Hi Opal!
Oooooh, that would tickle…
I think Schrodinger’s Horse is gonna be jealous if he’s still alive.
And don’t forget…In Russia, pHD has the talking horse!
Do the nibbles echo?
This may not directly follow from the OP, but I’m not about to start yet another thread.
Anyway, I’m not sure who is more aggravating in these threads…
Is it Christi7df, who seems to be arguing solely for the sake of argument? For crying out loud, it’s a physics question, not a philosophy discussion. God help us if she(?) finds Great Debates.
Or is A.R. Cane, who didn’t understand the most basic interpretation of the problem in the first page of the original thread, and some 600 posts later, still doesn’t understand it. As another Doper noted:
This hasn’t stopped A.R. Cane from repeatedly trotting out his(?) misunderstanding of the basic problem, and he has clearly been convinced in his own mind that his misunderstanding is correct due to all the Sturm und Drang over the more esoteric interpretations of the problem.
As for myself (who may or may not also be aggravating), I’m glad the threads were started. While I think I grasped the basic problem pretty quickly, I gained a fuller understanding of the problem by screwing up and getting called on it by treis. (In my initial assessment of the problem, I had ignored the effect that an accelerating treadmill would have on non-massless wheels.)
No kidding, I have never seen anyone refuse to discuss a physics problem becuase “its not practical” and I am shocked that someone would.
The thing that bothers me most about the beaten horse threads is the occasional comment along the lines of, “Well, obviously there’s no agreement on this, since it’s gone on for three pages now.” Sometimes it gets referenced elsewhere as ‘proof’ that (math, physics, any physical science) is undecidably vague. With almost every question asked here, as long as the problem is known, the answer will be knowable (and often not hard to figure out).
In these cases what’s usually happened is what KeithT described above – someone is rephrasing and altering or adding other condtions either out of curiousity or in an attempt to understand things. Or someone blunders into the middle of the discussion without any knowledge of what’s already transpired.
Words to live by :
If you haven’t read the entire thread, don’t comment on it!
(1) It was more an air disaster than a trainwreck.
(2) Who could read the entire thread?
(3) In the latest thread there are an awful lot of guests (i.e., it’s guests, not Dopers, who are beating it to death. Whatever it is).
(4) Will no one think of the canaries?
Answer: No.
Reason: Chuck Norris.
I think it was Mencken who said something like: “for every complex problem, there’s someone with an answer that is simple, easy to understand … and wrong.”
The type of question that causes this sort of issue is one that has a very cute, neat “solution” that anyone who did pretty well at high school math/science is pleased to be able to give, but which is wrong. If the wrong “solution” is ever so slightly counter intuitive, all the better to show how clever one is by giving it.
Cecil himself is a sucker for this sort of clever but wrong answer.
Classics are Monty Hall, aeroplane on treadmill, beer and ice water, and why a bicycle stays upright.
Hey. Why DOES a bicycle stay upright???
Because it’s bilaterally symmetrical, so the weight is evenly distributed on both sides of the wheel. Since there’s no preference for it to fall to the right or to the left, it stays upright.
[nitpick]
Improper list format.
Proper format:
(1) It was more an air disaster than a trainwreck.
(2) Who could read the entire thread?
(3) Hi Opal!
(4) In the latest thread there are an awful lot of guests (i.e., it’s guests, not Dopers, who are beating it to death. Whatever it is).
(5) Will no one think of the canaries?
[/nitpick]
… And I think the canaries are wonderful. Best if slow roasted over a low flame and served with melted butter and garlic. 
Do a search of Cecil’s columns. He gets it right second time.
If a horse riding a bicycle on a treadmill dies and is carried behind one of three doors…
… will four out of five dentists agree on whether or not the horse brushed its teeth properly?
I don’t think I know the “beer and ice water” question, what is it?
For the record, I’m glad that thread was started. It was one of the more interesting questions because we beat on it so thoroughly. I learned a lot from it, not just physics but about approximations and simplifications we often make unconsciously, and about common misconceptions.
Mmmm…canneries.
I can’t decide if that was deliberate or accidental…
scr4 here’s the column and here’s the discussion thread
I get angry and hungry when I think about the missing dollar.