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Cake day: June 24th, 2023

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  • You can say you can expect, but you really can’t, because if you’re talking about momentum you’re talking about velocity and you need a reference frame to define velocity and therefore momentum. Let’s pick the sun for instance with the assumptions of A. So if we just have one portal pointing one direction and one portal pointing up and chell walks in, you should blast out straight up at 66,000 mph plus the speed she was walking then. I think you could make the reference Frame to earth and try and get a, but that would create problems too.

    I think B, velocity relative to the moving portal, would be the only way to maintain some kind of consistency in game if you were going to have moving portals. Your examples are most consistent with B. A portal falls on chell, how fast does she come out? The speed the portal fell on her of course. And then she stops going out once the portal stops moving because it hit the ground and has stopped moving and they no longer have any relative difference in velocity. You could also say in the platform example that the platform was sitting still and the portal was moving down, you would emerge out the portal at the speed the first portal was moving down. Both should be equally valid ways if you want to maintain some consistency. But all of this is probably why they don’t allow moving portals in the first place.

    In the end though these are definitely strange unknowable physics, portals don’t exist, so really you could make the game however you please, either one is perfectly valid, you could just say any velocity on the other side is whatever it was in relationship to the earth before going through, but that’d be weird, because how fast do the people move out of A then? Do they fly out at the speed of the moving portal and then suddenly stop mid air and plop straight down? If you’re not moving faster than a moving portal does is become brick wall and smash you out of the way so you don’t gain any velocity in relation to earth so A can be maintained? There’s no way to test it in the current games. Hence the endless arguing. But I think B would be most consistent and allow for some really interesting puzzles though, especially if you had two moving portals! Or maybe 3d portals that can sit in the air and allow full movement through them in any direction to help make it possible. Portal 3? In VR with depth perception to accommodate?


  • The reason this is so confusing with different answers is that the portals don’t really exist, so inherently whether you say a or b is gonna depend on assumptions. In game they aren’t allowed to move so we have nothing to base it on to match game physics.

    Here’s my take, momentum is a product of velocity. Velocity needs a reference frame. Without it, there’s no real difference in saying the portal has a velocity of 0 and the people tied up have a the velocity and therefore momentum, or the other way around. If we assume velocity with respect to the portal is what matters and is the momentum carried forward, then it should be B. If it’s relative to the earth or tied up people, then A.


  • Taking these medicines in the forms they are found in nature is a horrible idea. Most of the plants they come from are poisonous because the therapeutic index of most of the drugs here are low, meaning the line between medicine and poison is very fine. Purifying the ingredient and allowing tight control of the dosage is the reason any of these are able to be used safely. Please don’t go around eating bits of foxglove or belladonna.

    As you’ve seen, modern medicine is not shy about taking ingredients found in nature when they actually have a useful purpose in medicine, and enabling them to be actually used safely instead of taking some random unknown dosage of a potentially deadly drug and hoping for the best.

    Except for fixing vitamin and mineral deficiencies, supplements are ineffective at best and dangerous at worst. They’re in desperate need of better regulation in the United States. They scam tons of people and get away with ridiculous claims like fighting dementia based on no evidence that would be totally illegal for any actual pharmaceutical company to claim, all while selling bottles of stuff with “proprietary formulas” or claiming to have plants that aren’t even in there when independent researchers look at them. All totally legal by the way, no requirement for ingredients listed on a supplement to reflect reality. Stay away if you value your health or your money. Not saying pharmaceutical companies are always shining beacons of beneficence here, obviously I have many problems with them as well, but they at least have some sort of regulated evidence base for the most part.






  • Yeah the article is a little rosy and overstating things by using words like carbon free which obviously isn’t the case, but fta:

    “Retrofitting a propeller plane with fuel cells and liquid-hydrogen tanks would result in a nearly 90 percent reduction in life-cycle emissions, compared to the original aircraft, according to the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT), a nonprofit think tank. That’s assuming the hydrogen is made using only renewable electricity —not with fossil fuels, the way the vast majority of hydrogen is produced today.”

    Battery powered commercial airplanes are a pipe dream right now, batteries are just too heavy for anything practical with flight. Solid state batteries might reduce it some but probably not enough. We’ll still need some kind of mass long distance travel in the future. Once they’re able to scale up renewable energy sources even more, hydrogen made with those sources could become an important storage medium for getting that energy to power planes or other things where batteries are impractical. So it makes sense to at least be exploring these technologies.

    Even for right now natural gas has a higher energy to co2 ratio than other types of fuels, so it’s possible there may even be a current efficiency boost, though I don’t know that off the top of my head.

    If every new technology was attacked saying, well it’s not perfect right now so don’t even bother trying, we wouldn’t have electric cars or all sorts of other innovations. I agree with you on the article though, I hate when they say stuff like “look we have carbon free airplanes now” when obviously we don’t.



  • As much as I hate meta/Facebook, don’t get me wrong, I don’t think these laws are right either. I don’t think you should have to pay to simply provide a link to another website. This runs antithetical to the whole idea and structure of the internet. If they’re taking the article or photos and republishing it on their own website that’s different and they obviously should have to pay for that. The linking to news sites is actually good for news sites though and increases profit for publishers by driving traffic to their sites, it doesn’t take profit away. The news publishers are free to have a paywall or put advertisements on the page being linked too and get revenue from that. This feels like publishers wanting to eat their cake and keep it too, they want big search engines and social media to link to their articles so the news sites get traffic and revenue from advertisements/subscriptions, and then they also want the search engines who created that traffic in the first place to pay for linking too? I think publishers are shooting themselves in the foot in the long run lobbying for these laws all for a pittance of cash.

    This idea could also affect things like lemmy too eventually and make them impossible, if you need to pay to simply provide a link to a news story or other website.



  • In that case if the blocks aren’t physical or natural resources only the analogy starts to fall apart a bit, since you’d have to consider productivity and what we define as being more productive. The computer or plow or any of a number of innovation would have created blocks that weren’t there before. Hard to anticipate the future. I do think our definitions of growth, value and productivity are major issues. In the end the economy and society has to transition to growth being defined as progress toward true sustainability, or at least the closest thing to it that can be achieved on a finite world that will eventually end no matter what is done on am absurd enough time scale.


  • You misunderstand me, I agree, just trying to generate discussion. I think the grey goo consuming the universe is the horrible hellish end result of infinite growth and a good argument that at some point moderation, priorities, and a “good enough” need to be declared. Also maybe thinking instead of growth about transformation, that innovation and newness doesn’t always have to mean ever increasing consumption. What “blocks” could be exchanged for other new and interesting “blocks” instead possibly. How could the blocks be better arranged?


  • Neuron@lemm.eetoMemes@lemmy.mlCapitalism explained through LEGO
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    1 year ago

    Totally get the point and generally agree. To play devil’s advocate though, what about intellectual property and artistic works? Is that theoretically an infinite or near infinite good? Or at least an unending one. Also space! Maybe we can eventually become grey goo, consuming the entire galaxy to propagate more things to consume the entire galaxy. Fun!





  • IANAL, but can read, and I think many people here are totally missing what this ruling actually says and doesn’t say. It says the standard that Colorado used in this man’s trial was too loose and would theoretically allow for conviction of protected speech. They did not say the speech in this case was definitely protected. They did not say it wasn’t threatening. It’s quite possible that if Colorado now chooses to retry the case that a jury would still decide he was guilty under the stricter standard too, but they have to retry him with a trial and jury working under that stricter standard, so that the overly loose law can’t be used to theoretically restrict protected speech under the first ammendment in the future. The supreme court just corrected the standard Colorado was using and kicked it back to them, they did not exonerate the guy unless Colorado chooses not to try him again. The headlines are all being written to be extra inflammatory and misleading.

    Just to take it to an extreme and make it extra simple, let’s say we pass a law that says, you are guilty of murder if you are anywhere vaguely near where someone was killed. A guy is caught on video clearly murdering someone. They take him to court and tell the jury in their official jury instructions, if this man was vaguely near where the murder occurred he is guilty. They of course find him guilty. Supreme court steps in and says, wait, sure he’s probably guilty, but the standard you had the jury judging him by was ridiculous, that can’t be the standard for a murder conviction, and would probably result on infringement of multiple constitutional rights if you keep using that standard. Do a new trial with a better standard.


  • Thanks for posting that! The grant was interesting. Specific aims page is down on page 107 to save others who want to read it some time.

    One of their main hypotheses they wanted to test was that covid viruses they found in animals in the Wuhan market would have greater fitness than those found in wild animals due to spillover between multiple species and other differences in the environment, which in light of current events seems a reasonable hypothesis.


  • https://www.factcheck.org/2021/05/the-wuhan-lab-and-the-gain-of-function-disagreement/

    Above is a good summary. Here’s my personal take if interested:

    Short story is an nih grant was awarded to a US based non profit research coalition, and the grant involved collaboration among multiple institutes. NIH funds are generally given to US based researchers primarily, but it’s also common if you have a good reason for the project to have international collaboraters on the grant as well. In this case they were collaborating with the Wuhan virology institute, who are obviously going to be very helpful in any collaboration to study corona viruses, since multiple novel corona viruses have been found or made the jump to humans in China before. So yes, a small portion of a much larger grant was sent to Wuhan, who helped provided corona virus samples for US researchers to study.

    As an aside it’s also mentioned there was another corona virus 96% similar in genome to covid was previously isolated by that lab from bats. But saying that’s proof they artifically made covid from that virus is pretty ridiculous, altering genomes to that extent and still having a functioning virus is basically science fiction, would take an absurd amount of technology and resources that just do not exist currently. For comparison, humans and chimpanzees have 98.8% similar genomes, so 96% is really not that close. To get from 96% similar to covid even in the much smaller viral genome would still involve at least 1200 changes to different nucleotides across every gene and structural non coding regions and still have all the proteins it encodes not only somehow still work and be expressed correctly but do this even better than before. We’re struggling along with just slight changes to one gene at a time in genetic engineering currently.

    Another point that keeps coming up, is research that was done in North Carolina (not China) that some people argue as gain of function research but by other definitions is not (if nih considered it gain of function research it would not have been funded due to a funding pause with that). This keeps being conflated with US funding gain of function research in China, which is not the case.

    All in all, the NIH was absolutely interested in funding research into corona viruses because of the fear that something like this would happen after multiple novel corona viruses that started pandemics. I’m still very skeptical of the lab leak theory personally, when we already have multiple instances of novel corona viruses causing epidemics lately, like obviously it could happen again and still can. I suppose it’s possible this virus was found somewhere else, then brought to the lab, then leaked from the lab, but then it would have already been circulating and could have caused a pandemic anyways even without a lab leak. I think people just want to have an easy answer or someone to clearly blame, when the whole world is actually to blame for some extent with out terrible responses to potential pandemics and actually chronic underfunding to this problem that should be a high priority for the whole world. And probably will be happening with only greater frequency as we encroach further on habitats and become more and more densely populated and interconnected. Saying oh we just need to lock down viral labs even more (which hey I’m not even saying is a bad idea, keep that stuff locked up tight), is a much simpler problem to tackle so people would rather go after that than the true larger issues we’re facing with our poor abilities to surveil for and respond to potential pandemics.

    Hope some found that interesting at least, sorry for the novel.