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anyone who heard about brain/body mass ratio knows it's inaccurate.
i know it's inaccurate, you know it's inaccurate but you seem to believe that pointing it out while making fun of midgets has value;it's funny ...
it's redundant at best. i probably should've ignored it but then you'd believe you are a comedian and would keep doing that because it would give you pleasure!.
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On November 28 2016 22:55 xM(Z wrote:
anyone who heard about brain/body mass ratio knows it's inaccurate.
i know it's inaccurate, you know it's inaccurate but you seem to believe that pointing it out while making fun of midgets has value;it's funny ...
it's redundant at best. i probably should've ignored it but then you'd believe you are a comedian and would keep doing that because it would give you pleasure!.
That is not what what you said appears to mean to an outsider. What i read is the following:
First you stated comfortably that intelligence is indeed based on brain/body mass ratio.
Then DanHH showed the absurdity of that by providing a counterexample with the midgetocracy. It does not appear to me that he makes fun of small people here.
Next, you completely misunderstand him, and assume that he just does not understand the concept of ratios.
He gets annoyed because he has to explain a joke to you.
And now you backpadel and claim that all of this was very obvious to you. Your posts do not show this.
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On November 28 2016 22:55 xM(Z wrote:
anyone who heard about brain/body mass ratio knows it's inaccurate.
i know it's inaccurate, you know it's inaccurate but you seem to believe that pointing it out while making fun of midgets has value;it's funny ...
it's redundant at best. i probably should've ignored it but then you'd believe you are a comedian and would keep doing that because it would give you pleasure!.
Are you a midget and are you trying to conceal why you are offended? If the brain/body mass ratio is related to intelligence, how do you explain that it some specific aspects of intelligence, such as the ability to understand humor, are seemingly uncorrelated to it, as both normal people and Romanians have the same brain/body ratio?
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On November 28 2016 23:04 opisska wrote:Show nested quote +On November 28 2016 22:55 xM(Z wrote:
anyone who heard about brain/body mass ratio knows it's inaccurate.
i know it's inaccurate, you know it's inaccurate but you seem to believe that pointing it out while making fun of midgets has value;it's funny ...
it's redundant at best. i probably should've ignored it but then you'd believe you are a comedian and would keep doing that because it would give you pleasure!. Are you a midget and are you trying to conceal why you are offended? If the brain/body mass ratio is related to intelligence, how do you explain that it some specific aspects of intelligence, such as the ability to understand humor, are seemingly uncorrelated to it, as both normal people and Romanians have the same brain/body ratio? meh, i'll just say i'm a midget and he's fat.
other than that it's based on levels.
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On November 28 2016 22:26 Simberto wrote:Show nested quote +On November 28 2016 20:59 Acrofales wrote:On November 28 2016 20:20 opisska wrote:On November 28 2016 19:46 Acrofales wrote:On November 28 2016 19:20 opisska wrote:On November 28 2016 18:58 Cascade wrote:On November 27 2016 12:55 Epishade wrote:
In the episode where Spongebob gets the shrink ray, he accidentally shrinks everybody in Bikini Bottom and they all get mad at him and start beating him up for being shrunk. To remedy this problem, he shrinks Bikini Bottom too, so that everybody is able to live as they did before, with everything at the same relative size. Assuming they had no outside contact and were isolationist, would they run into any problems, or was this an effective solution? Changing size of animals suffer from the square-cube law: en.wikipedia.org. Specially, our muscles act through electromagnetism which essentially scale with the square of the size, while gravity and inertia scales with the cube. This presents a large problem for scaling up the size of land animals, which is the parade example of the square cube principle. However, it is not as clean in aquatic animals (as mentioned in wiki), and even less so when it comes to shrinking an animal (not mentioned). So would they notice? Yes, no doubt. Even ignoring the rest of the world sudenly going 2x as big, everyone would be twice as strong when it comes to interacting with other things also scaled down 50%. They'd notice immediately. Would they survive? Not sure. I'd guess that the internal organs of most animals wouldn't survive a factor 2 increase in muscle compared inertia. How would the now too-strong heart cope? Digestion? Breathing? No idea. So well, I can't immediately point out something that'd kill them, but making a guess, I think there will be something internal that would be messed up. I have seen several shrinking-themed stories and I always wandered, how is the shrinking even done at the molecular level? You can't realistically shrink atoms - even if you somehow created a matter for which atomic distances are indeed shrunk, you constantly exchange matter with your surroundings and that would blow you up pretty fast, not to mention that interactions between small and big atoms would probably be pretty funky in the first place - unless you had a tank with shrunk-oxygen, you'd suffocate instantly I guess. Thus you need to make everything smaller using normal biomolecules. First, where do you put the surplus ones (and how do you get them back in place during unshrinking, should you plan to do that)? Second, you can't pick every n-th molecule to keep and run with it, the whole shrinking would basically mean a complete re-engineering of the whole body to work at the smaller size. We know that smaller life is possible, because it exists, but it is unclear to me, how small can we go while keeping the overall structure and function human-like. Our brain is pretty big and its size is a big issue in energy consumption, yet evolution thought it is a good idea to make it big - how much can we shrink it while retaining intelligence? Sure, there are people twice smaller than myself in volume, so some room exists  But "tiny people" shrinks (like milimeter-scale) are probably out of question not only because of the brain but because you wouldn't be able to physically fit in a working digestive and circulatory system, just because you can't really shrink the cells (because of molecule sizes) and you just wouldn't fit enough different cells in the place to make it work. That's pretty sad, because at those scales, you get all these interesting things (that are usually just glossed over), such as the surface tension making you unable to drink and microorganisms being physically threatening, but that's probably not gonna happen, because you'd be dead a long time before it from simply not having a working biology ... Mhmmm. So if we can have the magic of a shrink ray, why can't we have the magic of shrunk atoms? If we posit magic in the first place, then we can posit magic to make the changed situation work. There is a magic universe of small atoms, and all the shrink ray does is convert your big atoms into small ones. If it is gradual then you can choose the atom size on a dial. And don't give me no fundamental laws of physics prohibiting that. We just posited that the world is magic. As long as it's still internally consistent, then it's fine. Or do you read Harry Potter and complain that it's not realistic? Note that Harry Potter is not the best example, because it is textbook "because magic" trope. Mistborn is probably the best recent (popular) example of an internally consistent magical world, but it's a lot less well known. Well "because magic" solves everything, right? But if we aim for some consistency, then, as I said, the main issue is the interaction with real-size atoms. Your whole body is built upon a delicate balance of chemical reactions. Let's imagine that being "magically" shrunk by shrink each atom. Then you still need to breathe and eat and real-size atoms just aren't gonna play along very well with this. Essentially to shrink the atom you need to change mass and charge of all elementary particles and then within themselves, they would work fine, but normal atoms would be very exotic and probably terribly poisonous substances to them. Now the big question is, what changes you would actually make to make this work? Naively, one would just cut a piece out of every elementary particle - but that would actually have the opposite effect, because quantum mechanics is silly and lighter particles have larger wavelengths. As your size is determined by atomic/molecular forces, not nuclear ones, it could actually work to mess only with electrons and you would just need to make them heavier for everything to shrink. But then suddenly all energy scales would go way up, all the chemistry in you would both require and produce much more heat - this would mean that the world around you would suddenly be freezing cold and I am not even sure at what scale it would become physically unfeasible to energetically sustain basic metabolism because of the sheer volume of food that you'd need to consume to stay barely alive. You see, you're still trapped in your non-magical world where shrink rays don't exist. It's like watching the Iron Man movies and complaining that the Arc reactor has to be breaking the laws of thermodynamics. Yes, but so what? The problem here is that "because magic" is fine if it is used to set up an interesting world with consistent rules. Using "because magic" to solve problems makes stories boring. If the question is "Does shrinking everything lead to problems?", the answer "no, because magic makes all the problems go away" is both uncreative and boring. Obviously it works, if your assumption is "magic solves all the problems". That does not change the fact that it is boring. Thus, you need to make some assumptions and build a logical framework for that question to actually work in a way that is interesting. You can answer any question and solve any problem in speculative fiction with "because magic" or "because sufficiently advanced technology". Those stories are very uninteresting to t. For a story to be interesting, you need rules with regards to how magic/tech works if it is a major plotpoint. That is also the reason why Gandalf doesn't just magic the one ring to mount doom. Gandalfs magic does not follow rules, and thus it is not able to solve problems. Show nested quote +On November 28 2016 22:18 xM(Z wrote:
i don't think you know what ratio means here.
6/24=0.25
3/12=0.25
= keeping the same ratio but decreasing the size
= the 6/24 is as smart as 3/12
Edit: maybe i should've said keep the initial ratio but i mean ... come on, it's implied And midgets have a comparatively larger brain to rest of body ratio. Thus, by your theory that this ratio is the important thing, that would mean that midgets are on average a lot more intelligent than non-midget, and we should be living in a midgetocracy.
Well, to solve the issue then, we'd need to go into detail on how the bikini-bottom shrink ray worked, and given that it is a cartoon for children with 20? minute episodes, I don't think that will be adequately explained. So while internal consistency might be a problem, we cannot really know that. What we do know is that apparently the shrink ray works well enough to ensure none of the problems Opisska mentioned are an issue, because they are issues that would cause all of Bikini Bottom to die instantly rather than complain that they are shrunk. If, instead, you get hooked up on "but it's impossible, because shrinking everything down cannot be done without X", then you are not suspending your disbelief enough to enjoy the story. That's fine, but "because magic" has to be invoked SOMEWHERE in the story (or it wouldn't be fantastical), all that you're really saying is that your tolerance for "because magic" is too low to involve shrink rays. There is no quantum mechanics explanation of shrink rays because shrink rays do not (and cannot) exist in our universe. Just as the arc reactor would break the laws of thermodynamics, and there is no platform 9 3/4 at kings cross station.
The question of Bikini Bottom is thus not "wait, how did they get shrunk and not instantly die in the first place", but rather "now that they are shrunk, are there any issues that normal sized bikini bottomers would not encounter, but the shrunk down versions will". Clearly the fact that fish are not shrunk down make bikini bottomers now fish food to a hell of a lot more potential predators. For instance, while normal sized spongebob is presumably able to fend off turtles that try to nibble him, a shrunk spongebob would be swallowed whole and not even qualify as a full meal.
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On November 29 2016 00:00 Acrofales wrote:Show nested quote +On November 28 2016 22:26 Simberto wrote:On November 28 2016 20:59 Acrofales wrote:On November 28 2016 20:20 opisska wrote:On November 28 2016 19:46 Acrofales wrote:On November 28 2016 19:20 opisska wrote:On November 28 2016 18:58 Cascade wrote:On November 27 2016 12:55 Epishade wrote:
In the episode where Spongebob gets the shrink ray, he accidentally shrinks everybody in Bikini Bottom and they all get mad at him and start beating him up for being shrunk. To remedy this problem, he shrinks Bikini Bottom too, so that everybody is able to live as they did before, with everything at the same relative size. Assuming they had no outside contact and were isolationist, would they run into any problems, or was this an effective solution? Changing size of animals suffer from the square-cube law: en.wikipedia.org. Specially, our muscles act through electromagnetism which essentially scale with the square of the size, while gravity and inertia scales with the cube. This presents a large problem for scaling up the size of land animals, which is the parade example of the square cube principle. However, it is not as clean in aquatic animals (as mentioned in wiki), and even less so when it comes to shrinking an animal (not mentioned). So would they notice? Yes, no doubt. Even ignoring the rest of the world sudenly going 2x as big, everyone would be twice as strong when it comes to interacting with other things also scaled down 50%. They'd notice immediately. Would they survive? Not sure. I'd guess that the internal organs of most animals wouldn't survive a factor 2 increase in muscle compared inertia. How would the now too-strong heart cope? Digestion? Breathing? No idea. So well, I can't immediately point out something that'd kill them, but making a guess, I think there will be something internal that would be messed up. I have seen several shrinking-themed stories and I always wandered, how is the shrinking even done at the molecular level? You can't realistically shrink atoms - even if you somehow created a matter for which atomic distances are indeed shrunk, you constantly exchange matter with your surroundings and that would blow you up pretty fast, not to mention that interactions between small and big atoms would probably be pretty funky in the first place - unless you had a tank with shrunk-oxygen, you'd suffocate instantly I guess. Thus you need to make everything smaller using normal biomolecules. First, where do you put the surplus ones (and how do you get them back in place during unshrinking, should you plan to do that)? Second, you can't pick every n-th molecule to keep and run with it, the whole shrinking would basically mean a complete re-engineering of the whole body to work at the smaller size. We know that smaller life is possible, because it exists, but it is unclear to me, how small can we go while keeping the overall structure and function human-like. Our brain is pretty big and its size is a big issue in energy consumption, yet evolution thought it is a good idea to make it big - how much can we shrink it while retaining intelligence? Sure, there are people twice smaller than myself in volume, so some room exists But "tiny people" shrinks (like milimeter-scale) are probably out of question not only because of the brain but because you wouldn't be able to physically fit in a working digestive and circulatory system, just because you can't really shrink the cells (because of molecule sizes) and you just wouldn't fit enough different cells in the place to make it work. That's pretty sad, because at those scales, you get all these interesting things (that are usually just glossed over), such as the surface tension making you unable to drink and microorganisms being physically threatening, but that's probably not gonna happen, because you'd be dead a long time before it from simply not having a working biology ... Mhmmm. So if we can have the magic of a shrink ray, why can't we have the magic of shrunk atoms? If we posit magic in the first place, then we can posit magic to make the changed situation work. There is a magic universe of small atoms, and all the shrink ray does is convert your big atoms into small ones. If it is gradual then you can choose the atom size on a dial. And don't give me no fundamental laws of physics prohibiting that. We just posited that the world is magic. As long as it's still internally consistent, then it's fine. Or do you read Harry Potter and complain that it's not realistic? Note that Harry Potter is not the best example, because it is textbook "because magic" trope. Mistborn is probably the best recent (popular) example of an internally consistent magical world, but it's a lot less well known. Well "because magic" solves everything, right? But if we aim for some consistency, then, as I said, the main issue is the interaction with real-size atoms. Your whole body is built upon a delicate balance of chemical reactions. Let's imagine that being "magically" shrunk by shrink each atom. Then you still need to breathe and eat and real-size atoms just aren't gonna play along very well with this. Essentially to shrink the atom you need to change mass and charge of all elementary particles and then within themselves, they would work fine, but normal atoms would be very exotic and probably terribly poisonous substances to them. Now the big question is, what changes you would actually make to make this work? Naively, one would just cut a piece out of every elementary particle - but that would actually have the opposite effect, because quantum mechanics is silly and lighter particles have larger wavelengths. As your size is determined by atomic/molecular forces, not nuclear ones, it could actually work to mess only with electrons and you would just need to make them heavier for everything to shrink. But then suddenly all energy scales would go way up, all the chemistry in you would both require and produce much more heat - this would mean that the world around you would suddenly be freezing cold and I am not even sure at what scale it would become physically unfeasible to energetically sustain basic metabolism because of the sheer volume of food that you'd need to consume to stay barely alive. You see, you're still trapped in your non-magical world where shrink rays don't exist. It's like watching the Iron Man movies and complaining that the Arc reactor has to be breaking the laws of thermodynamics. Yes, but so what? The problem here is that "because magic" is fine if it is used to set up an interesting world with consistent rules. Using "because magic" to solve problems makes stories boring. If the question is "Does shrinking everything lead to problems?", the answer "no, because magic makes all the problems go away" is both uncreative and boring. Obviously it works, if your assumption is "magic solves all the problems". That does not change the fact that it is boring. Thus, you need to make some assumptions and build a logical framework for that question to actually work in a way that is interesting. You can answer any question and solve any problem in speculative fiction with "because magic" or "because sufficiently advanced technology". Those stories are very uninteresting to t. For a story to be interesting, you need rules with regards to how magic/tech works if it is a major plotpoint. That is also the reason why Gandalf doesn't just magic the one ring to mount doom. Gandalfs magic does not follow rules, and thus it is not able to solve problems. On November 28 2016 22:18 xM(Z wrote:
i don't think you know what ratio means here.
6/24=0.25
3/12=0.25
= keeping the same ratio but decreasing the size
= the 6/24 is as smart as 3/12
Edit: maybe i should've said keep the initial ratio but i mean ... come on, it's implied And midgets have a comparatively larger brain to rest of body ratio. Thus, by your theory that this ratio is the important thing, that would mean that midgets are on average a lot more intelligent than non-midget, and we should be living in a midgetocracy. Well, to solve the issue then, we'd need to go into detail on how the bikini-bottom shrink ray worked, and given that it is a cartoon for children with 20? minute episodes, I don't think that will be adequately explained. So while internal consistency might be a problem, we cannot really know that. What we do know is that apparently the shrink ray works well enough to ensure none of the problems Opisska mentioned are an issue, because they are issues that would cause all of Bikini Bottom to die instantly rather than complain that they are shrunk. If, instead, you get hooked up on "but it's impossible, because shrinking everything down cannot be done without X", then you are not suspending your disbelief enough to enjoy the story. That's fine, but "because magic" has to be invoked SOMEWHERE in the story (or it wouldn't be fantastical), all that you're really saying is that your tolerance for "because magic" is too low to involve shrink rays. There is no quantum mechanics explanation of shrink rays because shrink rays do not (and cannot) exist in our universe. Just as the arc reactor would break the laws of thermodynamics, and there is no platform 9 3/4 at kings cross station. The question of Bikini Bottom is thus not "wait, how did they get shrunk and not instantly die in the first place", but rather "now that they are shrunk, are there any issues that normal sized bikini bottomers would not encounter, but the shrunk down versions will". Clearly the fact that fish are not shrunk down make bikini bottomers now fish food to a hell of a lot more potential predators. For instance, while normal sized spongebob is presumably able to fend off turtles that try to nibble him, a shrunk spongebob would be swallowed whole and not even qualify as a full meal.
But the problem faced by them strongly depend on the method of their shrinking, that is the very point of the thing! Yeah, the problems "X is now bigger than them and thus could eat them" are obvious, but also - by the virtue of being obvious - pretty boring. The problem is though that once you start thinking about other problems, you realize that these are more of a "how come I am not dead now" issues than interestingly unusual annoyances. Note that I have never cast any doubt as to the possibility of shrinking things (which is a pretty big suspenssion of disbelief is you ask me), it's only that it is hard to come up with problems that can't be immediately generalized to something instantly life threatening.
But whatever, I will be game - but it's all only qualitative if we do not know the mechanism of shrinking even remotely. Thus: water viscosity - at what scale do they suffocate because they gill wouldn't allow enough water through for breathing? This depends strongly on how the shrinking affects metabolic rate per volume of the organism.
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On November 28 2016 23:02 Simberto wrote:Show nested quote +On November 28 2016 22:55 xM(Z wrote:
anyone who heard about brain/body mass ratio knows it's inaccurate.
i know it's inaccurate, you know it's inaccurate but you seem to believe that pointing it out while making fun of midgets has value;it's funny ...
it's redundant at best. i probably should've ignored it but then you'd believe you are a comedian and would keep doing that because it would give you pleasure!. That is not what what you said appears to mean to an outsider. What i read is the following: First you stated comfortably that intelligence is indeed based on brain/body mass ratio. Then DanHH showed the absurdity of that by providing a counterexample with the midgetocracy. It does not appear to me that he makes fun of small people here. Next, you completely misunderstand him, and assume that he just does not understand the concept of ratios. He gets annoyed because he has to explain a joke to you. And now you backpadel and claim that all of this was very obvious to you. Your posts do not show this. that is not how it works.
- every statement comes from a context. no one ever describes the full context so you, the interlocutor, infer the missing parts. in this case, you inferred that i didn't knew about the brain body ratio being inaccurate(even when its definition says rough estimate);
- Dan changed the context, case in which prior statements no longer apply or would need to be readjusted.
- i didn't misunderstood him, just though he wasn't funny so i (tried to) mock him with the ratios(yes, his joke was that bad that initially i thought he didn't get something).
- he gets annoyed because he has to explain why he wasn't funny and why he's mixing apples with oranges;
- there was no backpedal; between cartoons and magic, a rough estimate was a step up so i was owning it up.
Edit: and why his joke was really bad - the brain/body mass ratio is used to guess-estimate the intelligence on a per species basis, not to estimate the IQ in individuals of the same specie.
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On November 29 2016 00:19 opisska wrote:Show nested quote +On November 29 2016 00:00 Acrofales wrote:On November 28 2016 22:26 Simberto wrote:On November 28 2016 20:59 Acrofales wrote:On November 28 2016 20:20 opisska wrote:On November 28 2016 19:46 Acrofales wrote:On November 28 2016 19:20 opisska wrote:On November 28 2016 18:58 Cascade wrote:On November 27 2016 12:55 Epishade wrote:
In the episode where Spongebob gets the shrink ray, he accidentally shrinks everybody in Bikini Bottom and they all get mad at him and start beating him up for being shrunk. To remedy this problem, he shrinks Bikini Bottom too, so that everybody is able to live as they did before, with everything at the same relative size. Assuming they had no outside contact and were isolationist, would they run into any problems, or was this an effective solution? Changing size of animals suffer from the square-cube law: en.wikipedia.org. Specially, our muscles act through electromagnetism which essentially scale with the square of the size, while gravity and inertia scales with the cube. This presents a large problem for scaling up the size of land animals, which is the parade example of the square cube principle. However, it is not as clean in aquatic animals (as mentioned in wiki), and even less so when it comes to shrinking an animal (not mentioned). So would they notice? Yes, no doubt. Even ignoring the rest of the world sudenly going 2x as big, everyone would be twice as strong when it comes to interacting with other things also scaled down 50%. They'd notice immediately. Would they survive? Not sure. I'd guess that the internal organs of most animals wouldn't survive a factor 2 increase in muscle compared inertia. How would the now too-strong heart cope? Digestion? Breathing? No idea. So well, I can't immediately point out something that'd kill them, but making a guess, I think there will be something internal that would be messed up. I have seen several shrinking-themed stories and I always wandered, how is the shrinking even done at the molecular level? You can't realistically shrink atoms - even if you somehow created a matter for which atomic distances are indeed shrunk, you constantly exchange matter with your surroundings and that would blow you up pretty fast, not to mention that interactions between small and big atoms would probably be pretty funky in the first place - unless you had a tank with shrunk-oxygen, you'd suffocate instantly I guess. Thus you need to make everything smaller using normal biomolecules. First, where do you put the surplus ones (and how do you get them back in place during unshrinking, should you plan to do that)? Second, you can't pick every n-th molecule to keep and run with it, the whole shrinking would basically mean a complete re-engineering of the whole body to work at the smaller size. We know that smaller life is possible, because it exists, but it is unclear to me, how small can we go while keeping the overall structure and function human-like. Our brain is pretty big and its size is a big issue in energy consumption, yet evolution thought it is a good idea to make it big - how much can we shrink it while retaining intelligence? Sure, there are people twice smaller than myself in volume, so some room exists But "tiny people" shrinks (like milimeter-scale) are probably out of question not only because of the brain but because you wouldn't be able to physically fit in a working digestive and circulatory system, just because you can't really shrink the cells (because of molecule sizes) and you just wouldn't fit enough different cells in the place to make it work. That's pretty sad, because at those scales, you get all these interesting things (that are usually just glossed over), such as the surface tension making you unable to drink and microorganisms being physically threatening, but that's probably not gonna happen, because you'd be dead a long time before it from simply not having a working biology ... Mhmmm. So if we can have the magic of a shrink ray, why can't we have the magic of shrunk atoms? If we posit magic in the first place, then we can posit magic to make the changed situation work. There is a magic universe of small atoms, and all the shrink ray does is convert your big atoms into small ones. If it is gradual then you can choose the atom size on a dial. And don't give me no fundamental laws of physics prohibiting that. We just posited that the world is magic. As long as it's still internally consistent, then it's fine. Or do you read Harry Potter and complain that it's not realistic? Note that Harry Potter is not the best example, because it is textbook "because magic" trope. Mistborn is probably the best recent (popular) example of an internally consistent magical world, but it's a lot less well known. Well "because magic" solves everything, right? But if we aim for some consistency, then, as I said, the main issue is the interaction with real-size atoms. Your whole body is built upon a delicate balance of chemical reactions. Let's imagine that being "magically" shrunk by shrink each atom. Then you still need to breathe and eat and real-size atoms just aren't gonna play along very well with this. Essentially to shrink the atom you need to change mass and charge of all elementary particles and then within themselves, they would work fine, but normal atoms would be very exotic and probably terribly poisonous substances to them. Now the big question is, what changes you would actually make to make this work? Naively, one would just cut a piece out of every elementary particle - but that would actually have the opposite effect, because quantum mechanics is silly and lighter particles have larger wavelengths. As your size is determined by atomic/molecular forces, not nuclear ones, it could actually work to mess only with electrons and you would just need to make them heavier for everything to shrink. But then suddenly all energy scales would go way up, all the chemistry in you would both require and produce much more heat - this would mean that the world around you would suddenly be freezing cold and I am not even sure at what scale it would become physically unfeasible to energetically sustain basic metabolism because of the sheer volume of food that you'd need to consume to stay barely alive. You see, you're still trapped in your non-magical world where shrink rays don't exist. It's like watching the Iron Man movies and complaining that the Arc reactor has to be breaking the laws of thermodynamics. Yes, but so what? The problem here is that "because magic" is fine if it is used to set up an interesting world with consistent rules. Using "because magic" to solve problems makes stories boring. If the question is "Does shrinking everything lead to problems?", the answer "no, because magic makes all the problems go away" is both uncreative and boring. Obviously it works, if your assumption is "magic solves all the problems". That does not change the fact that it is boring. Thus, you need to make some assumptions and build a logical framework for that question to actually work in a way that is interesting. You can answer any question and solve any problem in speculative fiction with "because magic" or "because sufficiently advanced technology". Those stories are very uninteresting to t. For a story to be interesting, you need rules with regards to how magic/tech works if it is a major plotpoint. That is also the reason why Gandalf doesn't just magic the one ring to mount doom. Gandalfs magic does not follow rules, and thus it is not able to solve problems. On November 28 2016 22:18 xM(Z wrote:
i don't think you know what ratio means here.
6/24=0.25
3/12=0.25
= keeping the same ratio but decreasing the size
= the 6/24 is as smart as 3/12
Edit: maybe i should've said keep the initial ratio but i mean ... come on, it's implied And midgets have a comparatively larger brain to rest of body ratio. Thus, by your theory that this ratio is the important thing, that would mean that midgets are on average a lot more intelligent than non-midget, and we should be living in a midgetocracy. Well, to solve the issue then, we'd need to go into detail on how the bikini-bottom shrink ray worked, and given that it is a cartoon for children with 20? minute episodes, I don't think that will be adequately explained. So while internal consistency might be a problem, we cannot really know that. What we do know is that apparently the shrink ray works well enough to ensure none of the problems Opisska mentioned are an issue, because they are issues that would cause all of Bikini Bottom to die instantly rather than complain that they are shrunk. If, instead, you get hooked up on "but it's impossible, because shrinking everything down cannot be done without X", then you are not suspending your disbelief enough to enjoy the story. That's fine, but "because magic" has to be invoked SOMEWHERE in the story (or it wouldn't be fantastical), all that you're really saying is that your tolerance for "because magic" is too low to involve shrink rays. There is no quantum mechanics explanation of shrink rays because shrink rays do not (and cannot) exist in our universe. Just as the arc reactor would break the laws of thermodynamics, and there is no platform 9 3/4 at kings cross station. The question of Bikini Bottom is thus not "wait, how did they get shrunk and not instantly die in the first place", but rather "now that they are shrunk, are there any issues that normal sized bikini bottomers would not encounter, but the shrunk down versions will". Clearly the fact that fish are not shrunk down make bikini bottomers now fish food to a hell of a lot more potential predators. For instance, while normal sized spongebob is presumably able to fend off turtles that try to nibble him, a shrunk spongebob would be swallowed whole and not even qualify as a full meal. But the problem faced by them strongly depend on the method of their shrinking, that is the very point of the thing! Yeah, the problems "X is now bigger than them and thus could eat them" are obvious, but also - by the virtue of being obvious - pretty boring. The problem is though that once you start thinking about other problems, you realize that these are more of a "how come I am not dead now" issues than interestingly unusual annoyances. Note that I have never cast any doubt as to the possibility of shrinking things (which is a pretty big suspenssion of disbelief is you ask me), it's only that it is hard to come up with problems that can't be immediately generalized to something instantly life threatening. But whatever, I will be game - but it's all only qualitative if we do not know the mechanism of shrinking even remotely. Thus: water viscosity - at what scale do they suffocate because they gill wouldn't allow enough water through for breathing? This depends strongly on how the shrinking affects metabolic rate per volume of the organism.
I think a bigger problem than water viscosity is the fact that they are 2D and have no surface area on their gills at all  Apparently cartoon water works very differently from what we know 
Come to think of it, why are you talking about volume? Clearly we should be talking about how shrinking affects the metabolic rate per area of the organism? And that is great, because it only drops by a square of the shrink ratio, rather than the cube of the shrink ratio! Of course, the problems are probably not alleviated, because the outside of the organisms will drop approximately linearly with the shrink ratio (it depends on the shape, but Spongebob at least is square (or his pants are... hmmm), so it works there).
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On November 29 2016 03:21 Acrofales wrote:Show nested quote +On November 29 2016 00:19 opisska wrote:On November 29 2016 00:00 Acrofales wrote:On November 28 2016 22:26 Simberto wrote:On November 28 2016 20:59 Acrofales wrote:On November 28 2016 20:20 opisska wrote:On November 28 2016 19:46 Acrofales wrote:On November 28 2016 19:20 opisska wrote:On November 28 2016 18:58 Cascade wrote:On November 27 2016 12:55 Epishade wrote:
In the episode where Spongebob gets the shrink ray, he accidentally shrinks everybody in Bikini Bottom and they all get mad at him and start beating him up for being shrunk. To remedy this problem, he shrinks Bikini Bottom too, so that everybody is able to live as they did before, with everything at the same relative size. Assuming they had no outside contact and were isolationist, would they run into any problems, or was this an effective solution? Changing size of animals suffer from the square-cube law: en.wikipedia.org. Specially, our muscles act through electromagnetism which essentially scale with the square of the size, while gravity and inertia scales with the cube. This presents a large problem for scaling up the size of land animals, which is the parade example of the square cube principle. However, it is not as clean in aquatic animals (as mentioned in wiki), and even less so when it comes to shrinking an animal (not mentioned). So would they notice? Yes, no doubt. Even ignoring the rest of the world sudenly going 2x as big, everyone would be twice as strong when it comes to interacting with other things also scaled down 50%. They'd notice immediately. Would they survive? Not sure. I'd guess that the internal organs of most animals wouldn't survive a factor 2 increase in muscle compared inertia. How would the now too-strong heart cope? Digestion? Breathing? No idea. So well, I can't immediately point out something that'd kill them, but making a guess, I think there will be something internal that would be messed up. I have seen several shrinking-themed stories and I always wandered, how is the shrinking even done at the molecular level? You can't realistically shrink atoms - even if you somehow created a matter for which atomic distances are indeed shrunk, you constantly exchange matter with your surroundings and that would blow you up pretty fast, not to mention that interactions between small and big atoms would probably be pretty funky in the first place - unless you had a tank with shrunk-oxygen, you'd suffocate instantly I guess. Thus you need to make everything smaller using normal biomolecules. First, where do you put the surplus ones (and how do you get them back in place during unshrinking, should you plan to do that)? Second, you can't pick every n-th molecule to keep and run with it, the whole shrinking would basically mean a complete re-engineering of the whole body to work at the smaller size. We know that smaller life is possible, because it exists, but it is unclear to me, how small can we go while keeping the overall structure and function human-like. Our brain is pretty big and its size is a big issue in energy consumption, yet evolution thought it is a good idea to make it big - how much can we shrink it while retaining intelligence? Sure, there are people twice smaller than myself in volume, so some room exists But "tiny people" shrinks (like milimeter-scale) are probably out of question not only because of the brain but because you wouldn't be able to physically fit in a working digestive and circulatory system, just because you can't really shrink the cells (because of molecule sizes) and you just wouldn't fit enough different cells in the place to make it work. That's pretty sad, because at those scales, you get all these interesting things (that are usually just glossed over), such as the surface tension making you unable to drink and microorganisms being physically threatening, but that's probably not gonna happen, because you'd be dead a long time before it from simply not having a working biology ... Mhmmm. So if we can have the magic of a shrink ray, why can't we have the magic of shrunk atoms? If we posit magic in the first place, then we can posit magic to make the changed situation work. There is a magic universe of small atoms, and all the shrink ray does is convert your big atoms into small ones. If it is gradual then you can choose the atom size on a dial. And don't give me no fundamental laws of physics prohibiting that. We just posited that the world is magic. As long as it's still internally consistent, then it's fine. Or do you read Harry Potter and complain that it's not realistic? Note that Harry Potter is not the best example, because it is textbook "because magic" trope. Mistborn is probably the best recent (popular) example of an internally consistent magical world, but it's a lot less well known. Well "because magic" solves everything, right? But if we aim for some consistency, then, as I said, the main issue is the interaction with real-size atoms. Your whole body is built upon a delicate balance of chemical reactions. Let's imagine that being "magically" shrunk by shrink each atom. Then you still need to breathe and eat and real-size atoms just aren't gonna play along very well with this. Essentially to shrink the atom you need to change mass and charge of all elementary particles and then within themselves, they would work fine, but normal atoms would be very exotic and probably terribly poisonous substances to them. Now the big question is, what changes you would actually make to make this work? Naively, one would just cut a piece out of every elementary particle - but that would actually have the opposite effect, because quantum mechanics is silly and lighter particles have larger wavelengths. As your size is determined by atomic/molecular forces, not nuclear ones, it could actually work to mess only with electrons and you would just need to make them heavier for everything to shrink. But then suddenly all energy scales would go way up, all the chemistry in you would both require and produce much more heat - this would mean that the world around you would suddenly be freezing cold and I am not even sure at what scale it would become physically unfeasible to energetically sustain basic metabolism because of the sheer volume of food that you'd need to consume to stay barely alive. You see, you're still trapped in your non-magical world where shrink rays don't exist. It's like watching the Iron Man movies and complaining that the Arc reactor has to be breaking the laws of thermodynamics. Yes, but so what? The problem here is that "because magic" is fine if it is used to set up an interesting world with consistent rules. Using "because magic" to solve problems makes stories boring. If the question is "Does shrinking everything lead to problems?", the answer "no, because magic makes all the problems go away" is both uncreative and boring. Obviously it works, if your assumption is "magic solves all the problems". That does not change the fact that it is boring. Thus, you need to make some assumptions and build a logical framework for that question to actually work in a way that is interesting. You can answer any question and solve any problem in speculative fiction with "because magic" or "because sufficiently advanced technology". Those stories are very uninteresting to t. For a story to be interesting, you need rules with regards to how magic/tech works if it is a major plotpoint. That is also the reason why Gandalf doesn't just magic the one ring to mount doom. Gandalfs magic does not follow rules, and thus it is not able to solve problems. On November 28 2016 22:18 xM(Z wrote:
i don't think you know what ratio means here.
6/24=0.25
3/12=0.25
= keeping the same ratio but decreasing the size
= the 6/24 is as smart as 3/12
Edit: maybe i should've said keep the initial ratio but i mean ... come on, it's implied And midgets have a comparatively larger brain to rest of body ratio. Thus, by your theory that this ratio is the important thing, that would mean that midgets are on average a lot more intelligent than non-midget, and we should be living in a midgetocracy. Well, to solve the issue then, we'd need to go into detail on how the bikini-bottom shrink ray worked, and given that it is a cartoon for children with 20? minute episodes, I don't think that will be adequately explained. So while internal consistency might be a problem, we cannot really know that. What we do know is that apparently the shrink ray works well enough to ensure none of the problems Opisska mentioned are an issue, because they are issues that would cause all of Bikini Bottom to die instantly rather than complain that they are shrunk. If, instead, you get hooked up on "but it's impossible, because shrinking everything down cannot be done without X", then you are not suspending your disbelief enough to enjoy the story. That's fine, but "because magic" has to be invoked SOMEWHERE in the story (or it wouldn't be fantastical), all that you're really saying is that your tolerance for "because magic" is too low to involve shrink rays. There is no quantum mechanics explanation of shrink rays because shrink rays do not (and cannot) exist in our universe. Just as the arc reactor would break the laws of thermodynamics, and there is no platform 9 3/4 at kings cross station. The question of Bikini Bottom is thus not "wait, how did they get shrunk and not instantly die in the first place", but rather "now that they are shrunk, are there any issues that normal sized bikini bottomers would not encounter, but the shrunk down versions will". Clearly the fact that fish are not shrunk down make bikini bottomers now fish food to a hell of a lot more potential predators. For instance, while normal sized spongebob is presumably able to fend off turtles that try to nibble him, a shrunk spongebob would be swallowed whole and not even qualify as a full meal. But the problem faced by them strongly depend on the method of their shrinking, that is the very point of the thing! Yeah, the problems "X is now bigger than them and thus could eat them" are obvious, but also - by the virtue of being obvious - pretty boring. The problem is though that once you start thinking about other problems, you realize that these are more of a "how come I am not dead now" issues than interestingly unusual annoyances. Note that I have never cast any doubt as to the possibility of shrinking things (which is a pretty big suspenssion of disbelief is you ask me), it's only that it is hard to come up with problems that can't be immediately generalized to something instantly life threatening. But whatever, I will be game - but it's all only qualitative if we do not know the mechanism of shrinking even remotely. Thus: water viscosity - at what scale do they suffocate because they gill wouldn't allow enough water through for breathing? This depends strongly on how the shrinking affects metabolic rate per volume of the organism. I think a bigger problem than water viscosity is the fact that they are 2D and have no surface area on their gills at all Apparently cartoon water works very differently from what we know Come to think of it, why are you talking about volume? Clearly we should be talking about how shrinking affects the metabolic rate per area of the organism? And that is great, because it only drops by a square of the shrink ratio, rather than the cube of the shrink ratio! Of course, the problems are probably not alleviated, because the outside of the organisms will drop approximately linearly with the shrink ratio (it depends on the shape, but Spongebob at least is square (or his pants are... hmmm), so it works there).
A 2D organisms you say? That doesn't sound like a very much uplifting cartoon material - at least when you realize that a 2D organism can't gave a through-going digestive system (because it would split it into two disjoint pieces) and thus it has to literally vomit shit through its mouth. I hope it's not depicted in the actual cartoon at least.
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I keep people saying "midget" and I presume like most people they don't mean to use a derogatory slur, but it should be noted it is in fact considered a slur by many of the people being referred to.
The word “midget” was never coined as the official term to identify people with dwarfism, but was created as a label used to refer to people of short stature who were on public display for curiosity and sport. Today, the word “midget” is considered a derogatory slur. The dwarfism community has voiced that they prefer to be referred to as dwarfs, little people, people of short stature or having dwarfism, or simply, and most preferably, by their given name.
When we surveyed our community about the usage and overall impact of the word “midget”, over 90% of our members surveyed stated that the word should never be used in reference to a person with dwarfism.
Source
No idea if there are any little people around these parts, but I think it probably a good idea not to use the word going forward.
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Do midgets call other midgets midgets like black people call other black people the n word?
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On December 01 2016 02:22 Epishade wrote:
Do midgets call other midgets midgets like black people call other black people the n word?
No. And the words aren't comparable in they way you're attempting.
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I sometimes regret being totally normal and white male on top of it, because if i were a minority i could endorse all the slurs towards me with impunity.
Well, I am ugly and fat, but who here isn't, right?
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ZigguratOfUr
Iraq16955 Posts
On December 01 2016 02:33 opisska wrote:
I sometimes regret being totally normal and white male on top of it, because if i were a minority i could endorse all the slurs towards me with impunity.
Well, I am ugly and fat, but who here isn't, right?
You could fix that by impairing yourself in some way. Amputate a limb maybe. Or just move to Mongolia. Become a minority by choice rather than a minority by birth.
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On December 01 2016 03:18 ZigguratOfUr wrote:Show nested quote +On December 01 2016 02:33 opisska wrote:
I sometimes regret being totally normal and white male on top of it, because if i were a minority i could endorse all the slurs towards me with impunity.
Well, I am ugly and fat, but who here isn't, right? You could fix that by impairing yourself in some way. Amputate a limb maybe. Or just move to Mongolia. Become a minority by choice rather than a minority by birth.
cool idea, i hereby declare myself to be polish and authorize the use of "polack" - sadly the awesome czech anti-polish slur "pšonek" is not international, but i allow that too
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On December 01 2016 05:51 opisska wrote:Show nested quote +On December 01 2016 03:18 ZigguratOfUr wrote:On December 01 2016 02:33 opisska wrote:
I sometimes regret being totally normal and white male on top of it, because if i were a minority i could endorse all the slurs towards me with impunity.
Well, I am ugly and fat, but who here isn't, right? You could fix that by impairing yourself in some way. Amputate a limb maybe. Or just move to Mongolia. Become a minority by choice rather than a minority by birth. cool idea, i hereby declare myself to be polish and authorize the use of "polack" - sadly the awesome czech anti-polish slur "pšonek" is not international, but i allow that too
No one actually cares about slurs, its just what's most visible.
If you really want to experience being a minority ask your boss for less pay, no promotions, and only shitty hours. Then, defect your citizenship, and once you've done that reapply for a greencard, go through the process of having your life audited on a yearly basis as you prove you're a good citizen.
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On December 01 2016 05:51 opisska wrote:Show nested quote +On December 01 2016 03:18 ZigguratOfUr wrote:On December 01 2016 02:33 opisska wrote:
I sometimes regret being totally normal and white male on top of it, because if i were a minority i could endorse all the slurs towards me with impunity.
Well, I am ugly and fat, but who here isn't, right? You could fix that by impairing yourself in some way. Amputate a limb maybe. Or just move to Mongolia. Become a minority by choice rather than a minority by birth. cool idea, i hereby declare myself to be polish and authorize the use of "polack" - sadly the awesome czech anti-polish slur "pšonek" is not international, but i allow that too
I heard that Russians call us psheks so I guess it's somewhat international. Seems like other Slavs sounds find our "psh" sounds unique.
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On December 01 2016 07:01 JimmiC wrote:Show nested quote +On December 01 2016 06:23 Thieving Magpie wrote:On December 01 2016 05:51 opisska wrote:On December 01 2016 03:18 ZigguratOfUr wrote:On December 01 2016 02:33 opisska wrote:
I sometimes regret being totally normal and white male on top of it, because if i were a minority i could endorse all the slurs towards me with impunity.
Well, I am ugly and fat, but who here isn't, right? You could fix that by impairing yourself in some way. Amputate a limb maybe. Or just move to Mongolia. Become a minority by choice rather than a minority by birth. cool idea, i hereby declare myself to be polish and authorize the use of "polack" - sadly the awesome czech anti-polish slur "pšonek" is not international, but i allow that too No one actually cares about slurs, its just what's most visible. If you really want to experience being a minority ask your boss for less pay, no promotions, and only shitty hours. Then, defect your citizenship, and once you've done that reapply for a greencard, go through the process of having your life audited on a yearly basis as you prove you're a good citizen. \ Some of this is true, most of it is becoming less true every year. That being said it is very relevant where you live. There is a movement among many minorities to stop focusing on the racism to stop being a victim. I'm not sure how this will work but I think the biggest way to change is on the individual basis of people experiences and seeing that the racism is not true. There is always going to be some "isms" because of how humans are wired, hopefully we can get rid of the bad ones (like Asians being good at math and video game is not particularly hurtful). Sadly nothing on a message board esspecially one called dumb questions and answers will stop that. Also some people really do care about the slurs and find them very hurtful.
Slurs are definitely hurtful to certain degrees; but slurs is not what is meant when people talk about "systemic racism" or "Patriarchy"
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EPT
