|
credburn posted:On the subject of grammar, help settle an argument betwixt a friend and I: She's right. You don't have "one equipment" or "two equipment(s?)," you have "some equipment," perhaps one or two "pieces of equipment" if you want to get specific about number. So it is, as she says, a uncounted noun. And uncounted nouns generally get singular verb conjugation. You wouldn't say "this water have a weird taste" or "this stuff are heavy," lest you sound like a badly-translated jRPG character from 1997.
|
#
¿
Mar 14, 2022 23:56
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 9, 2024 23:07 |
|
|
Tenebrais posted:A truly 2D object would not have the mass to emit or reflect photons and hence could not be seen at all. I don't think this really makes sense. 3D objects, as we know them, are clouds of vaguely associated 0-dimensional particles. I don't see why constraining those particles to a plane would particularly stop them from emitting or reflecting light.
|
|
#
¿
May 5, 2022 19:07
|
|
|
Platystemon posted:That’s not a two-dimensional object. It has a third dimension on the order of one angstrom. No it doesn't??? Fundamental particles, as far as we know, are dimensionless, and definitely smaller than one angstrom. Atoms are on the order of one angstrom wide, but nothing akin to an atom as we know it can exist in a hypothetical 2D object.
|
|
#
¿
May 5, 2022 23:35
|
|
|
zedprime posted:Objects are the sum of interactions of particles which always cast to 3d because of various foibles of wave particle duality. Especially when we say "see." EMR is 3d which means the absolute best we could ever "see" is 2d cast to 3d. Well, you're absolutely correct that a two-dimensional assemblage of particles would bear little resemblance to what we normally think of as an "object." So what I'm imagining, here, is a potential field affecting this "object" that's uniform in two dimensions, and in the third dimension is basically an inverse Dirac delta function, infinity everywhere except one coordinate value where it is zero. This perfectly constrains the particles to the 2d plane at that coordinate, in the same way that a particle is constrained in the classic "infinite square well" that everyone learns to solve in their Babby's First QM course. And then you have some ordinary particles (electrons, quarks, the usual stuff that makes up what we think of as "ordinary matter") in some arbitrary arrangement within that plane to form our "object." The physics of such an object would be weird and counter-intuitive, for sure - the particles would behave in some ways as if the universe only has two spatial dimensions, but still interact with other things in normal ways. Whether such an object would be "solid" or not sort of depends on some assumptions you have to make - does the Pauli exclusion principle apply between the electrons of an ordinary object, unconstrained by this fantasy potential field, and the constrained electrons in this 2D object? To me it makes more sense if the answer is "no," but it could go either way. Could such an object form a rigid structure at all? I don't know, and I don't know that anyone does - what sorts of structures may form when quarks and gluons are constrained to a plane is a question for someone more well-versed in QCD than I, if there is even a sensible answer within our current understanding of particle physics. I'd guess that at best you're going to get some kind of weird diffuse quark-gluon plasma with some electrons floating in it, possibly destined to expand and disperse into very small net-color-and-electric-charge-neutral droplets, vaguely atom-like, bound together by strong and electromagnetic forces. Ultimately, there's a lot we can't really answer about how this would work; it's hard to get intuition for a situation where something as simple as a proton can't exist in the normal way. But ultimately my objection stands. None of these questions change the fact that the object is made of charged particles. Light interacts with charged particles - so why shouldn't it interact with this object? Since the potential field breaks the symmetry in one direction, momentum won't be conserved in that direction (or to put it another way, when the light bounces off of particles in the "object," it will ultimately exchange momentum with the field rather than the particle itself). Its charged particles create fields like any other - so the motions of its particles will generate radio waves and such. I guess you could reasonably say that we don't know whether visible light, in particular, would interact meaningfully with it. But the original post I objected to said ALL light/photons wouldn't be emitted or reflected at all, and I don't see any justification for that position. So, yeah, I thought about this way too much. Gaius Marius posted:Someone posts some stoner thought and suddenly everyone's a scientist or philosopher I spent over 7 years studying physics and the only thing it's useful for is posting
|
|
#
¿
May 6, 2022 01:22
|
|
|
Platystemon posted:The text isn’t even the half of it First of all, that's not what the argument was. Forum user Jezza of OZPOS (named Malcolm Turnbeug at the time) posted that sea shanties are "implicitly supportive of colonialism". Not because specifically the song The Wellerman mentions specific products of slavery, but because nostalgia in general for a white supremacist society is maybe a bad thing. Secondly, as you may have noticed, I am DontMockMySmock and not Jezza of OZPOS. I am of the impression that the person who gave me this red text didn't realize that Jezza and I were different people, since they apparently blamed me for the derail that Jezza started. How appropriate that we're having this discussion in this thread, because apparently you just figured that out, too. I neither started the derail nor contributed more than one (1) post to it. I didn't say a single goddamn word about sea shanties specifically, much less "sugar and tea and rum." You can read the derail yourself if you think I'm lying or something. So if you want to make fun of me for the dumb poo poo I've said then at least quote it properly. God knows I post plenty of dumb poo poo.
|
|
#
¿
May 6, 2022 10:34
|
|
|
I have a soft spot for Iron Man 2 because it has The Blue Beam of Science, the least scientifically accurate scene in any movie since The Core.
|
|
#
¿
May 21, 2022 23:27
|
|
|
Philippe posted:I love the blue beam of scienceness. I just love the way he slowly rotates a mirror with a big pipe wrench, sweeping the beam across his lab cutting cabinets and poo poo in half, so that the beam can hit his tiny magic triangle, instead of simply picking up the triangle and putting it in the beam where the mirror is
|
|
#
¿
May 22, 2022 13:53
|
|
|
it's a good thing he got that. . . schematic???. . . for the structure of a new "element" that was hidden in the scale model of the world's fair from his dad's office. 100% of that makes total sense you know, that new element that he makes in his basement, when teams of thousands of nuclear physicists can't accomplish the same thing with particle colliders that are literally miles in diameter his particle accelerator isn't even airtight. how does he get it up to speed with all that air in the way? also it's a good thing that his dad was working on synthesizing a new element that would make his arc reactors work, for literally no reason because they already worked with palladium a new element that is somehow stable for longer than a fraction of a second also love how Tony designed a little blood-sugar-meter type device that measures the palladium(?) levels(?) in his blood on a completely arbitrary scale from 0 to 100 "percent". iirc the meter has the words "blood toxicity" written on it, despite the fact that this is a device built by tony for tony; who are these words for? (the audience) also love how palladium poisoning mostly just gives him varicose veins i maybe have spent a little too much time thinking about Iron Man 2
|
|
#
¿
May 22, 2022 15:46
|
|
|
learnincurve posted:If you haven't watched ant man or ant man and the wasp yet then I'd give it a miss tbh. they send me into a kind of fugue state where my consciousness detaches from my eyes and ears
|
|
#
¿
May 22, 2022 16:07
|
|
|
credburn posted:I just learned that this quirky autistic kid whose website (blog?) I used to read in 2000 or something went on to become like an Internet celebrity. I've heard the name "Ulililia" before, but I never realized that was this person. I feel like I've bridged a twenty year gap in my head. I think I first learned about him from these forums, too. "Ulillillia" is a name I've seen mentioned occasionally on this website for a long long time but somehow I've managed to miss learning anything about them. Can someone give me the cliff's notes on who they are?
|
|
#
¿
Jul 12, 2022 22:44
|
|
|
Snowglobe of Doom posted:The etymology of the word 'helicopter' isn't heli + copter but helico (Greek helikos "spiral", as in "helix") + pter (Greek pteron "wing", as in "pterodactyl") No it shouldn't. It's normal in English for a letter in a word root to be silent or not depending on whether it's at the beginning of the word. For example, "gnostic" vs "agnostic". If anything, "pterodactyl" should have a non-silent "p", since it's not silent in Greek.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 9, 2022 06:11
|
|
|
credburn posted:You guys know that electronic techno song "Sandstorm"? Well, it is a pretty drat popular song. The youtube april fool's thing was a reference to a pre-existing meme; for quite some time there was a huge meme that whenever someone asked "what music is in this video?" in the youtube/reddit/whatever comments, people would reply with "darude - sandstorm" regardless of what the real answer was. KYM says it started in 2013.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 9, 2022 22:49
|
|
|
Hyperlynx posted:As far as I understand, from there it's mostly a question of how you decide to split up the frequency range between octaves. For whatever reason, Western music tradition has settled on 13 small steps, and from there into 8 bigger steps, some of which are one small step and some of which are two small steps (don't ask me why). 12 and 7, not 13 and 8. Here's the breakdown: Human hearing is logarithmic in pitch; in other words, 100 Hz sounds as different from 150 Hz as 1000 Hz does to 1500 Hz, even though the absolute difference in frequency is much larger for the latter pair. A note that is twice the frequency as another note sounds like the same note to our ears, because their higher harmonics overlap. In music notation, we call those the "same note" but at different "octaves." So you have a series of notes, like F#0, F#1, F#2, etc. that are all twice the frequency of the previous. This range from one note to another is split, exponentially (to accommodate our logarithmic hearing) more or less (more on this later), into twelve steps. Why twelve? This was all finalized by a bunch of old european dudes, and they designed it so that certain simple ratios, such as 3:2 or 4:3, could be represented in the sequence of notes, because they knew that plucked strings with those ratios of lengths sounded harmonious together. For example, G3 is about 196 Hz, and C3 is about 130.8 Hz, for a ratio of about 3 to 2. The human brain likes these particular pairs of notes, because their harmonics overlap somewhat (but not as much as notes that are the "same note"). Pairs of notes are called "intervals," and they are named stupidly. The 2:1 pair is called a "perfect eighth" or "octave," though it has nothing to do with the number eight (more on that in a moment), and the 3:2 pair is a "perfect fifth," and so on. The notes are labeled A, A#/Bb, B, C, C#/Db, D, D#/Eb, E, F, F#/Gb, G, G#/Ab. And then they repeat in that sequence. Some of them have two names and there are two conspicuous "gaps" for some reason. A "key signature" or "scale" is made out of a group of (usually) seven of those notes that, together, make harmonious music. For example, C major is C, D, E, F, G, A, and B, which is all the "natural" (i.e. not sharped or flatted, it's a dumb name) notes. If you take a starting note and the eleven other notes above it, a "major" scale consists of the first, third, fifth, sixth, eighth, tenth, and twelfth note in that sequence (and then repeats starting with the first). And the seven remaining notes are given roman numeral names - I through VII. The second most common kind of scale is the "minor" scale, in which III, VI, and VII are lowered by one note. So traditional music theory is based around these sets of seven. If you go one note further, to the eighth note which is the repeat of the first, and play the first and eighth at the same time, that's an "octave" or "perfect eighth," because the higher note is seven major-scale-notes higher than the lower note, or in other words, twelve notes higher overall (great naming system, huh?). For that reason, each set of those seven notes at higher or lower pitches is also called an "octave," because there are seven of them. Great naming conventions, european dudes. To make matters worse, two notes that are right next to one another are called a "half step," because they're one entire note apart, and two notes two apart are called a "whole step." You will notice that in a scale, the seven steps from one note to the next (including from the last note to the same-note-but-one-octave-higher) are 5 "whole steps" and 2 "half steps" in order to span the twelve "half steps" of a full "octave." Groups of three or more notes that harmonize together are called "chords," but I'm not going to get into that because that's a whole nother thing. So, mathematically, why the whole "octave" business with 12 notes? It's because 27/12 is very close to 3/2 (the "perfect fifth" of two notes separated by 7 out of 12 steps), and 25/12 is very close to 4/3 (the "perfect fourth", five out of twelve steps), which were the simple ratios that the old european dudes wanted to preserve in their musical notation. There's also the "major third," 24/12 ~= 5/4. Go twelve steps, 212/12, and you've got a ratio of 2/1, the "octave." If you choose some other number of logarithmically-spaced notes for each octave, then you don't get good ratios. To standardize things, the note "A4" is set to 440 Hz, and all other notes can be derived relative to it; for example, a "major third" up from A4 is C#4/Db4, which is ~550 Hz. So there, finally, is your answer to "why there was eight of them." There wasn't, there was twelve, and sometimes we pick out a special group of seven. And there's twelve because that gives you evenly spaced notes that also sound good because some of them (very nearly) make simple ratios in their frequencies. But it's all been obscured by very bad naming conventions invented by a bunch of weird old musicians who didn't know how to count. One last footnote: I mentioned that the exponential spacing of notes is only "more or less" true. It sometimes is; if you tune an instrument to follow that mathematical structure I just described, it's called "equal temperament," and all key signatures will sound equally good on the instrument. But sometimes people tune an instrument to more perfectly reflect the simple ratios that sound most harmonious; i.e. making the "major third" exactly 1.25 instead of 1.2599. The downside of this is that the ratios may be off even further if you do not play the particular key signature that the instrument is tuned for. "Temperament" is a whole rabbit hole with more really weird naming conventions; I would advise not looking into it. I mention it only for completeness. Sane musicians use equal temperament.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 16, 2022 10:47
|
|
|
Lady Disdain posted:The location of Mt Sinai is known. There is a mountain called, in the present day, Mt Sinai. There is a mountain in the book of Exodus called Mt Sinai. They are not necessarily the same place. Wikipedia lists at least 12 possible candidates for the Exodus Mt Sinai, including the modern Mt Sinai. Personally, it seems to me that the author of the story was clearly talking about an active volcano, which rules out most of the candidates including the modern Mt Sinai; but no one really knows whether that's the case, or even if the authors of Exodus were talking about a real mountain at all. There's lots of stuff like that when it comes to religious history; places that have been "traditionally" identified with places described in holy books but don't necessarily have any evidence behind that claim.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 26, 2022 11:44
|
|
|
verbal enema posted:Me hey, that word is generally considered to be an offensive slur by the people to whom it refers. i have no idea who this guy is or whether he's a fascist or not but you still probably shouldn't use a slur to refer to him.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 1, 2022 11:16
|
|
|
"my country never had slavery" - an incorrect statement pretty much anywhere on the loving planet
|
|
#
¿
Nov 5, 2022 11:11
|
|
|
As someone who read a lot of Heinlein as a teen, looking back, I'd say that Heinlein's politics are too ill-formed and poorly-thought-out to make that strong of a statement about. Heinlein wasn't really a libertarian. Some of his work makes it seem that way, but taken as a whole, his body of work doesn't really have coherent politics. Honestly I think "centrist liberal" describes him better, even though that libertarian poo poo is still there in places. But he's mostly what you got when a somewhat left-leaning guy buys into a bunch of WW2 and Cold War propaganda. In his most famous and influential book, Stranger in a Strange Land, the hero starts an idealistic free-love hippie commune, and the villain is an evangelical megachurch. In The Moon is a Harsh Mistress the heroes foment a worker's revolution against the corrupt bourgeois government, straight out of the Marxist-Leninist playbook (but couched in the language of libertarianism and not communism because, as mentioned, he bought into cold war propaganda really hard and didn't understand what "communism" means). In Time Enough for Love, the main character, blessed with extreme longevity, marries a young woman who he had adopted and raised as a daughter. And in Starship Troopers, the main character accepts uncritically the propaganda of a flagrantly fascist government. So, that's all four corners of the political compass right there. It's also worth noting that libertarianism in his time, or at least the flavor that he seemed to subscribed to, is a lot different from the "corporations are people and should have the right to murder me" style of modern libertarianism. He really did believe in freedom, for others as well as himself, and was pro-LGBTQ+ rights and kinda feminist (in a way that, today, would be considered archaic and backward, but he was doing a lot better than the society around him at the time). And, well, idk if anyone can really decipher what he was trying to say in Farnham's Freehold but I think he was trying to be anti-racist (that book is really bad imo). Definitely don't read Starship Troopers, but I still think that some of his work is redeemable, mainly the short stories and some of the young adult novels. And his importance to the history of sci-fi cannot be denied. In conclusion, Heinlein is a land of contrasts.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 9, 2022 05:40
|
|
|
Bargearse posted:Also the bit in The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress where the protagonist falls in love with a girl who couldn’t be any older than 12 and immediately brings her into his group marriage thing. To clarify, the twelve-year-old character is adopted by the main character and his family, and marries someone(s) else later in the book (I don't think she's still 12 at that point but she's probably not 18, so there's still a "yikes" there). The main character falls in love with, and brings into his group marriage, a different (adult) character. But yeah Time Enough for Love is usually my go-to when I have to explain that Heinlein had some hosed up sexual politics. Besides marrying a woman that he had adopted as a child, he also has a sexual relationship with his mother (time travel is involved, it occurs when his non-time-travelled self is about five years old), he facilitates a sexual relationship between twin siblings, and he has a sexual relationship with two gender-swapped clones of himself who are (iirc) 15 years old at the time. Heinlein pretty much went off the deep end with that book, and all of his books he wrote after that are incredibly terrible as well.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 9, 2022 08:50
|
|
|
It somehow never once, through 11 star wars movies and over two decades, crossed my mind that "star destroyer" might be etymologically derived from the naval ship type "destroyer." Perhaps because, ever since playing the board game Battleship as a kid, I've always known "destroyer" as "the smallest kind of ship." MariusLecter posted:WHAT IS THE BIGGER ONE DEFENDING?? the second death star.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 11, 2022 23:45
|
|
|
i often count in binary on my fingers if i need to count something up past ~20 or so. it's a very useful trick, and i am a huge dweeb
|
|
#
¿
Nov 17, 2022 05:06
|
|
|
Hyperlynx posted:I like Nurdrage for chemistry videos. He seems to be the most skilled and professional that I've seen. I was about to say "nurdrage is great but he hasn't made a video in x months" but when i went to his channel to check exactly how long it's been, it turns out he uploaded a video 9 minutes ago
|
|
#
¿
Nov 23, 2022 01:02
|
|
|
I remember reading a post about the exact same  confusion years and years ago. So, at least you're not the only one, Joburg.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 27, 2022 23:21
|
|
|
Len posted:A friend of mine posted what sounds like some questionable etymology the other day and it reminded me of this thread Etymonline says it comes from a related, slightly older sense of "wage" meaning a bit more generally "to pledge" or "to agree" (e.g. to pledge payment, or agree to a bet (i.e. "wager")). The specific sense of "a pledge of salary for a regular job" came a bit later. So, to wage war originally meant simply to agree to go to war. Doesn't have anything to do with paying soldiers money.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 5, 2023 00:04
|
|
|
The shorter your hair is, the more often you need to shampoo it. Your sebaceous glands produce the same amount of oil no matter how long your hair is, and that oil coats your hair. The more hair you have, the longer it takes for the oil to build up and coat all of it. There's also obviously some variation based on genetics or whatever. I have very short hair and I shampoo every single day or else my hair gets oily and clumpy. And if you have long hair, you have the opposite problem of not enough oil, which is what conditioner is for.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 13, 2023 20:43
|
|
|
No Way Home used those many villains as props, not as characters. The story isn't about them; the real conflict is internal to Spider-Man. They're just there to provide the necessary action scenes, not to have their own stories. Gaius Marius posted:No Way Home doesn't actually work as a movie. It works as a collection of nostalgic references and memes. And there's that, yeah. I wouldn't necessarily say that "not working on its own as a movie" is a fatal flaw for a movie that's third in a series and like 40th or whatever in a franchise, though.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 4, 2023 02:32
|
|
|
MariusLecter posted:The term tensile strength has roots etymologically with utensil(s) when they were first being widely used and had to have a strong utensil when at a dinner or banquet. No one wants to be taking a chunk of meat or a potato and have their utensil get bent out of shape. Can't find any evidence for this. "Tensile" ultimately comes from the proto-Indo-European root word "*ten-" meaning "to stretch," through the Latin "tensus." "Utensil" also comes from Latin and just means "thing one uses," from "uti" meaning "use." As far as I can tell from looking up their etymologies, their similarity in spelling is simply a coincidence.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 11, 2023 20:06
|
|
|
this video is a pretty interesting dive into how pre-capitalist laborers worked, and how capitalism changed work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvk_XylEmLo
|
|
#
¿
Dec 3, 2023 02:14
|
|
|
The first time I saw Pulp Fiction I assumed that "pipe-hitting" meant that they, like, used lead pipes to hit people, like in Clue(do)
|
|
#
¿
Dec 7, 2023 00:37
|
|
|
Megillah Gorilla posted:I think a lot of people misunderstood the term. I certainly did. I'm pretty sure he wants drugged out losers to do the work because he doesn't want his regular muscle to know he's been "emasculated" by being raped by Zed and/or Zed's friend(s).
|
|
#
¿
Dec 7, 2023 14:11
|
|
|
Can we please stop jerking off about war machines in a random pyf thread?credburn posted:There are three! I knew that there were two Van Halens in Van Halen, but I am just realizing that Eddie Van Halen isn't the lead singer.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 14, 2023 08:11
|
|
|
Brawnfire posted:Alos, that was a weirdly interesting video for the topic. "Weirdly interesting" is jan Misali's schtick. They do a lot of goofy music and videos about constructed languages which are not everyone's jam, but if you sort their videos by most popular you'll get all their great video essays about weird, disparate topics, which I highly recommend. For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hjRvZYkAgA
|
|
#
¿
Jan 13, 2024 21:47
|
|
|
Hyperlynx posted:If all the creatures in Hollow Knight are bugs, the fireflies they put in their lanterns must be absolutely teeny weeny! Well, there's a pretty big disparity in the sizes of bugs in real life.  
|
|
#
¿
Feb 13, 2024 11:44
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 9, 2024 23:07 |
|
|
Hyperlynx posted:And the only other similar expression I can think of is "stiff poo poo". "tough luck" is the PG version of the phrase, and, I assume, "tough titties" is derived from it.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 4, 2024 10:16
|
|