of the cosmos. These numbers humble us to the point where our presence on this Earth and in this age is only a cosmic blink of an eye. And we can't tolerate that. We want to be special, supreme, God's finest work, eternal etcetera.
But by the same token science provides us with great reasons to be extremely proud of ourselves. The fact that we have mastered the skills to probe the giant cosmos and the incredibly small quantum world of particles, that we have learned to cure once-deadly diseases, that we have taught ourselves to synthetically create materials nowhere found in nature, that we have successfully landed on the moon... should be enough to make us proud like a peacock. And if we were faced with more chances and less opposition, we might actually make those long-distance journeys one day, we might actually escape the confines of time... But as long as people find it more important to spend billions on the maintenance of the instruments of war, science will get the leftovers at best and that's not helping much.
3) Science is too modest
Way too modest. Many out there are deceived by writings in a book because they were told that those should be accepted as the truth without a thought, that it's wrong to be critical of these texts and that the only alternative is eternal damnation in hell. Science is the opposite of that but science is incredibly modest too. We never say evolution is fact even if it is. We always bend around it and keep feeding arguments to the non-believer, trying to convince him, but we never flat-out tell said non-believer he's a complete moron, good day and have fun living in your own magical world.
We never do that because we try to remain true to our own ethics. It used to be different, I know, but not any more, which is why scientists often "lose" debates on television. Reason, unfortunately, stands no chance against simple demagogy that holds the promise of Wonderland.
This happened to a colleague a few weeks ago, when we had a solar eclipse of roughly 84 % where I live:
- pupil: "This Solar eclipse is a punishment of God."
- colleague: "Funny thing God punishes only 84 % this time..."
- pupil: "You don't know what you're talking about."
- colleague: "More than enough to have predicted when this punishment of God would take place and also to predict when God will be angry next time, what percent punishment we will have to take here and what percent the good folks in France and Germany will take."
Take the landing on the moon. Better still, take a telescope, aim it at the moon, try to find the mirrors that the Apollo astronauts left there and that we still use today to measure the distance between Earth and the Moon via laser. No landing on the moon? Then hopefully the Phantom Villains put those mirrors there in Superman 2 because otherwise we have a problem.
4) Science brings bad new
Global warming, overpopulation, pollution, ... no-one likes to go to bed on these false notes. We rather think that tomorrow will be as good as or even better than today and screw those doombringers and their tales of darkness. This way, scientists' warnings are tossed aside like cheap nonsense and we continue sawing the legs from under our childrens' chairs. Two possible scenario's for the future:
- "Good thing scientists warned us in time!"
or
- "Scientists warned us, we should have listened."
FAILED LOGIC
Many folks out there question remarkable scientific findings because they're not 100 % verified, only 99 %. "Yeah yeah, big bang and all but there's this little detail - uh ... wait a sec ... here! - that scientists still don't quite agree on. So: the big bang theory is nonsense!"
Yet at the same time they accept lousy superstition at the merest hint of some meagre success: "A friend of a friend of a friend of my niece's son's school friend's methadone addicted father went to this woman, paid her 150 dollars and she told him he'd make a regretful decision that week and he bet on the horses and lost 500 bucks and he regretted having placed a bet so she was right so this women really is a fortune teller!"
As the Romans used to say: people want to be deceived so let them be.
Or our modern version:
And then there's the intelligence quotum that makes things more complicated. Many of us look to eachother for guidence for above reasons, but also because many don't have the ability to lead. To think for themselves. These are the 'workmen' (m/f) of society. let's put it this way, an IQ of 100 is supposed to be the average. and we can function from about 80 onwards (20% less). well then, only about 20% of modern (western) educated people have a higher education. Universities, at least in this country, have people amongst their students from an IQ of 110 upwards. So roughly only 20% of the people have a capacity of more then 10% higher then average. Geniuses are very sparse indeed but have an IQ of 140 plus. Which means they have a capacity of about 75% more then the lowest well-functioning humans. No wonder so many won't believe or understand them.
ah, welcome to science, where we can always complicate matters! ;-) But you're absolutely right, this was just to give a general indication of the intelligence gap that's existing, and probably will grow bigger and bigger.
"You know, if we disagree with the Bible, when someone says, ‘I’m an atheist,’ they’re saying, ‘I’m a fool’. They’re saying nothing created everything, which is just ludicrous intellectual suicide. The Bible says he who denies God’s existence is a fool, and if we say the guy is intelligent, then we are denying what scripture said."
Creationists continue to dig up the argument that scientists are ignorant because they claim that "nothing created everything". However, the intellectual suicide or rather the intellectual weakness is with the creationists themselves who were never properly educated in astronomy, cosmology, particle physics and quantum physics and therefore lack the brain power to grasp the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and the matter-wave duality, two essential facts in the explanation of how the universe came to be. But those are not facts, you say, merely "theories"?
Firstly, police procedurals are built on "mere theories"; scientific theories have withstood rigorous testing, violent attacks from sceptical scientists and years and years of experimental falsification by armies of people willing to prove the theory - at that stage still a hypothesis - wrong as if their lives depended upon it. Once a theory is finally accepted as such, it's darn well earned its status.
Secondly, yes, the Uncertainty Principle and the matter-wave duality are facts. If they weren't, our computers, cell phones, lasers, PET-scans and NMR-scans in hospitals, ... wouldn't exist. No controlled nuclear fission, no television sets, not even photographs could exist. In fact, the very theory that supports all of chemistry and thus of our understanding of pharmaceuticals, plastics, dyes, human metabolism, artificial sweeteners and fertilizers, chemical explosives, ... would be incorrect if it weren't for these two facts. We couldn't possibly have come 1% as far as we have now if the foundations of chemistry were based on a lie. In fact, the good minister ought to know that yelling on the Internet via computer that the Uncertainty Principle and the matter-wave duality are fallacies is the epitome of intellectual suicide. It's as stupid as saying that the Earth is flat while observing it from the Moon. It's as stupid as saying there is no chair when you're sitting on it.
Of course he doesn't mention the Uncertainty Principle or matter-wave duality because he's too stubborn to learn about them. Maybe he realises that understanding these facts, which I teach my 16 year old students in school, would show him the true light: the cosmic light that originated in the Big Bang and can actually be captured on photo. Strange that not the smallest bit of Biblical support can be attained in the same way or 'at all', but I digress. The point is that when scientists say "nothing", they do so jokingly. Leave it to Creationist nitwits to take even a joke seriously. There's no such thing as "nothing". Read Frank Close's little book "Nothing". It'll expand your views, sir, and hopefully replace the old ones. But the idea of small energy packets suddenly appearing on "borrowed" time according to the firmly tested equation dE x dt > h/2.PI and of energy condensing into matter via the equally firmly tested E = mc², isn't too hard to accept once you've figured out that almost every bit of modern tech wouldn't exist without it.
The best part is "we are denying what scripture said". Imagine that! So... a little bit of critical thinking, a trifle scepticism is not allowed? No seriously, you cannot argue with scripture? It was written in a book (by mortal hands) so it is the unconditional truth? You'd have to be stoned, and I mean like Heroine times Heroine stoned, to live your life by that principle. Why not read the funnies in the newspaper and make those your guiding light in life? Same thing. Less cohesive perhaps but probably a lot less misogynistic, racist and violent too. Of course scientists also learn things from a book. True, from dozens of well-written science books which never let you forget that you mustn't accept a single thing without testing it yourself. Go on! Grab some test tubes, chemicals, thermometers, balances, Bunsen burners, ... and do it yourself. See for yourself! THAT's how science educates itself. Not by saying, "well if you don't accept this, you're a fool and you'll burn in hell and we will cut off your head or burn you alive or hang you or... well basically any of the things we call The Lord's Work." You see, minor detail perhaps, but indeed we're not quite like that. (Though sometimes I wish we'd be as far as the punishment goes.)
He also wrote that:
"It’s like someone who sits in a 747 [airplane] and says I believe this happened when nothing exploded and everything fell into place. Everything, the wings, all fell into place without a designer. That is ludicrous."
MAH! Get me some STEW! Because this boy is delusional. Firstly, it's usually religious fanatics who make planes explode, but let's not go there. Secondly, is it better to claim that God put all the ingredients for a plane in his magical microwave, set the timers to Sunday and suddenly the plane was there? The same principles by which we understand how the Sun shines (and which we have been recreating in our particle accelerators for the past 60-something years), dictate the cooking of matter in the solar furnaces of our universe. It's very simple physics really and we can see it happen in various particle physics labs all over the world. So there's your plane stuff. And planes do have a designer. We call him an engineer. It's a person who went to school, studied math and physics, understood what makes the universe tick and put that knowledge to good use.
I have nothing against religion. I do, however, have a big something against religion trying to denounce science. As I've stated before, we did not double or even triple our life expectancies by praying to the gods of thunder, fertility, sunshine and rainbows, but through science. We did not create all of our technology by reading the Bible but by discovering the laws of nature and by putting them to good use. And if it hadn't been for a little place called CERN, the Internet might still not have been invented. For better or worse, all of this progress happened because science happened. Science constantly improves itself, corrects and fine-tunes itself. Religion just sits there, stuck in a 2000 year old delusion of grandeur but incapable of making one serious contribution to the longevity of our kind. Rather, one might argue that history reveals only one side of religion; a very destructive one. If a "fool" like minister Ray Comfort then suggests scientists are "fools" because they talk about things he clearly doesn't (want to) understand, he's making the biggest fool out of himself. But because science requires an intellectual effort whereas religion does not, or at least not to the same extent, science is, unfortunately, wasted on a majority of people who either haven't the chance or the will to be properly educated in it. They just live happy lives thinking that reading old books and bending over on a peace of cloth in some Holy place can also create game consoles, cars, airplanes, waste water treatment plants, bazookas, light bulbs, plasma tv's, washing machines, life support systems for hospitals, aspirin, ...
Maybe I'm the fool, because I have read the Bible from start to finish and I can't find anything about marrying one's cousin or having children with 25 wives including one's own daughters. I did read about stoning women to death even if they were raped - which really doesn't make sense if you think about it - and I read about a great flood that wiped the world clean except for a single boat with a couple of specimens on it. (No dinosaurs though. Strange, didn't they walk with us, according to Creationists? Or, wait, that was BEFORE the flood. Right. [\sarcasm]) But most importantly, I never read anything in the Bible that told me to stay away from science. In fact, I got the impression that God encourages Man to better himself, to improve his knowledge of things, his understanding of the universe or His Creation if you will. Yet the more we reveal about said Creation, the more those who call themselves "Creationists" fight back. Strange how these things go. "You should learn more about God's Creation! Hold on, you ARE learning more about God's Creation. Stop learning!" Wait, what?
That one of the most prolific, powerful and economically dominant countries in the world, the USA, allows itself the embarrassment of its notorious Bible belt, a cradle for Creationist terror, is beyond me. But since evil eventually destroys itself, according to Tolkien at least, I can still sleep at night.
But you need to understand that CERN is there to open up other dimensions and invoke demons.
Yes, CERN is where we are going to create black holes and make the whole world vanish. And the good news is, everybody pays for that. :) That's right, folks. Some of us fund this research through taxes. ;-)
If that is true, so sorry about what I said before, Satan.
That would be Thunderpants would it not !!.
Yes, but @DarthDimi pulled it off.
http://gizmodo.com/this-is-the-oldest-galaxy-weve-found-so-far-1729038001?utm_campaign=socialflow_gizmodo_facebook&utm_source=gizmodo_facebook&utm_medium=socialflow