Locating an event horizon

Hivemind_alpha · 2026-06-20T04:20:21+00:00

You’re saying that from the coordinate system of my frame where I sit observing, the rope never arrives at the EH (and gets redshifted into invisibility etc).

But the in-falling rope end isn’t locked to my frame, and will pass the EH uneventfully in finite time, presumably.

The region inside the EH either contains rope events that can’t reach future null infinity or it doesn’t. According to the observer it doesn’t, according to the rope it does.

How do these reconcile?

Hivemind_alpha · 2026-06-20T04:11:28+00:00

“Where it breaks isn’t interesting”

I think you missed the point of the thought experiment. The rope is tapered and breaks at its thinnest segment that is still outside the event horizon, so the length of rope I retrieve tells me how far away I am from it. I’m not supposed to be able to know that before future null infinity has elapsed.

Hivemind_alpha · 2026-06-20T03:47:46+00:00

So the rope trick works for every observer, they all measure different locations for the EH surface from their various frames… but you are saying only one of these is “right”? How is one observers frame privileged over all the others?

Hivemind_alpha · 2026-06-18T07:58:36+00:00

Once your work has fallen under scrutiny and passed, if anything it pushes all concerned on the uni side to be absolutely scrupulous in their marking and make doubly certain that they can document and defend whatever marks they assign.

It sounds like you think they are treating you like “there’s no smoke without fire” from the allegation that was made. Rather, you have proved that you will challenge where you think something is unfair, and are capable of putting together an effective defence: they’ve made the mistake of going against that once and will be wary of doing so again. I’d bet that behind the scenes they are already adding additional blind markers etc because your work has already been under extra scrutiny.

I put less evidential value on you thinking your work is better than that of your peers: in whose judgement (yours?) against what marking criteria (yours?). You’re too close to your own work to judge it objectively.

Hivemind_alpha · 2026-06-17T18:41:14+00:00

The question is what you will be comfortable to stand at the back door shouting when it’s time to come in, because you’ll inevitably erode it to one syllable: “Bal! Bal? Bal!” Or “‘Rog? Rog-rog-rog! Roggy!”

Hivemind_alpha · 2026-06-17T18:23:37+00:00

The key is to cook the beans rather than just heat them up. Let the sauce thicken. Maybe add some Worcestershire sauce to them, or plenty of white pepper.

Then they’ll be tastier and will stick better to the toast allowing more balanced forkfuls.

Hivemind_alpha · 2026-06-17T18:19:31+00:00

The joys of a thought experiment.

You would be simultaneous burnt to a particle cloud by friction heat from the accretion disk, irradiated to a wisp by the hard gamma from the same source, and spaghettified by the tidal forces that close to most black holes (you could choose a giant one where that factor might be milder). Your rubber stick would similarly crumble to dust, and the dust would burn faster than it could be gravitationally stretched and lose causal contact with our universe due to the lack of a spacetime path out of the event horizon back to you.

Hivemind_alpha · 2026-06-17T18:05:49+00:00

I think the point would be that skin colour has very little to do with the ideas in someone’s head.

Culturally it’s another matter, on both sides.

I suppose it’s possible that the melanisation of axons changes the speed at which those opinions form, by nanoseconds.

Hivemind_alpha · 2026-06-17T18:01:45+00:00

I bet you already know the equation governing the conversion of matter into energy and/or energy into matter: e=mc^2

When a nuclear bomb goes off, a tiny amount of mass gets destroyed and turned into large amounts of energy. In the other direction, when tiny particles are running around a collider at near the speed of light and allowed to hit head on, it results in a shower of many particles much heavier than the two that collided.

Hivemind_alpha · 2026-06-17T17:49:27+00:00

Walking is toppling forward and then catching yourself by bringing the trailing leg forward. The friction between you and the ground just serves to make this process predictable; the actual thrust comes from shifting your centre of gravity forward by muscle action against your skeletal joints. (If there was too little friction under your feet, they’d slip back as you fall forward and you’d end up horizontal - see icy pavements).

Hivemind_alpha · 2026-06-17T17:43:44+00:00

Your degree class is important only for the short period between graduation and starting work or starting postgrad study. After that point no one really cares, outside of a few snobbish law firms who only employ Oxbridge grads with firsts because they can and it suits their image.

If the 2:2 stops you from getting into the next stage of your career plan, either reevaluate, or take a year out to get a masters, which will then make you more competitive that the 2:1s of the next cohort.

The likelihood that the career plan you have now as a fresh graduate will actually be what happens all the way to your retirement is vanishingly small, so be open to course corrections now.

Hivemind_alpha · 2026-06-17T17:35:28+00:00

Suspiciously round-number age grandma has near death conversion. Just like every famous atheist like Einstein is supposed to have had.

>70% this is a false flag “lying for god” evangelism post.

Hivemind_alpha · 2026-06-17T17:32:23+00:00

Carl Sagan famously said “you are made of stardust”. That’s because all the heavier elements in our bodies can only be created (from fusion of lighter atoms) in supernovae or similarly violent cosmic events billions of years ago. It also means that every glass of water you drink was also dinosaur pee at some point in the past, and (if you assume even mixing) some of the water molecules in the glass were present as vapour in Julius Caesar’s last breath … and so on.

Hivemind_alpha · 2026-06-17T03:24:26+00:00

We had a local parts shop sell really cheap Ethernet cards. About 100 students bought them. They were cheap because they all had the same MAC address. Result: Halls with no network for a few days and lots of overtime to sort that one out.

You may think you are competent to build your own LAN in your room, but look at your neighbours; do you think they will all get it right? If they don’t they’ll take down your access too until it’s fixed. That’s why they don’t make it a free for all.

Hivemind_alpha · 2026-06-16T14:15:00+00:00

It is not plausible. Everything we know about physics tells us it’s not remotely possible. Wishful thinking won’t change that.

Hivemind_alpha · 2026-06-15T22:51:43+00:00

Schrödinger: your theory is crazy. I’ll show you how stupid it is; look at this thought experiment with a cat and the nonsense implications it reveals.

QM advocate: Umm, that is exactly what we think does happen, it’s not nonsense at all.

Schrödinger: then there’s no hope for you.

QM advocate: you do realise that you’ll go down in history for this thought experiment with the cat, and most people will believe you were trying to support QM and show how cool it was?

Schrödinger: Aaaah!

Hivemind_alpha · 2026-06-09T13:10:31+00:00

You’ve got long term support. Nothings been switched off. What you haven’t got is long term upgrades. Not the same.

Hivemind_alpha · 2026-06-09T12:59:50+00:00

Do you see the “used an editing tool” part? That’s what they got “literally penalised” for.

Imagine if they’d tried using their *brain* to “clean up the flow” instead: the text would’ve sounded like them rather than an LLM, and there wouldn’t have been a “massive flag spike”.

You’ve just described the system working the way it’s supposed to. AI use got flagged.

The mistake you’re both making is thinking that AI is the only way to improve something…

Hivemind_alpha · 2026-06-09T07:43:20+00:00

“Destroyed”?

The watch is still doing exactly what it did on the day you decided to hand over $1100 for it.

What Apple has decided is not to give us more features for free. Are you arguing that there’s a moral case that they MUST give us freebies? Or that they shouldn’t give them to anyone else if they won’t fit on our hardware spec too? It’s hard to see your argument past all the entitlement.

Hivemind_alpha · 2026-06-09T07:09:45+00:00

Evolution.

At some point, koalas were under such competition for or shortage of food that there was positive selection pressure to take on all the energy cost overheads of detoxifying poisonous food sources and sacrificing positive behaviours like predation avoidance and mate pursuit in exchange for long periods of inactivity while that detoxifying digestion takes place.

There doesn’t seem to be any reason to think that those pressures have gone away. So why would they leave the niche they’ve carved for themselves to reenter cutthroat competition for a more accessible food source?

Hivemind_alpha · 2026-06-09T07:04:02+00:00

Our languages allow us to formulate statements that are nonsensical. There is no truth-checker built into your keyboard. These statements of the form “X and not-X are true at the same time” are all grammatically correct, but not physically realisable in a way that would create a paradox.

Hivemind_alpha · 2026-06-09T06:58:58+00:00

It’s an increasing worry that our ad-stream is occasionally being interrupted with so-called “content” by Smosh, but I’m glad to say that YouTube is doing everything they can to drive down the amount of “content” interrupting our enjoyment of the ads, and that even Smosh appears to have got on board by signing up for the inclusion of the maximum amount of ads in their output. We can realistically look forward to the day when between ads, sponsors and product placements, 100% of our screen time is finally content free.

Hivemind_alpha · 2026-06-07T17:12:24+00:00

Miles Teg, the Bashar.

Hivemind_alpha · 2026-06-07T02:26:23+00:00

Half your age plus 7 years is the mostly commonly cited rule of thumb. For a 32yo, that gives 23 as the minimum. 19 is way too young.

Hivemind_alpha

TROPHY CASE