/sci/ - Science and Mathematics

What do you guys think about good documentaries? Are they informative? Do they give you actual knowledge of beings, landmarks, facts etc.?

Do you think you can retain that information, or do you think that you should just read books if you are interested in that specific thing? Do you watch documentaries? Do you re-watch them? What are your favourites and why?

My opinion is that they are very good to see the big picture of things. If you want to glance at the possibilities of living beings and scenery on earth, but don't want to get full understanding behind how it works. Basically, you may not learn a lot about a specific thing because you've seen more things.

My favourite is Cosmos by Carl Sagan, Planet Earth, BBC Life, Frozen Planet, BBC The Human Body. I got them all in HD quality so I can see the beauty of earth. Cosmos also inspired me to think more about the universe and I watched it many years ago.

I've been doing a lot of reading on bankruptcy problems (a subdiscipline of social mathematics or game theory) and throughout the articles I've read, a few claims have always been assumed to be true without any actual effort to proof them. Occasionally, an author will write "It can easily be shown that" or "It is trivial to proof that" or "It obviously follows that" and it pisses me the fuck off because I can't figure it out so apparently I'm just stupid. I'll attempt to condense it all down to a few equations so that I don't have to take you through all the formalities of bankruptcy problems:

Image 1 shows all the claims that are true by definition. (I think they're the only relevant relationships and definitions, but the longer I spend on this, the more I suspect that I must be missing a key stipulation without which the proof isn't possible.)
Image 2 shows the claim that is supposedly easy to proof.

I've been at this for hours, and while I concede that I'm not a mathmatician and generally stupid, I just don't see how this could possibly be done. The main problem seems to be that lambda and mu are defined only through sums, while the claim in image 1 pertains to individual elements.

I'd appreciate any input, wether it's ideas on how to do the proof or reasons for why it can't be proven or wether you just call me a faggot.

What is your opinion on tetraoxygen (oxozone)?

What's your favourite (direct or indirect) electrosynthesis reaction? Mine is pic related.

>heard about this book from CPG grey podcast
>all dat chemistry, math, science and engineering.
>fucking space


It's technically science fiction but it has lots of interesting stuff in it. Anyone have any other recommendations for books like this one?

Hello, /sci/! Recently I began pondering a question.

If there was a tournament with x people, and one team sent y people (where y is greater than one) while everyone else sent only one, what are the chances that two people from the same team will compete, assuming all initial brackets have the same chance of happening and any person has a 50% chance of beating the person they go up against?

(shitty) pic related, it's the situation when x=4 and y=2 (i.e., four people competing and two from the same team (represented by A here)).

Would anyone be able to help me find the relation between x, y, and the chances of this happening? I know it has to be 100% if y is greater than x/2, but I'm not sure about a general relationship. Thanks!

I'm having trouble wrapping my mind around this concept.

So, the pressure acts uniformly in all directions but here's the catch: the vertical components of all those forces cancel each other out! The final result is that only the horizontal components of the forces act.

Now, the way I see it is that the consequences of this statement should be that–borrowing from the idea of flux passing through an magnetic field–the strength of the horizontal force should be dependent on the angle between horizontal force and the infinitesimal area vector at that point.
Basically, the force at the very sides would be zero however, as you tend towards the center of the curve and the "tangential area" (if I can call it that) becomes increasingly more perpendicular to the horizontal force lines, the force would reach its maximum. Then, after describing this with some kind of equation, you'd do an integration and something nice would pop out.

Instead, you just consider the projected area. Can someone explain where I've gone wrong?

How can we build a vacuum balloon using widely available materials?

How much more difficult would space travel be for an intelligent aquatic species? Water is fucking heavy, ya know?

Would an extraplanetary alien civilization be necessarily terrestrial?

Why would anyone ever need to know how to measure things like the density of a sphere unless they were an engineer?

It's a miracle that we haven't fallen out of trees and died. What exactly gives us the big advantage over other animals?
We lack raw strength(run slow, low muscle mass v. animals,etc), and raw instincts(no natural compass, etc).
Is it our use of tools that have gotten us this far, and our cooperation with each other via language?

Trying to determine a good number of rats I will use in my experiment to make the experiment statistically meaningful.

I am going to be testing food and behavior and was thinking of using 3 groups
will 5 for each group be good enough?
how small can I go and still get meaningful results?

Will double blinding this improve the statistic power of the research? I've read that it always does but I'd like to confirm here since I don't see how it could affect my observations.

Thanks sci bros

If you could sequence any organism's genome, which would it be (assuming it hasn't been sequenced yet)?