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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • Buddahriffic@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzlab toys
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    24 hours ago

    I’ve wondered if mental state actually affects reality around us. Like some people who see paranormal shit are just more open to it or something while the presence of a skeptic prevents it from happening

    And people who just don’t have confidence that tech will work can cause random issues just by being present, but sometimes when a tech confident person comes to assist them, their confidence gets it to work properly.

    Maybe it has to do with particle/wave duality and the observer effect, and the simulation approximates things more when people aren’t paying as much attention or won’t likely investigate an issue closely after the fact, so the simulation gets sloppy because it’s approximating. But then when someone who will pay closer attention comes (or will come), the waves collapse into particles and it behaves as expected.

    Maybe those cases where a user claims something usually works when they do it a way that is clearly wrong to the more experienced observer, the approximation works out in their favour, but the collapse to particles makes it break like it was supposed to the whole time.

    Maybe Pauli understood some things about the technical equipment (and ropes?) that the others didn’t or was better at calibration and collapsed the wave more than usual.

    Though my guess for the chandelier is that someone first thought of the dropping it when he entered joke but then realized that saying they tried to do that and it failed would be even funnier plus save them a chandelier and be much easier and safer to pull off.



  • It would, similar to how the mass of each object does have an effect, even if negligible. But the question is if the radius of the bowling ball vs feather has a greater effect than the mass of the bowling ball vs the feather.

    You can adjust the value r in the universal gravitational equation by the radius of the bowling ball and compare the extremes (both plus and minus the radius) and the middle point to see the tidal effects.

    If the feather starts at the middle height of the bowling ball, the tidal effects would help the bowling ball. If it starts at the lowest point of the bowling ball, the tidal effects would hinder the bowling ball.

    But the magnitude of that effect depends on the distance from the center of the other mass.

    I think the main thing would be the ratio of the small mass vs big mass compared to the ratio of the small radius vs the big radius.

    Though, thinking of it more, since the bowling ball is a sphere (ignoring finger holes), the greater pull on the close side would be balanced by the lesser pull on the far side (assuming the difference between those two forces isn’t greater than the force holding the ball together), so now I think it doesn’t matter (up to that structural force and with the assumption that the finger holes aren’t significant).

    If they are falling into a small black hole, then it does become relevant because the bowling ball will get stringified more than the feather once the forces are extreme enough to break the structural bonds, but the math gets too complicated to wrap my mind around right now. If I had to guess, the bowling ball would start crossing the event horizon first, but the feather would finish crossing it first. And an outside observer would see even more stretched out images of both of them for a while after that, which would make actually measuring the sequence of events impossible.

    And who knows what happens inside, maybe each would become a galaxy in a nested universe.


  • I don’t think there is a finite number of monkeys that would be guaranteed to do so in the lifespan of the universe.

    Best we could do is calculate the expected number of monkeys it would take, assuming accurate probabilities, which I also don’t think is possible to determine.

    You can’t just take one divided by the number of possible characters that could be typed because monkeys can do many things other than typing away. A high portion of them would likely instead destroy the typewriter. In the infinite monkeys scenario, an infinite amount would destroy their typewriter in the middle of Hamlet’s to be or not to be soliloquy.

    Plus the odds of it actually happening are going to be so astronomically low that if you filled the known universe with monkeys, you’d end up with monkey stars and black holes before any Shakespeare.

    It really only works as a thought experiment about the nature of infinity.

    Unless there’s an infinite multiverse, in which case we are in the universe where a monkey wrote out the complete works of Shakespeare. That monkey’s name? Shakespeare. (And yes, many clapped when he did so.)



  • That’s the thing about infinity. If you have infinite monkeys, you don’t have to choose. You’ll have infinite instances of every possibility.

    Finding any of the monkeys that typed out something interesting (or did something interesting that wasn’t typing or more common interesting monkey stuff) is another issue. If there’s an 0.0000001% of something interesting and unusual happening by coincidence, then there will be 999,999,999 uninteresting or usual instances for each interesting and unusual one.

    Now if there were infinite copies of you searching the infinite monkeys for interesting and unusual events and all interesting ones get sent to an email address, the email server would overload in about the time it takes for the quickest interesting thing to happen, be noticed, and reported.


  • Yeah, people obsessed with car stereos are usually of the “I want everyone to know I’m playing music” variety.

    And occasionally of the “I want it to be dangerous to listen to music coming from my sound system” variety.

    Which I do kinda get, since I, too, thrive on wtf faces, though I generally don’t want to be a nuisance or damage my property in the process. Like it’s usually a wtf face from an unexpected combination that turns out to be better than one would expect, like saying I like chocolate sauce on sausages (which works because chocolate doesn’t have to be combined with tons of sugar).




  • Careful, reality might just destroy you instead to avoid the paradox. I suspect that’s how it avoids all of the paradoxes if time travel is possible in a single timeline universe. And this idea isn’t compatible with the multiple timeline time travel idea (otherwise the electron will end up in a different timeline each time it jumps backwards).


  • I think you’re overfitting to the average here with your expectations. Especially basing that on the experience level of people who would sign up for help learning how to use Windows products. And even then, the ones learning about copy/paste for the first time will likely make more noise about it then those waiting to see if you’ll teach them something new or any that ended up in your training because their work made them or something.

    While the majority might lack familiarity, the 40 - 80 age range includes tons of people that have been working with computers (windows or otherwise) since before Windows was even a thing, including many who worked on Windows and/or developed applications for it. Experience will range from not knowing what windows is, knowing it’s the OS but not knowing what an OS is, to understanding what goes on in the kernel at a high level of detail.

    There’s a lot of people on Windows just because of inertia and Linux can handle a lot of the use cases. It makes perfect sense to me that someone, once they’ve seen that things aren’t so scary and different on the other side of the fence, would wonder out loud about why they thought their inertia was so strong.

    Your skepticism is more baffling to me than that.


  • There could have even been a smaller group of former Egyptian slaves that fled and settled in Israel with the people who already lived there and over time their religion/culture was adopted by more and more people until it became the dominant one.

    Like a large group of people wandering a desert for 40 years doesn’t make sense, even if 40 years is just a metaphor for a long time and was just one full year. But a small group could have wandered and visited other settlements that might have helped them out but didn’t want them to settle down there, even for a long time.

    Kinda like how most Christians today aren’t descendents of anyone who would have had anything to do with Jesus or even descendent from Jewish people who believed in the Christian predecessor religion. They were just people who at one point were told they had to convert by words, swords, or guns.

    Just speculation based on thinking about the scenario and what cases might put the story somewhere between fiction and truth rather than just being entirely made up (which is also certainly possible).






  • I’m curious what the rankings of all the star trek doctors would be.

    Like for competence, would Flox (sp?) or EMH top the list?

    Or for charisma, would it be Flox or Bashir?

    For not taking shit EMH or Bones?

    Closest with the captain, Bones or Crusher?

    Most victim of the writers, Pulaski or Fitzgerald? (First one at least got a season but the second one didn’t even get an actor)



  • Buddahriffic@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzThe 1900s
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    19 days ago

    I come from a time when our telephones were teathered to the wall and had no screens or apps at all. Later on, there were machines that would answer the phone and let someone record a message if no one was home.

    If you wanted to watch something that wasn’t a movie or recording, you had to pick one of the options someone else had picked, and if you missed the time, you just missed it until someone decided it was time to play it again (at a different specific time you could miss).

    And if you did record something, you’d have to seek through the recording to find the start of it.

    Movie rentals involved going to a physical store and grabbing physical media with the content on it. If too many people wanted to rent it at a time, there just wouldn’t be enough and the later ones would have to pick something else to watch. Just going to one of these rental places was a borderline magical experience full of wonder and possibility. Oh and it was considered very rude if you rented a movie but didn’t seek it back to the beginning for the next person (which you’d have to physically return to the place with the physical media or you’d get charged late fees).

    And even though everyone’s name, address, and phone number were published in regional “phone books”, the closest thing to phone scams you’d (normally) see were prank phone calls, which were done for laughs rather than profit (albeit sometimes maliciously).

    Christians actually cared about being good people rather than thinking they can somehow be victims of an apocalypse they are trying to make happen and teleport to heaven because they’ve said the required amount of hail Marys and took advantage of the “just confess the horrible shit before it die and you’re forgiven” loophole (and probably not thinking about what happens if the rapture ends up happening too quickly for them to confess their latest batch of sins). Actually, the crazy ones might have been around then, too, they just weren’t so fucking loud back then.

    That second millennium was something else, I tell you what. You third millennium kids won’t ever understand.