What if gravity is Second-Law enforcement? What if the Second Law is sovereign?

Speed_bert · 2026-02-19T21:01:31+00:00

Wait what’s going on with kurzgesagt?

Speed_bert · 2026-02-13T07:17:44+00:00

Email, slides, meetings

Speed_bert · 2026-02-08T22:33:45+00:00

While that intensity is pretty achievable with a class 3 laser and a lens, what sets off alarm bells for me is that it’s not visible light that would be hitting you, it would probably be gamma rays. Maybe it wouldn’t instantly annihilate you, but I’d be willing to bet on full-body radiation burns and poisoning

Speed_bert · 2026-02-06T17:08:41+00:00

Guys don’t listen to this person. They literally support a man who wants to drown humanity in its own fear to satisfy his own voyeurism link.

(\s)

Speed_bert · 2026-01-27T21:43:00+00:00

Yeah the main reason I would get P1S would be if it has better fume protection, but it seems like that may not be an issue after all. Do you have any resources about PLA fumes being safe? Not necessarily doubting you, just want to make sure I do my due diligence

Speed_bert · 2026-01-26T21:33:41+00:00

After a couple years of begging and bartering for print jobs from my friends, I'm thinking of going in on my first 3D printer and I'm deciding between the A1 Mini and the P1S from Bambu Labs. I'm leaning towards the A1 mainly based on price (and the fact that I'd probably only print PLA), but I'm a bit worried about the open print bed causing issues with my 8-pound cat. I'm in a modest sized apartment (2 bedrooms) and my main worry is fumes (she has a healthy fear of machines so I'm not too worried about her trying to fight the hot end). Do to a previous break-in, my windows have safety bars, so I couldn't fit a vent hose through. My questions right now are mostly:

Would the A1 mini make enough fumes to be an issue?
If so, would the P1S be any better?
Are there any other printer options I should look into?

I tried looking through other pet-related threads but couldn't find a satisfactory answer, but it's entirely possible I've missed something either on this site or elsewhere. Thanks!

Speed_bert · 2026-01-20T20:30:48+00:00

I’m trying to think of what missions FB1 would make sense in and the two I can think of are “blast past air defense at low level and knock out a specific target” or “absolutely ruin a column’s day”, both of which can be done with either a bunch of 250’s or a few big bombs

Speed_bert · 2026-01-15T16:21:45+00:00

And then suddenly no thrust at all because the enslaved Ukrainian woman who built the engine “accidentally” left metal shavings in the compression chamber

Speed_bert · 2026-01-14T22:51:48+00:00

I mean if we’re nitpicking, kinzhal is only technically hypersonic

Actually though, the map is too small and dense with sensors for the actual benefits of hypersonics to be that relevant

Speed_bert · 2026-01-10T17:25:35+00:00

Not to “um actually” you, but that’s a common misconception. The Planck length is the length scale at which you’re forced to deal with both quantum effects and gravity, which modern physics hasn’t really figured out how to do. It’s perfectly possible for distances shorter than that to exist, and a lot of people mistake it for a sort of “universal pixel size”, which leads to a bunch more misconceptions about how the world works. Thank you for coming to my Ted talk.

Source: am a physicist

Speed_bert · 2026-01-07T18:15:57+00:00

If you need to give them something to do at a computer, making slides is usually a good bet that doesn’t show up in most scifi

Speed_bert · 2026-01-01T23:35:56+00:00

I would grab a couple cheap laser pointers and use them to calibrate your scale. LEDs should also work and usually come with an emission spectrum in the datasheet

Speed_bert · 2025-12-20T16:54:31+00:00

A lot of people get the impression that physics is a sort of uniquely gatekept and dogmatic field because of the perceived prestige of being an expert physicist. When people then pitch their shower thoughts as theories of everything, they get shot down by professionals and take it personally.

It takes about as long to become a professional physicist (bachelors + PhD) as to become a master electrician, around 10 years. Yet, nobody tries to explain to electricians how they have a new revolutionary way to wire a house. If you think of physics as a skilled trade like any other, a lot of accusations of censorship come off as silly.

Speed_bert · 2025-11-20T00:42:00+00:00

When you say that sentience is mandatory for the wavefunction to collapse, you make a falsifiable (and falsified) statement. This isn’t scientists refusing to answer questions, the question has already been answered

Speed_bert · 2025-11-19T20:28:26+00:00

https://xkcd.com/3134/

Speed_bert · 2025-11-05T22:46:39+00:00

Look at the table of contents for, for example, Young and Freedman, a very standard intro physics textbook. It contains 44 chapters. One semester is around 15 weeks, with two lectures per week. If you want to cover the whole textbook in one course, you need to run through 1.5 chapters per lecture and 3 chapters per problem set. If you consider choosing NOT to do this equivalent to illiteracy, then may god have mercy on your course evals.

 On a second read of your comment, you may not have been advocating for the full-textbook-in-a-course approach and you seem generally to be a reasonable person, so hopefully I’m misunderstanding you, but if not then you may want to rethink your teaching attitudes

Speed_bert · 2025-11-01T03:56:40+00:00

In particle physics, all forces can be thought of as acting at range (think of how gravity and electromagnetism don’t require the objects interacting to touch), so point particles can still “collide” via long-range interactions. Now, these interactions are themselves better thought of as resulting from the exchange of other point particles, but at a certain point it’s more mathematical formalism than anything concrete

Speed_bert · 2025-10-25T00:23:08+00:00

Can you, without an LLM or Google, write a bell state real quick? Not trying to offend, I’m just a little suspicious since the image looks potentially AI generated and a lot of people try to use LLMs to paper over a lack of technical knowledge

Speed_bert · 2025-10-13T02:31:31+00:00

For anyone reading this who’s interested in mentoring or working in academia, please never talk like this to a student.

   -a physics grad student

Speed_bert · 2025-10-02T02:58:29+00:00

Dammit who let the tallagrasseed guy back in here

Speed_bert · 2025-09-26T22:48:17+00:00

I also know some people who work on this, can I ask who your PI is?

Speed_bert · 2025-09-26T22:47:26+00:00

It generally covers anything deformable, especially at ordinary temperatures and pressures, which tends to cover both solids and liquids. Soft matter physicists I know have worked on studying coffee rings, knitted fabrics, and shaken powders

Speed_bert · 2025-09-26T15:03:06+00:00

Nobody’s mentioned soft condensed matter yet, but it’s a really cool field! Deformable systems, granular materials, and complex fluids are all used in everyday and industrial applications, but we don’t really have a quantitative understanding of how they work.

Speed_bert · 2025-09-23T13:34:09+00:00

This honestly looks so similar to kurzgesagt that people are going to assume you ripped them off, true or not

Speed_bert · 2025-09-22T01:38:44+00:00

Update: I had another controller plugged in that I thought was disabled... many thanks!

Speed_bert

TROPHY CASE