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.

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.

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.

It’s mind blowing to me that particles with no inherent physical shape or dimension can be considered “spinning” not because we observe them spinning but because they have literally all the characteristics of a spinning particle other than actual rotation around an axis

Earth is a good one if you’re only interested in time traveling on your home planet that happens to be Earth. But for a more universal perspective, I suppose the CMBR is the least arbitrary frame among all arbitrary frames

Youtube’s use of A/B testing is very smart in that it’s actually nothing about testing user response and all about limiting the number of people they piss off at once with their god awful changes.

The day I can’t block ads on the internet is the day I stop using the internet.