Secrets of the City

Oh god! NO! He would never make it through the DFL primaries or get elected by a long shot. Already, this bastard has made too many demons and enemies to spare while serving as U.S. Senator for MN before 06! What’s next? Roger Moe as his running mate?!

Newsflash Dayton: GO HOME! Retire for god sake! Don’t run for office again! Be a man and join the private sector!

Actually, a light year is 9.4605284 × 10¹⁵meters.

Apparently he’s just announced that he’s backing out…said something about an Anthrax warning @ the capital in 2010.

I don’t get it. Four years IS a political light year. Whasa prob?

You can always count on Jason DeRusha to set things strait. But just to be clear, a POLITICAL LIGHT YEAR is a relative measurement of how long it takes for enough people to forget a politician’s indiscretions and failures to vote him/her back into office. This is sometimes referred to as “the Marion Barry theorem.”

Are you suggesting Four Years ARE a political light year?

Actually, the exact length of a light-year depends on the relative length of time of the year used in the calculation, and a wide consensus about standards is just as hard to build in international science as in politics.

Light years for that reason are used in science fiction and by people who want to sound scientific. Astronomers do not use light-years when they want to be precise but instead use au for galactic and parsecs for intergalactic distances. You can generally count on WCCO for sounding like an authority without actually being one.

jderusha’s figure uses the sidereal year. It really won’t matter since 2010 is the generally accepted year of the arrival of our future alien overlords anyway.

I just wanted to jump start some comments on this post. Mission accomplished.

And if anyone wants to know what MNSpeak is: here it is. A post with a scientific mesaurement, astronomical explanation, political reference to a mayor/cokehead, and a good joke by grote.

Big G,

Your comments about Mark Dayton are dead on, thanks for saying it!

I always thought a light year is a measure of distance not time.
Oh well.
DAMN YOU CATHOLIC SCHOOL EDUCATION. DAMN YOU TO HELL.

Oh, and I totally missed Not2Sure’s massive burn: You can generally count on WCCO for sounding like an authority without actually being one.

My source was google. And you can count on me to sound like an authority without being one. I’m here for you.

Yeah, why weren’t people rushing to Jason defense on that one.

Jeez. You’re all a bunch of jerks.

Well, there you go, a lesson in journalism on the value of independent sources. Yahoo gives a different value for the length of a light year because of the inequity in calendar lengths used.

anywayz… I find it hard to believe Dayton would even consider a run for governor a possibility. I don’t have anything against the man or his politics but an effective leader is hardly the perception his tenure in the Senate has created for him here at home. Maybe his comments were just a passing shot at the Minnesota DFL who were definitely less than supportive before the microphone passed forever out of his reach?

I think this is the exact reason people don’t trust scientists.

They tend to amplify the disagreements about the minutiae in science. This type of “nerd/geek” argument tends to give the lay people the feeling that scientists don’t know anything because they can’t even agree on something that seems rather basic, like the length of a light year.

Standards such as calendar lengths are hardly minutiae. They are inherently political and often cultural power struggles and as such are just as difficult to generate wide consensus as disagreements about what is the most effective way to deter crime in a metropolitan ciy. There is a clear scientific answer about what is the best method. But implementing that plan requires the consensus and assent of individuals who have varying goals and agendas.

And the reason “lay people” or at least the American public version don’t “trust” scientists is because they don’t understand scientific inquiry, they are the product of a failing educational system that produces citizens that generally lack the acumen and basic scientific understanding legitimately to question scientific results, and American access to science over the last 100 years has increasingly become a political tool of a corrupt government and a headline-at-all-costs corporate news industry that values controversy and sound bite over truth and explanation.

Take for example, the response to the recent FDA statement that food derived from cloned sources is not inherently dangerous nor poses a greater health risk than “normal” food requiring labelling as a canonical example.

What education system are scientists a product of?

Not this one page 53. That’s not a bad volume if you’re interested in the subject imho.

I thought a “light year” was the DISTANCE time travels in a year, not a measurement of time. In fact, time doesn’t even exist (it’s just a device invented by man to measure change). So t’hell with it, let’s bash the TV guy for not verifying his information.

You’re a dolt, TV guy! D-o-l-t DOLT!

Time exists. It slows down in a denser gravitational pull, and also when Don Shelby goes out in the hall.

I think we’ve all learned something here. Something about ourselves. And something about each other. I’m sure in a political light year, none of us will remember what we learned. But that inferior knowledge is there, and will always be there. Unless it’s not.

A light-year is a unit of distance. What part of that hasn’t been clear?

The exact distance depends on what your definition of a “year” is. There’s also some uncertainty in the speed of light (we can only measure it so accurately), which, when multiplied by a year, will give a large uncertainty on the distance.

Pshaw. Next you’ll be telling me that a league is a measure of nautical distants, not depth.

You know, 20,000 leagues does seem awfully deep.

Er, distance.

Wasn’t that an SNL skit? Captain Nemo was going over the difference between leagues and fathoms.

Time does not exist. For all the earth knows, it could be 2007 or 3000 bc; a day could be 82 hours instead of 24 hours. Earth doesn’t care.

While the exact way we choose to define time is somewhat arbitrary, I would argue that time does exist. It is one of the fundamental quantities in physics, along with mass, temperature, and length. According to special relativity, rates of time run differently depending on velocity and space is just another dimension of spacetime. So there’s a lot of basis for it in physics.

Unless you’re getting philosophical on me, in which I don’t have a leg to stand on.

Wasn’t that an SNL skit? Captain Nemo was going over the difference between leagues and fathoms.

Yep.

Time and Space are one and the same.

Dig it.

Political light year

Political = crap
light = beer
year = too long if not illuminated

A light-year is a unit of distance. What part of that hasn’t been clear?

Think as the Starship Enterprise when it goes into warp speed. The faster the ship travels, the more likely it would increases its light year distances.

I love MNSpeak because no one can seem to EVER stay on topic. Hooray for BADD (Blog Attention-Deficit Disorder)!