cosecantphi [he/him]

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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: July 27th, 2020

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  • cosecantphi [he/him]@hexbear.nettoScience Memes@mander.xyzLaunches
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    22 days ago

    The reason you need to slow down is because you’re starting on Earth, which means you’re moving fast enough parallel to the sun’s surface that for every foot you fall downwards toward the sun, the sun’s surface curves away by 1 foot. This results in the nearly circular orbit around the sun we exist in.

    If you start speeding up, the orbit becomes more elliptical, except your aphelion starts raising away from the sun because now you’re moving fast enough that you’ve moved more than 1 foot sideways in the time you’ve fallen 1 foot downwards.

    Slowing down has the opposite effect. If you get your speed down to 0, you’ll fall straight down toward the sun as normal with gravity. But you don’t need to go all the way down to 0 velocity to enter the sun, you just need to slow down until your elliptical orbit brushes up against the sun’s surface. If you then want to speed back up to avoid falling into the sun, you need to do it parallel to the sun’s surface. At this point, speeding up toward the sun will actually make you fall into the sun faster.

    So basically the problem isn’t that you’re moving too fast to fall into the sun. By virtue of Earth’s orbit, you’re moving too fast in a direction away from hitting the sun’s surface.



  • Understanding classical waves better is what helped me wrap my mind around the physical meaning of the uncertainty principle. It’s not a technical limitation, and it’s not just because you need to interact with something to measure it. It’s just a property of waves. Since small enough particles exhibit the properties of waves, it only makes sense that we can’t know their location and momentum at the same time with arbitrary precision.

    The velocity of a wave is a function of its frequency and wavelength. But imagine a highly localized wave, essentially just a peak. What’s its frequency? Well, we find that it doesn’t have one frequency! If you decompose the wave, you find its mathematically a superposition of multiple sine or cosine functions with different frequencies and therefore velocities. So the more localized the wave is, i.e the more you know its position, the less and less you know about its frequency and therefore velocity.

    This stuff blew my mind when it was first explained to me.





  • Veritasium

    Sucks about this guy, he used to actually make interesting pop-sci videos without mangling the concepts and conclusions too badly. It was a breath of fresh air compared to the bullshit other science popularizers like Michio Kaku were dreaming up at the time. But nowadays his videos all have these extremely vague clickbait titles. And much worse than that: he clearly shills tech from sponsored companies. Not with marked sponsorship segments, but with entire videos that are essentially long form advertisements with all of the disinformation marketing entails. Other than the word sponsor being highlighted and placed before the title, there is no indication for his audience that they shouldn’t view such sponsored videos as normal Veritasium videos.

    The most blatant example of this was when he shilled for Waymo self driving ride share cars in an 18 minute video they sponsored. It was about two years ago, the title:

    Why You Should Want Driverless Cars On Roads Now

    Here’s a video detailing the ways in which Veritasium misleads his audience to produce corporate propaganda using the driverless car video as its main example. It’s an hour long, but I still recommend giving it a watch because it’s so thorough: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CM0aohBfUTc

    I’m sure Veritasium does still make good, well researched and well intentioned videos, but after seeing the way he intentionally manipulates his audience in certain videos, I can’t help but be distrustful of everything he says elsewhere.





  • I don’t have much experience with cocaine or stimulants in general, but I have gone through the ringer of opioid addiction. I’m five years clean now thanks to Buprenorphine.

    From that horrific experience, my gut feeling is that there is no possible way sugar is anywhere near as addictive as opioids. At least not for anyone predisposed to enjoying opioids, of course. Going through opioid withdrawal is a horror I will wish on very few people. It has broken me before, and it has broken some of the strongest people I’ve ever known. I have never felt an incredible urge to steal from my own family to satisfy a sweet tooth, that’s for sure.




  • Pay off my debt, buy a modest home, go back to school, never work a shit job for minimum wage ever again.

    But I don’t need anywhere near 20,000,000 dollars a year to do that.

    After some large donations to communist organizations, I’d put the remaining few million per year into buying commercial slots on every major TV network in the US. Then I’d create Jury Nullification PSAs and blast them over the airways continuously until the message sinks in universally that juries are under no obligation at all to respect the laws currently grinding marginalized people into dust.



  • I like that North Korea has turned the Truman Show into a real thing all for the sake of western tourists. It takes a serious dedication to the art of theater and acting to transform an entire country of 26 million people into an endless and infinitely deep stage production. They’ve built full skyscrapers just as back drops for their sets. They painstakingly carved and painted millions upon millions of wooden props to resemble food items such as fruit, vegetables, and grains to place in store sets ubiquitously since real food no longer exists there. The wide assortment of actors walking the streets and pretending to go to work and do their jobs, each of them with their own unique backstory handcrafted to resemble the life of a real person. The fact that they’ve maintained the illusions of functioning trains by using clever line of sight techniques to hide the dozens of stage crew that need to push the cars along the tracks.

    This is a very impressive accomplishment once you consider 90% of the country is currently being held in concentration camps for disrespecting the Kim dynasty by not maintaining the same haircut as their supreme leader. That the remaining 10 percent can put on this kind of show is spectacular without any kind of monetary compensation or even food. Everyone there is starving to death, but they’ve managed to hide such inadequacies through industrious makeup and lighting techniques. The country’s dedication is so intense even that these actors are allowed to have their own haircuts so as to not hurt immersion.