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.

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.

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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.

Pyongyang must be prepared to seize South Korean territory in the event of an “emergency,” North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has said.

This doesn’t read to me like the DPRK has any plans to take any military action in the near term, Kim is simply reiterating that the DPRK must remain prepared to do so should a big opportunity arise or the US crosses a red line.

Chad trains stay winning over virgin hyperloop

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.

Hard embedding ads works for live streams since you can’t know when exactly any given ad will start or end. If Youtube were to do this, it would be very trivial for sponsorblock to simply take on the role of adblocker since the community would be able to report the location of the ads.

It’s based, actually. So is stealing from businesses. In fact, if piracy really was the same as stealing, I’d definitely make a point of pirating more often

Tbh, I lose some amount of respect for anyone who mentions they pay for media that is easily accessed through piracy, netflix included

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.

Please walk into the sea.

I really wish I could have a permanent record of everything every liberal has ever said so I could easily demonstrate how full of shit they are in 10 to 20 years when they all collectively deny ever having supported Israel through the Palestinian genocide.