Urkel Forever - 2010-04-26
I have to say that I am still baffled by this lying scientists thing. I realize that there are lots of whacked out people who believe that, for one, biology is basic a big satanic conspiracy. As crazy as that is, I can make sense of it. They have crazy beliefs that conflict with a branch of science. Ergo, they reason, Satan is making the biologists lie. But what amazes me is that there really seems to be no background explanation available. Are there some people that think science, all of it, is a lie? Even the part about how magnets work? Why? What am I missing?
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Urkel Forever - 2010-04-26 "But what amazes me is that there really seems to be no background explanation available."
That should read: "But what amazes me HERE is that there really seems to be no background explanation available."
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boner - 2010-04-26 I have a young earth creationist friend who seems otherwise reasonable. He has ADD and poor reading comprehension, i.e. he never reads books especially science books. So you can't have an on-the-level discussion about biology. Or religion since he hasn't really read the bible at all beside what they teach at sunday school.
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tmavomodry - 2010-04-26
yeah but what about rainbows?
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APE_GOD - 2010-04-27 WHAT ARE THEY PUTTING IN OUR WATER THAT MAKES RAINBOWS DOWN HERE?
WHAT ARE THEY PUTTING IN OUR WATER NOW
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godot - 2010-04-26
Curiously, the professor is describing coulombic attraction / repulsion of static charges, not magnetism, which generally involves moving charges.
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gSSEhh - 2010-04-27 This must be a subtle joke.
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APE_GOD - 2010-04-27 Dude....that is a cleaver. That is not a hatchet.
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kingarthur - 2010-04-27
Not quite how magnets work, but close enough!
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glendower - 2010-04-27
I can share the insane clown's frustration on this. I'm not a science guy, so I googled "How do magnets work." The resulting articles only pissed me off. Most of them explain the fairly comprehensible concepts of electromagnetism and why iron can be magnetized in the first place. But what I find puzzling is why permanent magnets exist in nature. Aren't segments of iron supposed to lose their charge naturally? Why the fuck would something stay magnetized? Fucking magnets.
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pastorofmuppets - 2010-04-27 Which is why the people who think the internet is a good substitute for a formal education are full of shit.
Understanding magnetic fields behavior requires understanding fields in general, which takes a fair amount of math. It's not hard math but requires at least an understanding of vector fields and derivatives, and most people stop taking math classes before they learn those.
Understanding why some ("soft") permanent magnets lose their charge and others don't requires knowledge chemistry... I'm not sure what specifically but I'm guessing at least crystal structures. I don't claim to understand chemistry beyond what I got in HS, but what I know is irrelevant since I never cut an album telling thousands of impressionable kids that learning is bullshit so that I could make a few more bucks at the next soda shower festival.
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kingofthenothing - 2010-04-27 The Professor in the video has videos on MIT's Youtube Channel. He's a Professor of Physics. So, they chose a good source, just not the right material.
Wikipedia is not a great place to help someone come to an understanding a of a thing. They gave up on trying to "Make Technical Articles Accessible" long ago. It's an ugly beast at times but it does serve a useful function in finding trivia. Trying to learn a new subject, on the other hand, presents certain difficulties, which I'm sure, by now, you've come to know.
That doesn't mean that real learning can't happen via the Internet. Like I mentioned before, MIT has video classes on its channel on YouTube. They are actual lectures, that take actual time to watch. More than this, there are videos from other uploaders that happen to teach middle school and high school courses. If you're a little rusty on your Algebra (and that can be forgiven), just search for whatever you are having problems with, say, quadratic equations, and you'll get helpful videos, some even with people speaking in an English accent, which you may or may not find pleasant.
There's a whole class, some 36 lectures, on Electricity and Magnetism, by the Professor in this video, on the MIT channel. If you want to educate yourself, I warn you, it will take a while, as most videos are in the 50 minute range. It might cut into your cat-video watching time but at least you'll learn new things and potentially become a more interesting person in the process.
http://www.youtube.com/user/MIT#p/c/C2CEECFD938FD494
If you look for it, it's out there, but not always. Take into account that the human race hasn't figured absolutely everything out yet. We've come pretty far, but there are still mysteries to this world, and new things are always being discovered. The internet age has spoiled many of us who want our knowledge right now, right this very second, and like the bratty children we've become, we must (re)learn that we can't always get our way, but if we ask nicely, we sometimes do.
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pastorofmuppets - 2010-04-27 OpenCourseWare is the shit and the MIT lectures are great. One neat thing is that if you are taking a class at another school that is using an MIT Press book, sometimes you can find lectures at MIT OCW given by the author. If you use iTunes to access the stuff then it's all on one place. Obviously what I said about replacing a formal education with the internet doesn't apply when you can get the formal education *over* the internet. I meant WP and other places where there are no consequences for publishing bad info.
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memedumpster - 2010-04-27
http://www.physics4kids.com/index.html
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nemeses9 - 2010-04-27
Stating facts tested and proven for centuries = lies?
I can dig that.
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