Beating a Dead Horse Can Still Be Entertaining
Beating Dead Horses Can Still Be Entertaining
Reels on FB either short-circuits thinking or those with short-circuited thinking are preferentially drawn to it.
The number of utterly thoughtless or irrelevant answers or those from the swollen belly of Assumption’s womb as forcefully ejected as piglets from a farrowing sow is staggering, especially if it has anything to do with math or science; no, I take that back, with everything. It’s just especially noticeable in matters of math and science.
On others, such as the one featuring a colorized movie of a street scene in 1902 England in which you see kids standing around looking at the camera, one of them holding a baby brother, and men in their work uniforms walking by in the background, you’ll find comments like, “Why are these children not in school?” or “It’s a violation of child labor laws for these kids to be working in a factory!”
Not much more can be said to comments like those than, “Because it’s in the afternoon after classes as seen by their hanging out and taking care of younger siblings and men in the background are going home from work?” or “A. They’re not in a factory. B. They’re not working, and C. It’s 1902 England and the kids that WERE still able to work, because the socialists who pushed through child labor laws to impoverish immigrant families and use their resulting misery to organize them into a political dependency class to push the revolution or the labor union Marxists who did the same thing to constrict the labor supply to drive up wages and increase both union dues and to create a political dependency class of workers to push the revolution were only just getting started in their dual approach of creating the poor and then exploiting them, and the kids who worked were still on the job?” Not a whole lot those people can do but say, “Ya huh!”
But in the reels posing the simplest types of math problems, aside from responses saying stuff like, “It’s not a problem because there’s no equal sign” or “You solve it left to right just like reading” or “it all depends on how you choose to interpret it,” you will get others who seem to be pulling rules for orders of operations from their memory hole of grade school or junior high like formerly frozen fish out of a deep freezer that’s been unplugged since they were in grade school.
But with them, pointing out their errors by working through things step by step, (showing where and how they went astray, providing references for order of operations from places like Physics Letters A or texts by Richard Feynman) virtually always elicits the same level and type of vitriol you see on pages by UnionThugs, DemocratUnderground, skeptics-ring enthusiasts, climate catastrophists, flat-earthers, devotees of high colonics, Obama/Hillary/Biden/Kamala supporters who somehow have lost their minds or damaged their brains (see the immediately preceding category), abortion activists, trans-sexual acronymics, vegans, pronoun-fetishists, Hamas and other jihadists, and UFO-cultists, that is, the “a man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still” crowd. Yeah, I said “man.” Women aren’t like that. Has anyone EVER seen a woman convinced against her will?
The following is from one of those reels.
Here is the object of that class of irritants that, on these reels, almost never produce any pearls:
Projectile Motion
A bullet is dropped from the same height when another bullet is fired horizontally.
They will hit the ground
A. Simultaneously
B. Depends on the observer
C. One after the other
D. None of the above
The responses to the remark below run the gamut with many of the AOL (no, the other meaning) people dropping their braying hyena emojis to show their scorn /ridicule / amusement, who can tell?
But I usually like to be more explicit yet in a somewhat ameliorative fashion, more or less.
Dan Arnold
The dropped bullet will hit the ground first.
The dropped bullet weighs more as it still has the casing attached, the fired bullet weighs less as it has detached from the casing and has spent the powder used to eject it.
—Dan Arnold
You’re both WAY overthinking this thing and way underthinking it.
The overthinking part:
A. It said “bullet” in both cases.
B. The nature of the problem considered presumes two identical objects, the only variable being the presence or absence of horizontal motion as opposed to acceleration earthward by gravity in both.
C. The ONLY reason the problem is stating “bullet” in both cases is to prevent what you just did: introducing irrelevant and meaningless details that distract from what’s being considered here:
Does the horizontal velocity of an object imparted by some other force, whether an explosive force, or a spring, or a finger, given that once both objects are freely falling and the downward vector of their motion due to gravity begins at the same moment and from the same distance above the ground, have any effect on the acceleration of that object by the force of gravity, all other conditions being equal, and when those objects will hit the ground?
Answer: No.
The underthinking part:
Suppose someone said, “Which will hit the ground first:
A. A booger falling out of your nose or
B. A booger flicked off your finger from the same height as your nose.
And suppose you heard people offer these answers:
A. “Probably the one that just fell out because do you know how hard it can be to flick a booger off your finger?”
B. “Probably the one that just fell out, because when you’re actually able to flick the booger off your finger its trajectory could have an upward or downward component to it and so it could take a longer or shorter amount of time to get to the ground.”
C. “It depends on how massive the booger is.”
D. “If the trajectory of the flicked booger, once it leaves your finger at any particular velocity, has no upward or downward component imparted by the flick and it starts its journey from exactly the same height as one falling from your nostril, then both will take the same length of time to hit the ground.”
Which is correct?
It’s D.
Bottom line: don’t introduce other variables into problems, because, for the purpose of the problem, they simply do not exist and distract you from thinking about the only important variables.
Like this:
You could just as well have been comparing a bullet fired horizontally from a gun at a particular height with a bowling ball dropped from the same height:
The acceleration by gravity earthward is going to be exactly the same for the bullet fired from the gun or for the projectile still in the casing or for the bowling ball.
The time it will take for any of them to reach the ground by the force of gravity will be exactly the same unless acted upon by another force (air resistance or a puff of wind or the fired bullet glancing off the cranium of a passerby who happens to get in the way).