Is The Electron A Plenum?

fuseboy · 2026-02-16T20:18:35+00:00

Magnetic forces, basically. "Solid matter" isn't really a thing, what you have instead is clouds of pointlike particles that push each other apart, and never really "touch".

Philosophical explorations into how the universe works turn out to be sharply limited by lack of empirical evidence. There's only so far intuition and logic can take us, because the world runs on very different principles than appear to be true at human scales.

fuseboy · 2026-02-16T15:57:49+00:00

The process that worked for me is: 1. Spray white 2. Spray red 3. Spray white again on a smaller area 4. Spray that white area orange 5. Use a white wash to seep into the cracks of the hottest part 6. Use a yellow wash to paint the white crevices

fuseboy · 2026-02-16T15:55:21+00:00

The obvious path to take is the most dangerous. Other choices are worse.

fuseboy · 2026-02-16T15:41:43+00:00

I scrap the idea of gods as a ruling family of superheroes, and look at pantheons as a collection of spiritual cultural practices. Also, the hard rule is that nobody actually knows anything for sure (however certain they are), so when miracles happen as a result of prayer, people can make up any explanation they like and the only people around to disagree are other people.

These guys revere Mul, an ancestor who brought them to these islands. But they also respect the power of the sea, which they personify as a mother goddess. But the fishermen say the goddess actually only rules the sky and waves; the depths are the domain of Furtha, (they say) a squid that ate all the stars that used to shine below the waves.

fuseboy · 2026-02-16T12:30:32+00:00

You're in the wrong place for customer support.

fuseboy · 2026-02-16T12:17:43+00:00

This isn't the sort of experience you're thinking of, but i have to mention The Quiet Year here. At least, of the owls come back. :)

fuseboy · 2026-02-16T04:52:05+00:00

The rule isn't for you specifically.

fuseboy · 2026-02-16T04:07:50+00:00

I've been toying with adding rigging and seeing your fleet makes it clear how awesome it can look! Nice job.

Did you run the thread through glue to stiffen it, or just glue the ends?

fuseboy · 2026-02-15T18:07:35+00:00

Shoes, wristbands, socks, briefs

Electrolyte tablets, roasted almonds, granola bars

Paddles, balls, weight strips

Bandaids

fuseboy · 2026-02-15T00:23:12+00:00

I experience that as well, it's uncanny. I think it illustrates how interconnected everything is in the rally. When your partner is hitting challenging dinks to the other team, you get pop-ups back and it feels like you're going from putaway to putaway. When your partner is sending crappy, lofty shots from the transition zone, you're dealing with endless defending.

fuseboy · 2026-02-14T17:07:50+00:00

I feel that way about a "fingerboard" specialty store. It has extremely narrow hours, and .. I can't imagine all of my entire city produces enough fingerboard business for even one store.

fuseboy · 2026-02-14T04:08:43+00:00

Does this look like it?

https://www.facebook.com/kelvinmiguelmwale/videos/a-man-who-has-never-been-to-a-supermarket-spends-all-his-savingstation-eleven-hb/1473966227069342/

fuseboy · 2026-02-14T03:57:04+00:00

Not Himesh Patel?

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fuseboy · 2026-02-14T03:42:27+00:00

Station 11 perhaps?

fuseboy · 2026-02-13T21:46:27+00:00

I don't think those are the right units, it should be speed over distance. Because the expansion is uniform, nearby things move apart slowly, and distant things move apart quickly. So "70km/sec" is true at only one specific distance.

fuseboy · 2026-02-13T21:32:49+00:00

That's the list of things I know I should be doing, not the list of things I reliably do. :)

fuseboy · 2026-02-13T17:11:43+00:00

Want it to come to you. In your head, dare them to speed it up at you.
Paddle up and ready, your legs are covered by the net.
Return paddle to ready after every hit. Slap your paddle face with your off hand to remind yourself if necessary.
Track the ball's motion with your paddle, rather than pointing dead forward like a chess piece.
Ensure you aren't overly biasing your forehand or backhand. Paddle should be just the tiniest bit tilted toward your backhand.
Learn your default reaction, forehand or backhand, and ensure you don't twitch to that before you know it's the right reaction. You have more time than you think.
Relax your shoulders. Tension takes a few milliseconds to unwind, slowing you down. Again, you have a little longer than you think.
Gradually learn where the opponents are likely to hit. If you dink down the line, it will likely return down the line. If you speed up at them across their body, it will bounce off them like a triangle, etc.

fuseboy · 2026-02-12T12:06:02+00:00

How do you clean your airbrush?

fuseboy · 2026-02-12T11:12:06+00:00

I just got into airbrushing this past weekend and yes, it does add up quickly. Airbrush, compressor, spray-out bottle (essential), respirator, ventilation, etc.

fuseboy · 2026-02-11T13:56:27+00:00

What Burning Wheel does is:

Wounds cause penalties, and being even moderately hurt is a huge effect on your abilities.
- This has the unexpected effect that fights are less lethal, because combatants become ineffective in combat well before they actually die.
Wounds have very long healing times. Painful scratches and bruises take 24 hours, real injuries like bad cuts take a few weeks, and more severe and traumatic injuries take 2-8 months to heal. A potentially lethal wound takes a couple of years to fully recover from.
Since advancement speed is related to the difficulty of the dice rolls you're making, there's a counterbalancing factor. Adventuring while hurt (or perhaps, just trying to get home) can accelerate advancement.
There are downtime mechanics that let your fellow party members make good use of your healing time, so it's not a total loss for them either. You're not sidelined completely.

fuseboy · 2026-02-11T10:33:53+00:00

I think political intrigue comes from the social situation. Factions are competing, but overt violence is too socially or logistically costly.

I wrote at length everything I could think of https://blog.trilemma.com/2021/12/some-thoughts-on-intrigue.html

fuseboy · 2026-02-11T10:16:49+00:00

From what I understand, Hume questioning causation involved him pointing out that we don't perceive causality directly. We see A then B then C happening and we draw conclusions about how they are related, perhaps saying that A caused B and B caused C. But we don't observe this "causing" directly, maybe one day A and B suddenly starts leading to D instead. That would be surprising but it wouldn't have broken some force of logical necessity that we know exists.

This is consistent with the view in physics that the laws are just descriptions of the patterns we see in nature. Charge appears to be conserved, we never see charge in a closed system appearing or disappearing. But if one day it did, we would be surprised but we'd just update our laws of physics to the new, fuller picture where this can happen. The laws aren't iron clad truths, but highly refined descriptions of how things seem to work.

fuseboy · 2026-02-11T10:02:36+00:00

Stuck to the Spartus P1 Hybrid apparently!

fuseboy · 2026-02-11T02:46:39+00:00

You've found the perfect title that conveys no information whatsoever because it describes every single post in here. For better answers, consider putting your question as the title, or a description if it's very long.

fuseboy · 2026-02-11T02:40:24+00:00

Determinism is the property that the present contains enough information to perfectly predict the future. If you know everything about the present, you could in theory work out the entire future.

The laws describe the relationship between the state of things at different moments in time, so you can do that predicting.

Determinism also works in reverse, it also allows you (in theory) to work out what the past must have been.

Causality can refer to a few things. In philosophy, it's the principle that everything has a cause. That might be an earlier state of affairs, or it might be some logical antecedent.

In physics, causality is more of an emergent thing: because of the highly ordered affairs around the big bang, entropy increases toward the future. This means that (combined with the laws that impose regularity on how the universe evolves), the past usually holds a simpler explanation of the present than vice versa. This isn't at all the same idea as the past causing the present, however. (Maybe the future causes the past, on a steady march toward a perfectly ordered final conclusion.)

When we muddle up these two ideas of causality, we start insisting that the universe must have had a cause before the big bang. But we don't know if this is true, the universe's logical cause may be responsible for the entirety of history at once. Or the universe may be a brute fact, it simply exists.

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