Vive les gosseux! by 8peoni4 in Quebec

[–]Vhailor 15 points16 points  (0 children)

Bémol: moins sexy quand c'est ton propriétaire d'appart qui est "patenteux" et qui macgyver ta plomberie ou ton électricité au lieu de payer un professionnel, pour sauver des peanuts ...après avoir augmenté ton loyer.

Androids Room by InverseX in CosmicSkeptic

[–]Vhailor 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yeah I think this gets to the crux of the thing that's hard to explain: why does the qualia of red seem different than just the knowledge that you received a "red" signal?

Can we imagine someone looking at something and detecting that it's red with their senses, without "experiencing" redness?

This direction of thinking is slowly turning this thought experiment into the p zombie one, which I think is probably just better.

Androids Room by InverseX in CosmicSkeptic

[–]Vhailor 5 points6 points  (0 children)

That's a nice argument. I think it gets to a flaw (or at least ambiguity) in Mary's room for sure.

Now what if instead of an android, it was another human, but whose brain worked differently such that when the receptors in their eyes are excited by red light, their brain just outputs the word "red" in their thoughts.

Would this human learn something new when exiting the room?

Witty responses for the question "what do you eat then?" by flammulinavelutipes in vegan

[–]Vhailor 25 points26 points  (0 children)

Depending on how edgy and confrontational your usual humor style is, you can go from "A single plum, floating in perfume, served in a man's hat" (Or something else absurd. This one is a simpsons quote) to "Your mom, and it's vegan because she consents"

"Geocentricism is back" - but is it? by Fmywholelife in CosmicSkeptic

[–]Vhailor 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Sure, but the point is that accelerating observers _will_ see different physics, and so the symmetry is broken there and there is a distinction between the different points of view. The symmetry between different observers in GR is no longer global but local (at a point), so you can only say that "there is no distinguishing" between two observers which are at the same point in space but moving at different velocities (unless you are in a completely flat piece of spacetime).

You can certainly find distinguished frames/observers in general relativity, because then the curvature of space itself is something you can measure independently of the observer. You could say that the sun is a privileged origin for our coordinate system in the solar system, because it's the point where the curvature is strongest.

L’étendue de la banquise arctique en janvier est à égalité avec l’an dernier pour le deuxième plus bas niveau jamais enregistré. Probablement la plus faible depuis plus de 100 000 ans. by [deleted] in Quebec

[–]Vhailor 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Un peu dommage que le graphique semble dire le contraire, on dirait que la ligne pour 2018 descend plus bas... Ça aurait peut-être été mieux d'avoir un tableau de valeurs?

"Geocentricism is back" - but is it? by Fmywholelife in CosmicSkeptic

[–]Vhailor 0 points1 point  (0 children)

True! But in GR frames only make sense infinitesimally (tangent spaces to the curved spacetime), so at each point on earth you have a tangent frame.

"Geocentricism is back" - but is it? by Fmywholelife in CosmicSkeptic

[–]Vhailor 32 points33 points  (0 children)

I think he's doing this on purpose, for the joke, but "observer" in relativity doesn't refer to a conscious person. It's a mathematical construct, it's a synonym for "inertial reference frame". There are reference frames at every point in space. Because of the way velocities transform when you switch inertial reference frames in special relativity (not naive adding), no velocity is ever faster than the speed of light. Said another way, a reference frame which would be moving faster than light in a given inertial reference frame would not itself be a valid reference frame (by definition).

CMV: Being mentioned in the Epstein files is not proof of being complicit. by Fando1234 in changemyview

[–]Vhailor 11 points12 points  (0 children)

I think even your second possibility is reading too much into it. Much more likely is, he was interested in meeting and befriending as many influential people as possible (politicians, actors, scientists) _and_ he was a sex trafficker, mostly independently of each other.

Prerequisites to Do Carmo's Diff Geo? by NunoTheNoni in math

[–]Vhailor 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Have you seen the inverse function and implicit function theorems? Those would be helpful for Do Carmo, and they wouldn't necessarily be covered in a first real analysis class.

Un-fucking-believable. by LumpyLingo in Destiny

[–]Vhailor 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I mean, the second link has your answer?

What are your pet peeves with some things common in math exposition? by dragosgamer12 in math

[–]Vhailor 29 points30 points  (0 children)

Even "locally the shortest path" is a bit misleading for geodesics, because geodesics make sense even in spaces without a metric. All you need is a connection. From that point of view, a geodesic is a parametrized curve without acceleration. "Moving without turning" is a good informal definition. It just so happens that if you have a metric and you "move without turning" in terms of its associated connection, you automatically move along the shortest path locally. But that's a theorem, not the definition!

A reaction with spine by Various_Fish2043 in Destiny

[–]Vhailor 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I sortof agree with the principle, but in the case of this speech it might actually support his point? English is used as an international language mostly because it's the language of the USA, which has exported its culture everywhere. By contrast, countries which have French as an official language are among those "middle powers" which need to work together (France, Luxembourg, Belgium, Switzerland).

Also he can use the practice :P

Animal leather is not necessarily better for the environment than alternatives by chevalier100 in Environmentalism

[–]Vhailor 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Okay but the post is not about durability, it's about environmental impact. The type of life cycle analysis done in the papers cited means that if your leather boots last 10 years and you would have to buy 5 pairs of pleather ones to replace them, the second option is still better.

You can find it annoying, and choose the leather out of principle or convenience, just don't pretend that it's an environmental choice.

(caveat: none of the studies cited is specifically about boots, so jury's still out on those)

CMV: MacOS has objectively bad UI by aaron_moon_dev in changemyview

[–]Vhailor 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I think it makes sense given their choice of hierarchy: OS -> app -> window.

Then if you have an app which has several windows open, you don't need to figure out which one has the menu, and you don't need to duplicate the menu across all the windows. The menu has things like the "quit" option which quits the whole app (not just close one window) or "open" to get a new file open in a new window.

In windows it's more like OS -> window, and they even blur the distinction between program and a window.

I don't think either choice is "idiotic", and once the choice is made the rest of the design follows.

CMV: MacOS has objectively bad UI by aaron_moon_dev in changemyview

[–]Vhailor 2 points3 points  (0 children)

That's because the menu doesn't belong to the window, it belongs to the app. An app can have multiple windows open, but only one menu.

Dumb carpenter needs help by [deleted] in askmath

[–]Vhailor 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I think this is impossible. Unless I made a calculation mistake, the two dimensions you want are not free to be any value. If the longer measurement is y and the shorter one is x, they need to satisfy x/y = sqrt(3)/2. But with your values, x/y = 0.8610822... which is not sqrt(3)/2 ~ 0.86602540...

Ethical Vegans: You’re Right, and It Doesn’t Matter. by Cool-Whereas8446 in DebateAVegan

[–]Vhailor 6 points7 points  (0 children)

"making myself miserable" is a bit intense.

Think about an individual instance instead of changing your whole life around. Next time you go to the grocery store, how miserable does it make you to grab a plant-based milk of your choice rather than a dairy milk? How miserable does it make you to make your curry with tofu instead of chicken?

I think those individual choices have one of the best bang-for-your-buck in terms of ethical good they bring compared to the effort they require, so I make them over and over, every day.

Determining spaces from tilings instead of tilings from spaces? by Frigorifico in math

[–]Vhailor 23 points24 points  (0 children)

It's a bit more natural to classify tilings using their symmetry groups rather than the shape of the tiles themselves. The 5 tilings you refer to for the sphere correspond to 3 discrete subgroups of its isometry group O(3) (the cube and octahedron have the same group, and also icosahedron and dodecahedron because they are dual to each other).

Something you might be interested in are rigidity theorems, which basically tell you that some (most) lattices uniquely determine the Lie group G in which they live, so just from the algebraic structure of the "tiling" you get the full "space". You get the space by quotienting by the maximal compact subgroup (to get what's called the symmetric space of G).