3bodyproblem, at first when you got busy here I thought you said some good stuff. This isn't. I want to back up spork and the others who put time and effort into this little toy, brainteaser and educational tool.
Oh I agree, there is no solid definition of blogging. I used it as I saw fit.
Well you should be careful of just using words as you see fit. You should at least have said earlier "Well, not blogging in the strict sense, but..." and carried on. Then people might have given you more credit and considered what you were saying more than I expect they have done.
He posts videos on youtube and responds to comments. He maintains the site by adding videos. That's blogging.
So do you rail at everyone who has a hobby and posts friken videos and call them bloggers as if it were a bad thing to blog anyway? Don't you ever think you might want to blog? Aren't your posts blogs?
If that were just it I probably wouldn't have said much, but there's tons of sites I found with a simple search with him plastered all over it.
Try less emotive language. You searched, found what you consider a lot of hits, and spork featured highly in these results. So? "Plastered"?
Had he said "Oh, well I post and respond to people on many different sites, but I don't maintain a website dedicated to DWFTTW" it would have been it. But to flatly deny it?
Since you concede that your definition of "blogging" is not everyone's (and I have to say that it is a rather loose one), you can hardly also claim that he lied. He does not blog according to his definition.
If you look around the net, at the different posts made, they are all by the same three guys, TAD, Spork and SCZ.
And that is clearly a ridiculous statement. Have you counted how many people post on the subject? Have you got to more than three yet? If not, count yourself in: now that's four. Mender, five. Me, six. Ynot, seven. Now I make it that those poor souls you picked on are already outnumbered. Who's SCZ, by the way?
They argue the same things and gang up on anyone who questions them by saying "this is first year (or high school) physics" "you don't know inertial reference frames" "why don't you make one and do this for yourself".
They sometimes get slightly short with people who raise very stupid objections, or jump in all guns blazing before they've got any kind of idea what the cart does, or constantly gripe about some minor detail, or just become trolls on the subject, etc. I made a couple of those mistakes myself. I took one look at the thing (Goodman's video), read a few posts, and made a sweeping judgement from a position of almost total ignorance. I, like so many, thought that the prop was a turbine, for a start. Getting over that was quite a big step to understanding it, but my schoolboy physics of 25 years ago and gut feelings still kept me thinking I had found reasons why it couldn't work. The treadmill being equivalent (near as is necessary) was another minor glitch, but I soon remembered some of that from earlier, applied myself to it, and now it's about as confusing as seeing someone skydive indoors over a big fan.
I certainly didn't feel ganged up on, but it was frustrating. I now see that a good deal of the frustration was that I was unable to explain what a particular theoretical objection was precisely enough. It seemed that people misunderstood, or answered it with some other point that I thought was irrelevant to the one I raised. Now I see that this was because I was talking to people who knew much more about physics and especially
way more about aerodynamics, and their answers were almost always on the money, and it was my problem not being able to connect the dots.
My worst feeling at certain points was that they did not seem to teach clearly how the cart worked, but rather sat back and waited for objections, and then corrected or criticised the objection. But that was partly because it was set as a brainteaser. If you hold everyone by the hand and walk them through it all in nice neat steps, well, it's just a series of lectures on some fairly trivial quirk of mechanical engineering.
This motion of this cart isn't first year physics. It's a little more involved than that.
I think I agree with you there to some extent. I think that sometimes the frustration of not being believed by people like you causes some exaggeration - or indeed that might be said of some parts of the problem. And then if you've a mind to think it's all a scam, you may miss the context of that. But I'm not sure what "first year" is these days, let along "first year physics". It depends on your location maybe.
Inertial reference frames are for constant velocities. That cart accelerates up the ramp.
But you can deal with accelerations of objects in constant-velocity inertial frames just fine, I believe. It's not an accelerating frame of reference. It is a little like someone jumping out of an aircraft to skydive in still air, and saying "Now, if you think about it, we could have a ruddy big fan blowing air upwards at that speed and float about in it!" ...or all the endless analogues that have been proposed, some more accurately fitting than others. Those who dispute the treadmill proof on those grounds are just like people telling us not to waste our money trying to make an indoor skydiving rig; you'll never fly! In case you don't know, you do.
As for the "buy one yourself", I'm skeptical these guys don't have a vested interest in the cart. At first I didn't, but you start poking around the net and all of a sudden you see $$$ beside the same three names.
These things just don't add up.
Well maybe you should work out how that business plan goes in theory. These guys seem to have been genuinely ready to bet on it, have independent tests, and I think spork even said at one point that he'd put up way more than the disbelievers, and - and here's a nice little thing to ponder on - whoever lost would pay JREF. Now there's a shrewd, greedy, selfish blogger if ever I saw one.
Easy to see even out on the street, yet humber gets it backwards.
