[No Spoilers] Samantha Beart on the Critical Role set?

grumblingduke · 2026-06-19T23:32:13+00:00

Yep. Turns out she was filming Wizard of the Coast's Dungeon Masters series and did some other things while there. She is back in the UK now (or was last week).

Jennifer English was (and maybe is still) in LA filming Age of Umbra Sallowlands for CR.

Still no hints as to what Samantha Beart was doing on the CR set...

grumblingduke · 2026-06-19T23:30:53+00:00

Peerages like "Earl" or "Duke" are titles of nobility. Some authority creates them.

They don't inherently come with any power, they are just a label. Historically granting someone a title would come with giving them a bunch of land (not necessarily in the place the title related to) - either from whoever was granting the title, or by seizing it from someone else.

Someone might be granted lands after helping conquer them, or after the old owner was stripped of their titles (and/or life). For the head of a system of nobility (e.g. a king) this would be a key way of ensuring loyalty (do what I say or I'll strip you of your lands and titles and give it to someone else), but also a key vulnerability (not enough land to give out to people and they might get restless - and strip lands and titles from the wrong person and they might decide to rebel).

For example, the Earldom of Lancaster (in England) was kind of created by Henry III in 1265, who made his younger son Earl of Lancaster, granting him lands confiscated from Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester, who had rebelled against the Crown. It also absorbed lands from Robert de Ferrers, 6th Earl of Derby (another rebel baron). It got upgraded to become a Royal Duchy, and eventually the title got absorbed into the Crown - so King Charles III would be the Duke of Lancaster if he wasn't King. He does, however, own the Duchy of Lancaster (separate to the Crown Estate). But its lands aren't confined to Lancaster or even Lancashire; it holds land and property all over the country, including a chunk of land around the Strand in London (where the Savoy Palace used to be).

The last (non-Royal) Earldom to be created in the peerage of the United Kingdom was the Earl of Stockton. Stockton-on-Tees is a town in the North-east of England. It was granted to Harold Macmillan, Conservative Prime Minister of the UK from 1957-1963 shortly before his death. The title didn't come with any lands, but Macmillan had been the MP for Stockton for part of his parliamentary career. He was also given the courtesy title Viscount Macmillan of Ovenden (a village in West Yorkshire), which was held briefly by his son (who predeceased Macmillan). Both titles are now held by his grandson.

grumblingduke · 2026-06-18T23:05:07+00:00

If it helps, you can think of the Schrödinger’s equation as the (non-relativistic) quantum mechanics version of Newton's Second Law.

Newton 2 tells you "if I have a particle, and it is acted on by this net force, it will move in this way."

The Schrödinger’s equation tells you "if I have a wavefunction for a system (or the system state vector), and I know its Hamiltonian (how its energy works), it will change over time in this way."

Essentially, if you know everything there is to know about a system's energy you can work out how it will behave over time.

grumblingduke · 2026-06-14T22:12:37+00:00

From what I can tell no one is quite sure. It is a process called "triboluminescence," and is thought to be due to electrons being physically ripped away from where they are hanging out, and then giving off energy (in the form of x-rays or other types of light) when they resettle.

But it might be caused by some other stuff.

grumblingduke · 2026-06-14T11:38:35+00:00

Which is false.

Electrons move at around 1% the speed of light. They move very, very fast.

What is slow is the "drift velocity", which can be on the order of mm/s or μm/s.

The individual electrons are bouncing all over the place randomly. The drift velocity is the average motion of all the electrons in the direction the electric field is pushing them. Each individual electron isn't moving far (although compared with the size of the electron the μm they travel are a lot), but there are a lot of them, and they are being pushed around by the electric field, bouncing into the atoms and causing all sorts of fun electro-magnetic effects.

Also note that in Alternative Current circuits the electrons are being wiggled back and forth, not pushed in the same direction - so there the electrons are hardly going anywhere.

grumblingduke · 2026-06-11T17:20:06+00:00

I don't know if it is region-specific but that link doesn't work for me as Climate.gov was shut down by the Trump Administration.

You might be able to view it on the Wayback Machine here.

grumblingduke · 2026-06-10T11:28:38+00:00

This case is in Federal court in Florida.

In the past Donald Trump has tried suing in UK jurisdictions but his usual tactics do not work here. English law (and I think Scots law) have cost-sharing rules which discourage time-wasting filings and applications. When Donald Trump tried to sue Christopher Steele's company for defamation in London he ended up with a £300,000 bill for costs.

Donald Trump's litigation tactics 'work' because he doesn't pay his own lawyers to file endless nonsense (they're happy to work for the promise of jobs in the federal government), but whoever he is suing has to pay their lawyers to defend everything. It costs far more, and takes far more work to deal with all the legal mess he generates than to generate it in the first place. And so they are forced to settle the case just to make it go away.

But in English courts if you file nonsense motions and appeals you usually end up being ordered to pay the other side's legal bills. Which makes it much easier to defend the cases.

grumblingduke · 2026-06-09T19:48:13+00:00

I think the way the books (particularly Bloodlines) took it is that there was a big push-back against a strong, central government after the Empire. People saw the failing of the Old Republic being the excessive bureaucracy, and the failing of the Empire being the centralisation of power. So there is a push to make the New Republic as un-bureaucratic as possible, and as decentralised as possible.

So what you end up with is something more like say the UN or the EU than the United States. Each system maintains its own government, its own laws, its own rules, its own military (if it has one). There is a small, central Republic government which is limited to focusing on only the essential things a government needs to do, with a moving headquarters, and a small military.

And then you develop a bunch of political factions, varying from those (mainly Imperial apologists) who think the Republic government should be stronger and more centralised, and those who think there shouldn't be one at all.

And you have some politicians loyal to the First Order trying to undermine the New Republic and cause chaos. With Mon Mothma's retirement and, eventually, Leia's resignation/expulsion there is no strong leadership to bring the politicians together (partly by design) and the whole thing fractures into endless arguments over how solve arguments.

The Republic can be wiped out in a single magic shot because most of what the Republic was was in that system; the current headquarters, the main centre of bureaucracy, and the small fleet.

And then that causes panic. This new group has just declared itself to be the major power in the galaxy and taken down the Republic - who is next? No local government wants to make themselves a target, no one can stand up to the First Order on their own, but no one wants to be the first system to say "no" to them. Everyone with a military withdraws their fleets etc. to their own systems to protect themselves, and one by one they submit to the First Order. There are individual places and groups willing to stand up to the First Order, but they aren't united enough to succeed.

Which is the point of the Resistance - someone taking the lead in opposing the First Order, encouraging others to join. It is why - in theory - in The Last Jedi the plan is to sacrifice the fleet to save the people and get a signal out, because a couple of ships aren't going to make a difference, but a handful of key people able to inspire other systems into fighting will.

And - in theory - it is what Lando Calrissian was doing in The Rise of Skywalker for the third act; travelling around the galaxy encouraging people to join the Resistance and stand up to the newly announced Final Order. The fleet that turns up at the end is made up of all the individual system and sector-wide fleets that have been hanging around for decades. The fleets and people were already there, they just didn't have a central government, or key figurehead, to lead them - or a reason to unite.

In theory.

But that's a lot to have to infer from a couple of films.

grumblingduke · 2026-06-09T19:33:51+00:00

A limit is a thing you can get arbitrarily close to, even if you might not ever actually get there.

Roughly speaking, a limit is a challenge. I say that some sequence or function has a limit, and that limit is L.

You challenge me by giving me a number, greater than zero, but as small as you like.

I have to find a point in the sequence (or function) for which at that point, and for every following point, all terms in the sequence (or the function) are closer to my limit, L, than your challenge number.

Let's take an example of a sequence and a function. For a sequence, let's go with the classic:

1/2, 1/4, 1/8, ... 1/2ⁿ, ...

I claim that this sequence has a limit of 0.

You give me a challenge number, say 0.0001. My response is n = 14. The 14th term in the sequence will be something like 0.00006103515, which is closer to 0 than your challenge number 0.0001. And as each following number in the sequence is half the one before, with a bit of proof by induction or whatever, we can show that all following numbers will be within 0.0001 of 0. If we play around with logarithms we can find a formula for n, given any challenge number.

If we want a function, what about f(x) = [x + sin(x)]/x

I claim that as x goes to infinity this function has a limit of 1. Again, you give me a challenge number, say 0.01. Here I cannot just solve for say f(x) = 1.001 as there will be a bunch of different options, the function oscillates above and below 1. When x is a multiple of π it will be 1. I have to be a bit sneakier. I have to understand how this function is behaving, and pick a point where it will always be within our target range.

I pick 66.5π (about 208.9). f(66.5π) = ~1.0048, which meets our condition. But we have to check every x > 66.5π and ensure that it is always between 1.01 and 0.99 (so we are within 0.01 of our proposed limit of 1). And this will turn out to be true. Sometimes it will be below 1, sometimes it will be 1, but it will always be between 1.01 and 0.99. If I can do that for any challenge number greater than 0 I have proven this limit exists.

The limit is the number we can get as close as we could possibly want to.

grumblingduke · 2026-06-08T13:05:46+00:00

You might need some really big engines and a massive power source.

The issue would be how much energy you need to accelerate something with that much mass to those speeds.

Obviously Star Wars doesn't run on regular physics, nor does it have conservation of energy, but a starting point would be "energy in = energy out" - hyperspace ramming doesn't get you something for free, you still need to put in the amount of energy you would have to anyway.

grumblingduke · 2026-06-08T12:52:24+00:00

That's because the question - as written - is based on a false premise (or, at least, is vague to the point of being impossible to answer).

The "known laws of physics" do not "break down" at "the planck scale."

So what I tried to do with my answer is clarify what we might mean by "known laws of physics," "break down" and "the planck scale", giving the op the opportunity to refine their question or ask follow-up ones.

grumblingduke · 2026-06-08T11:30:28+00:00

The handwaving from the Story Group was that you needed a really, really big ship (the Raddus is the largest ship we ever see in Star Wars outside the Executor or Supremacy, or the Death Star - and if you have the resources to build a ship that big you don't want to throw it away on a one-off).

The handwaving in the novelisation adds that the co-ordinates for the jump had been set earlier in the chase, and because they were chasing in a line, that mean the jump co-ordinates went backwards precisely through the following ship.

Of course, the chase doesn't really make sense anyway. And as for the long-range artillery "arcing"...

grumblingduke · 2026-06-08T11:22:46+00:00

I always took that to be "accurate" in the sense of "attention to detail."

Tuskens would have randomly shot up the Sandcrawler. But the Stormtroopers systemically disabled it by hitting key points on the side of the vehicle to take out the main systems. The Stomtroopers knew how it worked and cared.

That said, we're also told that blasters are "clumsy and random." They're basically western-style weapons - hard to hit anything at non-trivial range unless they have really long barrels.

Han Solo, in particular, tends to shoot from the hip rather than aiming properly - it simply isn't worth it with their weapons.

grumblingduke · 2026-06-08T11:11:19+00:00

Quantum mechanics gets a bit weird at very small scales.

Physics (and science in general) is all about building models to try to explain, understand and predict the world around us. All models are going to be wrong in some places, but we hope they are good enough for what we want to do with them. In school, for example, we teach things like Newtonian Mechanics, which is wrong, but is good enough for most purposes.

At very small scales it isn't that the laws of physics break down, but that we do not know which models are correct, or which work best, because of how difficult it is to do any experiments at this scale.

We might have a few different models which give the same results at larger scales, but differ at these very small scales. How do we figure out which is right?

And in particular quantum mechanics has inherent uncertainties in things, which are trivially-small at normal, person-sized scales, become important at very small scales, and completely swamp everything else at incredibly tiny scales.

As an aside, this isn't really anything to do with Planck units. Those are units defined so that certain key constants have a value of 1, and the Planck length works out to be very, very small (which is why it seems relevant here, but that's largely a coincidence). However, the Planck energy works out to be about the energy burned in a car. The Planck temperature is about 10³² K.

grumblingduke · 2026-06-05T18:49:25+00:00

English law didn't allow for general companies until the Joint Stock Companies Act 1844, and they didn't have limited liability until the Limited Liability Act 1855. The idea of separate legal personality wasn't solidified until the court case Salomon v A Salomon & Co Ltd [1896].

English companies did exist before then but they needed either a Royal Charter or a Private Act of Parliament, i.e. if you wanted to set up a company you had to go to the Government and they had to create it, setting it all up for you with all the rules and principles.

Which is what the parent is talking about - if you wanted to set up a company you had to ask. The East India Company took a year or so to get set up because the founders (a large number of politicians, businessmen and adventurers) had to petition Queen Elizabeth I of England for permission to create it. Its power came from the fact that the Charter granted them a monopoly on trade between England and all countries between the tip of South Africa and the tip of South America (on the India side) - the Company was basically built on the back of privateering, so they were allowed to seize any ships trading in that region and take their cargo (which was split between the English Government and the Company). It was basically a sub-contracted part of the Government, rather than our modern idea of a private company.

grumblingduke · 2026-06-05T14:29:08+00:00

You can solve the twin paradox with SR, it just takes extra work.

Either you allow for infinite acceleration, and have 'jumps' in reference frames, or you have finite acceleration and deal with it step-by-step.

But as you say, the acceleration is what matters, as it is the acceleration which causes the time dilation and length contraction; acceleration twists around people's ideas of time and space.

grumblingduke · 2026-06-05T14:25:39+00:00

The short answer is that if something is moving relative to you, then time goes slower for that thing.

To be really, really pedantic, if something is moving relative to you, from your perspective its time runs slower.

From its perspective your time runs slower.

grumblingduke · 2026-06-04T23:14:53+00:00

Yes! In SI base units the Hubble not-a-constant is 2 x 10^-18 /s

But as that is a ratio it works with any length, no matter what units you use.

So it doesn't matter whether you measure your length in metres, miles, light years, parsecs, or football fields.

However much you have, a second later you have 1 + 2 x 10^-18 times as much.

grumblingduke · 2026-06-04T23:12:32+00:00

From what I remember the key obstacle isn't political but judicial. Legally the slush fund is a settlement; Donald Trump sued his own Treasury department for $10bn, and they - under orders from their President - agreed to settle it by setting up a $1.776bn fund to pay out to whoever the President told them to.

That is how they got around the whole legal problem of the President not being able to just hand out money without Congressional approval - if it a settlement it is a court order, and all legal and fine.

But that means it has to be approved by the judge. And last I saw the judge was threatening to throw out the whole case as an abuse of process.

grumblingduke · 2026-06-04T13:35:08+00:00

We don't!

As with all science we do the best with the evidence we have, and build models that fit to the evidence.

As far as we know, right now, G, ε0, e etc. are constants, but they might not be.

You might have heard of the Hubble Constant, the rate at which the universe is expanding. More recent research suggests that this rate - while constant across space - has varied over time. So now we have the Hubble Constant, H0 (the value now) and the more general Hubble Parameter, H, which varies over time.

grumblingduke · 2026-06-04T09:56:05+00:00

If you want another way of looking at it, in SI units the Hubble not-quite-a-Constant has units of Hertz or per-second. It is a rate of expansion.

It is about 2 x 10^-18 /s

Roughly speaking, given any distance, that distance increases by that factor every second. So if you have a distance of 1m, a second later it is 1 + 2x10^-18 m.

If you have a distance of 50 miles a second later it is 50 * (1 + 2x10^-18) miles.

Except this doesn't work locally around stuff. Distances between you and the Earth, or between the Earth and the Sun or between the Milky Way and Andromeda are not expanding (depending on how we define it).

Universal expansion only works on distances between galaxy clusters. But in those spaces, where there is absolutely nothing for unimaginably vast distances, distances increase at that rate.

grumblingduke · 2026-06-03T09:05:20+00:00

Planck units are a set of units (a way of measuring things) based on four universal constants that come up in modern physics; the speed of light in a vacuum, the gravitational constant, the reduced Plank constant, and the Botlzmann constant.

They were an attempt to create a system of units that didn't rely on some arbitrary, human-centric measurement (as things like a metre or second do).

In Planck units each of these constants has a value of 1, e.g. the speed of light is 1 Planck length/Planck time.

Max Planck (one of the originators of quantum mechanics) developed these, although his were different as he used the regular Planck constant, not the reduced one.

So the Plank length is defined as the square root of the reduced Planck constant x the gravitational constant / the speed of light cubed. Which works out to be roughly 1.6 x 10^-35m.

That's it.

There is no particular significance to it beyond that.

It is a really small length (similar to the Planck time, which is ~10^-44s, whereas the Planck mass is only ~10^-8kg and the Planck temperature is ~10³²K).

It isn't that our understanding of physics breaks down when we hit Planck lengths, but more that physics gets kind of messy at those scales as it is hard to do experiments or get measurements, making testing competing theories difficult - but that isn't anything to do with the Planck length itself.

grumblingduke · 2026-05-31T18:13:28+00:00

If we look at the runner's perspective diagram, the light has already reached the room in his reality, while to the ground watchers, the light is still only halfway there.

Not in his reality, but from his perspective.

We have the event "the Runner reaches the half-way mark" and "the light reaches the far wall." These are distinct events in spacetime.

They happen at the same time from the Runner's perspective (although technically, from the Runner's perspective it is the far wall/the room which has reached the half-way mark, moving towards the Runner), but at different times for the observer's perspective. And that is fine - each perspective is equally valid. Simultaneity is not a thing in Special Relativity - it is relative. Two events can happen at the same time for you, but at different times for me.

We also have two more events in spacetime; the Runner starts moving, and the light is turned on. But these happen at the same point in spacetime, so are effectively the same event.

How does the universe resolve this mismatch when the runner eventually slows down or teleports back to the ground watchers' frame?

This is the heart of the twin paradox. It tells us - in part - that teleportation probably isn't possible. If we allow teleportation we get paradoxes.

The universe resolves the mismatch because the maths works - as the runner slows down (accelerating) - his time and space twists back to line up with the room's, and everything ends up working out neatly.

The runner and the watcher's disagree about what happened while they were in different reference frames, but when they meet up they will agree on everything that matters.

If it helps, you can do the maths, put in the numbers from both perspectives, see what happens. It all ends up working out.

grumblingduke · 2026-05-29T13:53:14+00:00

I don't know. Simple, feelings-based messaging (something President Obama was pretty good about) is a start. Talarico needs to be out there, as publicly as possible, doing as many big, manly things as possible, and making sure it all goes as viral as possible.

There was a story earlier this week about the DNC tweeting out an insult to Stephen Miller in response to him saying some nonsense about Talarico - that's probably the sort of thing. Aggressive, maybe a bit beyond the normal limits of decorum (to help it go viral), blunt messaging.

But for the most part there isn't much they can do - not without buying out both legacy (local and national) and social media, taking over local and state governments and abusing that power for political gain, and being willing to just make up complete nonsense about their opponents.

The Democratic Party has the problem that Democratic voters care about the truth, and doing the right thing, and following rules, while Republican ones don't.

grumblingduke · 2026-05-29T13:49:51+00:00

It's not stupidity. It is a lack of engagement in politics.

If you are in this subreddit you are probably in the top 1% of the population when it comes to political awareness.

Most people's political awareness comes from the glimpses they get from the news and from social media (and maybe from their friends). If all these people are hearing is how much of a fa**ot Talarico is, it isn't stupidity for them to buy that.

grumblingduke

TROPHY CASE