Discussing Science with people who need to learn more science
 

So, this can be rather Annoying right?

I got myself caught up in a little discussion earlier on today, where basically people were discussing the properties of Sound and how much damage Sound can actually do.

Until someone posed that a Strong enough Sound wave could cause an Earthquake.

"Wait, what? No it can't." I said as a pure reflex.

Thus started the discussion that Sound could cause Earthquakes. I tried to explain that the worst case scenario would be for a Strong enough, constant sound wave replicate the effects of a decent Aftershock. But it would never trigger an Earth Quake by itself. It's just not feasible.

The the argument was made that if the sound was really really really really strong it could... which i just replied that a sound wave powerful enough to trigger a real Earthquake would be so devastating on it's own that it would be it's own Phenomena, this would be the same as saying that saying a ton of C4 could cause an Earthquake...

Then people started point out examples from Batman cartoons and other such sources... at that point, patience is running short.

Finally the discussing culminated with somebody citing HAARP. As an Example that it was possible and it was actually already done.

This HAARP here

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Fr...search_Program

At this point i promptly gave up on the discussion...

So, you guys ever went through stuff like this?

Something similor involving Solid State Lasers. Friend of mine kept on insisting that they did not exist. But then I brought up The FIRESTRIKE laser. And then this came along.

Not nearly as impressive but one day not too long past, my physics class got into an awful tangent about whether robots were going to become a "thing". I instinctually just shot the idea down (out of the 5 people that talk in that class) because the notion was brought up by a straight nerd. As such I was shooting down the idea of what could be programmed into the robot whether they would ever get into the complexity of doing anything useful, because at the time the most impressive thing I'd seen a robot do was play ping-pong. Or as the chinese call it Ping-Pong.

So the teacher gets in on the discussion and starts showing videos to the class of robots that have been programmed into doing tons of stuff like playing music, driving cars, and there's even one that can do the catwalk.

With the technological industry ever-booming robotics are coming into view, and I felt like a dumbass (nothing new).

Hey, as long as you feel like a dumbass instead of blindly rejecting all the evidence that made you feel like a dumbass, it means you learned something. That's not something everyone can say.

Using the word "sound" in a context like this is already misleading, because a sound wave is just an oscillating wave in air pressure that you can hear. A shockwave given off by a bomb is the exact same thing (a wave in air pressure), it just doesn't oscillate.

So yes, you could set off an earthquake if you made a sufficiently strong sound at a fault line, for the exact same reason you could cause an earthquake by setting off a sufficiently powerful explosive in the fault.

Also, a loud enough sound could cause the earth to literally quake, might have been what they meant.

As an economics major, and due to certain soirees involved with my misspent early days of University, I'm friends with many people in the college of commerce. Or as they insist on being called, members of the Edwards School of Business. Through the miracle of facebook, people being expressing their political opinions. As way of criticism of a proposed policy from the NDP, someone makes the statement, "The trickle down effect is a proven fact!"

Note how I'm an aforementioned econ major. I comment, "No, it isn't, actually. Here's 4 papers written on that very subject. There's just no evidence to suggest it works." That guy's like "Okay, cool, thanks for clarifying that." I think that through the magic of science I've demonstrated that he should abandon a preconceived notion. But alas, a new challenger appears and is all "I'm a professional tax accountant, and what about this and this and this." My response is, "You're splitting hairs. It doesn't matter, there's just no evidence to suggest this works. The only way that taxation as you propose works as a method of wealth redistribution is if the only thing taxes are used for is welfare and you tax such that income is held constant. This is both theoretically and practically retarded."

His response to that? "HA! You literally just said we should tax the rich people poor. I'm done talking with an artsy about taxation policy." So I respond "I didn't literally say any of that. You can't read. I understand that it's inconvenient when reality does not conform to your political preference, but sorry that's just the way it is."

This ends with an epic bitch-fest, ending with me meeting him in person two days later, this guy saying something snarky about "leaving business to the real professionals" and my telling him that he was a parrot who kept repeating the same trick hoping someone will love him. In hindsight, that probably was a little bit personal, but it seemed like a good idea at the time.

To be pedantic, a sufficiently strong sound probably doesn't exist, since a soundwave louder than 200 dB is called a shockwave.

I don't have any stories of conquering people with science since I'm usually the one annoying believers in science by talking about philosophical concepts using scientific terms.

Such as, "Trickle down theory" to me immediately paints an image of a great, tall table where all the rich people eat, where the potato peels and fish bones and cherry stones and half-chewed gristle and spilled drinks they don't care to eat mix and turn to a rotting liquefied sludge that trickles down the table legs to feed the poor masses. And trickle down theory is an attempt to rationalize this as a sound and beneficial state for the world to be in, because that sludge is the only thing there could ever be for poor people to eat. I don't know if that's an accurate metaphor for trickle down theory, but I like it, so I use it, in my various musings and fictions. Where it runs into problems from people who may mistake it for a part of a political agenda or something.

That is the best metaphor for trickle-down I've heard so far.

Could you possibly link those papers since I would actually be interested in learning more about trickle down. I'm against it already in principle but I have less knowledge of it's practical failings.

Devil's Advocate. I like playing it.
 

To be fair, both of you could be entirely right and wrong at the same time, based on different papers.

The problem with saying one economic thing will work and another won't is that, until we have a country that we want to use as a test subject, we don't really know what certain economic ideas will give us. Same with political goals, really.

So, while yeah, you can go, "Look at all this as to why Trickle Down doesn't work", those papers aren't really conclusively rigorous, because of a lack of ability to test.