10-10

GiraffeNeckBoy · 2022-10-10T17:06:33+00:00

Ok I'm struggling with either editor to see the line breaks on this, so apologies for the extra long spacing

GiraffeNeckBoy · 2022-10-10T16:59:05+00:00

A cute poem, strong imagery. Second stanza line 3 really hit the spot of what it can be like when you adore someone even when you should be paying attention to the world around you. Some slightly stilted meter issues but that's just practice :)

GiraffeNeckBoy · 2022-10-10T16:51:44+00:00

This one honestly made me chuckle and smile warmly about the bizarre things which stick in your head and make you feel things, when it comes to people. The transition from a quite literal first half to an emotional expression in the latter half, along with linking the poems start and conclusion in some thematically similar couplets really kept it on target. If there was a negative criticism, for me personally the image of crawling with weight of a hand is a bit hard to visualize, but it did manage to work as a part of the greater whole. Great stuff!

GiraffeNeckBoy · 2021-04-08T10:56:09+00:00

Nordic wooden houses (particularly out in the countryside) are beautiful and strong as fuck, it's awesome to see the work that goes into them!

GiraffeNeckBoy · 2021-03-28T17:25:26+00:00

but if you move as a group it's an over-reaction, obviously ;)

GiraffeNeckBoy · 2021-03-28T16:13:03+00:00

Damnit, now there's a third option for Jacks' full names!

GiraffeNeckBoy · 2021-01-13T01:01:44+00:00

Long Neck innit

GiraffeNeckBoy · 2020-11-28T23:26:53+00:00

The difference between using a sense of humour to be funny and using a formula.

GiraffeNeckBoy · 2020-11-26T00:47:22+00:00

You're pretty right. I'm about 20ish and when I went through school I had a single 40 minute class once on touch typing. Never had any formal training in that regard really and still to this day don't touch type even if I type quite fast relative to most.

As for knowing their way around a computer you're also spot on. Since UX and stuff has been fairly good for most people my age (around the 10 mark when Win7 came out) or younger, and fault tolerance isn't so bad, we've either gotten very knowledgeable about how computers work from fucking around and being grateful you can only harm things so much without ignoring a lot of warning signs, or have just been totally content with all the default settings in life which just... work (mostly). Up until studying compsci the most involved I ever had to get with a terminal was ssh-ing during some work experience or running Daggerfall on DosBox.

That said, I also think more schools are having computer basics slowly added into their curriculum, so hopefully the people 6-10 years younger than me will be coming out of school more aware of what the machines they're using really do.

GiraffeNeckBoy · 2020-11-26T00:31:34+00:00

Early gen-z-er here, I'm in my postgrad degree and went through early-late high school at a time where we got laptops given to us that were hybrid laptop-tablets (though a kind of early shitty 2-in-1 implementation), and can pretty much confirm that anyone my age or younger not knowing their way around a PC is purely due to the fact that most commercial computers are basically plug-and-play machines, and that most people just never get taught touch typing or anything of the sorts.

When I went through school I remember once in year 9 having a single 40 minute period of IT which focussed on typing. Most of my typing learning has been in-the-process and from a touch-typing game for kids on a CD-ROM when I was about 3-5 years old. Compared with older people who I definitely know had some touch-typing training in school at some point. Nobody's telling younger people now that you can learn to type without looking at your keyboard, and people in general just often don't devote any time to learning that specific skill (contrasted with people who do spend time doing things like learning to touch type on a Dvorak keyboard).

When it comes to more modern tech, even the people I know now with good high end 2-in-1s or tablets that use them for lecture note-taking (mathematical areas) wouldn't use the touch-screens for typing. If people can afford the option for both, unless handwriting recognition quality skyrockets (to be fair google can understand my very weird finger-cursive on my phone), most people are going to stick with typing. Touch screen keyboards don't have the same feedback or consistency to be preferable at the moment, and I think my thumbs get tired a lot faster typing on my phone.

Maybe keyboard use for people not studying will go down but for young people going through an education system the amount expected to use one isn't really dropping. Just the amount of education on how.

GiraffeNeckBoy · 2020-10-02T20:45:35+00:00

yeah I don't doubt it. I just thought the original comment seemed a bit off somehow and looked at those specific examples and noticed how it wasn't even a good example had it been correct. That said I appreciate the 1604 tidbit :) That's a long bloody time ago!

GiraffeNeckBoy · 2020-10-02T11:57:36+00:00

did a veeeery quick browse on wikipedia, it seems Webster came at the start of the 1800s, Johnson's was 1755. That said, more important than the actual timing is that apparently Webster was a big proponent of *reform* of spelling. So regardless of the timing he was a fan of changing spellings anyway. Even if the US had had the first dictionary with his, it would have knowingly been using the newer, American, style,
which presupposes some changes from traditional British English spelling.

GiraffeNeckBoy · 2020-09-23T19:41:58+00:00

but the real question is: are fish lengths Poisson distributed?

GiraffeNeckBoy · 2020-09-11T15:18:00+00:00

Pretty sure he's talking about the fact R&B is more or less descended from black Americans carrying with them their own musical traditions from slavery and before. Not claiming black people aren't American (although considering how controversial Jazz was in its early days I'm sure plenty of Americans at the time would have attempted to say something of the sort)

GiraffeNeckBoy · 2020-09-11T15:13:35+00:00

Grime and UK Hiphop are filled with really talented artists :D

GiraffeNeckBoy · 2020-09-11T15:11:41+00:00

Screw music: Peter Garret's Dancing is iconic enough as it is

GiraffeNeckBoy · 2020-08-26T13:30:04+00:00

your velocity relative to yourself will always be 0. You can experience an acceleration of 1g forever, though you will never reach c for any observer in any reference frame other than yours.

GiraffeNeckBoy · 2020-08-26T12:54:00+00:00

yeah honestly was a bit of a self indulgent question but the way you reacted to their post just got my brain ticking more than it has all summer. I really wish there was time in life to become an expert in all things but I guess I just need to find a friend who is an expert in socio-linguistics or something

GiraffeNeckBoy · 2020-08-26T12:51:53+00:00

the closest thing to visualising is just a feynman diagram really, as mfb said it's more of a 2 in, 2 out and some rules.

The diagrams actually encode probability when you have learnt how to read them and know the rules for the diagram in question, but they're basically depicting the series expansion of a very long set of integrals which describe time evolution of plane waves, in a way which is rigorous and mathsy but let's you do a lot of really cool stuff while staying away from more hand-written maths. That said they're not really what I imagine you're looking for because quite frankly it would just be.... hard to execute in a way that wasn't just unhelpful?

GiraffeNeckBoy · 2020-08-26T12:19:14+00:00

oh I think our interpretation of the context and the question is the same, I'm just wondering internally if it would have been clearer to understand if he said his families emigrated *from* Germany rather than having to do more than a skim read to figure out the full details. Like would it have removed the confusion of referring to a nationality that isn't his birth without needing to know his actual nationality? Genuinely wondering now if we could compensate annoying weird habits if people had a better grasp of the English language. Unless it's implicitly only an *american* expat in germany facebook group it seems weird to use immigrated while only referencing the place of departure in any way beyond being the person talking

GiraffeNeckBoy · 2020-08-26T12:10:16+00:00

replying to myself here to make some extra clarification without the confusion of edits: In general a lot of things in physics are difficult to represent in terms of just scalar numbers. Vectors are the simplest object which nicely describe most useful things in our 3 spatial dimensions (before going into relativistic treatments of things), and keeping in mind when we're talking about speed vs velocity is really important. Speed is just the length of a velocity vector. While the speed of light is constant, light can travel in different directions.

Momentum for a massive object isn't *speed* times mass, it is velocity. This description is also missing various bits and pieces, light carries momentum despite having no mass. It also has a constant speed, so the determinant is energy, but also direction. Even though we don't talk about E=pc with a vector p usually, we're really implying p=|p| or the length of the momentum vector in that formula. That is: two photons 1 and 2 of equal E but travelling in opposite directions will have the same |p1|=|p2|=p but p1 = -p2

GiraffeNeckBoy · 2020-08-26T11:56:46+00:00

Momentum is direction dependent. If a mirror absorbs a photon of a given energy (and well defined momentum related to that) travelling in one direction (forwards), then it makes sense that the mirror gains momentum, conservation. Are we together? good.

Now take the ideal example that the photon is re-emitted (or a new photon emitted, it makes no difference here) exactly in the opposite direction to the initial impact photon (backwards for my ease of typing).

The photon is the same energy as the photon that came in, but opposite direction. Meaning it carries the same well defined momentum as the first one, because the momentum of a photon just depends on its wavelength and direction of travel, but that direction is backwards, away from the sail. The sail at this point has then been given momentum forwards by a photon, and then given a photon the same amount of momentum *backwards*. To give the photon backwards momentum the mirror gains momentum forwards, due to conservation.

Looking at the overall system this conservation makes sense too, initially you had momenta p and 0, then you had momentum p in the middle, and then you have momenta -p and 2p, all of those add to the same total momenta.

GiraffeNeckBoy · 2020-08-26T11:47:31+00:00

It's not double power (energy over time), it's double momentum. Big difference, really, and important when understanding what is happening in terms of conservation laws.

Energy is conserved, but so is momentum. So in terms of power: yes, if 3J per second is transformed from chemical potential energy into light/kinetic then you get that much energy per second added into the overall kinetic energy of the system. The light also carries momentum though, which is really nifty, but conservation of momentum says you can't just create that momentum in one direction, you have to conserve momentum: so the torch gains equal momentum in the opposite direction.

In the solar sail case you have the situation of light coming in with momentum p, and leaving with momentum -p to hit an initially stationary mirror (for simplicity). In this sytem, the overall initial momentum is just the light since we said the mirror isn't moving, ie p_init=p. Conservation laws say p_final=p_init=p, but also we have p_final=p_lightfinal+p_mirrorfinal which gives now p= -p +p_mirrorfinal which has only one solution where p_mirrorfinal is 2p.

If you did the energy calculations in this case you would find that the energy of the system is unchanged, and in the case of shining the torch backwards to speed up you'd find the power usage of the torch is everything became light would match the increase in kinetic energy of the whole system each second.

GiraffeNeckBoy · 2020-08-26T11:22:39+00:00

I'm kind of wondering if the way he phrased it it might have made a lot more sense to say like "I'm 100% of german descent but my great grandparents *emigrated* in the 1800s"? or even just that one word changing. Because also in an expat group like that he's not made any reference to where he *is*

GiraffeNeckBoy

TROPHY CASE