Deep Thoughts

[Danoff]

Why is it that we say "bless you" when someone sneezes but nothing when people cough? If anything, a cough is way more deserving of concern, blessings, or acknowledgement than a sneeze.

Now, I'm aware of the superstitious reasons why people used to say "bless you", but I'm wondering why say it today. I feel like a sneeze should not be acknowledged, but a cough could mean "I'm about to start choking to death". Just doesn't seem like we're getting that one right these days.

 

[Omnis]

Because when people cough you usually ask if they need some water.

 

[CTznOfTime]

When other cough, you ask them to stay away from you...

 

[Danoff]

...and why shouldn't the custom be that the person who sneezes does the commenting? You know, like "excuse me", as if they farted.

 

[Public'sTwin]

...and why shouldn't the custom be that the person who sneezes does the commenting? You know, like "excuse me", as if they farted.

Farts aren't usually indicative of an illness. Alternately, neither are coughs funny, nor enjoyable for the person experiencing them. They are also far less offense to others' olfactory senses.

 

[Touring Mars]

Vocally admitting to farts can be a risky business round these parts - my mate is a chronic offender and has almost got us thrown out of pubs but for his awesome skill at shifting blame to the perfectly innocent, despite the fact that he can clear an area of about 5 yards radius no bother at all. The fact that he then does it again and clears another part of the pub doesn't seem to bother him either

 

[Talon]

I remember feeling the almost falling asleep before, and I remember quite clearly that I didn’t want it; it felt like I was fading away, like I was dying somehow. Every time I feel that, I just wake up, it is just too much.

I get that feeling all the time, and I kinda like it. Like I know I'm about to fall asleep soon.


More deep thoughts:

Why is Twilight SO popular with SO many people? I don't understand.

If the universe is expanding, then that implies that there is an area outside the universe. But if everything is included in the universe, then how is there an area outside the universe? Kinda the same thing with parallel universes. Is there one huge universe that contains all of them?

 

[Public'sTwin]

If the universe is expanding, then that implies that there is an area outside the universe. But if everything is included in the universe, then how is there an area outside the universe? Kinda the same thing with parallel universes. Is there one huge universe that contains all of them?

Read "A Briefer History of Time" by Hawking to find out. He answers in a very easy to read, well-explained manner - though I won't repeat it here as it is a bit long-winded.

 

[Solid Lifters]

Vocally admitting to farts can be a risky business round these parts - my mate is a chronic offender and has almost got us thrown out of pubs but for his awesome skill at shifting blame to the perfectly innocent, despite the fact that he can clear an area of about 5 yards radius no bother at all. The fact that he then does it again and clears another part of the pub doesn't seem to bother him either

Your friend is disgusting and should be thrown out. When you feel a fart coming, you get up and excuse yourself to the bathroom. Blast away in there. Before blasting a pooter, a friendly verbal warning of, "IN COMING!" would be considerate.

 

[Perfect Balance]

Why is Twilight SO popular with SO many people? I don't understand.

This is why:

[youtubehd]K4uuGvmAxTI&feature=fvhl[/youtubehd]

If the universe is expanding, then that implies that there is an area outside the universe. But if everything is included in the universe, then how is there an area outside the universe? Kinda the same thing with parallel universes. Is there one huge universe that contains all of them?

The universe isn't literally "expanding" it's just that what we can see of the universe is expanding. Basically, what we can see of the universe is only as much as light has had time to travel in however many light years the universe has existed. So each day, as more light reaches us, we can see more of the universe, thus "expanding."

Though I think someone like Famine or Danoff would be able to explain this in a more understandable way.

 

[Talon]

That actually makes a lot of sense, I've never heard it explained that way before. Your explanation for Twilight makes sense, too.

 

[lbsf1]

People dont remember falling asleep either, as a rule.

On the surface, falling asleep seems trickier than dream recall. We wake up from sleep due to promptings that originate deep within the unconscious, like it or not (?!) While the act of falling asleep usually involves some degree of conscious decision to let it all go. And by 'all' I mean what we think of as ourself.

The analogy between sleep and death is an old one (my favorite example is 'dirt nap') ..but actually falling asleep, the act of doing that, is quite mysterious. On one level, falling asleep is a slap in the face to the ego, who must relinquish control at that point. Like it or not. The ego does not have to be aware of dreams though, and can ignore them or even deny they really exist. And yet to most egos the idea of dying during sleep seems attractive. Go figure.

Dreams themselves, as we know them, are the tip of the iceberg of something far greater. What WE think of as the dream state never actually 'stops happening' ..it is we, who leave it (we never actually leave the dream state. But we indeed turn our attention and focus away from it, for a time, so that we can have these experiences.

In the words of Marlon Brando in The Wild Ones, '..crazy' (snaps fingers)

You can remember falling asleep. It is a technique used in lucid dreaming called WILD where you keep yourself consiously awake while your body falls asleep so therefore you enter directly into a dream and can therefore control the dream straight away. You go through stages of feeling tinglying in your body (this is sleep paralysis starting) and then you see and hear things in your head and then these turn into the dream.

 

[niky]

I don't know why anybody would willingly want to go through the state of sleep paralysis... it's.not.fun.

My dreams seem utterly profound of late. I've come up with the idea for a video game called "Chicken-dale's run", where you play a muscular, mustachioed gay exotic dancer in a chicken-head head-dress and a thong (red, with a gold star up front), who's stuck inside a gigantic tube worm, and you're trying to escape by running down to the end of the tubeworm.

Oops. Should have kept that one to myself.

Why is it that we say "bless you" when someone sneezes but nothing when people cough? If anything, a cough is way more deserving of concern, blessings, or acknowledgement than a sneeze.

Now, I'm aware of the superstitious reasons why people used to say "bless you", but I'm wondering why say it today. I feel like a sneeze should not be acknowledged, but a cough could mean "I'm about to start choking to death". Just doesn't seem like we're getting that one right these days.

A cough starts up in the head (usually). A sneeze is a deeper, more thorough, more violent exhalation... which is why people thought a sneeze was someon's soul escaping (but you knew that already). People cough all the time, sometimes for not so serious reasons. Sneezes are rather less common, so we always treat them as an event. (Late reply)

 

[ROAD_DOGG33J]

A sneeze is a deeper, more thorough, more violent exhalation...... People cough all the time, sometimes for not so serious reasons. Sneezes are rather less common

Are you sure that's not the other way around, except for smokers.

 

[Alex.]

Is it possible that we base each decision we make on everything we have experienced, every decision we have made in life, before the time to make the next decision arrives? If so, then the moment before we make the decision it has already been made. So technically we are on a semi-set course defined by every single life experience we have had.


It's difficult to articulate. Once one experience or decision happens, you are set on a course. Where your decisions and other peoples influences on your life due to their decisions are always going to happen ever since the first decision they made. Because what we have seen, what we know and what we have experienced are only things we can base a choice on.

There must be a better way of explaining it.

 

[niky]

Depends on how flexible you are, I guess. Some people are utterly predictable in what they're going to say or what decision they will make. They're set in their ways due to things they have done and experienced in the past. Some are not. (Personally, I am like this... I'm pretty fickle) The bigger question is... can your unpredictability, caused by the need for some spontaneity or the desire for change, be predicted? Hmmm...

Let me flip a coin, Batman. Heads you die, tails I kill you...

Are you sure that's not the other way around, except for smokers.

If you're sneezing all the time, then there's something wrong with you... or your house is full of pollen...

Maybe it's the fact that a sneeze is the closest to orgasm most people get? You cough with your mouth... a sneeze is a full-body reflexive shudder...

Bless you... oh yes... OH YES... Bless you.

 

[Azuremen]

Is it possible that we base each decision we make on everything we have experienced, every decision we have made in life, before the time to make the next decision arrives? If so, then the moment before we make the decision it has already been made. So technically we are on a semi-set course defined by every single life experience we have had.


It's difficult to articulate. Once one experience or decision happens, you are set on a course. Where your decisions and other peoples influences on your life due to their decisions are always going to happen ever since the first decision they made. Because what we have seen, what we know and what we have experienced are only things we can base a choice on.

There must be a better way of explaining it.

Go watch The Matrix: Reloaded for a bit of philosophy on decision making and pre-determination in choices.

 

[ROAD_DOGG33J]

If you're sneezing all the time, then there's something wrong with you... or your house is full of pollen...

Maybe it's the fact that a sneeze is the closest to orgasm most people get? You cough with your mouth... a sneeze is a full-body reflexive shudder...

Bless you... oh yes... OH YES... Bless you.

Well I've never had a sneeze that felt like it was ripping my heart out, coughs on the other hand...

 

[nk4e]

A old wives tale now?

 

[Public'sTwin]

The universe isn't literally "expanding" it's just that what we can see of the universe is expanding. Basically, what we can see of the universe is only as much as light has had time to travel in however many light years the universe has existed. So each day, as more light reaches us, we can see more of the universe, thus "expanding."

Though I think someone like Famine or Danoff would be able to explain this in a more understandable way.

This:

Into what space is the universe expanding?

Over time, the universe is expanding in space. The words 'space' and 'universe', sometimes used interchangeably, have distinct meanings in this context. Here 'space' is a mathematical concept and 'universe' refers to all the matter and energy that exist. The expansion is in reference to internal dimensions only.

Finite space theory does not suppose space has an edge, but rather that space wraps around on itself. If it were possible to travel the entire length of space without going faster than light, one would simply end up back in the same place, not unlike going all the way around the surface of the balloon (or a planet like the Earth).

The notion of more space is local, not global; we do not know how much space there is in total. The embedding diagram [here] has been arbitrarily cut off a few billion years past the Earth and the quasar, but it could be extended indefinitely, even infinitely, provided we imagine it as curling into a spiral of constant radius rather than a circle. Even if the overall spatial extent is infinite we still say that space is expanding because, locally, the characteristic distance between objects is increasing.

The expansion of space is often illustrated with models which show only the size of space at a particular time, leaving the dimension of time implicit.
----------------------------
In the "ant on a rubber rope model" one imagines an ant (idealized as pointlike) crawling at a constant speed on a perfectly elastic rope which is constantly stretching. If we stretch the rope in accordance with the ΛCDM scale factor and think of the ant's speed as the speed of light, then this analogy is numerically accurate—the ant's position over time will match the path of the red line on the embedding diagram above.

In the "rubber sheet model" one replaces the rope with a flat two-dimensional rubber sheet which expands uniformly in all directions. The addition of a second spatial dimension raises the possibility of showing local perturbations of the spatial geometry by local curvature in the sheet.

In the "balloon model" the flat sheet is replaced by a spherical balloon which is inflated from an initial size of zero (representing the big bang). A balloon has positive Gaussian curvature while observations suggest that the real universe is spatially flat, but this inconsistency can be eliminated by making the balloon very large so that it is locally flat to within the limits of observation. This analogy is potentially confusing since it wrongly suggests that the big bang took place at the center of the balloon. In fact points off the surface of the balloon have no meaning, even if they were occupied by the balloon at an earlier time.

Should clear that up.

 

[Touring Mars]

The universe isn't literally "expanding" it's just that what we can see of the universe is expanding. Basically, what we can see of the universe is only as much as light has had time to travel in however many light years the universe has existed. So each day, as more light reaches us, we can see more of the universe, thus "expanding."

That's not correct - space really is expanding and as the universe gets older, an observer at any particular point can see objects at greater distances. The way I think of it is like a cake in an oven. Now imagine that you can only see the ball of cake within 1 cm of where you are - as time goes on, the area of cake you can see will expand, but what is it expanding into? It's not actually expanding into more cake, it's just that the area of cake you are in is actually expanding - as is the rest of the cake beyond the portion you know about/can see. That's my understanding of it anyway...

Typically, the more distant an object, the faster it is travelling away from us. As such, it is possible that objects beyond a certain distance are travelling away from us at such velocity that they may never be visible to us.

 

[Keef]

That's not correct - space really is expanding and as the universe gets older, an observer at any particular point can see objects at greater distances. The way I think of it is like a cake in an oven. Now imagine that you can only see the ball of cake within 1 cm of where you are - as time goes on, the area of cake you can see will expand, but what is it expanding into? It's not actually expanding into more cake, it's just that the area of cake you are in is actually expanding - as is the rest of the cake beyond the portion you know about/can see. That's my understanding of it anyway...

Typically, the more distant an object, the faster it is travelling away from us. As such, it is possible that objects beyond a certain distance are travelling away from us at such velocity that they may never be visible to us.

But what if space is just space, it's infinite, and only the objects and stuff we can detect are moving. Space always stays the same. Sounds reasonable.

 

[Touring Mars]

But what if space is just space, it's infinite, and only the objects and stuff we can detect are moving. Space always stays the same. Sounds reasonable.

Not when you consider what is actually observed... which is that distant objects appear to be uniformly moving away from us, and the further an object is, the faster it appears to be moving away from us.

While gravity acts on objects at all scales and therefore can dictate the movement of any particular object, there is clearly another force at work, other than gravity, which is responsible for generating the observed pattern of motion of objects in the universe. The only explanation that satisfies the observational evidence is that the universe (and space itself) is expanding... so while gravity might draw massive objects together, something else is driving things apart on a cosmic scale at the same time.

The strange appearance that we get is that everything (on a cosmic scale anyway) is moving away from us, suggesting (incorrectly) that the Earth is at the very centre of the Universe. However, there is no reason to believe that this wouldn't be the case from any other viewpoint in the universe... one giveaway sign that we aren't truly at the centre of the universe is the extremely uniform distribution of mass in the universe, which strongly supports the view that there is infact no centre of the universe*, and strongly supports the view that while it might look to a casual observer that they are at the centre of the universe, it is infact merely an illusion.

* This is because the universe is observed to be extremely uniform in all directions, which is not what you might expect from a universe that had an actual centre, from which all existing mass spewed out into an awaiting empty void of infinite space. That the universe is so uniform, has no perceptible centre, and everything appears to be moving away from everything else (on the grand scale) all strongly suggest that space itself expands. While the universe itself began as a single point, it rapidly (massively) expanded and distributed it's entire mass extremely evenly. While it continues to expand, the force of gravity ensured that what began as tiny fluctuations in the smoothness of the primordial universe would later become responsible for the large-scale structure observed in the universe today.

 

[Danoff]

Seems like "necklace" ought to be pronounced "neck lace". The way we pronounce "necklace" sounds like "headless". This person has no neck.

 

[Joel]

Hmm, I've never really thought of that one, but it makes sense.

Strange language, eh?

 

[GT_Prologue5]

That universe stuff was just mind-blowing. Wow.
I don't know what to say.
And about dreaming, it's true that you dream about things that have happened or will happen.
One day I was texting my friend all day, and then I had a dream about her. (just cause I say her doesn't mean its what you think. Pervs)
When Fathers' Day was coming, I had a dream were God gave me the final day I could ever see my father, I had two dreams like this.
The thing is is that my father passed away this year (Feb. 13th).
I am now convinced that he was trying to connect with me to see me once more. It's not a bad theory, cause I'm one of those people who beleive that you can connect with people through mind, body, and soul.
I need to stop[ ranting.

 

[Perfect Balance]

That's not correct - space really is expanding and as the universe gets older, an observer at any particular point can see objects at greater distances. The way I think of it is like a cake in an oven. Now imagine that you can only see the ball of cake within 1 cm of where you are - as time goes on, the area of cake you can see will expand, but what is it expanding into? It's not actually expanding into more cake, it's just that the area of cake you are in is actually expanding - as is the rest of the cake beyond the portion you know about/can see. That's my understanding of it anyway...

Typically, the more distant an object, the faster it is travelling away from us. As such, it is possible that objects beyond a certain distance are travelling away from us at such velocity that they may never be visible to us.

I'm trying to understand why what you've said makes me wrong, and I'm having trouble wrapping my head around your cake example.


I remember reading somewhere that although each day we can see more of the universe as light reaches us, but there may actually be less things for us to see within our range of vision as time goes on.

Although, wouldn't that require something to move faster than that speed of light for us to lose sight of it as it moves away from us?


Not a very technical explanation, but I can't seem to brain properly today.

EDIT: Also, another "deep thought." Would objects moving towards us appear to be playing on "fast forward" since the light from the object would have less distance to travel to us as time goes on?

 

[NapoleonMikey]

All this deep methodical thinking of the universe makes me want to start siding with the religious faction because there's just less thought needed and less headaches. But i understand GT_Pro's thought process and that was always how i understood the universe but the person who brought into the equation of what the universe is expanding into has really just thrown this all into a burning train wreck of thought and confusion.

 

[niky]

I'm trying to understand why what you've said makes me wrong, and I'm having trouble wrapping my head around your cake example.


I remember reading somewhere that although each day we can see more of the universe as light reaches us, but there may actually be less things for us to see within our range of vision as time goes on.

Although, wouldn't that require something to move faster than that speed of light for us to lose sight of it as it moves away from us?


Not a very technical explanation, but I can't seem to brain properly today.

EDIT: Also, another "deep thought." Would objects moving towards us appear to be playing on "fast forward" since the light from the object would have less distance to travel to us as time goes on?

If you can accept that the Universe was once a tiny bit of nothing (right before the Big Bang), then expanded into the Universe we see today, you should also be able to accept that space itself can expand.

There wasn't just void space then BANG! There was no space, and then BANG! There was matter and space and everything else.

Space is expanding. Thus, you can have galaxies moving through space at relatively low velocities, but they appear to be receding from us at near light speed.

In effect, these galaxies are not moving through space at subluminal or even superluminal speeds. They're just being carried along as space itself expands.

We can't see galaxies receding (through the expansion of space) faster than the speed of light, because the light will never reach us. To that effect, there may be a practical limit as to how far into the Universe (and how far into the past) we can see.


-

As for objects moving toward us, yes, if they're moving fast enough.

 

[Perfect Balance]

There wasn't just void space then BANG! There was no space, and then BANG! There was matter and space and everything else.

I think this is what's killing me. This was kind of my understanding of space expanding before, but that always brought up the question "what is space expanding into?" and how is more space being created from space (as in area, not the space up high in the sky) that didn't exist before.

And then someone came along as said it wasn't "expanding" but simply what we could see of it was expanding, and then everything was kosher.


Then you came along and shot that down, and now I'm back to where I started.

EDIT: I think I may be thinking of it in the wrong way. So, when we say space is expanding, it's simply because the objects in space are getting further from each other, right? So space is theoretically infinite, but obviously we can't see all of it, and because everything within our field of vision is expanding (spreading out), we can only assume that the rest of space that we can't see is doing the same thing, thus, expanding?