In a program called SpaceEngine, the observable universe is simulated, based on everything we know so far.
You can fly around freely and if you start at earth, you’ve got this blue beautiful ball right next to you and an ocean of stars all around you.
First I flew towards the sun with the speed of light. Earth got tiny quickly, but then you realise: it would still take you 8 full minutes to get to the sun at this speed.
So you pump the speed to millions of light years per second (luckily we can ignore the laws of physics).
You stop at a random place, some hundreds of millions of light years away from earth.
And then you realise what astronomers mean when they say: the universe is basically homogeneous. It looks basically the same everywhere.
And in fact you once again see an ocean of stars in front of you. Just as if you were back at earth. However as you turn around, there is of course no earth, but the same view of an ocean of stars and earth is unimaginable far away. You are alone in an infinite ocean of light.
This program truely messed with my head (in a good way).
I have a great idea for a program! I should describe it in agonizing detail to an AI owned by some company so it will spit out working source code. Nothing can go wrong with my plan!
This is a flawless plan, especially since they pinky swore that they wouldn’t keep around the information you put into the black box AI. So we’re all safe!
I mean, they can still steal your idea, fork it, repackage it and charge for it while refusing to upstream their development. But now it’s a licensing discussion and not a personal attack.
...whoosh.
In no logical sense does the sun orbit our moon. The earth does however indeed orbit the moon (or technically they both orbit a common centre between the earth and the moon).
I’ve talked to the man in the moon and he said the sun rises and sets on the moon like it would if the sun orbits the moon. Same for the earth. Both orbit the moon. Face it.
And of cause there are 3 camps and alot of disagreements but essentially, the majority of scientists argue, like me, that it is the moon which is the center. You can always cite some fringe scientists arguing otherwise, that doesn’t change the general consensus.
For some reason I’m just looking at this, and thinking of far-future people digging up ANY roads with lines or on/off ramps or cloverleafs, scratching their heads, and going:
i mean wisdom is something you gain from experience so presumably later generations are always going to be wiser provided they study the past, that’s kinda how we got to where we are
Human nature does not change very much over time. When I was younger I thought the future was going to be awesome because then, people like me would be in power. Now there are many politicians, celebrities, activists, journalists, other people more powerful than me who are the same age as me or even younger; they are pretty much the same as the ones who are older than me.
I love playing these games. Everyone thinks I am an idiot at poker because I always make stupid bets and give off obvious “tells” in the first few rounds.
People are unbelievably easily manipulated. We were playing a big blind of ten cents and I managed to win twenty dollars in one night.
You would probably just sound like a non-native speaker. I assume it would be similar to weak forms and how weak forms are usually absent from non-native english speech.
As a non-native speaker, I was kinda confused at first by this comic because in my head the vowels definitely didn’t sound all the same. But I personally consider pronunciation of vowels in English to be one of the greatest mysteries in the universe, so no wonder.
As a native English speaker and Spanish learner, consistent vowel pronunciation is so incredible. 🥺 Just looking at a word and knowing how to pronounce it… amazing stuff. Kind of wild that in some languages you don’t have the ‘curse of the self educated’ (randomly mispronouncing words you’ve only read, not heard spoken).
As a middle ground kind of guy, I would like to pre-emptively state that a lot of us don’t actually think the answer is always the middle ground between two stances. It’s just that we’re more likely to propose a middle ground solution because we evaluate the plausibility of both stances in a more balanced way (as opposed to existing-stance-holders who are prone to bias towards their own stance.) When the two seem roughly equal in plausibility (which happens fairly often, otherwise the argument would be more one-sided,) that’s an indication to evaluate the middle ground as well.
Middle ground folks are often caricaturized as wanting to find the middle ground between an objectively sensible point A and a radically wrong point B, when the spectrum of opinions is sort of like [ - - - - - A - | - - - - - - B ]. In that caricature, we’re looking for a middle ground at point C [ - - - - - A - | - - C - - - B ], when in actuality we’re evaluating (and not automatically accepting) something two or three steps closer to A. In some such cases, A might already be the most sensible middle ground.
I’m not scared of conflict, I’m averse to needless conflict. I may get involved in a conflict for the purpose of breaking it up, or I may initiate a conflict for a good cause such as combating hatred and averting future conflicts - if I feel it’d be productive.
Middle implies middle. If you are leaning towards a side, then you’re side-leaning. You can’t have your cake and eat it too, centrist, that’s what everyone makes fun of ya’ll for.
Somewhere in the middle means it doesn’t have to be dead center - it just has be between the two extremes and not exactly one of the extremes. To put it in numbers, somewhere in the middle between 0 and 1 is not just 0.5. It can also be 0.4. Or 0.7. Or 0.00000000001.
It’s an abstraction of a caricature I’ve seen. Point A was civil rights, point B was the KKK, and the middle ground guy was like “what if we only kill half of Black people?”
If i have a very plain boring hamburger. Bun cheese patty bun, are the cheese and patty in the middle? Middle doesnt always mean center, center doesnt always mean exactly in the center between 2 points either because thats why the term dead center exists
This is also true. I like to evaluate solutions outside the presented dichotomy in general, and that often means outside the line between them, but I didn’t want to complicate my initial explanation that much.
I’m actually not as neutral as I may seem. There are quite a few cases where I hold more extreme opinions, but as a general trend, I average somewhere around the middle.
Ok, but let’s realize that you’re not necessarily the one who’s defining the spectrum of options; or put another way, there’s not an objective spectrum of options.
For instance, in the case of Israel and Gaza, you could define the leftmost bracket as “give Israel to the Palestinians” or “the second-state solution” or just “a cease-fire,” and likewise the rightmost bracket could be “let Israel keep the war going but let civilians out through Egypt” through “Israeli settlement of Gaza” all the way up to “glass Gaza.” Depending on who’s talking, and how extreme each person is in the discussion, the most humane solution might not be in the middle at all.
I’m not seeing a conflict here. The point I’m making is that the middle ground is not necessarily in the middle of any two given opinions, because the spectrum is wider than that. And also that the middle is not necessarily the best, just worth evaluating.
It’s not a conflict. What I’m trying to say is that what people hear when you say you want to “evaluate the middle option” is entirely dependent upon the options presented in the argument, which is why the caricature is so common.
Are you the alien? Nobody calls a potato for eating hot potato... If you're eating a potato it's going to be hot. Hot potato is referring to the game where you pass something along very quickly. It's saying you're all passing something along that no one wants to get caught with or stuck with, and it's almost never literally, it's usually taking about a responsibility being passed or something like that.
No, fellow human. Of course I am not the alien. Ha, ha, ha. You are funny and I would be pleased to talk with you another time in the future. Ha, ha, ha. Good bye.
The alien impersonator was me all along! HAHAHA!!!
I mean, seriously, I am not a native English speaker, but even with my weird English accent, it only became weirder if I try to speak fast while keeping the emphasis on that 't' at the end of "hot". My native accent also probably lends to that glottal stop taking over the 't' and merging it with the upcoming 'p' sound. It also helps that the two sounds (glottal stop and the bilabial 'p') are on opposite sides of my mouth, so I can quickly sound them in succession. The end result sounded to me like an exaggerated "posh British" rendition, as if the alien watched way too much BBC before invading Earth.
It just sounded way weirder than I otherwise would be. I can't really describe it.
I feel like the battleship Yamato in the documentary Star Blazers has already demonstrated that it is completely viable to launch a naval vessel into orbit and have it perform with excellence.
Just as a note, though - nukes in space work completely differently than nukes in the atmosphere.
I think they also have an EMP effect that can damage ship/sat electronics.
But, like the internet, a sub is a series of tubes. You have a big horizontal tube that the people and the engine lives in, and you have vertical ones where the things that blow up cities live.
I mean, there are optional smaller horizontal tubes, but I feel like if you’re going to launch a sub into space it really ought to be one of the big ones. Maybe it’s just a Freudian thing.
xkcd
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