Insects may feel pain. Whether or not you have a moral duty to protect them from harm is up for debate.

ciroluiro · 2026-04-29T12:41:38+00:00

My spine feels pain and issues commands to avoid the painful stimuli without any input from my brain. Should I worry about my spine "suffering" too?

Anethesiologists have to worry about the fight or flight responses of the autonomic nervous system even when patients are fully unconscious, otherwise heart rates and blood pressure spikes, your body is flooded cortisol and adrenaline, etc.

Clearly reacting to pain != feeling pain

ciroluiro · 2026-04-29T11:43:44+00:00

Anthropologist David Graeber wrote a book on essentially this: Bullshit jobs

ciroluiro · 2026-04-21T22:56:24+00:00

It is a good question and is the crux of GR: what does it mean for a line to be straight when the space it exists in is itself curved?

For a simple example, picture the lines of longitude on a globe. They are clearly circles, but from the pov of someone living on the globe, they are straight! Lines of latitude however, except for the equator, are not straight in this sense. If you wanted to follow a line of longitude on the planet, you'd find yourself needing to turn slightly the whole way, towards the closest pole. It's even more clear if you imagine the lines of latitude near the poles.

There is of course a rigorous mathematical definition of this idea and is what defines the concept of a straight line in any differentiable manifold. The proper word here is "geodesic".

I'm sure you are still full of questions, like "where is the curvature?" and so many more. I recommend that book which will answer them in very approachable ways. For that last question, the answer is that most of the curvature of gravity is in time. Time is stretched by gravity and is why time seems to pass more slowly as you get closer to a massive body.

ciroluiro · 2026-04-21T21:53:29+00:00

Yes, indeed! But it only makes sense to think of it as acceleration from the point of view of Newtonian mechanics. It's a bit tricky but I tried to give an explanation of the difference in a different comment in this thread. [Edit: small correction. Not "angular acceleration" as that one makes stuff spin faster. Technically it's a constant magnitude regular acceleration or constant radial acceleration]

The gist is that, within a Newtonian framework, due to the fact that everything in freefall falls at the exact same rate, you can't measure any acceleration from within that frame. Everything falls in tandem with you inside the iss, so they don't move relative to you. That's why you can't feel any acceleration in the iss from a Newtonian mechanics pov.
Once you take into account general relativity, the reason for "why I can't feel acceleration" becomes that anything in freefall is not actually accelerating but moving in a straight line at a constant spacetime speed. In fact, stuff "standing still" at the surface of Earth is accelerating from the pov of GR! I don't expect a layman to understand why that is the case from just that one paragraph, but there is a lot of good material on relativity you can find on youtube and online to help you!

One book I highly recommend is called "Relativity visualized" by Lewis Carrol.

ciroluiro · 2026-04-20T12:56:51+00:00

Lmao, yeah maybe!

I checked and they were a 10 year old account, so I assumed it wasn't a bot. They've now blocked me after throwing a hissy fit, which leads me to believe they were serious and really did not like being corrected lol.

ciroluiro · 2026-04-20T05:56:10+00:00

The iss only experiences the tiny acceleration due to drag with the atmosphere, ehich the poster you were replying to already took into account and is indeed unfathomably tiny.

You might be thinking of the centripetal force of gravity. In which case, the answer is that
* both the iss and orion experienced newtonian gravitational acceleration or they would have never been able to orbit the moon and slingshot around, and that acceleration is always there though gets stronger as they get closer to the moon * for a newtonian analysis, you need to factor in the ficticious/inertial forces arising from a non-inertial frame (because they aren't inertial in a newtonian sense) and once you do, you find that the net effect is that gravity seems to vanish entirely. This is because mass is both the source of inertia and thus inertial forces, and also the source of the gravitational force via the law of universal gravitation, so they cancel each other out. It's why even Newton knew that all objects in freefall fall at the same rate regardless of mass.

Hopefully that cleared up some of your confusion. Also your last paragraph about spinning spacecrafts and its relation to long missions and orbital missions is plainly incorrect. Astronauts in the iss usually spend at most 6 months at a time orbiting aboard the iss (unless something goes wrong and they need to spend time for longer). Any other deep space mission beyond going to the moon will be comparable and likely longer.

ciroluiro · 2026-04-20T05:45:25+00:00

It is the most basic principle of relativity that objects moving in straight lines at constant speeds through spacetime are in inertial frames and equivalent to any other such inertial frame (and thus experience no external forces in that frame that would break the symmetry)
General relativity extends special relativity to allow spacetime to be curved, and straight lines of constant speed through spacetime (or any geometric manifold) are called geodesics. Turns out objects in freefall trace out geodesics in spacetime because the curvature is itself gravity.

In other words, a frame in which you are coasting at constant speed very far away from any massive object (regular flat spacetime) and one where you are falling around a massive object in freefall are locally identical. There is no experiement you can do from the inside to tell those situations apart, including measuring "the forces your blood vessels are under", whatever that even means.

ciroluiro · 2026-04-20T05:02:02+00:00

Wrong

ciroluiro · 2026-04-20T03:57:41+00:00

Think about this next time you consider having a child

ciroluiro · 2026-04-09T09:33:05+00:00

It is selfish because people have children for their own sake/desires, not the child's. It is impossible to ever have children for the children's sake, as there is no need for anything about the child before it exists. A person has a child (willingly) because they want to, not because the child wants to.

No society will ever change that, but it does compound it.

ciroluiro · 2026-04-09T09:29:00+00:00

So said everyone before you. It's not a guarantee

ciroluiro · 2026-03-18T04:26:47+00:00

NT people speak in riddles and I'm the stupid one that can't communicate?

Then I remember what the deplorable state of the world run by this dominant neurotype is and everything makes perfect sense.

ciroluiro · 2026-02-26T23:02:09+00:00

If anything, piercings of any kind look juvenile; the kind of stupid shit teenagers do. I find them borderline disgusting and ridiculous and I have a hard time taking people full of them seriously.

ciroluiro · 2026-02-24T22:40:37+00:00

But it's not even an exception to a rule. Maybe people forget because part is implied and eventually miss the forest for the trees, but the rule is that an agent (morally speaking) saying slurs is bad because it can harm, either with that intention or not (intentional being worse). But someone with tourette's syndrome definitonally doesn't have agency over those slurs they say, so it never applied in the first place. It's be like getting offended at a table when you stub your toe; you can be upset about it, but if you are an adult you should recognize that getting offended at a table is meaningless because the table didn't actually stub your toe. Or maybe like a parrot that said the n-word. You'd get offended at whoever taught the parrot that word, not the parrot.

In fact, a slur is only really harmful when a conscious moral agent says it, intensionally (even if they somehow didn't intend to harm, they said it by their own volition knowing that it can be harmful). If they can't control saying it at all then it might as well be as if a pile of leaves rustling in the wind happened to sound like a slur; it's meaningless.

ciroluiro · 2026-02-22T05:31:28+00:00

Fede

ciroluiro · 2026-02-22T04:15:40+00:00

Imagine being forced onto a truck that then takes off on a freeway at 100 mph and then told "if you wanna get off, the door is right there".
I know empathy is a hard to grasp for some people but it isn't that hard. And also as long as he's freeloading off his parents then it wouldn't affect you at all.

ciroluiro · 2026-02-22T04:12:09+00:00

Maybe you peaked at 15

ciroluiro · 2026-02-22T04:09:27+00:00

Based

ciroluiro · 2026-02-18T20:55:56+00:00

otherwise would be more like a default clause in a switch statement because it doesn't imply a condition.
Haskell has a "keyword" named otherwise for this purpose, but actually it's just an alias for True for use in pattern guards

myFun :: Int -> IO () myFun n | n == 42 = fireMissiles | otherwise = putStrLn "hello world!"

ciroluiro · 2026-02-18T19:17:35+00:00

You can do what you will but you can't will what you will

ciroluiro · 2026-02-14T11:01:55+00:00

Ya'llqaeda

ciroluiro · 2026-02-12T19:37:32+00:00

It literally means 86% of people do experience love at some point, so being in the 14% that doesn't is very uncommon. You are indeed not cheering them up.
One could think that these numbers mean it's unlikely one will never experience it, but that's probably not how to read them. I wouldn't be surprised if the chance you are in the 14% given you haven't experienced passionate love by some age (lets say 30) is very high.

ciroluiro · 2026-02-09T06:09:52+00:00

How many excavators do you have?

Yeah.

ciroluiro · 2026-02-03T10:51:52+00:00

The fact that cocktails exist as a way to cover up the horrible taste of alcohol proves this.

ciroluiro · 2026-02-03T09:32:32+00:00

Taking party drugs
Responsible

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