andrestm

andrestm

36p

42 comments posted · 1 followers · following 1

13 years ago @ Listverse - Top 10 Most Influentia... · 2 replies · +7 points

I like the list but I don't understand something. You do state that there is a difference between psychiatrists and psychologists. Yet you name the list "Top 10 psychiatrists" when it's clearly a list devoted to psychology, as repeatedly stated. This would be like naming a list of chiropractors "Top 10 Rheumatologists."

I liked the list, though. I just think it should be named "Top 10 psychologists." Skinner and Piaget (whom I deeply admire) were not psychiatrists, for example.

13 years ago @ Listverse - Top 10 Greatest Milita... · 0 replies · +2 points

Why would Russia support China? Do you already know the circumstances under which this hypothetical and VERY improbable confrontation would occur? Damn, you're good.

13 years ago @ Listverse - Top 10 Greatest Milita... · 0 replies · +1 points

Well maybe I'm a polar bear with machine guns from Mars. If we're talking maybe, maybe you're just a madman and I shouldn't be listening to you. I mean, why should I listen to you, are you Vladimir Putin? You say that "maybe Russia has weapons the world has not seen yet." But that's absolutely obvious. Can't we say the same about the US? What does that have to do with anything? The fact of the matter is that the US Armed Forces have an R&D budget that is as big as the total budget of the Russian Armed Forces. Now who has the capacity to develop more weapons? Gee, I wonder...

13 years ago @ Listverse - 10 Craziest Scientific... · 0 replies · +6 points

1. "English" should be always capitalized.
2. "Seriously grammatical flawed" doesn't make any grammatical sense—do you mean "grammatically flawed"?
3. "Could you please have somebody look at your stuff before you post it, or take a writing class." Is that a complete sentence? Is that a question or a request? Don't you need a question mark at the end of that?
4. "It" after the period should be capitalized.
5. There should be a period after that thanks.

I mean, if you're going to be a "grammar Nazi" at least have the goddamn decency to check your own writing. Oh, wait, I get it, this is a joke. Hahah! you almost got me there, pal.

13 years ago @ Listverse - 10 Craziest Scientific... · 0 replies · +1 points

Trust me. If traveling through time some day becomes a possibility, calculating where the ship or whatever should land would be the least of problems. Think of it as the computers and the Internet. Go back in time and tell Galileo about them, he would probably say, "well but how are you going to power them? how are you going to keep the energy flow to the computer constant? that sounds impossible to me!" And he would have been right in pointing out that problem, but in reality, the Internet and computing are so much more complex than electricity that by the time we started using computers electricity was not really a problem. Time travel requires so many more calculations and stuff than locating the right coordinates for landing that there are many more problems to worry about, not that one.

13 years ago @ Listverse - 10 Craziest Scientific... · 0 replies · +1 points

Not necessarily. A theory can—and will, as is often the case—be proven wrong. A theory is a proposed explanation for a phenomenon that is consistent with the scientific method, but it is not an axiom. Take the superstring theory as an example. It is NOT simply a hypothesis (i.e., an "educated guess"), because there is some degree of evidence behind it, but it has NOT been proven correct either. Let's just be a little bold here and say that a hypothesis is more equivalent to a guess (an educated one) and a theory is more like a prediction (with a lot of background behind it). Time travel is not a mere hypothesis—neither is heat death. Let's not generalize and say that all of these things are theories, but clearly they're not all hypotheses either.

13 years ago @ Listverse - 10 Craziest Scientific... · 0 replies · +2 points

Good points. The thing is, unlike time travel into the future, which "only" requires us to find out a way to travel at speeds approaching the speed of light (which by any current or proposed technologies is practically impossible), time travel into the past would require us to find astronomical objects that have not been discovered yet, and not only that but also manipulate them in ways that either are impeded by the laws of physics or demand more resources that are available in the universe. I could be wrong, though. I mean, I don't know *every* theory that has been proposed as to how we could travel backwards in time, but the ones I've read about make it pretty impractical.

You're right, though, in that we've come a long way in only a few thousand years. Give us a million more and we'll do wonders that we couldn't even conceive with our mindsets stuck in the present times, but then again there are things that are pretty much beyond us, because of the physical constraints of the universe. Wouldn't it be exceedingly interesting to somehow find out how humanity or any other civilizations will deal with the inevitable, ultimate fate of the universe, and how far we/they will go with technology?

13 years ago @ Listverse - 10 Craziest Scientific... · 4 replies · +9 points

In theory, Einstein's special relativity allows time travel into the future but not into the past. However, actual theories have been posed as to how **general** relativity could allow some sort of loophole that we could use to travel backwards in time. A lot of people who think they know a lot love to dismiss time travel to the past as if it were nothing more than pseudo-science from pop culture, but you will find a good number of reputable astrophysicists (Princeton's J. Richard Gott, Caltech's Kipp Thorne, just to name two of them) that have proposed ways to use some of the universe's theoretical properties under general relativity to travel into the past.

But even if time travel into the past were theoretically possible, trust me, the technology that we would need to make it happen is waaaaaayyyy beyond us. And I don't mean us, you and me, I mean beyond humanity as a whole. Even forward time travel will be incredibly difficult to achieve and it will require lots and lots of resources, but backward time travel is just a completely different level.

I loved the list, by the way.

13 years ago @ Listverse - 10 Human Creations Att... · 0 replies · 0 points

See, your rejection of the missile explanation requires the existence of a second, greater conundrum. Why would the Russians make up a "missile test gone awry" explanation? Why would they be lying like that? I'd prefer to think you're wrong.

13 years ago @ Listverse - Top 10 Greatest Milita... · 0 replies · +1 points

You're right but I never suggested anything that contradicted what you've just said. The fact that you're right doesn't mean I'm not.

Keep in mind two critical facts regarding WWII:
-Out of the 204 billion dollars that the allies allocated to produce munitions, the United States spent $106 billion, more than half.
-The US produced, among others, than half of the military aircraft, machineguns, and military trucks used in WWII by the allies.

What I'm trying to say is that while the Russians did most of the fighting, and everyone should appreciate that, the fact is that the US was an enormous manufacturing power for the allies, and even Stalin admitted that the war couldn't have been won without them. Like I said before, just because your brain is really important for you doesn't mean your lungs aren't.