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Yeah. This fantastic woman married me. I have no idea why.
Also, I really don't understand rockets at more than a superficial level, but I saw one launch once.
I'm quite uncertain about jet airplanes, especially when you're, like, driving in the same direction and there's a strong headwind, and it almost looks like you're going faster than them? They're just hanging there, god knows how many tons of metal and 300 people. It's creepy.
And I really think economics is proof that we're in the Matrix, because the more I think about it, the less (functional, not ethical) sense capitalism makes, and everybody who talks like they know about it just sounds like stringing together a bunch of buzzwords. Also, there's that truism that if you ask four economists a question, you'll get five opinions. Plus nobody can reliably predict the stock market; weather - a highly chaotic system - is more predictable than the stock market. It's like the programmers put it in, but when it got to the point where they had to make it explainable, they couldn't without introducing recursive conflicting rules, so it's just hand-waving, and people pretending or misleading themselves that they know how it all works.
Do you want explanations for the jets and rockets, and if so what is your current understanding?
Rockets are: put a bunch of flammables in a giant tube and light it on fire. That's my understanding. Well, Ok. I know there are nozzles on gimbals, but... here's a joke that represents what I'm talking about:
A brain surgeon goes to a party, and the host is introducing him to people.
Host: "John, this is Jack. He's a software engineer."
John: "Oh, that's nice, but it isn't brain surgery."
Host: "This is Mary; she worked in industrial inorganic chemistry."
John: "Oh that's nice, but it isn't brain surgery."
Host (annoyed): "Maude, this is John. He's a brain surgeon."
Maude: "Oh, that's nice, but it isn't rocket science."I think the big picture is deceptively simple. The practice of getting into orbit is far, far more complicated.
As for airplanes, yeah. I understand them well enough; I think with the right equipment and practice I could build something that flies. It's just, sometimes seeing a behemoth in the air it's just a bit astonishing, and unintuitive.
To be honest most of the basic physics behind rocketry actually isn't too difficult. The matter of engineering it into reality definitely is very difficult, finding fuels that burn hard enough and figuring out how to contain them while they burn and the like. The nature of going so far and so fast also means that tiny errors add up to very big problems.
All rockets function on the fact that if you push something in one direction, you also go in the opposite direction by a proportionate amount. Lighting fuel on fire while it's in a tube that only has one way out just happens to be a great way to push the burning fuel really, really hard and therefore get a really hard push back. The forces involved always have to cancel out the total momentum of everything involved; you chuck X kilograms of burning fuel out of the back at Y metres per second, you accelerate forward by however much you need to to make your momentum match that in the opposite direction. This is Newton's third law of motion, the "for each action there is an equal and opposite reaction" one
Nozzles and the like can adjust which direction the way out is pointing. If the way out points left a bit, the momentum of the fuel is also going left a bit, so the reaction momentum you get goes a bit to the right, and now you have steering
I think the biggest conceptual block people usually have about orbits is that they're not about going up fast, they're about going around the Earth fast. If you point your rocket straight up and just keep going straight up, you won't go into orbit around the Earth. Either you'll crash straight back down when you run out of fuel, or you have a rocket with enough power and fuel to reach Earth's escape velocity, in which case you'll just continue travelling away from Earth forever until you find something else's gravity. You know the kind of arc that a ball has when you throw it? Imagine that you're superhumanly strong and can throw a ball literally however hard you want. You could throw it beyond the horizon without breaking a sweat. Once you're throwing it that hard, the curvature of the Earth starts to become relevant, right? The ground is effectively dropping away underneath the ball as it travels forward, letting it fly farther before it hits the ground. Eventually if you throw hard enough, the curvature of the Earth turns away from the ball at the same rate as the ball is falling. The ball is now in orbit. The ISS (and anything else that wants to orbit at the same altitude) goes around the Earth so fast that it does 15 entire laps around the planet every day
Unfortunately for our rockets, the Earth's atmosphere is very bad to actually move through that fast, so they go up first to get out of the thickest part of the atmosphere and then gradually turn sideways to achieve orbit
Once you start getting into things like how to get from Earth to other planets you've got to worry about some other stuff, but this comment is probably getting long enough by now and not many of our rockets do that yet
I totally get what you mean about planes not looking like they should work. The size of them and the fact that we've got basically nothing to reference them against for scale and motion when they're in the air is really confusing
Damn, you got here first! OP, if you don't find their explanation satisfactory, reply to my comment and I'll be sure to help.
The stock market is chaos, driven by bias and a bunch of unknown and unknowable variables.
A simple example with 3 players.
- P1 thinks stock A is a good buy (for whatever reason) at $1/unit. P1 decides to buy putting upward pressure on the price.
- P2 has been holding a bunch of A for a while and has a number ($1) in mind to sell at, P1 can't know this information. This sale puts downward pressure on the price.
- If P1 & P2 have the same number of shares, the pressures are equal, and the price doesn't move. If they don't the price moves either up or down.
- P3 has been watching A, sees that it moves and decides that this is a good time to buy, (going down its a bargain, going up its on the rise get in early), putting further upward pressure on the stock.
Each action by the different players causes something to happen to the price, no-one can know all the internal thought patterns of all the other interested parties, and thus can never have perfect information. And even with perfect information, it may not be possible to predict, as some stocks interact in non-predictable ways.
e.g. Nvidia goes up, TSMC usually goes up, but not always. TSMC going down can be caused by Nvidia, but also thousands of other things also.
Conclusion: can the stock market be predicted? General trends - Yes, specific stock movements - No!
Wait until you learn about passive indexes where the logic is you give me money = buy and then factor in the volume of assets under management in that cycle. Then take a look at retirement age and global average age trending closer towards retirement age lol do the math on that one
Seeβ½ It's a glitch in the matrix. They added the feature, but failed to work it out in advance and coded themselves into a corner.
I think what happened is that they spent all the budget up front, really nailing stuff like Physics and Evolution, and then came to a crunch and Management said, "just their something in there! We'll polish it later," only it's so self contradicting, they can't.