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Post by davidh on May 3, 2009 19:07:40 GMT -6
On Saturday, I got a hole in my back tire. I decided to use a $1 to boot my tire and it worked like a champ.
During the ride, I noticed some really expensive bikes. I mean ridiculously expensive. The question at hand is should I use higher denominations the more expensive the bike is? Would a guy on a Pinarello Prince and Campy 11 speed be insulted if I offered him only $1 as a boot for his tire?
Should I bring higher denominations and foreign currency for such occasions?
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Post by Lurch on May 4, 2009 7:59:17 GMT -6
Your question is first flawed by an anthropomorphic fallacy. In truth your bike is not cognizant of anything, except riding and washing it and those are the only 2 things that matter to it, but let us it was a factor then I would refer to Schodinger's Cat. Schrödinger's cat is a famous illustration of the principle in quantum theory of superposition, proposed by Erwin Schrödinger in 1935. Schrödinger's cat serves to demonstrate the apparent conflict between what quantum theory tells us is true about the nature and behavior of matter on the microscopic level and what we observe to be true about the nature and behavior of matter on the macroscopic level.
Here's Schrödinger's (theoretical) experiment: We place a living cat into a steel chamber, along with a device containing a vial of hydrocyanic acid. There is, in the chamber, a very small amount of a radioactive substance. If even a single atom of the substance decays during the test period, a relay mechanism will trip a hammer, which will, in turn, break the vial and kill the cat.
The observer cannot know whether or not an atom of the substance has decayed, and consequently, cannot know whether the vial has been broken, the hydrocyanic acid released, and the cat killed. Since we cannot know, the cat is both dead and alive according to quantum law, in a superposition of states. It is only when we break open the box and learn the condition of the cat that the superposition is lost, and the cat becomes one or the other (dead or alive). This situation is sometimes called quantum indeterminacy or the observer's paradox : the observation or measurement itself affects an outcome, so that the outcome as such does not exist unless the measurement is made. (That is, there is no single outcome unless it is observed.) We know that superposition actually occurs at the subatomic level, because there are observable effects of interference, in which a single particle is demonstrated to be in multiple locations simultaneously. What that fact implies about the nature of reality on the observable level (cats, for example, as opposed to electrons) is one of the stickiest areas of quantum physics. In the same way that it would seem that this poor cat was stuck in a half life realm, it was really just a poor kitty stuck in a box. In the same way it may seem that this bike exists in the realm of expensive taste in the end it is just a bike, for it to be "the good bike" it only has to be ridden and enjoyed for its function.
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