The only think I have read of Baxter is his short story Last Contact[1], but I still think about it very often. Reading the Xeele sequence is in my todo list.
I mean any type of energy is just as intangible as potential energy, so I don't see that the energy stored by doing work (i.e. interacting with one four forces) is that different to the idea of energy stored by being in motion. You never measure "energy" directly after all, but it's a useful abstraction - after all, everything in science is an explanatory position.
Yes, everything in an explanatory position. That's precisely the point I was trying to get to.
I just happen to consider the explanation that a rock sitting on top of a mountain having "potential energy" to be relatively content free.
There's always a tension in physics (or has been for a couple of centuries or so) between force-based explanation and energy-based explanation.The force-based explanation (gravity) of why the rock might move downhill makes vastly more sense to me than the notion that it has "potential energy". However, the force-based explanation is not always clearly the right one either.
Also, I wasn't referring to "the idea of energy stored by being in motion". This is precisely the hangup that trips up so many. An object doesn't have energy because it is moving. And it doesn't move because it has energy. The motion and the energy are the same thing, just two different ways of talking about the same thing. The distinction matters because the way we've developed the semantics of "motion" and "energy" in physics means that, for example, "motion" is not something that is transferred between objects, but "energy" is.
Because gravity distorts _space-time_ - not just 3-D space - then the event horizon is the boundary at which gravity means that all future paths (technically everything within your future light cone) lie either on or within the event horizon, leading to a stable orbit at the horizon or spiral into the centre of the black hole respectively.
Space isn't distorted at the event horizon and you wouldn't notice any effects from crossing it - other than no longer being able to see the outside universe.
Technically, in GR gravity is the distortion of spacetime, it does not have independent existence that acts on spacetime. It's mass that distorts spacetime.
Same here. I'd been using GFA Basic for a couple of years when I came across Turbo Pascal which really helped - being a version of BASIC with code blocks, variable types including records, functions and procedures and even references - so I picked up Pascal just by reading the help documentation and studying the numerous very clear and helpful examples included on almost every page.
This was a good couple of years before I discovered the Internet at university so there was no easy access to learning resources. I'd tried to pick up C a couple of times without much luck before learning TP, and it wasn't until after that that I then was able to transfer what I'd learnt from Pascal to C - although again that was aided by another great Borland product, C++ Builder :)
The article is saying that the inherited wealth of the remaining 20% of today's billionaires is greater than the wealth of those new-made billionaires, there's no contradiction there at all. And obviously you'd expect most new billionaires to have a net wealth close to the $1bn mark, so all it would take is each of the 20% to inherit four times as much on average.
This page lists nine people who inherited over $50bn each, and another 23 who inherited between $4bn and $50bn, totalling just over $1.1tn of inherited wealth. Easy to see how that would outweigh the wealth of a larger number of new billionaires.
But that already happens with property taxes - just look at all the people in California who can only afford to live where they do because their property taxes are fixed at their original rate, and so they cannot afford to move anywhere else within the same area.
The best approach there isn't to lower taxes (although a deduction for a primary household is fine of course) but to allow them to defer payment until it's sold/they die. Since in this situation their house is also worth several million dollars.
Which then significantly exacerbates the potential for a negative equity trap, because moving now requires paying all of those deferred taxes. So the longer you've lived somewhere the more you need to down-value when you move...
Nice one, I remember writing a 2D graphics library in Turbo Pascal using embedded hand-optimised assembly for the actual drawing code when I was your age, but that was back before I discovered the internet so it ended up being something I'd enjoyed writing but never did anything with, so well done on taking the next step turning it from a personal project to one that other people can see and maybe use themselves - it all looks very tidy, well-commented and the README is clear.
Putting things out there for the world to see can be a scary thing, but remember that what people say is often as much about them than it is about your work, especially so when what they say is about you.
PS I'm actually more interested in Motes than this myself, going to experiment with it now :)
Oh, I just noticed some bugs in the code while using Motes the other day. Expect some weirdness with the Emacs plugin. The scripts have been working flawlessly for me the past few weeks though. I hope you like them :D
The use of a continuous roll of paper with punched perforations to control a loom was invented in 1725 by Basile Bouchon. Then in 1745 Jacques de Vaucanson invented the first fully automated loom using punch cards which unfortunately was not well received at the time - perhaps due to pushback over the automation making the draw boy role redundant - and it wasn't until after his death that Jacquard reintroduced the idea alongside other improvements and was a success. de Vaucanson also invented the chain drive and slide lathe apparently, he was all about automation.
Probably not possible because it wasn't thought of when the system was first implemented and introducing such a change would involve getting new hardware with the jump feature and quite probably new hardware both to read the new card format and to produce the cards themselves. And everyone else also having to do so given the dominance of the IBM 12/80 card format.
