Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: FlamingCobra on October 24, 2011, 04:50:02 pm
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There's no point in me making a new topic every time I have another retarded question. So I will put them all here.
- Since servers aren't compatible with PC operating systems (and thus must use server OS's), then does that mean supercomputers are also incompatible with PC operating systems?
- If white holes exist, then what happens when a white hole collides with a black hole?
- Since black holes have infinite density, would white holes have negatively infinite density?
- If humans made conditions on a planet favorable for life as we know it (i.e. added atmosphere, ocean, and temperatures habitable for humans, but no flora or fauna), and then we sent a very simple life form (such as e. coli) to the planet, would that life form evolve & diversify very slowly over millions of years, or would we see an event like the Cambrian explosion since no ecological niches are being occupied?
- Did they figure out for sure whether neutrinos can move faster than the speed of light?
- Since atoms of matter are made of protons and neutrons (which are made of quarks) surrounded by an electron cloud, and atoms of antimatter are made of antiprotons and antineutrons (which are made of antiquarks) surrounded by a positron cloud, and electrons, positrons, quarks, and neutrinos are all elementary particles, would it be possible to have an atom composed of a nucleus of positrons and neutrinos surrounded by a cloud of other elementary particles, such as quarks or bosons?
- Does generation II and III matter always decay to generation I matter?
- Are there any stable "exotic atoms"?
- Is there more evidence for cosmological constant or quintessence?
- How many classes will I have to take to understand general relativity, special relativity, casualty, cosmological constant, quintessence, and string theory?
- What's this "gauge" crap?
That's all for now.
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and here are my stupid responses
1) servers ARE compatible with PC operating systems
2) your guess is as good as mine.
3) black holes do not have infinite densities
4) depends on what you mean by "life as we know it." earth conditions during the formation of life were very different from how they are now.
5) afaik they measured the distance wrong
6) wut
7) dunno
8) my guess is no
I'd do more research but I have a discrete math exam in nine minutes.
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solitary quarks violate confinement and you'll only find them in very high energy states
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9). "Dark energy" seems to behave like one.
10). Plenty. :)
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As intriguing as string theory sounds (from my extremely limited knowledge of it), I don't like the idea of black holes being "fuzzballs."
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solitary quarks violate confinement and you'll only find them in very high energy states
Yeah basically what happens is that quarks are linked to other quarks via gluons, the intermediary particles of strong interaction (also known as strong nuclear force or colour force).
Gluons have an interesting property that the further you stretch the quarks from each other, the bigger the force pulling the quarks back together gets.
This means that as you pull quarks apart from their particle, you are essentially adding a LOT of energy into the system.
At some point, yes, the gluon attachement will break - but that's because the energy you have fed into the system pulling quarks apart actually materializes as new quarks, resulting in formation of quark-antiquark pair. These newly minted quarks will then form new joint quark particles with the original nearby quarks, rather than the quarks floating around alone after you've pulled them apart.
This results in interesting things such as conservation of baryon number, and it also appears likely that all particles formed of quarks have an electric charge in multipliers of e rather than fractional charges like the quarks.
So, that covers why individual quarks do not appear.
As to the other part of question:
Bosons are not same kind of particles as fermions.
Standard model of particle physics consists of two families of particles: Fermions and bosons.
What we know as matter is built of fermions. Fermions are named after Enrico Fermi, and they obey the Fermi–Dirac statistics in quantum mechanics (these names are not a coincidence, in case you haven't guessed).
Fermions are further divided into baryons and leptons.
Baryons are particles that consist of quarks, and they are further still divided into hadrons and mesons. Hadrons consist of three quarks, while mesons are quark-antiquark pairs.
Quarks are particles characterized by a property called "colour charge". There are three different colours, typically called Red, Green and Blue (and, if you want to be pedantic, you could name the antiquark properties Cyan, Magenta and Yellow!).
There are six (known) types of quarks, usually named up, down, charm, strange, top and bottom (don't ask, these are not supposed to be properties that make sense per ce, they are just named so to cause least amount of confusion when handling these particles in non-mathematical format like natural language).
All joint quark particles have neutral colour charge (also known as white). To achieve this, all hadrons consist of three differently coloured quarks, much like a white pixel on your display. Mesons are also white, but they have a quark of a colour, and antiquark of corresponding anticolour. For example, proton consists of up, up and down quarks, and these would be of red, green and blue variety to make the proton have neutral colour charge.
Meson could have a red up-quark, and a cyan up-antiquark.
As you might guess, having matter and antimatter in a single particle does not exactly encourage stability, and thus all mesons are unstable to varying degrees. Their decaying products depend on the charge of the meson, and vary between leptons and bosons.
Leptons are small elementary particles. The three most known are electron, myon and tau. Neutrons also belong to the lepton family; as symmetry would suggest, each lepton has its own neutrino and antineutrino types (you may have read of electron neutrino, muon neutrino and tau neutrino in some publication). Basically, muon and tau can be thought of as heavier cousins of electrons - they have largely similar characteristics except they are not stable, have higher mass and that's about what I remember of them straight out of my head.
The other main family of particles in standard model are the aforementioned bosons. They are so named after Satyendra Nath Bose, and they obey Bose-Einstein statistics.
Like with Fermions, the names are not a coincidence. :p
However, instead of being "particles" in a classical sense (which you should forget about anyway when dealing with anything with quantum or relativity in its name), they act as intermediary particles for the interactive forces of nature. Bosons are much more varied than fermions, but at the same time more restricted in their role in the universe.
For example, photon is the boson of electromagnetic interaction. It transmits electromagnetic forces, and freely traveling photons can be detected as electromagnetic radiation. There is also a whole slew of phenomena that are basically explained by virtual photons. Photons are massless and travel at... speed of light. :lol:
For the other interactions of nature, we have:
Weak interaction (aka weak nuclear force) which has three bosons; W+-boson, W--boson, and Z-boson. These bosons have mass, and they have a curious property that neutrinos are only able to interact via W- or Z-bosons. Other forces (aside from gravity) seem to not affect them.
Strong interaction (aka strong nuclear force or colour force) which is mediated by a particle called gluon. This can be thought of as a blob-like entity that stretches when you pull it apart, and much like with a spring, has a harmonic force that increases as you deflect it from the balance point (this causes the earlier described phenomenon with taking quarks apart from reach other; like a spring, its energy just increases as you stretch it more and more.
In a way you could consider the quark-antiquark formation as analogoous to the gluon spring "breaking". But instead of "breaking" in conventional sense, the energy loaded into it simply converts into different form...
The last major interaction of the nature is by far the most mysterious. Gravity.
So far, we do not have a theory of quantum gravity that would work with precision equal to General Relativity. In fact, quantum gravity theories seem to break apart at very small small distances, causing infinite forces, or predicting much higher gravitational interactions than we can see actually happening. It is a mystery currently why gravity is so weak at very small distances, yet insanely strong force at a distance. In cosmological perspective, gravity could just as well be the ONLY force that affects the macroscopic universe in the galactic scale.
Well, that's an exaggeration I guess. You need to take account the other forces when you're simulating the early universe. But pretty soon the distances between objects in universe became so big that nuclear forces and electromagnetic forces were hopelessly stomped by gravity... and the mysterious cosmological force that accelerates the expansion of universe, of course.
The hypothetic intermediary particle of gravity is called, quite unimaginatively, graviton.
As you might have guessed, bosons don't really exist alone either*, much less form some sort of exotic atoms with other particles. Unless you want to consider quark-gluon particles such.
EDIT: Gauge boson is another often used term for bosons that transmit interactions.
...and after reading this you should remember, in immortal words of Mr. Python: "It's only a model."
By that I mean that you shouldn't be thinking of these particles as some sort of really small objects. Elementary particles in standard model are dimensionless, and there's no way of saying if quantum mechanics and standard model of particle set actually accurately describe what is going on, BUT they do produce very, very, very, very accurate predictions.
If you want to get more into what a particle is, and how bosons apply forces between particles, and the more exotic implications of particle physics (such as multidimensional string theories) you'll have to find another person to get answers from. I suggest going to library and searching for some books by Stephen Hawking, Michio Kaku, Richard Feynman and possibly Carl Sagan (for cosmological context of all this stuff).
Also, I wouldn't call these particular ones "stupid questions". Ignorant perhaps, but stupid would be to stay ignorant.
*obviously bosons can exist alone, but they are always an intermediary of interaction between particles. For example, photon is always emitted by charged particle, and absorbed by charged particle at some point... probably. There is a possibility that a photon could just travel endlessly without ever meeting a charged particle to pass its energy to... but that's when the universe undergoes thermal death and the average energy density of universe drops, and finally all matter degenerates into black holes, which slowly radiate themselves into nothingness via Hawking radiation... and then there will only be an endless space full of photons that never interact with anything...
...ever.
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- most servers are perfectly compatible with standard windows, and most PCs can have a server OS installed, the issue is that in these situations you would not have an OS optimized for the hardware, for instance desktop OSes would have a lot of extra crap running that a server would not need (like a GUI) and a server OD would not have drivers for graphics cards and the like. similarly a highly specalised computer would need a highly specialized OS so supercomputers usualy have their OSs written to them, or at least heavily modified.
- grey hole
- I think you need to define what a 'white hole' is let alone 'negative density'
- something like that would die, you would need to send something that can survive off of what ever inorganic mater is there already, like an archaea. to answer your question, it would probably follow the same boom and bust cycle seen on earth.
- no, but it does not look good
- no, positrons are leptons and therefore not effected by the strong force (and therefore cannot form nuclei). you could conceivably have an electron-positron pairing, or an nuclius - anti-nucleus pairing, that orbited each other, but the would likely be extremely unstable and prone to mutually annihilating.
- Dun'know
- if they were stable we wouldn't call them exotic would we?
- what, aside from the increasing red shift?
- 3 (note these classes each have prerequisites)
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ITT we learn how crazy the Standard Model is
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i only have one question
1: are you on meth?
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<snip>
*obviously bosons can exist alone, but they are always an intermediary of interaction between particles. For example, photon is always emitted by charged particle, and absorbed by charged particle at some point... probably. There is a possibility that a photon could just travel endlessly without ever meeting a charged particle to pass its energy to... but that's when the universe undergoes thermal death and the average energy density of universe drops, and finally all matter degenerates into black holes, which slowly radiate themselves into nothingness via Hawking radiation... and then there will only be an endless space full of photons that never interact with anything...
...ever.
But if all matter fell into a black hole isn't there a chance that since it would be a singularity, another big bang could occur? And thus the universe would be an oscillating universe?
What happens when there is a knot in cosmic string?
@ Nuke: No.
PS: I rather like the idea that gravity is the one force that has any meaningful influence in the macroscopic world.
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PS: I rather like the idea that gravity is the one force that has any meaningful influence in the macroscopic world.
gravity is super ****ing weak and only really matters at the megahugenormous scale
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How smalldid the tweezers have to be to stretch the quarks apart to demonstrate gluons and their force and effect?
And no one even touched on the last question lol.
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I rather like the idea that gravity is the one force that has any meaningful influence in the macroscopic world.
Cosmological scale only, man.
I'm talking like... interstellar, or galactic scale. Stars in a galaxy. Galactic clusters. Superclusters. Universe as a whole.
In these scales, gravity is the only meaningful factor out of the four known basic interactions.
In the scale of solar systems, electromagnetic force is obviously important as a means to transmit energy from star to planets. And for all matter locally, all forces are in action.
Maybe I worded it poorly. What I meant it, is that at extreme distances, the only viable way for objects to interact is gravity. Other forces are obviously meaningful in macroscopic (as in, non-quantum) physics, and get even more important in quantum scale while importance of gravity is reduced due to extremely short periods of time that stuff tends to happen in.
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- If white holes exist, then what happens when a white hole collides with a black hole?
yin and yang.
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So. . . uh . . .
What's a white hole?
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- If humans made conditions on a planet favorable for life as we know it (i.e. added atmosphere, ocean, and temperatures habitable for humans, but no flora or fauna), and then we sent a very simple life form (such as e. coli) to the planet, would that life form evolve & diversify very slowly over millions of years, or would we see an event like the Cambrian explosion since no ecological niches are being occupied?
Neither, likely. E. coli isn't that "simple" and is already suited to particular niches. And it's a least partially dependent on an otherwise functioning ecosystem.
Life on Earth functions in a massively complex and interrelated system. You can't take a solitary organism from here, deposit it somewhere without those systems, and expect that it will miraculously start an evolutionary process. Chances are that if you dumped just a single species on another planet without any sort of pre-existing ecosystem, it would die off within a few generations.
Bobb's partially right that an Archaea would probably have the best chances of survival, but most organisms depend either directly or indirectly on the presence of functioning carbon and nitrogen cycles (including Archaea).
Just because an organism is considered relatively simple doesn't mean less-evolved (common mistake, though) - E. coli have had just as many billions of years of evolution as multi-cellular eukaryotes (e.g humans).
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TL;DR: White holes are really god damn weird things.
To quote the best and most accurate source of information in the Internets:
A white hole, in general relativity, is a hypothetical region of spacetime which cannot be entered from the outside, but from which matter and light may escape. In this sense it is the reverse of a black hole, which can be entered from the outside, but from which nothing, including light, may escape. (However, it is theoretically possible for a traveler to enter a rotating black hole, avoid the singularity, and travel into a rotating white hole which allows the traveler to escape into another universe.) White holes appear in the theory of eternal black holes. In addition to a black hole region in the future, such a solution of the Einstein equations has a white hole region in its past. However, this region does not exist for black holes that have formed through gravitational collapse, nor are there any known physical processes through which a white hole could be formed.
Like black holes, white holes have properties like mass, charge, and angular momentum. They attract matter like any other mass, but objects falling towards a white hole would never actually reach the white hole's event horizon (though in the case of the maximally extended Schwarzschild solution, discussed below, the white hole event horizon in the past becomes a black hole event horizon in the future, so any object falling towards it will eventually reach the black hole horizon).
In quantum mechanics, the black hole emits Hawking radiation, and so can come to thermal equilibrium with a gas of radiation. Since a thermal equilibrium state is time reversal invariant, Stephen Hawking argued that the time reverse of a black hole in thermal equilibrium is again a black hole in thermal equilibrium. This implies that black holes and white holes are the same object. The Hawking radiation from an ordinary black hole is then identified with the white hole emission. Hawking's semi-classical argument is reproduced in a quantum mechanical AdS/CFT treatment, where a black hole in anti-de Sitter space is described by a thermal gas in a gauge theory, whose time reversal is the same as itself.
If your brain is not in a knot yet you didn't understand the quoted text fully. Re-read it and try to keep your cerebral matter from liquifying and leaking into your spine due to excessive freaking out.
Weird **** of this magnitude is above my pay grade. :shaking:
To summarize:
White hole is the antithesis of a black hole. This in basic concept is simple - it means an area in space-time that cannot be entered from outside, but from which stuff can come out of.
White holes are also suggested as the hypothetical "other end" of an Einstein-Rosen bridge. It has been suggested as a solution for what happens to stuff falling into a rotating black hole; somewhere, it is radiated out (corresponding probably to black body radiation depending on the intensity of the radiation) from a white hole...
What would probably happen if a white hole and black hole collided is total guesswork for me.
They would either create some really weird **** in local space-time, or the colliding elements might simply disappear from view at the collision scene. In the latter scene, the mass effect (hur dur) of the second black hole (which collides with first white hole) would probably be added to the mass measured for the first black hole, and the second white hole's intensity would possibly increase.
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So. . . uh . . .
What's a white hole?
The time reversal of a black hole -- rather than spacetime flowing into the event horizon at speed c like in a black hole, you have spacetime flowing out of it at speed c. In other words, instead of being unable to escape a white hole, you're unable to get into one.
AFAIK general relativity does not forbid the existence of such a thing, but we know of absolutely no way in which one could be created and they are generally believed to not exist.
edit: ninja'd by the herra D:
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Since servers aren't compatible with PC operating systems (and thus must use server OS's), then does that mean supercomputers are also incompatible with PC operating systems?
Dammit, I don't have anything witty for this.
If white holes exist, then what happens when a white hole collides with a black hole?
We get a mixed child
Since black holes have infinite density, would white holes have negatively infinite density?
You racist
If humans made conditions on a planet favorable for life as we know it (i.e. added atmosphere, ocean, and temperatures habitable for humans, but no flora or fauna), and then we sent a very simple life form
(such as e. coli) to the planet, would that life form evolve & diversify very slowly over millions of years, or would we see an event like the Cambrian explosion since no ecological niches are being occupied?
Bacteria has already been said to be able to live in conditions we cannot as humans live in. Therefore it is superior
Did they figure out for sure whether neutrinos can move faster than the speed of light?
I don't know who Neutrinos is. Is s/he from Star Trek?
Since atoms of matter are made of protons and neutrons (which are made of quarks) surrounded by an electron cloud, and atoms of antimatter are made of antiprotons and antineutrons (which are made of antiquarks) surrounded by a positron cloud, and electrons, positrons, quarks, and neutrinos are all elementary particles, would it be possible to have an atom composed of a nucleus of positrons and neutrinos surrounded by a cloud of other elementary particles, such as quarks or bosons?
I like quirky bosoms
Does generation II and III matter always decay to generation I matter?
You don't matter, so why would your second and third generation selves change that?
Are there any stable "exotic atoms"?
No. Take exotic dancers for example. Daddy issues galore
Is there more evidence for cosmological constant or quintessence?
There is no evidence for anything. We are all teapots
How many classes will I have to take to understand general relativity, special relativity, casualty, cosmological constant, quintessence, and string theory?
How many classes are you willing to take in order to understand all of that
What's this "gauge" crap?
It's when people measure the escape velocity of feces
That's my unrelated and unimportant contribution. It's not actually supposed to be insulting, just me being bored
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10: How many classes will I have to take to understand general relativity, special relativity, casualty, cosmological constant, quintessence, and string theory?
Depends how well you want to understand them. For instance, the basic principles of relativity (both special and general) can be understood by anyone, and there's plenty of material on them freely available on the internets.
Now if you want to understand it to the full extent, then you'll first need a strong background in physics and mathematics (typically 3 semesters of university level physics and calculus), and an introductory astronomy course would certainly help too. With those prerequisites you'll be ready for two specialized courses -- one in cosmology, and one in relativity. With that you'll have covered everything you just mentioned minus String Theory in great detail, though String Theory should at least have some quick discussion somewhere in there.
For an in-depth investigation of String Theory, you'd probably need a grad-school level course specializing in it, but I don't know for sure. (I'm still an undergrad.)
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- Since servers aren't compatible with PC operating systems (and thus must use server OS's), then does that mean supercomputers are also incompatible with PC operating systems?
while many servers are x86 based (there are other architectures though) they usually have more ram and more cpus/cores than your typical desktop os can handle is licenced to use (as far as windows goes, the desktop oses are intentionally crippled so that server admins cant buy the cheaper desktop os and install it on their server). the server os really isnt that much different from the desktop os, aside from higher limits (more cores, more ram, and server appropriate defaults), and a software suite that is applicable to a server admin's or a desktop user's needs. the term server can also apply to any software running on any computer that provides some service to local or remote clients. for example i run a tftp server on my desktop so i can do network installs to other computers. this does not require any special hardware. a server os contains many of these server applications where a desktop os will not have them.
supercomputers are vastly different in that they tend to be vector processors. this means they operate on large sets of similar data per instruction, where a desktop or server does one operation per instruction (not to be confused with a cpu with multiple cores where they may do vastly different operations simultaneously). for a pc or server to do what a supercomputer can do it would have to iterate over the sets and do the operation multiple times, which takes up cpu time. its kind of ironic that the modern video card is actually more similar to a supercomputer architecture than a desktop/server architecture.
that being said operating systems require very low level code that is specific to the architecture being used. since the instruction set (and not to mention the entire programing paradigm) in a super computer would be vastly different than a desktop/server cpu. its no different than trying to run x86 code on an arm processor. they just arent speaking the same language. you can do things to make a codebase compile in various architectures but you would still require different executables to be made for the various architectures.
and my last point to make is that a modern super computer is really just a server cluster, which can be programed to act as a virtual vector processor, or can also act as a regular old server with a ****ton of memory and cores at its disposal.
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9: Is there more evidence for cosmological constant or quintessence?
Good question... this is the most recent free paper I could find on the topic:
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0705/0705.1955v4.pdf (http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0705/0705.1955v4.pdf)
In short, the universe can be modeled fairly well using either, but because there's as of yet no firm evidence for a time-variation in dark energy, and physicists being physicists, we prefer to stick with the cosmological constant (or more accurately, Ωλ for a constant dark energy) over the more dynamic concept of quintessence.
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Neutrons also belong to the lepton family;
News to me; I thought they were hadrons. I think you meant "neutrinos."
It is a mystery currently why gravity is so weak at very small distances, yet insanely strong force at a distance. In cosmological perspective, gravity could just as well be the ONLY force that affects the macroscopic universe in the galactic scale
Not really, actually. It's only a mystery why it's so much weaker than the other forces to begin with. Once that happens, the fact that it is the only force that matters on cosmogical scales follows almost immediately, once you also accept the fact that gravity is always attractive, never repulsive. Since the forces between charged objects are so strong, they all met up and became buddy-buddy long ago. The strong and weak nuclear forces only act over very tiny distances anyway (they both have some utterly ridiculous power-law fall off that may as well be exponential), so once the universe is effectively electrically neutral, the only force left that matters at all is gravity. It's still extremely weak, but give it a few million/billion years, and even a weak force that's constantly active can produce big results.
Basically, gravity is the only thing that matters in cosmology precisely because it's so weak.
If your brain is not in a knot yet you didn't understand the quoted text fully. Re-read it and try to keep your cerebral matter from liquifying and leaking into your spine due to excessive freaking out.
Oh, come on. It ain't that hard. :p See here (http://jila.colorado.edu/~ajsh/insidebh/rn.html) for a more complete description and visualization of what white holes are.
For an in-depth investigation of String Theory, you'd probably need a grad-school level course specializing in it, but I don't know for sure. (I'm still an undergrad.)
Undergrad QM doesn't even come close to string theory. A year-long (at least) graduate level quantum field theory course, followed by an in-depth literature review on the subject, would be the level of preperation you'd need to really understand the subject.
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Neutrons also belong to the lepton family;
News to me; I thought they were hadrons. I think you meant "neutrinos."
Yes I did. Thanks for pointing that out.
It is a mystery currently why gravity is so weak at very small distances, yet insanely strong force at a distance. In cosmological perspective, gravity could just as well be the ONLY force that affects the macroscopic universe in the galactic scale
Not really, actually. It's only a mystery why it's so much weaker than the other forces to begin with. Once that happens, the fact that it is the only force that matters on cosmogical scales follows almost immediately, once you also accept the fact that gravity is always attractive, never repulsive. Since the forces between charged objects are so strong, they all met up and became buddy-buddy long ago. The strong and weak nuclear forces only act over very tiny distances anyway (they both have some utterly ridiculous power-law fall off that may as well be exponential), so once the universe is effectively electrically neutral, the only force left that matters at all is gravity. It's still extremely weak, but give it a few million/billion years, and even a weak force that's constantly active can produce big results.
Basically, gravity is the only thing that matters in cosmology precisely because it's so weak.
Good points.
One thing that comes to mind, though, relating to gravity being always attractive, never repulsive force.
Just because the normal matter we know always gravitates toward each other (gravity being an attractive force), doesn't mean all stuff in the universe behaves the same. The current hypothesis is that visible matter and energy form four percent of the entire universe (correct me if I misquoted the percentage). The rest is dark matter, which does behave just like normal matter with regards to gravity (based on observations of rotating galaxies they should have a halo of dark matter around them, which we can't see but which affects the speed at which different parts of the galaxies rotate) - and dark energy, which we know very little of and make random guesses.
However, while we're making those random guesses, we have also observed a mysterious force that seems to be accelerating the rate at which our universe is expanding. Which really sounds quite a bit like antigravity to me in certain senses.
If your brain is not in a knot yet you didn't understand the quoted text fully. Re-read it and try to keep your cerebral matter from liquifying and leaking into your spine due to excessive freaking out.
Oh, come on. It ain't that hard. :p See here (http://jila.colorado.edu/~ajsh/insidebh/rn.html) for a more complete description and visualization of what white holes are.
Well I was more referring to the weird stuff that suggests white hole and black hole are the same object, and that a white hole may become a black hole at later time.
The actual anti-blackness itself isn't so much of a stretch... but the other implications mentioned are rather exotic.
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Just because the normal matter we know always gravitates toward each other (gravity being an attractive force), doesn't mean all stuff in the universe behaves the same. The current hypothesis is that visible matter and energy form four percent of the entire universe (correct me if I misquoted the percentage). The rest is dark matter, which does behave just like normal matter with regards to gravity (based on observations of rotating galaxies they should have a halo of dark matter around them, which we can't see but which affects the speed at which different parts of the galaxies rotate) - and dark energy, which we know very little of and make random guesses.
However, while we're making those random guesses, we have also observed a mysterious force that seems to be accelerating the rate at which our universe is expanding. Which really sounds quite a bit like antigravity to me in certain senses.
Yeah, radiation plus normal matter is something like 4-5%. Dark matter makes up additional 25-30% of the universe, and dark energy the rest. Think of dark energy as a perfect fluid that has negative pressure. Yeah, that's really weird and totally at odds with how every other fluid behaves. Still, because it has negative pressure (in an FRW model, anyway), it causes the universe to expand. Dark energy, by the way, is the mysterious force that accelerates the rate at which our universe is expanding. If I may just quote some basic results at you, in a flat FRW model*, if the universe is matter-dominated, the size increases as t2/3, if it's radiation dominated, it goes as t1/2, and if it's lambda (dark energy) dominated, the universe expands exponentially (this also means that an empty flat universe is an eternal one). A flat radiation or matter dominated universe slowly stops expanding over time - the expansion rate is zero when t is infinity.
*An FRW model assumes that the universe is homogenous and isotropic on large scales and each component of it is a perfect fluid (no viscosity, basically). FRW universes can be closed, flat, or open. Our universe closely approximates a flat FRW universe which is becoming lambda-dominated over time.
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What would happen if someone had been exposed to high levels of magnesium, strontium, and barium and low levels of calcium since birth?
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Why do you ask?
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I'd like to know the effects it would have on bone strength/density
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You'd get a lot of nutritional adverse effects as other alkali earth metals don't act as exact substitutes for calcium, they have subtly individual properties and would thus behave differently.
Aside from probable problems in growth and bone integrity you could get things like deformities (especially if nutritional levels were very badly skewed during pregnancy) and, more likely, termination of the pregnancy.
Aside from the bones requiring calcium for the hydroxylapatite mineral, they also require other things for the calcification, such as vitamin D and, apparently, small quantities of the other alkali earth metals you listed (although that seems to be debatable). Magnesium, for certain, is an important mineral for humans; not as much is known of strontium and barium.
I am suspecting that while the calcium in bones could be partially substituted by strontium, barium or magnesium due to their superficially similar qualities, the resulting bone mineral would have somewhat different properties than the calcium based apatite - whether it would be harder, more brittle, more flexible, more durable, or just a plain disaster, I cannot say.
What would probably be more important for immediate vitality of the human being are the calcium channels in our nervous system. I don't want to think very much what would happen if there was no calcium available, or if all calcium was replaced by other alkali earth ions.
It should also be noted that it would likely be impossible to offer more of other alkali earth metals than calcium in the diet. Calcium is very ubiquitous, avoiding it would prove immensely problematic, and magnesium, strontium and barium would have to be added in spades...
Actually while you're at it, why not add beryllium and radium to the experiment? I don't think the subject will have a very long or fulfilling life anyway...
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You'd get a lot of nutritional adverse effects as other alkali earth metals don't act as exact substitutes for calcium, they have subtly individual properties and would thus behave differently.
Aside from probable problems in growth and bone integrity you could get things like deformities (especially if nutritional levels were very badly skewed during pregnancy) and, more likely, termination of the pregnancy.
Aside from the bones requiring calcium for the hydroxylapatite mineral, they also require other things for the calcification, such as vitamin D and, apparently, small quantities of the other alkali earth metals you listed (although that seems to be debatable). Magnesium, for certain, is an important mineral for humans; not as much is known of strontium and barium.
I am suspecting that while the calcium in bones could be partially substituted by strontium, barium or magnesium due to their superficially similar qualities, the resulting bone mineral would have somewhat different properties than the calcium based apatite - whether it would be harder, more brittle, more flexible, more durable, or just a plain disaster, I cannot say.
What would probably be more important for immediate vitality of the human being are the calcium channels in our nervous system. I don't want to think very much what would happen if there was no calcium available, or if all calcium was replaced by other alkali earth ions.
It should also be noted that it would likely be impossible to offer more of other alkali earth metals than calcium in the diet. Calcium is very ubiquitous, avoiding it would prove immensely problematic, and magnesium, strontium and barium would have to be added in spades...
Actually while you're at it, why not add beryllium and radium to the experiment? I don't think the subject will have a very long or fulfilling life anyway...
Because beryllium and radium are radioactive.
Any ideas of how someone COULD have jacked up bone strength without resorting to genetic engineering? Since bones dump calcium in lower gravity environments, I will assume that it immediately follows that bones of humans that matured in high gravity environments would have significantly higher calcium levels?
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You mean aside from high calcium supply, along with other nutrients required for calcification, and lots of exercise where the skeleton, skeletal muscles, and tendons are stressed (which is THE single most effective way to get strong bones - lots of activity in childhood and youth)?
There's always traditional engineering with titanium plates screwed on the bones, possibly in a mesh pattern. Very invasive, though. Not recommended.
Also, it's not gonna help much for joint strength. Ligaments are gonna get torn anyway with certain amount of stress on them, even if bones stay intact.
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You mean aside from high calcium supply, along with other nutrients required for calcification, and lots of exercise where the skeleton, skeletal muscles, and tendons are stressed (which is THE single most effective way to get strong bones - lots of activity in childhood and youth)?
There's always traditional engineering with titanium plates screwed on the bones, possibly in a mesh pattern. Very invasive, though. Not recommended.
Also, it's not gonna help much for joint strength. Ligaments are gonna get torn anyway with certain amount of stress on them, even if bones stay intact.
Invasive procedures = do not want.
How much stronger are we talkin' here?
Any thoughts on increasing visual acuity?
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How much stronger are we talkin' here?
So much that it can significantly decrease the risk of fractures once your bone density starts to go down by aging.
Think of it as a buffer zone for old age. For most adults, bones are quite well enough durable, and significantly bigger risk of fracture is not knowing how to fall right, than having less bone density than those who beat their bones up regularly. If you know how to fall with minimized damage, risk of fractures gets much lower (as does the amount of pulled muscles, twisted ankles and wrists, and general bruising you're likely to experience.
The mechanism is that once bones get microdamage from small shocks, they get repaired to higher density. How much structural integrity actually goes up, I can't say, but bone density does increase and that means it takes longer for the bones to degrade.
Any thoughts on increasing visual acuity?
Aside from cybernetic augmentations such as binoculars to increase aperture size and magnification, or glasses or contact lenses to improve the focusing of the image - no, you're stuck with the resolution that the cells on your retina offer you.
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what about osteopetrosis and Hypercalcaemia?
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Aside from cybernetic augmentations such as binoculars to increase aperture size and magnification, or glasses or contact lenses to improve the focusing of the image - no, you're stuck with the resolution that the cells on your retina offer you.
There have been developments with artificial eyesight (http://braintech.blogspot.com/2006/04/artificial-eyesight.html) so I won't be surprised if 10 years from now devices like the linked one surpass natural eyesight.
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Ok, from what I can tell, the G171V mutation to the LRP5 gene produces high bone mass and otherwise increases skeletal strength. What I'm wondering is, can that mutation be administered therapeutically using viruses? If so, what would be the results of doing that before the onset of puberty in addition to rigorous physical activity and..... dangerously high calcium intake. As well as setting up some sort of mechanism that creates small vibrations or shocks while the person sleeps, causing microdamage to the bones, as you stated.
And couple all of that with very generous protein intake and a little bit of steroids?
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Ok, from what I can tell, the G171V mutation to the LRP5 gene produces high bone mass and otherwise increases skeletal strength. What I'm wondering is, can that mutation be administered therapeutically using viruses? If so, what would be the results of doing that before the onset of puberty in addition to rigorous physical activity and..... dangerously high calcium intake. As well as setting up some sort of mechanism that creates small vibrations or shocks while the person sleeps, causing microdamage to the bones, as you stated.
And couple all of that with very generous protein intake and a little bit of steroids?
yeah no
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You'd be more likely to create a permanent dialysis patient with cancer than any sort of supersoldier.
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10. Read a lot on your own to make the classes you do have to take if you're pursuing a degree easier to get through. :) Try to find forums and projects that are related to what you want to learn and what you want to do (seems like you're already doing this :D).
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You'd be more likely to create a permanent dialysis patient with cancer than any sort of supersoldier.
How did you guess? :drevil:
10. Read a lot on your own to make the classes you do have to take if you're pursuing a degree easier to get through. :) Try to find forums and projects that are related to what you want to learn and what you want to do (seems like you're already doing this :D).
I care not about degrees in medicine or supersoldiers. Or cosmology. I just find some of these topics interesting. Especially regenerative medicine. Well, actually, I think a research position in regen. med. would actually be pretty cool but.........
I'd most like to get a degree in video game creation or anything that will let me work on NRS. Maybe I'll be able to get a job with LiftPort group? But then I'll be such a super mega nerd that no woman would ever be caught dead with me. WAAAAAAAAAAAH!!! T_T
Going back to the whole supersoldier thing, I believe I have already worked out a way to significantly improve reaction time. Total Liquid Ventilation. I have read from some sources that TLV delivers more oxygen and is more efficient at removing CO2 than gas breathing. I would assume that more oxygen to the brain = better information processing = faster thinking & better reaction time.
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I believe I have already worked out a way to significantly improve reaction time. Total Liquid Ventilation. I have read from some sources that TLV delivers more oxygen and is more efficient at removing CO2 than gas breathing. I would assume that more oxygen to the brain = better information processing = faster thinking & better reaction time.
You would assume wrong.
Gas exchange in the lungs is just one part of the respiration. The oxygen needs to be carried around the body via blood, bound to hemoglobin molecules (which also transport carbon dioxide back to lungs). The amount of oxygen that the blood can absorb per unit of volume is therefore dependant on the amount of hemoglobin molecules in it. You can't increase that by increasing the oxygen partial pressure in the lungs.
Furthermore, oxygen saturation below 90% in normal humans results in hypoxemia, and healthy individuals at sea level usually exhibit oxygen saturation values between 96% and 99%. So, there's not much headroom there to increase the blood saturation in the first place. The brain gets all the oxygen it needs in normally operating human being at sea level, and you can't simply increase the amount of oxygen in the blood unless you increase the amount of hemoglobin in the blood.
Which is done regularly among high endurance athletes, who spend time in hypobaric conditions acclimatizing their bodies to lower partial pressure of oxygen. The body responds by producing more red blood cells and thus more hemoglobin, which increases the total respiration capacity by increasing the amount of gases that the blood flow can transport.
This, however, does nothing for reaction times and has a much bigger effect on the physical capacity of an individual in aerobic exercise - this is of supreme usefulness for long distance endurance athletes, to an extent that sports organizations have set upper limits for allowed hemoglobin concentrations on the athletes' blood.
Secondly, your assumption that high oxygen levels would lead to higher reaction times. This is untrue. Dangerously low oxygen partial pressure can result in hypoxia, and dangerously high carbon dioxide levels can result in hypoxemia. The difference between these two is that hypoxia happens when there's simply not enough oxygen, while hypoxemia occurs when the hemoglobin oxygen saturation is reduced below 90% by other molecules taking room from oxygen in the hemoglobin molecules; CO2 can be responsible for this in high concentrations, but CO (carbon monoxide) is much more dangerous because it binds to hemoglobin stronger than either CO2 or O2, and therefore even low concentrations of carbon monoxide can be harmful or deadly.
Both conditions result in oxygen deprivation of tissues, and this can cause dizzyness, fatigue, lethargy, lack of concentration, confusion, slowed down reactions, loss of consciousness, brain damage, or death.
Just because oxygen deprivation results in increased reaction times, increased oxygen saturation won't result in reduction of reaction times. Brain doesn't quite work that way.
Pure oxygen treatment can, however, be used to treat various types of conditions such as mitigating hearing damage. Hyperbaric oxygen therapy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbaric_medicine) is more effective still.
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lulz
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Since when does oxygen deprivation increase your reaction time? That sounds self-contradictory to me.
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Since when does oxygen deprivation increase your reaction time? That sounds self-contradictory to me.
:banghead:
Think through of what you just said.
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You know what I meant! :mad:
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Increased reaction time = slowed down reactions.
Decreased reaction time = faster reactions.
I don't know what you meant, but I know exactly what I meant.
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OH OH OH!!!!!!!!! Oh. I misread what you said.
oxygen deprivation INCREASES reaction time. Ok. I gotcha. That makes perfect sense. Must've read too fast.
Well, that pretty much throws all of my ideas out the window.
The only thing left then is... if only there were some kind of material that is stretchier, rubberier, and somewhat thicker than latex, yet as strong as or stronger than body armor.
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What the heck kind of use would that material to be as body armour?
If it's stretchier than latex, the bullet will just push it into the underlying tissue, and it doesn't really make difference whether there's a hole in the material or not - it'll still make pretty much the same wound, except the bullet will stretch the material through the wound canal and probably cause MORE DAMAGE.
What you want from body armour is that bullets can't penetrate it, cause minimal deformation, and distribute the shock of the impact to a wide area - which means the material must have certain amount of rigidity.
It's the same thing as if you were comparing a bicycle helmet and woollen knit hat in durability. Drop both from a tall building - styrofoam bicycle helmet will likely shatter, while the knit hat will just deform.
Yet, the helmet will be the one that can provide any sort of protection to wearer's head precisely because it doesn't deform as easily as the hat.
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Fluids could work as body armor. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilatant#Body_armor)
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Yeah, non-newtonian fluids could work for that due to their variable properties.
For a single phase material, the requirements of stretchier than latex, yet more durable than body armour would be paradoxal. For a material capable of changing its properties in high energy impact situation, not so much.
Problem would be containing the fluid and maintaining the suit so that perforation on the outer surface won't result in diminished effectiveness.
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Is there any shear thinning fluid that is solid in normal pressure situations? Seems the ideal thing to contain the dilatant.
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Ok. Here's a good question: Why are we no longer domesticating animals and plants for new food sources?
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because all of the good ones are already domesticated?
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Ok. Here's a good question: Why are we no longer domesticating animals and plants for new food sources?
We've filled all the useful slots in the hierarchy of domestication.
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Not really because some plants tend to grow better in some climates than others. And we don't know just how many different plants exist out there. Just because we've already got something that works doesn't mean we can't stop trying or looking for others. Different tastes aren't a bad thing and some may have different or better nutritional qualities.
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Double Posting!
People have been backing up their computers for years, so I'm supposing the only reason Carbonite exists is
1. Profit
2. For stupid people who don't know how to backup their computers, and
3. To help the government spy on you (more)
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We are still domesticating stuff. There're big projects to increase the viability of Quandong orchards, and the first big macadamia orchards only started in the 1920s. Plus I've seen multiple proposals to start making pets out of Chuditchs and Quolls, to improve their numbers and decrease cat populations. I'm sure similar things are happening in other countries.
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Here's a question that holds great relevance: Who is your favorite "evil" AI and why?
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Here's a question that holds great relevance: Who is your favorite "evil" AI and why?
The answer is SHODAN. Period.
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Here's a question that holds great relevance: Who is your favorite "evil" AI and why?
1. Cylons
sexy genocidal machines
2. Omnius
frak Skynet, this one is evul
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The answer is SHODAN. Period.
Good answer. She was one of mine as well, right next to Colossus from the film "Colossus: The Forbin Project".
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AM is also a contender as well.
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HATE. LET ME TELL YOU HOW MUCH I'VE COME TO HATE YOU SINCE I BEGAN TO LIVE. THERE ARE 387.44 MILLION MILES OF PRINTED CIRCUITS IN WAFER THIN LAYERS THAT FILL MY COMPLEX. IF THE WORD HATE WAS ENGRAVED ON EACH NANOANGSTROM OF THOSE HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF MILES IT WOULD NOT EQUAL ONE ONE-BILLIONTH OF THE HATE I FEEL FOR HUMANS AT THIS MICRO-INSTANT FOR YOU. HATE. HATE.
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:D
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HATE. LET ME TELL YOU HOW MUCH I'VE COME TO HATE YOU SINCE I BEGAN TO LIVE. THERE ARE 387.44 MILLION MILES OF PRINTED CIRCUITS IN WAFER THIN LAYERS THAT FILL MY COMPLEX. IF THE WORD HATE WAS ENGRAVED ON EACH NANOANGSTROM OF THOSE HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF MILES IT WOULD NOT EQUAL ONE ONE-BILLIONTH OF THE HATE I FEEL FOR HUMANS AT THIS MICRO-INSTANT FOR YOU. HATE. HATE.
:shaking:
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how do I scan a file/link for viruses before I download it?
also, I have "Java 6 Update 27 (64-bit)" so why isn't there a game window on the minecraft classic (http://www.minecraft.net/classic/play) page?
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Here's a question that holds great relevance: Who is your favorite "evil" AI and why?
The Berserkers
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Um...... what about my previous two questions?
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Double Posting!
People have been backing up their computers for years, so I'm supposing the only reason Carbonite exists is
1. Profit
2. For stupid people who don't know how to backup their computers, and
3. To help the government spy on you (more)
Assuming you are not talking about this (http://www.carboniteaddon.com/), reasons 2 and 3 are delusions on your part.
how do I scan a file/link for viruses before I download it?
You don't.
also, I have "Java 6 Update 27 (64-bit)" so why isn't there a game window on the minecraft classic (http://www.minecraft.net/classic/play) page?
This is not minecraft support.
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Here's a question that holds great relevance: Who is your favorite "evil" AI and why?
Edward. :D
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Not really because some plants tend to grow better in some climates than others. And we don't know just how many different plants exist out there. Just because we've already got something that works doesn't mean we can't stop trying or looking for others. Different tastes aren't a bad thing and some may have different or better nutritional qualities.
You realize that the process and genetic changes wrought by domestication have only begun to be understood very recently, that most domestication has taken hundreds of years, and that this is an evolving process for every species humanity has interest in, right?
As in, domestication is an ongoing process, and is unlikely to ever end.
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Um...... what about my previous two questions?
are you sure youre not lying about your methamphetamine usage?