solrize
@solrize@lemmy.ml
- Comment on What're your strong opinions from an aged / dead fandom? 2 days ago:
Your post made me realize B5 is nowhere near dead. It’s just resting. Lensman series anyone?
- Comment on What're your strong opinions from an aged / dead fandom? 2 days ago:
What? I have no idea what any of that is. I was thinking of Babylon 5.
- Comment on What’s up with Myrrh being more prevalent? 3 days ago:
It’s mentioned in a well known Christmas carol that is often heard at this time of year. I’m not into it myself. Its bitter perfume breathes a life of gathering gloom. Too emo for me.
- Comment on Why do personal knowledge base applications like Obsidian have all these bells and whistles for querying and parsing metadata/frontmatter but nothing similar for the actual content of notes? 5 days ago:
Just use a text editor that can search.
- Comment on Can anyone recommend a logging blood pressure cuff that doesn't require an app or account? 6 days ago:
This looks promising, it lets you collect data from Omron devices. It’s from a quick web search so idk any more about it.
One way this is better than manual logging is that it can run while you sleep. That is, you could have it take your BP once an hour all night or whatever. That’s done in hospitals all the time. It’s uncomfortable so I wouldn’t do it routinely, but it might be worthwhile if you suspect something might be up. Obviously, discuss it with your Dr too.
- Comment on How do we know that the ratio between the circumference and the diameter of a circle is preserved across radius sizes? 6 days ago:
In math, it’s a theorem based on certain assumptions and definitions about the distances between points, and what length means. You start with human-made assumptions and follow them to wherever they lead.
Those assumptions are pretty well justified based on local observations of the real world. Are they true on a bigger scale, say at astronomical distances? People began to wonder this in the 1800’s, in the era of Gauss and Riemann. There’s another theorem that the interior angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees, and Gauss (an astronomer as well as a math whiz) actually proposed testing that on astronomical observations. I don’t know if hey tried any experiments though. A deviation from 180 degrees would mean that space was curved.
Lo and behold, it turns out that space actually is curved, in the presence of gravitational fields. That was figured out by none other than Einstein, who became world famous when Eddington did an observation during a solar eclipse in 1919 and saw the apparent motion of distant stars when they got lined up with the edge of the sun. The eclipse was needed for the observation since otherwise the sun would have drowned out the distant stars. But, it was quite a sensitive experiment, maybe not possible in the era of Gauss.
Anyway, the “big” answer to your question is that the ratio being constant is in the end an empirically observed fact, but that on a cosmic scale is only a close approximation, and (even Einstein didn’t foresee this) falls completely apart near very extreme ragions like black holes.
Einstein’s theory (“general relativity”) was still an incredible work of genius. As the saying goes, they didn’t call him Einstein for nothing!
- Comment on what was the worst enemy of feudalism? 6 days ago:
This isn’t my area at all but I thought that the traditional picture involved feudalism eroding due to technological development empowering the merchant and industrial classes. In both cases, the serfs or peons didn’t get much of a say, but it wasn’t really an ideological conflict, more of a natural economic shift.
- Comment on Trump’s Top Aide Acknowledges ‘Score Settling’ Behind Prosecutions 1 week ago:
Wow, wonder if there’s conflict between Trump and Wiles now.
- Comment on California Hires Former C.D.C. Officials Who Criticized Trump Administration 1 week ago:
One is Susan Monarez, a former director of the C.D.C., who was fired by the White House in late August after Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. tried to remove her from her position and she resisted leaving. The other is Dr. Debra Houry, a former chief medical officer of the C.D.C., who quit partly in protest over the firing of Dr. Monarez.
I doin’t know anything about either of those, but Monarez was apparently appointed by Trump then fired a month later for resisting RFK idiocy. A good way to go but a not so promising way to enter.
- Comment on should I go back to my old job now that several people, some of them more knowledgeable than me have told me they don't understand my decision to quit it? 2 weeks ago:
Just be honest about why you quit and what you’re getting out of it, and that the pay at the new job is almost the same. Say you can think about going back if they offer you a big pay increase and other stress relief.
- Comment on How to deploy a satellite and what are the costs? 3 weeks ago:
Start by joining amsat.org I guess.
- Comment on Once a Gamble in the Desert, Electric Grid Batteries Are Everywhere 3 weeks ago:
Even with the gift code but now blocks reader mode and tells you to turn it off. Bah. Article is ok though.
- Comment on Could there be additional forces at super low energies? Could a new fundamental force be discovered anytime soon? + other questions relating to forces 3 weeks ago:
Currently known forces splitting at low energies, and hidden 5th force: nobody knows. Physics is an observational science and right now there aren’t any observations that require such observations, but never say never.
Star wars force: come on, it’s fiction.
Gravity incompatible with QM: basically, quantum field theories are developed by starting with classical field theories (say electromagnetism) and doing some mathematical transformations called “canonical quantization” and “second quantization” (these have wikipedia articles). In the 1920s through mid-1940s this worked well for electromagnetism, and made good predictions except it broke down at very small scales, giving “infinity” as the answer to calculations that should have been finite. In the late 1940s a scheme called renormalization was developed, that allowed cancelling out the infinities and getting very precise answers. That was called quantum electrodynamics (QED). Later this was extended to the strong and weak nuclear forces, giving the standard model (SM). That was harder, but same basic idea.
The trouble with gravity is that when you perform quantization and then renormalization, the infinities still don’t go away. That’s what the incompatibility means. There are a lot of proposals like string theory to quantize gravity, but it’s all very speculative.
As for detecting gravity waves but not gravitons, it’s similar to the situation with visible light. As far back as the 1700s(?) it was possible to combine light beams and see interference patterns, thus confirming the existence of light waves. Light “particles” (photons) are much harder to detect and I think this was first done convincingly by Einstein’s explanation of Brownian motion around 1900 (before relativity).
Disclaimer: I’m no expert and I haven’t made any progress in understanding this stuff beyond the handwaving level that you see above.
- Comment on What does it mean when someone says they're a "targeted individual"? 4 weeks ago:
It means they look like this:
- Comment on Is there a word for when someone is not capable of, or doesn't try to understand verbal communication in a language, they are fluent in similar to functionally illiterate but for speech? 4 weeks ago:
You mean the person can read and write, but is bad at voice communication? Maybe a hearing problem?
- Comment on Marjorie Taylor Greene Says She Plans to Resign in January 5 weeks ago:
“I believe in term limits and do not think Congress should be a lifelong career or an assisted living facility.” Woah lol, shots fired.
- Comment on Can we have a healthy life only with fruits or fruits and plants combined alone, and if not why? 5 weeks ago:
Being vegan takes a bit of nutritional awareness but it’s not that difficult. You might want some vitamin supplements as people have said. Note that fruit isn’t that much different from candy in terms of the sugar hit. I’m not vegan myself in terms of intentionally sticking to such a diet, but often my eating patterns end up going that way anyway, and it works out ok, at least for a while.
- Comment on Trump Berates One Reporter and Tells Another,‘Quiet Piggy’ 5 weeks ago:
Do you mean moi? Oooh! He noticed me!
- Comment on 1 month ago:
I had an Acer as a work laptop some years back. It was fine, though I didn’t use it that heavily, so maybe issues would have come up if I did. Also, maybe there are worse now.
For personal use I’ve generally bought Thinkpads and pounded the crap out of them. I’m currently thinking of getting a Lenovo Yoga if they go on special Black Friday again, but I have trepidations.
- Comment on When "AI" content becomes indistinguishable from human-made content, is there, philosophically speaking, any meaningful differences between the two? 1 month ago:
It’s up to you. There’s a traditional wooden drinking cup called a kuksa that is popular with outdoors types. It’s carved from a solid block of wood. You can buy them, but it’s more “bushcrafty” if you make one yourself. Further, you’re supposed to use only hand tools, no power tools. OTOH, one that you order online was probably milled by a machine. It’s hard to tell them apart though.
Is there a philosophical difference? Up to you.
- Comment on Are physical mail generally not under surveillance? If everyone suddently ditched electronic communications and start writing letters, would governments be able to practically surveil everyone? 1 month ago:
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physical mail has gotten way more expensive, now 78 cents for a regular letter and $5 for a small package. So it adds up. I probably send a dozen emails a day while sending out maybe 3 envelopes per month, usually stuff like bill payments or business docs, rather than personal letters.
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they collect all the metadata now, i.e. photographs of the front and back of the envelope. I try not to write return addresses on envelopes but sometimes it’s necessary and sometimes I forgot to omit it. They do get delivered without the return address, though I don’t have enough samples to say the reliability is any different.
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- Comment on Federal Judge, Warning of ‘Existential Threat’ to Democracy, Resigns 1 month ago:
stepping down to defend against the “assault on the rule of law”
Wait, isn’t that exactly what they want? And can’t you do a lot more as a federal judge than as a rando? The saying used to be “don’t mess with federal judges–they can lock you in a room and throw away the room!”.
- Comment on Do air purifiers really reduce dust much? 1 month ago:
They help, and they can take out airborne pathogens. Look up “Corsi-Rosenthal box” if you want to DIY a very powerful and cheap but noisy one.
- Comment on Which community for showing my apps? 1 month ago:
Depends on the app? Maybe say more about what the apps do.
- Comment on Hegseth Is Purging Military Leaders With Little Explanation | The moves to fire or sideline generals and admirals are without precedent in recent decades and have rattled the top brass. 1 month ago:
Bill Kristol (conservative commentator I think) also questioned it on tweeter:
x.com/BillKristol/status/1983909906664059280
Purges of senior military officers.
If this were happening elsewhere, we’d understand right away what was happening.
It’s hard to grasp that it’s happening here. But it is…
- Comment on when are the upcoming political elections held in america? 1 month ago:
There’s no legal requirement for state or city elections to synchronize with federal ones, but they tend to do it anyway because elections are expensive to run, so they like to combine them. It’s not always, just a lot of the time.
- Comment on when are the upcoming political elections held in america? 1 month ago:
Not in 1900 or 2100…
- Comment on when are the upcoming political elections held in america? 1 month ago:
For the most part they are held every two years in November, in even numbered years. Next year is the so-called midterms, which will elect among other things the entire House of Representatives and 1/3 of the Senate. Every 4 years (2024, 2028, etc.) is the presidential election. For the Senate and Representatives, in practice, most of the incumbents get re-elected without much difficulty, but some seats will be in play.
In odd numbered years like 2025, there are a few elections like Mamdani’s and a couple of stage governorships, but there are far fewer seats in play than in even numbered years.
There are also occasionally special elections that can be anytime, i.e. in months other than November. Also, there are primary elections (not deciding who gets an office, but rather, who gets to be a party’s nominee for that office) that are held some months before the November (“general”) election.
Finally there are various kinds of local elections that are not entirely synchronized with the ones for federal offices.
- Comment on Are you friends with any AI bots? 1 month ago:
Not that I know of, but these days I guess there is no way to tell.
- Comment on Is the damsel in distress trope just independent? 1 month ago:
No the real world operates by physics which is consistent, but above that are artificial constructs like damsels in distress, that are inconsistent. There’s no world in which those things all work as advertised. We just get by anyway.
