Comments

• SadSadSatellite@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  There’s a type of bacteria that infects caterpillars and produces a toxin that makes them lose all rigidity. The toxin is called MCF.

  MCF stand for Makes Caterpillars Floppy

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  • DragonTypeWyvern@literature.cafe ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    That’s the best thing I’ve heard all week.

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  • Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    oh man you really don’t want a flaccid caterpillar, total mood killer

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    • littlebluespark@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Yeah, if the mood called for that wavy, reach-for-the-sky dance that caterpillars do. On the other hand, if the mood called for a thick, rigid caterpillar, throbbing with pent-up intention, you might want to reconsider the parties you attend.

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• Kyle_The_G@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  scientists work their asses off, its nice to have a little fun and make the endless hours all worth it.

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• Aurenkin@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Not exactly the same but I remember starting my software engineering course and having to remote into the university servers to write code. All the servers were named after Red Dwarf characters. Being a career changer, as soon as I saw the server names I had this calming feeling that I’d finally found my people.

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  • FuglyDuck@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    My dad was never at university, but he was a unix admin for ages. his naming conventions for clusters?

    Star Wars characters. Red Dwarf Characters. Star trek characters. Asimov’s robots. and apparently, his annoying bosses. (For the troublesome clusters.)

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    • HakFoo@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I’ve heard it’s a “pets vs cattle” thing. When you have a small fleet of distinct servers, you name them. When you have a thousand interchangeable boxes, you give them systematic IDs.

      Or you scale up to a franchise with a large enough cast. I wonder if anyone uses One Piece character names for servers?

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• fckreddit@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  To be honest, love the “Ferrous Wheel” pun. It’s too good.

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  • Faresh@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Can you explain it? I don’t get it.

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    • fckreddit@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Ferrous means iron. When they say Ferrous wheel, it means how the iron is stored and used in geology. It is a pun on Ferris Wheel, which is an amusement park ride,

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    • acockworkorange@mander.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Google Ferris wheel. The London Eye is an example of a Ferris wheel.

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• drail@fedia.io ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Physics is a mixed bag with this stuff. Gell-Mann came up with the name quarks after a line from Finnegan's Wake because Joyce referenced them as coming in three. It was a nonsense word inserted just to rhyme with Mark, Park, etc, so its pronunciation in physics isn't even correct, but it was fun and physicists were just having a good time with it.

  Three quarks for Muster Mark!
  Sure he has not got much of a bark
  And sure any he has it’s all beside the mark.

  Then we got the strange/charm and top/bottom (which was originally the beauty/truth, so bullet dodged there) so the quarks really got all the fun names.

  Neutrinos (my field of study), had so much potential for fun, stupid naming that was squandered. The neutrino was originally proposed with the name "neutron" by Pauli, but then the actual neutron was discovered and observed first, so the name got pinched. To remedy this, the electron neutrino was dubbed "neutrino" or little neutron (they didn't know that other flavors of neutrino existed). Meanwhile, the muon neutrino was originally supposed to be the neutretto (before they realized that the neutral leptons were related by the different particle generations), so we could have had a world where each generation of neutral lepton was just another combination of neutron + diminutive italian suffix.

  1. Neutrino
  2. Neutretto/neutronetto
  3. Neutrello/neutronello

  Then, when the mass eigenstates were confirmed, we could have diversified and gone with big suffixes to indicate that neutrinos have mass.

  1. Neutroni
  2. Neutrachione/neutronachione
  3. Neutrozzo/neutronozzo

  But noooooo, particle physics decided to just give neutrinos the lamest possible names, electron/muon/tau neutrinos for flavor states and m_1/m_2/m_3 neutrino for mass states. I am ashamed of my predecessors for what they've done.

  Don't even get me started on the J/Psi debacle...

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  • crapwittyname@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    The time derivative of position is velocity. The derivative of velocity is acceleration. Derive again and you get jerk. Then it’s snap, crackle and pop.

    (For those too young, these are the names of those characters they use to sell Rice Krispies)

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  • criitz@reddthat.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    TIL I’ve pronounced quark wrong my whole life (rhyming with park).

    Though I’ve heard it done that way elsewhere - perhaps it is also considered acceptable at this point.

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    • XTL@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      You need it to make the quantum duck joke. Quark quark.

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    • drail@fedia.io ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Gell-Mann said it sounds like "quart", Joyce rhymed it with Park, it is a silly word and the pronunciation is as fluid as you desire.

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  • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Chromodynamics just uses colors, but makes up for that simplicity by introducing anti-colors.

    Neutrello

    That sounds delicious.

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    • drail@fedia.io ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Neutrello sounds good, but it is actually pretty...

      weak

      Rimshot, crowd moans

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  • SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Wait, how is “quark” supposed to be pronounced? Not like the Star Trek character or the German cheese?

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    • TheTetrapod@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I pronounce it with the a sound I’d use in “warp”.

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    • drail@fedia.io ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      In physics- Like "quart" with a k
      In the Joyce novel- rhymes with park.

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  • littlebluespark@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    So… It seems that you feel let down by your predecessors in physics’ inability to tell the future… Hunh. Odd, that.

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• can@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  #transcription

  fuckingflying

  I hate linguistic anthropology. Why? One of the most influential experiments in linguistic anthropology involved teaching a chimp asl. One of the most influential linguisti cs is named Noam Chomsky. You know what the chimp’s name was?

  Nim Chimpsky.

  Fucking monkey pun.

  And this is in textbooks, in documentaries, everywhere. And everyone just IGNORES THIS GOD AWFUL PUN cause of how important the experiment was. But BUT LOOK AT THIS SHIT. FUCKING NIM CHIMPSKY. I HATE THIS WHOLE FIELD.

  dendritic-trees
  Its not just the linguistic anthropologists.

  There’s a group of very important genes that determine if your body develops in the right shape/organization… they are called the hedgehog genes, because fruit fly geneticists are all ridiculous. The different hedgehog genes are all named after different hedgehogs. And then someone decided to get clever and name one "sonic hedgehog’ because this is just what fruitfly geneticists do.

  Well sonic hedgehog controls brain development, and now actual doctors are stuck in the position of explaining to grieving parents that their child’s lethal birth defects or life-threatening tumors are caused by a “sonic hedgehog mutation”.

  And this is why no one will invite the fruit fly people to parties.

  error-404-fuck-not-found
  Biogeochemical scientists, upon discovering the complex mechanisms that govern the storage and use of molecular iron on our planet, decided to call this cycle “the ferrous wheel”. We groaned about that for at least five solid minutes.

  callmegallifreya
  The phenomenon of sneezing when exposed to sudden bright light is called an Autosomal-dominant Compelling Helio Opthalmic Outburst. ACHO0. Half a byte of data is a nibble.

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• adenoid@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  The predicted outcomes of sinus surgery for chronic rhinosinusitis may use the SNOT scale (sinonasal outcome test)

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  • captainlezbian@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Relevant username. Also wow sinonasal is hard to read correctly, I got sinusoidal a few times

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• reev@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I’ll just leave this here

  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cox–Zucker_machine

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• Jilanico@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thagomizer

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  • littlebluespark@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    To be fair, that was coined by Larson and then adopted by the scientists, whereas the previous examples were coined by those in the field, specifically.

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  • ken_cleanairsystems@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    My favorite.

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• Zargag@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  These are hilarious. I NEED MORE!

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  • FuglyDuck@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    there is a species of mushrooms named Spongiforma Squarepantsii.

    there is a beetle named Agra vation

    a spider named Apopyllus now

    apparently, a sea slug Yoda purpurata. (but I don’t see the resemblance.)

    and a waterbug named Ytu Brutus,

    (compliments to ChatGPT…lol)

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  • jerrythegenius@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Same lol

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    • FuglyDuck@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      we’ll just drop this here,

      there’s also a protein involved in visual signals in the brain named Pikachurin,

      there’s a wasp in austrialia named Aha ha,

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• gamermanh@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Fun fact (not really) about Nim: he and the other ASL chimps were HORRIBLY abused. Basically every single one of them.

  And it was all for nothing, not a single bit of evidence shows that teaching chimps ASL worked and allowed any form of actual communication.

  Yes, even Koko.

  youtu.be/e7wFotDKEF4

  source

  • Dasus@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Well, communication is definitely shown.

    But… “speech”, “language”, “sentient thought”? That’s the subjective bit, imo. Communication is easy.

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  • Monzcarro@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    There is also a good You’re Wrong About podcast episode on this.

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• Daft_ish@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Half a byte being a nibble is too cute to hate.

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  • VindictiveJudge@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    There was an early trend of giving tech stuff fantasy terms, too. Programs that do something for the user being wizards and programs that do things when triggered being daemons, for instance.

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    • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Player characters and profile pictures are called “avatars” after Hindu mythology. It is the physical embodiment of a divine being on a lesser plane.

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• I_Has_A_Hat@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Meanwhile, in immunology:

  “Can we have fun names?”

  “NO! Now shut up and keep isolating proteins and cell markers!”

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  • stelelor@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    The stupid terminology in immunology made me hate it so much, even though the actual mechanics are fascinating. At some point my brain just reached saturation with all the CD proteins. Enough is enough!!!

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• TopRamenBinLaden@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  1/4 of a byte, or half of a nibble, is a crumb.

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  • bizzle@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Thanks for giving us your two bits

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    • littlebluespark@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Ha! 🤓

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• mindbleach@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Hahaha, I’ve assumed it was just computer-science dorks, but maybe the urge to pick stupid names is intrinsic to all science dorks.

  I dunno if any of the “soft sciences” will get this, but naming things is in NP-hard.

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• Dave@lemmy.nz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  After looking this up, TIL that Knuckles is an echidna. I had no idea!

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  • SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Yeah, that’s probably why they called him “Knuckles the Echidna.”

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    • Dave@lemmy.nz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I don’t remember ever playing any of the early games, but I can only ever remember him being referred to as “Knuckles”, as in “Sonic and Knuckles”. I guess I was just a little too far removed from the game to ever follow the characters.

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  • Greens@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Interesting fact: Echidnas, like platypus, have no stomach.

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    • smeg@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Wait til you find out about their penises!

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• xkforce@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Not just hedgehog, there’s one called Sonic Hedgehog…

  And there’s an enzyme called Fuculokinase sometimes abbreviated “Fuck” in the literature because some of us are still 12 years old.

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  • SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Yes, that’s what the image text says

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• EffortlessEffluvium@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  It’s a nybble…

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  • SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Nope.

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    • XTL@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Yes. Two nibbles make a bite. Two nybbles make a byte.

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• reverendsteveii@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  www.catb.org/jargon/html/N/nybble.html

  Worth noting that at the time of documentation a half-byte was a nybble, and the more mundane spelling came along later

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  • roguetrick@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I appreciate that some fucking guy recorded himself reading that goddamn article.

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• FilterItOut@thelemmy.club ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Meanwhile psychologists just name things as exactly blandly as they can. There’s a neat phenomenon where a relationship can immediately be viewed as deeper and more connected, merely by one of the individuals sharing deeply personal information. It even works at the very first interaction. In other words, if someone tends to overshare, or blurt out info about themselves, we measure their blirtasiousness and its effect on relationships. Not even kidding. I think the folks who came up with it were Scottish, which is why the blirt rather than blurt.

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• TankieTanuki@hexbear.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  en.wikipedia.org/…/Fourth,_fifth,_and_sixth_deriv…

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  • AlligatorBlizzard@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I studied physics, not engineering, in undergrad, so I knew about the joke, but I didn’t realize that snap was actually used in some cases. That’s really interesting!

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  • Akasazh@feddit.nl ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    That might just be Kelloggs product placement, for all we know. /S

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• Warl0k3@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  C++ is just the next iteration of C. C# is just another layer of iteration on top of C++. Flags are simple indicators for programs, usually set by a controlling human/system, semaphores are flags that communicate between processes.

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  • Yaztromo@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    C++ is just the next iteration of C.

    This is somewhat clever when you know that the ‘++’ operator is the post-increment operator in C.

    C# is just another layer of iteration on top of C++.

    …except there is no ‘#’ operator in C or C++, so any interesting self-referential pattern breaks down here. The ‘#’ comes from musical notation, where a ‘#’ (sharp) note is played a semitone higher — and was chosen more for marketing purposes rather than scientists having an inside joke.

    You could have also mentioned ‘D’, which is another “next iteration of C” independent of C++.

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    • fibrechips@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      The # is actually two “++” stacked on top of one another

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    • WeirdAlex03@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      The C programming language also descends from the B programming language (though B’s lineage unfortunately goes to BCPL, not A)

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    • Auk@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      except there is no ‘#’ operator in C or C++, so any interesting self-referential pattern breaks down here

      is two layers of ++, so the pattern is there. Whether that was originally intended or coincidence is another matter, but it works well enough that I suspect it was considered when picking names.

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• state_electrician@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I’ve learnt about byte/nibble over 30 years ago and just now got the pun.

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• WalrusDragonOnABike@reddthat.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Been in a lab meeting (biochemists) with a group who were naming a new method they made. They started with the acronym and decided what it would stand for second.

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• Overshoot2648@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  17, 18, and 19 on the periodic table spell out ClArK, guess what’s below 18. Krypton. I can’t remember which one came first, but superman is baked into the periodic table now. :/

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• BreadOven@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  There’s always NMR scientists. Proton-Enhanced Nuclear Induction Spectroscopy.

  Also one paper that was talking about copper nanotubes (NT). So it was shortened to CuNT. I think that paper may have been oblivious to it though?

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  • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Maybe they were Australian.

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• Magnetar@feddit.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  In quantum mechanics, there are types of vectors that are written like |a>, which is called a “ket”, and their dual vectors as <a|, which are called “bra”. You write the scalar product as <a|b>. This is called the Bra-Ket-Notation.

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• ShamanSpiff@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I got bits and bytes mixed up for a minute, and was trying to figure out how the heck you have a boolean

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  • Karyoplasma@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    You never met my ex. She was the queen of half-truths.

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  • XTL@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    And you’re right because the commenter couldn’t spell nybble.

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  • littlebluespark@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    So, you’re like super-ancestor to the famous Spaceman? 😱

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    • ShamanSpiff@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      That’s me!

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• VelvetStorm@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I looked it up and yep it’s all true.

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• rtxn@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  One does not simply walk into Mordor. One has to build a spacecraft because even the eagles can’t fly there.

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