woodenghost
@woodenghost@hexbear.net
- Comment on Which grass? 3 days ago:
“Oh, this’ll be the last time with you on a baseball field.”
“Oh, don’t worry, there’s still plenty of thyme and I’ll have any thistle be dealt with first thing tomorrow.”
“You’ll have what?”
“I’ll tell our groundskeeper. He knows how to deal with them. You should hire him for your garden, you can see what marvelous work he’s done here.”
“This’ll be the day. I can see it everywhere.”
“Only until tomorrow.”
- Comment on Which grass? 3 days ago:
“Okay, nevermind, we’ll get back to it. For now, what’s that growing around second base?”
“That’s a big dill.”
“I’m sure it is, it’s almost obstructing the field. But what herb could be such big a deal that you let it grow on a baseball field?”
“Sure is”
“Never mind, we don’t have time for this. Can you get me back the time I lost on this bullshit?”
“Oh, you want thyme? Then let’s go to third base.”
“I just said, we don’t have time for this!”
“Well that’s why we should go to third base. We have plenty of thyme, you’ll see!”
“No we don’t, I just told you! We should head back to first base.”
“Back to witch?”
“To first base.”
“Yes. To witch.”
“You know which, I just told you to which base, we’ll keep the time in mind, pass by the big deal on second base and get back to which?”
“That’s the first time you got it right!”
- Comment on what’s your best “nitric acid acts upon trousers” moment? 3 days ago:
Those brown/red gases are different Nitrogen oxides and very unhealthy to breath in. I had to do this once and the fume hood was barely keeping up. It filled quick with the stuff. Later, we had to get the copper back and were deducted points for each fraction of a gram lost.
Once I discovered a large hole with black edges on the back of my lab coat. Someone must have spilled sulfuric acid on it without noticing. So it makes sense to wear them in a crowded lab, even if you think you yourself don’t need to.
- Comment on Theories on Theories 4 weeks ago:
Math: here’s a theorem, if it’s proven, it’s true until someone finds an error in the proof or in the compiler, if it’s a computer assisted proof (and the compiler can never be proven not to be flawed - Turing) or in one of the assumptions or in their proofs or until the axiomatic system used is proven inconsistent (and it can never be proven not to be inconsistent - Goedel) or until you decide you need to work in a different systems or technically if we stay in the system, but language or culture shifts and we change what we mean by the specific words and symbols used in the theorem.
Even if it’s true, unless you’re a platonist, it’s not true in the sense that it corresponds to a factual state of affairs in the world (there are no triangles). It’s only true within the system you’re using, just like the sentence: “Sherlock Holmes lives in Baker Street” is only true in the fictional world of the novels by Arthur Conan Doyle. Or even less so, because unlike novels, math statements are tautologies, reducible to a small number of axioms or axiom schemes.
- Comment on What would you do? 5 weeks ago:
Neither. Math builds a lot on other math. And the curriculum is very standardized. That’s why, when people just happen to miss something at any point, because maybe they have more important stuff going on in their live right now, they never catch up. We should drop the requirement that everyone has to learn the same math at the same time, higher more teachers and allow students to flow freely between courses to focus on the stuff they can learn with the mark they already know. This will allow students to catch up and, paradoxically, produce a higher over all level of math knowledge, if less standardized and predictable for employers.
Now, to ensure students also want to learn math, both abstract math courses and mixed seminars should be offered. Students could choose to attend either or both. In the seminars, math, physics and engineering would be mixed in challenges were students with different skills and preferences have to work together to produce a cool result (like a robot, a game, an experiment, etc.). The abstract courses shouldn’t be forgotten, because many students actually enjoy learning math. Instead of just teaching rules and how to follow them, they should involve a creative aspect, where students are encouraged to break rules by making their own definitions, formulate their theorems and try to prove them (like actual mathematicians do).
- Comment on What would you do? 5 weeks ago:
“Teaching practical skills” is code for producing lots of ‘human-capital’ with a highly standardized skill set that is useful and predictable for capitalists. Catering to individual interests is not required, neither is actually understanding math, just being able to blindly follow an algorithm.
- Comment on Poorly drawn guys club 1 month ago:
They only look unfamiliar, because they are just that good at hiding.
- Comment on Littering 🚯 2 months ago:
People have tried to ban it. But it’s an ever so slight inconvenience for hunters to switch to other ammunition.
- Comment on Littering 🚯 2 months ago:
It’s the leading cause of death for all birds of prey in Europe too. Partly because hunters leave killed animals or their guts lying around, where the birds find them. It’s not just vultures who eat already dead prey. But birds who only eat freshly killed prey (live falcons) are dying at the same rates. Why? Because their prey often has lead embedded in their bodies. They mistakenly eat it too, but also one in three living ducks and geese in Europe has been shot before and has lead permanently embedded inside their body.
- Comment on Booby Dance 3 months ago:
They have a cloaca. It’s all butt stuff.
- Comment on Poor Jeremy 3 months ago:
Okay, thanks
- Comment on Poor Jeremy 3 months ago:
But all three seem to be coiling in the same direction? All tilt to the left side and coil clockwise.
- Comment on pro choice 3 months ago:
Sure, why just this morning I got me a second car by choosing five sets of points of my old car and rotating them around a bit in my garage. No, you can’t see it, it was uh… a non constructive job. (jk I don’t own a car, or a garage for that matter)
- Comment on Statistically, probably with the beetles. 🪲 5 months ago:
Moths, they’re cool and cute.
- Comment on same shit every day, on god 5 months ago:
Bombs are insanely powerful too and yet useless as an energy source. What matters is cost in cent per kWh. Fusion showes every sign of becoming very very expensive, even in the best case scenarios.
Laser based fusion for example literally uses gold coated diamond pellets, hundreds of which have to be shot into the reaction chamber to even break even energyweise in theory. At that point, no energy is produced at all and costs per kWh are still infinit. And the lenses get destroyed so fast you constantly have to exchange them.
Meanwhile both renewables and energy storage technologies continue to get cheaper and cheaper. Fusion faces barriers in engineering, fundamental physics and even in mathematics (modeling plasma is critical). Some of which might be insurmountable in principle. But I’m the end the one barrier that matters is the economic one. And no one even has a plan on how to tackle it expect for shoveling an insane amount of tax money into the fire indefinitely.
- Comment on same shit every day, on god 5 months ago:
In Germany, funding for research is being cut alot. The solar cut happened a long time ago and fifty thousand jobs where lost at the time. Last year, they basically cancelled almost all battery research (needed for electric cars and stuff). Now, many more important stuff is being refunded. Except for fusion. Fusion is receiving a big boost in funding. Everyone and their dog are doing fusion research now
I think, that’s not despite the famous “fusion constant” (fusion being always “only” thirty years away), but because of it. Unlike solar or batteries or anything else that actually works, fusion does not threaten to disrupt the oligopolies of the power companies, or the car companies or anyone else’s. It enables a wealth transfer (accumulation through dispossession) to companies involved in the research, without contributing to the crisis of overaccumulation, because no use value exists, so no value ever needs to be realized. It’s like building a pyramid in the desert.
- Comment on One photograph. Two daughters. Three Nobel Prizes. 6 months ago:
I found this on wikipedia:
Irène “was accidentally exposed to polonium when a sealed capsule of the element exploded on her laboratory bench in 1946”. That was from her own work. She lived another ten years, than died from leukemia.
Ève lived to be 102 years old and died in her sleep in 2007.
- Comment on Relativity 6 months ago:
Hate it when I accidentally drive over a lagrange point on my bicycle and the resulting tire wear leads me straight into a wormhole.
- Comment on arborholing 6 months ago:
What are signs of ‘species domestication’?
- Comment on one bright second 6 months ago:
Or imagine it the other way around: The heat death has long started and we live in it. Who knows what kind of civilizations existed in the first quark gluon plasma 10^-12 to 10^-5 seconds after the big bang? They would have been tiny, fast and highly energetic. There are many orders of magnitude in size more between us and the plank length then between us and the observable universe. There’s lots of room down there. To them, we would seem like sluggish giants living off of tiny sparks within the faded light their long dead world set free when the universe became transparent 18,000 years after the big bang.
- Comment on one bright second 6 months ago:
Life could also just slow down a lot, use less energy. It would feel the same. Billions of years go by in a flash on the far end of the bell curve. But no problem, there always more time.
- Comment on Nice. 7 months ago:
Pavlov sits at the bar with some friends enjoying drinks as someone walks in and the door bell rings. He suddenly gets up. “What’s up? Are you leaving?” One of his friends asks. “I just remembered,” he replies. “Got to go feed my dogs.”
- Comment on don't look up :) 7 months ago:
Celebratory staff outing with a free picnic to honor a newly discovered comet on safe, far away orbit?
- Comment on wax on 7 months ago:
Damn, I somehow thought, that they made it with their mouth or something. Now I can’t stop wondering what that feels like.
- Comment on IT'S A TRAP 7 months ago:
There are different ways to compare the “sizes” of infinite set. So you could both be right in different contexts and for different sets. But the one concept people mostly mean, when they say, that some infinities are larger than other, is one to one correspondence (also called “cardinality”):
If you have a set and you can describe how you would choose one element of a second set for each element of the first, than that’s called a one to one correspondence. In that case, people say the two sets have the same cardinality which is one way to define their size (and a very common and useful one).
For example there is a one to one correspondence between the integers and the even integers. The procedure is to just take the integers and multiple each of them by two. So these two sets have the same cardinality and in that sense, the same size.
There is even a procedures that proofs, that the set of the rational numbers has the same cardinality as the natural numbers.
But Cantor proved, that there can never be such a procedure, that established a one to one correspondence between the natural numbers and the reals. So it’s in that sense, that people say the reals form the larger set.
- Comment on IT'S A TRAP 7 months ago:
Also almost all real numbers are undefinable. (Unless you’re using a model, that makes them countable.)
So that means, if they are all different, than almost all the “humans” on the bottom track are something we can not even imagine in principle. Wouldn’t be surprised, if infinite Superman’s where among them.
- Comment on 2 OP 7 months ago:
Okay, wow, it was true all along. Thanks for sharing that cool video!
- Comment on 2 OP 7 months ago:
I tried to research that, but couldn’t find anything. I have to call bullshit.
- Comment on Hue hue hue 7 months ago:
It’s fine, the sun send us an heart emoji.
- Comment on It's always Brassica 8 months ago:
No, it’s just a joke. But lots of veggies are.