Very true, but you also don't want to give them a conceptual definition that is plain wrong, like you did.
I get the impression (not only from this thread but also from other threads) that you are trying to troll me, for whatever reason. Cut it out, will you?
By the way, I'm used to the following definition: the difference of entropy between states 1 and 2 is the integral of dQ/T over any reversible process that starts from state 1 and ends at state 2.
The problem with mathematically accurate definitions is that they are very hard for laymen to understand. That's why more informal and understandable definitions are necessary, even if they might not be fully accurate or might lead to misunderstandings.
When explaining General Relativity to a layman, you could give him the Einstein field equations, or when explaining quantum mechanics you could lay out the Maxwell equations, but that would be equivalent to explaining it in klingon. More colloquial approximations (if not even metaphors) are necessary to give even a slight idea of what's going on. It will be inaccurate, of course, but the alternative is not explaining it at all (at least not in a language that normal people understand).
You asked why someone should watch the show and those are my reasons.
Nobody should have to justify why they engage in a harmless hobby. It's a hobby, and if someone enjoys it, they have all the right in the world to engage in it without having to explain themselves to anybody, and without people belittling or even insulting them because of it, or even dismissively asking for an explanation.
It's like those people dressing in costumes and camping for a week in front of a movie theater to see the latest Star Wars or whatever movie, or people cosplaying for an anime convention, and then some moron commenting that what a bunch of nerds, they should get a life. That kind of person is an idiot. People are entitled to engage in whatever hobby they want if they like it. If someone doesn't understand it, at least they should understand that different people have different interests, and that not everybody has to fit into the same preconceived mold of "adulthood", "manliness" or whatever crap.
(If someone wants to honestly know why people engage in a certain hobby, out of pure and innocent curiosity, and without any kind of dismissive or self-righteous preconceived attitude, and wants to engage in a mutual conversation about such hobbies, that's a completely different story. That kind of conversation can be an informative and fulfilling learning experience on sociology and human nature.)
These are the gamers that care about achievements and hundred percent completion. In fact, if one achievement or objective is perceived as too hard (or worse, glitched), it invalidates the entire gaming experience for them, and they will refuse to even start. It's because the entire fun in the game is the feel of accomplishment -- without the end, the journey becomes pointless, and the conscience quickly resents all the precious time "wasted" on the task.
Sounds like someone I know very well... I am afflicted with this curse.
There are three things in gaming that seem to be very popular but which just don't interest me almost at all: Achievements, real-time strategy games and online multiplayer games.
I have never understood the charm in achievements. Some people seem hooked to them, searching every single useless item in the game just to get some kind of "all items found" achievement, and so on. I don't see any reason to do so.
To be fair, though, I often get hooked to things that most other people deem boring. One prominent example is level grinding in many RPGs. (If it's well done and the awards are just right, it can be really addictive.) I do understand perfectly, though, why most people find it boring, so it's not like I blame them.
I really don't see any connection between these two concepts. They both make sense on their own, but I keep getting confused trying to bridge the gap. Are they just separate ideas that share a name?
Don't ask me. I have never heard of anything like Bobo wrote nor do I understand a word of it, but then, I'm not a physicist and I only have an extremely cursory knowledge of these things.
Anyways, as I said, what I wrote is a more or less informal definition of entropy. How you define it in terms of physical laws and quantities is beyond my knowledge.
You're surprised that upon observing behavior that you admit is "lame and pathetic", some people will "belittle", and horror of horrors, even "insult" the childish idiot in question? Really? Are you pulling our leg?
I don't understand your hostility, so I'll just ignore it.
When I see random people mentioning Ponies in an unrelated Internet discussion, I just think they're really lame and pathetic.
That wasn't my objection. If someone thinks that a MLP reference is lame and pathetic, that's understandable. What crosses the line for me is when they start belittling and even outright insulting people who make such references. They act as if the MLP fans should "grow up", by acting in an extremely immature way themselves. That's hypocrisy.
Not because they like something that's not masculine, but because they think their fandom is such hot shit that they can't wait to mention it to every random stranger. The utter irrelevance of this to the target discussion doesn't stop them.
As I said, that's not the issue. If someone made a (completely off-topic) reference to almost anything else (such as Transformers, Star Trek or Doctor Who) nobody would think anything of it. It's only when someone makes a MLP reference that people start attacking for no good reason.
I really do think that the difference comes from a sense of masculinity and contempt towards (male) people who seem to go contrary to its tenets.
The cool part of the game is how often you "thought" you were taking a shortcut, doing something sneaky, discovering a path that is not the intended path and feeling smug. Well, that is how everybody felt, because that is the way you are supposed to go! For those of you that played and beat portal, trying playing it a second time, and avoid your gut instinct to take the shortcut and try it "the hard way." You will find out that there is no hard way! You found the only way but the game let you believe you outsmarted it.
Actually there are many levels in Portal 1 where there's the "intended" solution and then there's a significantly less obvious shortcut, which is nevertheless acknowledged by the developers (iow. there are many challenges where you need to solve the level with less portals than the "intended" route would need, sometimes significantly less).
I expect the best way to define distance between two galaxies would be either "if a photon were to exit Galaxy A right now, how long would it take that photon to reach Galaxy B?"
But that's the thing: During the travel time of that photon the distance between the two galaxies will increase. Hence the travel time will not tell either the distance at the moment when the photon was sent, nor when it arrives (because the distance is changing all the time).
(Ok, there are a few exceptions where a pair of galaxies are actually moving towards each other, as their speed towards each other is greater than the metric expansion of space between them, but that's an exceptional situation. Either way, even in that case the distance is changing between sending and receiving the photon.)
Also, as said, "right now" is an ambiguous term because of relativity of simultaneity, and time dilation near gravity wells (and probably other factors).
"How long would it take for a photon to travel from galaxy A to galaxy B" does not really answer the question of "what's the distance between A and B?" (because the question is ambiguous; distance when, from whose perspective, etc.)
The scammers really are getting lazier by the year.
Another example I just received:
Scammer wrote:
I need a confirmation of acceptance to transfer US$ 21,300,000.00 to you,
(Yes, again that was the entirety of the email.)
Also got this:
Another scammer wrote:
Good morning,
Your account ACH and Wire transactions have been provisionally placed on hold in order to ensure your security, because of the expiration of your security version. We kindly ask you to download and install the most up-to-date installations, by following this link.
As soon as it is installed, your account transactions will be fully reinstated.
The sad thing is that many people will download and install anything someone tells them to.
While reading about the Hubble Ultra Deep Field image, I got thinking: How exactly can we define the distance between two galaxies?
"How far is that galaxy from us" is actually a difficult question to answer because it's very ambiguous. What we see now is how the galaxy was millions, even billions of years ago (from our perspective), not how it is currently. Moreover, the galaxy is receding from us, and hence the distance has increased significantly between the time that it sent those photons and when we received them.
Not only that, but the geometry of spacetime itself can change. What was once the shortest path between two points (iow. a geodesic) might not be anymore. The shortest path might be different now than it was back when those photons were emitted.
We could estimate how long it took for the light to reach us, and from that how far the galaxy was from us when those photons were emitted, However, we have moved away between the emission of the photons and our detection of them, so that has to be taken into account in the calculation (iow. our true distance from the galaxy was shorter when those photons were emitted than the path they took before they reached us). (I think some terms related to this are comoving distance and proper distance.)
To complicate things even more still, defining what the distance is now is not an easy question either. That's because "now" is different in different frames of reference. Time passes at different speeds at different places (for example the mass of the galaxy may affect how you experience the pass of time). Defining "now" is complicated.
So what is the best way of defining the distance between two galaxies?
I'm wondering why the show is so divisive. I don't remember any other show that's so divisive as this one.
If someone makes any kind of remark about ponies in some forum post or as a response to some blog post or whatever, something humorous like "this needs more ponies", there's a quite good chance that someone will start either insulting that person, or at the very least respond to him/her in a very belittling and dismissive manner, and a flamewar will ensue. Yes, I have seen actual examples of this.
The rational thing to do when someone posts something like "this needs more ponies" is to simply ignore it, if you don't find it funny. Or even if you do. Haha, someone made a lame joke; let's get on to more interesting things. But no, someone has to respond to it dismissively or in an outright insulting manner.
The irony is, by trying to sound "manly" or whatever, they are just sounding like a jerk. Why can't people just let other people have whatever hobbies they like, and make any references they like? (And it's not a question of the reference being off-topic or out-of-place. If it had been a reference to almost anything else, but equally off-topic, such as star wars or doctor who or whatever, it would have not resulted in such a response.)
Having non-obvious game mechanics in a game (even if discovering how that game mechanic works is not strictly necessary to complete the game), such as the ability to create new items/spells/whatever by combining existing ones, is a double-edged sword.
Current gamers are accustomed to everything given to them ready-made, without the player having to do much to learn any complicated game mechanics. The vast majority of games are either casual games (of the type which you could eg. play while sitting on the bus on your portable device) or straightforward run-and-shoot games with little to no tactical elements to them (such as the vast majority of first-person shooters).
Hence if you create a game mechanic that actually requires some effort from the part of the player, you are risking the player being lazy and giving unfavorable reviews.
In the 80's I played many text-based (but graphical) adventure games. The vast majority of them did not have an auto-mapping feature. You had to draw the map yourself on paper. Rather than being an annoyance, that was, in fact, an integral part of the gaming experience! You felt like an explorer who discovered new lands and drew maps of them.
Nowadays that would be completely unthinkable! (I mean having to draw a map yourself. Of course text-based adventure games are also unthinkable today, but that's another issue.) If a game where remembering a big map is essential didn't offer an auto-mapping feature, all reviews would score it negatively because of that. People are lazy. They want everything ready-made and they don't want to put any effort on it.
That's why non-self-evident complex game mechanics are a risk for game makers.
Sometimes, at least in my case, they can save the game from the "unfinished games" heap. For example, I bought Crisis Core thinking that Square Enix games are superb, but didn't realize that Square Enix seems to have had this slump in the past half decade or longer where they have lost the ball completely and most of their games suck. It turned out that the game is really boring. I tried two times to finish it, but couldn't.
However, the third time I tried it, I discovered the sub-game mechanic of combining items to create stronger items. It's nothing really fancy, but somehow it was so interesting that it kept me playing until the end.
Personally, I'm more concerned about the notable lack of Fluttershy the entire season.
I think episode 19 will be dedicated to her.
OTOH, I have noticed that most episodes seem to be dedicated to Rainbow Dash, Applejack (or the Apple family) or the Crusaders. The others have had progressively less and less relevant screentime. Only minor and less important appearances (if at all). Even the "main main character" Twilight has suffered from this.
I'd say the if you get friend-zoned, consider yourself lucky. At least you have some social relationships with other people. There are people who aren't even friend-zoned because they don't have friends of the opposite sex (or the same sex if that's what floats your boat) at all.
