cosecantphi [he/him]

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.

Actually childish understanding of geopolitics and history

Ukraine hasn’t even been independent for my entire life, what are you talking about? Do you think thirty years is a long time? Are you twelve?

This is the thing that gets me with lemmy libs at times. I want to dunk on them harder, but some of them are so naive and ignorant about basic facts of recent history that in the back of my mind I can’t help but think I’m probably talking to an actual, literal child. Then I just feel saddened about it more than anything.

I’m sorry but your reply is literally incoherent, and I’m not sure what if anything in my comment caused your brain wormed mind to react like this.

Liberal solipsism strikes again

At what point did this become Russia’s aggression? Certainly after the fall of the Soviet Union by western backed coup (before which Ukraine and Russia were literally the same country). Did Russia’s aggression start when NATO aggressively expanded into the former Eastern bloc after promising not to as a major condition of the USSR’s dissolution? How about when Russia subjected its own population to devastating austerity, resulting in untold death and destruction, all in a genuine effort to liberalize and assimilate into NATO themselves? Was that Russia being too aggressive? Or did Russia’s aggression not start until after the west continued to wage economic warfare anyway, demonstrating NATO never had any intention to let Russia coexist peacefully on the world stage regardless? How aggressive was it of Russia when the west helped to orchestrate the 2014 Maidan coup in Ukraine to install a rabidly anti-Russian fascist government on one of Russia’s largest land borders? I guess Russia was being too aggressive when Ukraine decided to ban the Russian language and shell Russian speaking civilians in Eastern Ukraine for literally years and years in violation of the Minsk agreements, resulting in massive pro-Russian separatist movements forming to fight off Banderite pogroms.

I think I get it now, after exhausting literally all available diplomatic avenues to peace, aggressive Russia started this conflict out of nowhere by supporting the cause of the breakaway republics invading poor innocent Ukraine, wow can’t believe a country would go to war like this at the drop of a hat! Irrational aggressive Russia should just take their troops home and surrender all territory back to Ukraine, a country losing a war so badly it’s on the verge of collapse.

Maybe don’t go around making inflammatory geopolitical comments in public if you only just started paying attention to this conflict in 2022

Getting into a friend’s car that’s been sitting in full sunlight at 105 degrees for the past 6 hours and they’re just casually playing on their phone while you’re increasingly suppressing the urge to scream at them to put the keys in the ignition and turn the air conditioner on

I found some under the couch cushions!

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.

The thing about elemental mercury though is that it doesn’t wet things like water or other liquid metals like Gallium do. The surface tension is so strong that virtually none of it is going to end up staying on your tongue

Tbh, I think I’d much prefer to try my luck licking Mercury rather than Uranium

Removed by mod

That makes it even worse. Imagine putting in all this effort and taking all this supposed risk to create a new social media platform free of the pitfalls that come with a for profit site like reddit only to slowly adopt the exact same corporate friendly code of conduct while purposefully curating a community of annoying shitheads who are nearly indistinguishable from the horde of cretins on reddit.

If making a new reddit is legitimately the best they can do, then they should absolutely just scuttle the entire project.

real this house has people in it hours

So how close to losing and being forced into an unconditional surrender does Ukraine need to be before Europe stops sending aid at their own huge expense?

And yet the United States continues to slide into fascism despite having elected Biden. What horrific Trump era policies did the Democrats even bother to repeal after they won in 2020 and held both the senate and the house?

They are still funding the construction of border wall segments. They never repealed the Republican tax cuts. They have done nothing about the concentration camps on the southern border for fuck’s sake. They never codified Roe v. Wade, we literally lost the right to abortions while Biden was in office. They could have stacked the supreme court but they didn’t.

The Democrats and the Republicans form an obfuscated one party system in the US. Republican leadership aggressively ramps up the oppression of marginalized people, then Democratic leadership does nothing to restore our rights nor proactively prevent the same thing from happening again. Instead they just use their time in office to suck all of the energy out of people’s movements that could actually effect change.

And much more importantly than all of that, Republicans and Democrats are virtually identically evil when it comes to foreign policy. When the US is dropping bombs on you and destroying your country, you’ll tend not to care whether it was a Red MAGA or Blue MAGA administration pulling the trigger.

In some specific cases it might be worthwhile to vote for Democrats in local elections where there exists much more leeway for politicians to stray from the party line, but voting for them in national elections is just lending your voice to legitimizing their bullshit good cop/bad cop routine they play with the Republicans.

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.

Yep, and it’s a lot more successful than you’d think. I’ve been using it for over a year now and I literally have not come across a sponsored video yet that hasn’t had its sponsored segments reported. Not even on videos that were uploaded literally 10 minutes ago. Highly recommend

Congrats, that already exists as a browser addon and it’s free. Look up sponsorblock.