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TauZero , to Seattle in Man hit, killed by Seattle Monorail while spray-painting graffiti

Wow, you can even see the graffiti in that exact spot in the street view! Right on the rail, you know, where the side wheels go. Never thought I’d need to add “concrete rails create a flat surface attractive nuisance for graffiti” in the monorail “con” list.

https://mander.xyz/pictrs/image/5225e553-ed8a-495b-916e-5c050af01f50.jpeg

TauZero , to Ask Science in if something happened to the black hole at the center of our galaxy, could we know about that problem before it affected us?

This is correct. FTL communication using any form of quantum entanglement is provably mathematically impossible by the no-communication theorem. Most common sci-fi trope though.

TauZero , to Ask Science in if something happened to the black hole at the center of our galaxy, could we know about that problem before it affected us?

If the black hole specifically disappeared, it would have no effect on us. The solar system would not even be launched on a 100 million year trajectory out of the galaxy, as galactic rotation is dependent on the masses of stellar and interstellar matter in the disk and dark matter in the halo. The supermassive galactic black holes, despite being supermassive, still only make up a tiny percentage of total galactic mass.

If you want to wow your friends, tell them about false vacuum decay. We could have bubbles of true vacuum expanding out in space from multiple directions towards us at lightspeed, and no way of knowing about them, stopping them, or outrunning them. Any point in space could nucleate a new true vacuum bubble at any time, just like a given uranium atom could decay now or in 5 billion years or never. Even spookier, by principle of quantum immortality, the Earth could have been engulfed by vacuum bubbles many times before, and we are just the one tiny sliver of probability space where by luck alone we survived long enough to talk about it here and now.

Thankfully false vacuum is just an idea and there is currently no evidence that it is real.

TauZero , to Ask Science in How does a signing a post with a pgp key prove that you are actually the person behind the post?

👍

TauZero , to Ask Science in How does a signing a post with a pgp key prove that you are actually the person behind the post?

To help you with the terminology, the names for the two operations are “signing” and “verifying”. That’s it.

What can you do with…

public keyprivate keyEncryption:encryptdecryptSignature:verifysign“Signing” is not at all the same as “encrypting” with the keys swapped. It is a separate specific sequence of mathematical operations you perform to combine two numbers (the private key and the message) to produce a third - the signature. Signing is not called “hashing”. A hash may be involved as part of the signature process, but it is not strictly necessary. It makes the “message” number smaller, but the algorithm can sign the full message without hashing it first, will just require computation for longer time. “Hash-verifying” isn’t a thing in this context, you made that name up, just use “verify”.

@dohpaz42 is mad because you messed up your terminology originally, and thought you were trying to say that you “encrypt” a message with the private key, which is totally backwards and wrong. He didn’t know that in your mind you thought you were talking about “signing” the message. Because honestly no one could have known that.

TauZero , to Ask Science in What if solving interstellar travel isn't about figuring out faster than light propulsion, but how to extend our own lives?

Oh yeah, it’s like flying the wrong way down the tube of the Large Hadron Collider. The tougher challenge though is like @MuThyme said maintaining 1G acceleration. Following the rocket equation, which is logarithmic, a 50 year multi-stage rocket will be bigger than the universe itself, even if you use some kind of nuclear propulsion 10000 times more efficient than our chemical rockets.

TauZero , to Firefox in Is preview on hover possible in firefox?

Did you toggle on toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets? Firefox stopped parsing userChrome.css by default since several years ago.

TauZero , to Firefox in Firefox on Android suddenly ate 10GB of mobile data, can I find out how?

Probably some tab. Buggy javascript sometimes goes into infinite loops, including DDoSing its own website with 0-timeout requests, and no way to immediately tell other than the phone getting warm. You probably can’t see it now that the tab is closed, and I’m not sure if the mobile firefox has access to these features, but on desktop you can see open sockets with sent/received bytes in about:networking, and per-tab/per-addon cpu usage in about:performance, and set up logging for next time. But otherwise there isn’t a convenient chart with per-website data usage hidden somewhere.

TauZero , to Ask Science in What if solving interstellar travel isn't about figuring out faster than light propulsion, but how to extend our own lives?

You are behind the times on physics advancements buddy! Thanks to the recently discovered concept of relativistic time dilation, a 5000 light year trip at the speed of light will take literally 0 seconds of your lifespan. More practically, travelling in a starship that accelerates at 1G to the halfway point, turns around and decelerates to the destination, you can reach ridiculous distances within a single human lifetime:

shipboard timedistanceearth time1 year.263 LY1.05 Y2 years1.13 LY2.37 Y3 years2.82 LY4.35 Y4 years5.80 LY7.50 Y5 years10.9 LY12.7 Y10 years166 LY168 Y15 years2199 LY2201 Y20 years28.8 kLY28.8 kY25 years380 kLY380 kY50 years149 GLy149 GY100 years22.8 ZLy22.8 ZYThis is the formula to calculate the distance and time:

<pre style="background-color:#ffffff;">
<span style="color:#323232;">x(τ) = c**2/a [cosh(τ a/c) - 1]
</span><span style="color:#323232;">t(τ) = c/a sinh(τ a/c)
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">a = 9.8 m/s
</span><span style="color:#323232;">c = 3e8 m/s
</span>

The formula is hyperbolic, which is why travel distance is not a linear relation of travel time. E.g. given τ = 10 years:

<pre style="background-color:#ffffff;">
<span style="color:#323232;">x = 3e8**2/9.8 * (cosh(60*60*24*365*10/2 * 9.8/3e8) - 1) * 2 / (3e8 * 60*60*24*365)
</span><span style="color:#323232;">  = 166 light years
</span><span style="color:#323232;">t = 3e8/9.8 * sinh(60*60*24*365*10/2 * 9.8/3e8) * 2 / (60*60*24*365)
</span><span style="color:#323232;">  = 168 years
</span>
TauZero , to Ask Science in How young are the youngest fossils?

What’s a fossil? Is the deer skull I found a fossil? Is the imprint of a chicken bone in wet concrete a fossil once the concrete sets?

TauZero , to Ask Science in Tell me about the physics of material "falling onto a neutron star and emitting hard x-rays"

As a quick calculation using the Boltzman formula:

<pre style="background-color:#ffffff;">
<span style="color:#323232;">E = 3/2 k_B T
</span>

Say we imagine that the entire kinetic energy of bulk material from Earth (let’s say iron) impacting the star at 10000km/s is converted into thermal kinetic energy of individual iron atoms (atomic weight 56).

<pre style="background-color:#ffffff;">
<span style="color:#323232;">1/2 m v**2 = 3/2 k_B T
</span><span style="color:#323232;">T = 1/3 m v**2 / k_B
</span><span style="color:#323232;">k_B = 1.38e-23 J/K
</span><span style="color:#323232;">m = 0.056 kg / 6.02e23
</span><span style="color:#323232;">v = 1e7 m/s
</span><span style="color:#323232;">T = 1/3 * .056/6.02e23 * 1e7**2 / 1.38e-23
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">T = 225 GK
</span>

Looking at the black body temperature chart that 225 gigakelvin corresponds precisely to gamma rays from neutron star collisions.

TauZero , to Ask Science in Tell me about the physics of material "falling onto a neutron star and emitting hard x-rays"

Roche limit is not really relevant here. That’s for orbiting bodies, like a satellite around a Jupiter-like planet whose orbit spirals inward due to tidal forces, and eventually crosses the Roche limit, whereby the moon disintegrates into a cloud of rocks that spreads out and forms a ring. Yes, the hyperbolic orbit of the collision trajectory here is a “type” of orbit, but really the video is about the collision itself. There is not enough time for the planet to meaningfully disintegrate under the neutron star’s gravity. “What’s that? The ground is kinda shaking. Could that be the tidal force from that neutron st-ACK!!!”.

In the video you can see the surface of the Earth bulge out towards the star under its gravity in the last second, but most of the kinetic energy of the explosion is imparted by direct physical interaction (i.e. electromagnetic) between the matter of the earth and the matter of the star, and in particular between the matter of the earth that has already been accelerated and the matter of the earth lying farther out.

Or at least it would be if the impactor really was just a chunk of iron with the density slider cranked up. This fluid simulator can’t imagine anything else of course, but you are right that it remains a question of whether a neutron star or a black hole could impart any kinetic energy onto the greater earth at all. Maybe it will just pass through and leave a circular hole, sweeping the material in front of it onto itself. The tunnel would immediately collapse, and the crust would be messed up from tidal sloshing, but maybe the ball of the earth itself will remain intact.

The hard x-rays I believe is a reference to thermal radiation of infalling matter. Just like a bullet that hits a wall while staying intact is hot to the touch because its kinetic energy got 100% converted into heat, or a meteoroid that hits the Moon creates a flash of light visible from Earth because for a second the cloud of collision debris is as hot as the filament of a lamp, the earth material impacting the surface of the star gets really hot. The impact velocity is at minimum the escape velocity of the star, which is thousands of km/s, which means the peak of thermal radiation is in the x-ray range.

TauZero , to Firefox in Optimized version of Firefox?

Check out one of the privacy-focused Firefox forks like LibreWolf, IceCat, or Waterfox. All three disable/rip out pocket by default, I believe, and reduce number of situations they phone home to Mozilla or Google. Memory savings are minimal though.

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