Gustephan
@Gustephan@lemmy.world
- Comment on And you can thank me for it 29 minutes ago:
With a reflective pool of water on the forest floor. Like the rest of us
- Comment on Order of magnitude is a hell of a drug 10 hours ago:
“Everything I don’t like is ai”
Grow up. The imgflip watermark is clearly visible in the meme, and it’s an ancient meme format.
- Comment on Order of magnitude is a hell of a drug 14 hours ago:
Euclidean geometry enjoyers in shambles
- Comment on Order of magnitude is a hell of a drug 14 hours ago:
I guess n would be infinite in the limit I’m looking for. I’m looking at this in like a “musing about theoretical complexity” angle rather than actually needing to use or know how to use pi on modern systems.
For the record, I realize how incredibly pedantic I’m being about the difference between the irrational pi and rational approximations of pi that end up being actually useful. That being said, computational complexity has enough math formalism stink on it that pedantry seems encouraged
- Comment on Order of magnitude is a hell of a drug 20 hours ago:
You sound like an involved and caring father. Rock on, dude
- Comment on Order of magnitude is a hell of a drug 21 hours ago:
Do said atomic instructions produce pi though, or some functional approximation of pi? I absolutely buy that approximate pi is O(1), but it still seems like a problem involving a true irrational number should be undecidable on any real turing machine
- Comment on Order of magnitude is a hell of a drug 22 hours ago:
Is it actually? I’ll admit im pretty rusty on time complexity, but naively I’d think that pi being irrational would technically make even reading or writing it from memory an undecidable problem
- Comment on Order of magnitude is a hell of a drug 22 hours ago:
“is not like you do calculations by hand anyway”
… get off my lawn, whippersnapper.
- Comment on Order of magnitude is a hell of a drug 23 hours ago:
That’s because your engineering ass needs things to be physical and sane. Physics is a field for the mentally unwell to sink further into insanity while incoherently scribbling greek letters on every available flat surface.
On a more serious note, yeah you absolutely have to be careful about where you apply really ambitious simplifications like that. There are plenty of mathematical regimes where you can use natural units (this is the term to look up if your interest extends further) and simplify your reference frame by a hell of a lot though. Setting the speed of light to 1 is also a hell of a drug, and brother I’ve got an addiction
- Comment on Order of magnitude is a hell of a drug 23 hours ago:
You’re a monster. I love it
- Comment on Order of magnitude is a hell of a drug 23 hours ago:
The real comment mvp. You deserve every positive vote my post got
- Comment on Order of magnitude is a hell of a drug 1 day ago:
Somebody else already said it, but that’s what the title is.
Longform: for a lot of calculations that happen in astro deal with distances so large so large that only order of magnitude changes actually meaningfully affect the end result. To connect to a more common topic, here’s a joke. “Whats the difference between a million dollars and a billion dollars?” “About a billion dollars” This joke works for the same reason; 1 billion is so many orders of magnitude larger than 1 million that (1,000,000,000 - 1,000,000 = 1,000,000,000) is only incorrect by ~0.1%, even though substituting 0 for 1 million in that equation seems ridiculous on the face of it
- Submitted 1 day ago to science_memes@mander.xyz | 71 comments
- Comment on Free Talk Friday - June 13th, 2025 4 days ago:
I don’t know that I’d call it a compliment or an insult? It just was. It was unusual to see “a few dudes in short sleeve button ups and khakis who look like a mildly jamming dad band” keep the concert energy up after Veil of Maya played and performed a much more stereotypical hardcore set. They didn’t speak to the crowd at all, other than the one interruption when the sound wasn’t right. My comment may also have been influenced by the fact that I’ve watched some of his (Tosin Abasi) guitar tutorials on YouTube and it is exceedingly clear that he’s working with a healthy dose of the tism. Calling it autistic wasn’t meant as a compliment or an insult though, just a matter of fact neutral statement about the experience.
- Comment on Free Talk Friday - June 13th, 2025 4 days ago:
This happened to me at a concert in Cincinnati once. Veil of Maya opened and played a great face melting hardcore set with thrashing and screaming and moshing, then Animals as Leaders came on and played the most autistic set I’ve ever seen. Every one of them looked like a music school postdoc just casually jamming, while the pit was still going and having a great time. At one point, the lead guitar Tosin notices some issue with the speakers, stops the music, goes up to the mic with the tiniest little mouse voice, and is like “I’m hearing an audio issue I can’t play through, speak amongst yourselves while we get it fixed”. Absolute banger of a show. I think of that every time I hear “talk amongst yourselves” now.
- Comment on It's not supposed to make sense... 5 days ago:
The most important thing I’ve ever been told about quantum is “shut up and calculate.” Results don’t seem physical? That’s quantum. Results don’t make sense? That’s quantum. Shut up and calculate
- Comment on Well whenever you notice something like *that*, a wizard did it 1 week ago:
Christian scientists on their way to tell you about how their evidence free belief in magic shouldn’t affect how you view their ability to derive truth from evidence
- Comment on Got to be impressed with this guy's skill 1 week ago:
I’m sure this is real and that guy is super talented, but I’d love to see a video of somebody who couldn’t do this but still had confidence because they thought the video would be edited so the bread didn’t all fall to the ground
- Comment on Shamelessly stolen and posted here for y'all 1 week ago:
At least it’s not forty cakes. That’s as many as four tens. And that’s terrible
- Comment on Sometimes when it's quiet I sit on the shower floor 2 weeks ago:
How is this TERFy? (Not disagreeing or challenging your position, I just don’t understand and would like to)
- Comment on JUST DO PSYCHEDELICS LIKE NORMAL PEOPLE 3 weeks ago:
“Drugs” is a pretty wide net, and yeah most of them would make it more difficult. Someone who isn’t me once told me that psychedelics make it a lot easier to follow really abstract thought, and that comes in handy when trying to imagine theoretical geometries our brains and other sensory equipment didn’t evolve to comprehend
- Comment on Anon isn't fooled by planes 3 weeks ago:
Bruh some of the earliest planes were literally called biplanes. The gay has been complicit in aviation demon magic since the very beginning.
- Comment on JUST DO PSYCHEDELICS LIKE NORMAL PEOPLE 3 weeks ago:
No no, I think there’s a misunderstanding here. If you can accurately describe to me what an n-brane is or have ever used terms like “deformation in the local topology”, I assume you’ve done SIGNIFICANTLY more psychedelics than most people. I’ve never had easier access to psychedelics in my life than when I spent most of my time near the math buildings at uni.
- Comment on Interesting question I really hadn't thought about 4 weeks ago:
Normally I’d have your back with the translation but I can’t understand the cockney accent OP is speaking with
- Comment on Uncultured 5 weeks ago:
Telomeres are a structure on DNA. These things, aglets, are a common metaphor used to describe the function of telomeres as aglets basically do for shoelaces what telomeres do for DNA
- Comment on A person born in 2015 is 20 years old 5 weeks ago:
I’d tell you to get off my lawn, but I was born in the 90s so I don’t own a lawn and statistically never will
- Comment on It puts the frequency in the bucket or it gets the sigterm again 1 month ago:
From the moment I understood the weakness of my analytical math, it disgusted me. I craved the strength and certainty of numerical methods. I aspired to the purity of the Blessed Statistics. Your kind cling to your transforms, as though they will not decay and fail you.
- Comment on If I snapped you back in time 650 years right this very second, how would you use your current knowledge to succeed? 1 month ago:
I could probably discover electricity, depending on where I landed. Jewelers of the time could make wire, copper was common, and magnets (lodestones) had been discovered. Realistically though I’d be a dumb giant (ie, speak no known languages of the time and statistically I’d have like a foot on the “tall” people of the era). I’d probably try to find some party trick that looked like magic to people of the era then hope that people would welcome and try to integrate me rather than burning me as a witch. Then I’d probably die in a week or two anyway to some disease lol
- Comment on This is how we do it 1 month ago:
Couldn’t tell ya. Iirc they were pretty much all killed by data by the time the LHC reached 12TeV collisions, and I’ve been in a different field since then
- Comment on He lepton the market trend 1 month ago:
Later, the bartender collected their Nobel prize for observing and writing about a meson that stayed stable for the duration of a short conversation
