Vexing yet pointless questions
 

So, it seems to me everyone has those questions that have no bearing what so ever on life, yet still seem to bug you. Like what is a holla back girl. something that still bugs me every now and then. Given the vast pool of useless info available here on TFP, it seems like the ideal place to ask them. So, I here by declaire this the pointless question thread. If you see on you know the answer to, fill us in. If you have one, ask it.

Just what the hell is a holla back girl anyway?

What is the degradation propensity of an amorphous mass?

Link
here you go.

Come on now, that's an easy one. It is so easy i don't even have to type it out.



The real question is when you drink grape juice and then pee afterward, where does the purple go?

In your poop. You will certainly be interested in reading Green Poop: The Implications Of Food Dye On Poop Color | PoopReport.com.

It helps make your crap brown.

1. holla back girl

A girl that is willing to be treated like a doormat or booty call. She is a girl that will allow guys to do whatever they want with her and will just wait for them to 'holla back' at them.

Google is your friend

This thread was made for you, wasn't it, RL? :lol:

The one that always got me:

The speed of light is constant regardless of the frame of reference, so, If there were a concave mirror - a bowl with a perfectly reflective inside surface - travelling through space at the speed of light with respect to the observer, and light were to hit that bowl, would it remain in the bowl? Would it pool in there? How would it appear to the observer?

Now, I have taken relativistic physics in college (not doing particularly well, but I did pass) and it still gets me. I understand that from the bowl's frame of reference, it's stationary, and light hitting it enters and leaves at the speed of light without a Doppler effect, but to the observer light hitting an object at the speed of light should have its wavelength compressed to zero.

So there you have it - a nagging problem with no application.

Well, seeing as how the bowl is travelling at the speed of light, light shouldn't be able to hit the bowl I would think?

I think the bowl would pass the observer so fast they would have a pretty damn hard time observing it. :p The visibility time frame would be so small that it would result in very little information (light) transfer from the object to the observer. The little information that reached the observer would probably just look like a bowl traveling really really fast. :eek:

I thought the brown-ness was from discarded blood cells for the most part. ..?

If a photon were to strike the surface, it would reflect back at the speed of light as if it had reflected from a fixed point, but with reduced momentum because a photon will always travel at the speed of light in any medium. You'll have to read up on how a photon can be massless and still have momentum because I haven't taken physics in years.

The Philosophic stuff

What is the sound of one hand clapping?
If a tree falls in a forest and there is no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?

Then there's the stuff you muck up the kids with, like telling them that if they sneeze and fart at the same time, their head explodes. But then that's just plain mean.

Lastly, you mix the two up together, and then ask questions like:
If there's no God, then who pushes up the next tissue in the tissue box?

You know why hippies snap their fingers at poetry readings instead of clapping? they figured it out.

driveway...parkway... you know the drill

I don't think the question is valid...

Only light travels at the speed of light yes? Everything else travels fractionally slower. Normal stuff anyways... In that case - the time dilation fixes your problem. That's my gut feel on it anyways.

Probably others here will have a better explanation.

That the question is wrong is probably the answer. It's very like - If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? The question is wrong, because at a minimum there are other trees to hear it. Or it could be one of those questions like, If an airplane crashes on an international border, where do they bury the survivors?

While it is ture that only light travels always at the speed of light, I am unconvinced that there isn't a combination of frames of reference wherein a physical object travels at the speed of light orthagonal to a particular frame of reference. That said, the whole Bowl shaped aspect of the question would go away because the object moving at the speed of light would have a length = 0, so, even assuming that things did work where light hitting it would be reflected so as to move with a speed of zero relative to the mirror (which I do understand would not be the case), it would not pool, as the mirror would be flat.

Bear in mind, this question came up when my granddad tried to explain relativity to me when I was about 9 or 10. Of course I didn't understand it at the time, but the question has stuck with me as the touchstone of my understanding of the concept. I figure if I can ever visualize it I will be able to say I have a basic understanding of how this all actually works. It's equally likely that there is no way to even approximately visualize this situation, and it's a fool's game.

The answer is that from the perspective of the bowl, the photon would be massively blue shifted as it came towards the bowl, and then red shifted as is goes away.

Essentially, if you race towards a photon it gets more blue, and if the photon races away from you it gets more red.

Mentally, it feels as if the photon OUGHT to be moving in the same direction as the bowl, at the same speed, and that therefore it ought to "pool" in the bowl.

In truth, because all photons look like they're moving at c regardless of the observer, the difference is expressed in terms of a change of wavelength (i.e. Doppler shifted). The bowl will never quite catch the photons, and taken over an huge timescale, the photons will be almost infinately shifted to the end of the spectrum - becoming gamma radiation.

Actually, if the bowl is moving at a constant speed, which would be c from the second reference frame, isn't that the same as having it's own frame of reference moving at 0 with respect to itself? Or at the very least at some arbitrary velocity based on nearby accelerating frames of reference?

Regardless, I am hip to the Doppler-Fizeau effect. And I understand that, from a frame of reference in motion relative to the mirror, the light would appear to shift in one direction or another depending on the angle of incidence and the angle of reflection relative to the observing frame of reference. With that said, if a frame of reference is selected such that the mirror is travelling perpendicular to the angle of observation at the time light hits it, and has a velocity of c relative to that frame of reference, and if the light hits with and angle of incidence of zero, then the shift should, theoretically, be infinite. At the very least the wavelength would shrink to some incredibly tiny number, Planck's constant, probably.

This is well answered by the finest a cappella group out there, The Bobs: .

I thought it was because if they tried to clap they would miss their own hands, which were seeming so huge but far away at the same time.

How did I drop a letter off at the post office at 8am Monday, it bounce between post offices, get delivered by noon 75 miles away, and get a response post card mailed back to me by 3pm Tuesday... YET, I drop a similar letter off at 8am Monday, it bounces between post offices for days, gets delivered by noon Friday five miles away, and I get the response post card the next Friday at 3pm.

Are some post offices really that much more efficient?

HAHAHAHA oh lordy. Thank you for that.

Do infants enjoy infancy as much as adults enjoy adultery?

(BTW, nice av, seer!)

how about this:

the speed of light, c, is constant and absolute, right? nothing travels faster than c, right?

so, if I turn on a flashlight pointed in one direction, the light leaves it traveling at c. now, if I turn on another flashlight pointed in a direction 180 degrees from the first flashlight, that light leaves traveling at c also. so that means that these two pulses of light are traveling away from each other at TWICE the speed of light (or 2c)...right?