The 20p Question Thread

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It would basically act like a pendulum - and for broadly the same reasons - albeit in a straight line rather than through an arc?
It wouldn't be in a straight line, no.

Also, It would keep banging off the side of the borehole, because the earth is spinning and moving through space.

1. The earth's spin means that unless the borehole was at the pole, the back wall of the borehole would keep catching up with the weight due to the coriolis effect.
2. Since the example involves removing friction, the earth and weight would be two separate systems with different orbital parameters. As the weight sped up as it approached the centre of the earth, its solar orbit would get raised relative to the planet. I cannot quite visualise what this would do but it hurts my brain thinking about it.

Addendum: If we were to stop the earth moving through space for the duration of this thought exercise, this would have a lot of surprising and alarming effects and would be correctly regarded as a Bad Move.
 
If you fill up a 1 Tb computer hard disk, how much heavier is it?
That depends, are you filling it with 1s or 0s?
 
A 75/25 mix. What is your answer for that?
No idea :biggrin: but I love dredging info from my ravaged brain so I'll throw some proverbial at the wall.

Without searching the web, because that's cheating.

Data is stored on magnetic media - be that tape or disc - as discrete magnetic fields. As magnetism is energy and energy is mass, a magnetised bit of data on magnetic medium MUST be heavier than just the medium itself, and there must be way to theoretically measure it. I guarantee you 100% that someone will have done the maths and worked out how much energy a bit has for a given data density and a given field strength.

From the elementary comp.sci I learned oh my god 25 years ago, 0 on magnetic medium isn't represented by the lack of a magnetic field, it's a magnetic field in the opposite direction. If it's the same strength field a 0 will have the same energy as a 1, so the total energy in the disk would stay the same.

Back when I learned this stuff, floppy disks were split into radial sectors and tracks, like a dartboard, and hard drives were basically a stack of discs (called platters) on top of each other, using a sturdier material that could pack more data onto the surfaces.

If the track and sector approach still holds then it means that the data density can't be uniform across the whole disk. The further outer along the disc you go the less dense the data is in order for track and sector addressing to make any kind of sense. With variable data density the "weight" of any given bit depends upon where on a disk it is.

And if it's on a platter higher up in the rack, it means it has more potential energy because of gravity.

So my answer is, I haven't the foggiest. Any split makes it impossible to answer. I'm going to have the play the following card:
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steveindenmark

Legendary Member
Another ownership question.
If a meteorite lands in your garden do you own it? Because the one that landed last week was given to the Natural History Museum.
I was wondering if the family could have made a fast buck and sold it instead?
Do you have a photo?
 
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