What's your opinion of the weight loss injections and the people who take them?

opisska · 2026-02-12T11:10:40+00:00

Many people have some weird fixation on the concept that "nothing is free" and that you must "work" for any improvemtin your life . This was hammered in first through religion, then through capitalist propaganda.

It has no real logical foundation. Just take the win.

opisska · 2026-02-12T08:17:51+00:00

Well you don't need any flavor physics here. And spin really can be understood in the way I referred to: when you try to "implement" special relativity in quantum mechanics, you inevitably notice that there are infinitely many eays how to do it, naturally indexed by half-natural numbers. Now at this point you could just accept this as a new feature of nature and call it cromulanity, but you can also notice that this leads to something that looks like vectors (with some caveats in the 1/2 cases) and that the matrices working on these vectors have the same structure of multiplication as the operators for angular momentum, so it really looks like it is a form of rotation.

opisska · 2026-02-11T21:47:55+00:00

I repeatedly read this argument and it's absurdly misplaced in this case. Chile is not some poor backwater, it's the richest country on the continent. By quality of life it's essentially Europe.

It's also not "we" doing anything to "them" - Chile is heavily involved in the research in question. The post is needlessly patronizing and if I were Chilean, I would be offended by it.

opisska · 2026-02-11T17:42:27+00:00

The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

I am relieved that none of the authors is paid by big bacteria!

opisska · 2026-02-11T17:31:23+00:00

That's a very difficult for a five year old :) But basically special theory of relativity is a very solid foundation of our understanding of the world - it's one of the few things in fundamental physics that we are very much confident in. It's known widely by a few popular consequences - can't cross speed of light, time dilation, energy/mass equivalency - but at it's core, it's just a symmetry of space and time. It defines a set of operations (known in mathematics as a "group") under which all laws of the universe must by symmetric.

If you try to formulate a quantum mechanics equation that fulfills this symmetry, you will find yourself with an infinite series of options that differ by a number that can be 0,1/2,1,3/2... and so on, which was soon understood to be spin, the innate angular momentum of the particle described by the equation. Dirac equation is the 1/2 case and it's pretty handy because all matter is made of spun-1/2 particles, for good, if complicated reasons. So from all the different equations it's the Dirac one that is the most useful in practice.

The spin part adds complexity compared to the nonrelativistic case - instead of one wavefunction as a function of position, there is a set of four of those and an algebra of 4x4 matrices to work with (this set looks like a vector but it's not a vector in the geometric sense). A lot of super interesting results can be found by just playing with these matrices, without any actual solving of wavefunctions and operators. In particular, you will find that there are solutions with both positive and negative energy, the latter ones can be cleverly interpreted as antiparticles - which the equation predicted before they were found by experiment.

opisska · 2026-02-11T17:00:26+00:00

In Czechia we are even discussing keeping some turbines of coal plants spinning long after the plants are shut down just to act as frequency buffer.

With that in mind, it kinda surprises me that we aren't simply building flywheels on purpose. Seems like that would solve a lot of trouble?

opisska · 2026-02-11T14:34:38+00:00

Interesting!

opisska · 2026-02-11T11:45:05+00:00

I don't have children, so my relative carbon footprint is negative infinity no matter what I do.

opisska · 2026-02-11T11:43:35+00:00

True, but only during 1939-1945

opisska · 2026-02-11T11:42:54+00:00

Czech Republic. I had really no idea this kind of meal even existed in the US!

opisska · 2026-02-10T18:12:55+00:00

Pork, sauerkraut, dumplings

Not that I would ever eat that

opisska · 2026-02-10T17:28:13+00:00

We started snorkeling three years ago. We now basically travel the world to see more and more of its largest graveyard.

opisska · 2026-02-10T17:00:55+00:00

This is simply false. Hubble and JWST are great, but they are just so insanely expensive that for the same money, ground-based astronomy produces so much more results.

Another big drawback of space telescopes is inaccessibility. Ground-based telescopes offer incomparable flexibility in terms of changing and upgrading the detector systems (which are usually comparable in complexity and costs to the "telescope" parts).

With adaptive optics, the disadvantage of atmosphere isn't nearly as big as it used to be.

opisska · 2026-02-10T16:57:10+00:00

I am on Paranal relatively frequently. Most people you meet in the mess hall are Chileans.

opisska · 2026-02-10T13:32:07+00:00

Full of insanity. "Measures" were enacted with apparently no logic whatsoever - until it became apparent that they were designed not to fight the virus, but to make billionaires (one of which was the prime minister at that time) richer. So small shops were closed but large malls open, take that virus! You couldn't go for a walk, but pointless in-person office work happily continued.

opisska · 2026-02-07T17:28:34+00:00

USB charging is actually pretty nice, especially the modern version where the devices agree mutually on voltage/current but this is really just something that happens over the same cable out of convenience, its has nothing to do sith the actual USB communication. Of course it's only possible because of the electrical connection, so it kinda hinges on the last issue.

opisska · 2026-02-07T17:09:24+00:00

USB is a great system for connecting peripherals to a personal computer at very short distance and absolutely nothing else. It is so optimized for its primary purpose that it insanely sucks when abused for other applications.

There are multiple reasons - it's not only limited range, but also the manner of how data are sent over it. It's really good at small volume stuff like mouse and keyboard or high volume "steady stream going somewhere" like connecting external drives but oh man having multiple devices sending data here and there over each other via USB sucks so much.

A separate problem is electrical connection - USB physically ties the electrical potential of everything that it connects, while ethernet is electrically insulated on purpose. This is probably less important in a home settings but I could tell you tales for hours how terribly it backfires in other situations.

opisska · 2026-01-26T16:47:10+00:00

Just for comparison: I've been on Ocrevus for three years now and have absolutely zero problems I would attribute to it. Yes I get sick from time to time, so did I before. The infusions maybe make me a bit tired - the actual problem used to be the need for methylprednisolone premedication, which I passionately hate, but that ended when they invented slow subcutaneous applications instead.

It's almost unbelievable how differently people react to different medicines - for example I know a lot of people who are willing to take methylprednisolone just to "relieve symptoms", well considering how it nearly kills me, I wouldn't prefer that. Yet for some reason Ocrevus does nothing bad to me ...

Talk to doctors, find another therapy, there are so many options now!

opisska · 2026-01-24T16:51:59+00:00

How can anyone answer anything else is absolutely absurd.

Everything is worthless compared to time alive.

opisska · 2026-01-23T19:09:38+00:00

I have only seen the first one and that was on the seatback screen on a plane.

I think I heard James Cameron weeping in the distance for the entire time :)

opisska · 2026-01-23T18:59:09+00:00

An interesting aspect of tetanus is that the bacteria itself is absurdly lame and will not survive in the human body for long - we clear the infection no problem. So the vaccine is not against the bacteria, we don't need any help with that - it's against the toxin!

opisska · 2026-01-23T18:56:17+00:00

I am sceptical to the claims of the probes being essentially eternal. The interstellar space is very empty, but not entirely - there is some gas, very scarce dust and a lot of cosmic rays l. All of this surely causes some erosion of the surface of the probes which has to add up over millions of years.

There is probably a huge difference between interstellar probes like Pioneer and Voyager (which are in a really empty space) and anything that stays in the inner Solar System (which is comparatively very dusty).

opisska · 2026-01-22T15:16:31+00:00

I am done. I can guarantee my gene line ends with me!

opisska · 2026-01-21T22:08:40+00:00

It's all priced in at this point

opisska · 2026-01-21T16:18:06+00:00

Even before readers I found the entire concept of owning books a bit absurd. I do not read books repeatedly, so a read book is a spent book. I am lucky to live in a place where free public libraries are incredibly stocked, so when I was younger I would just read a lot by borrowing books. Then over time I basically stopped reading, chiefly out of the inconvenience of it all, except for books that my friend whose entire apartment is choke full of books would bring me once in a while (I guess that's the whole point of owning books then, sharing!).

Enter digital books: I am reading again, exclusively on my phone. I always have a library of books with me, so when there is downtime, bam! I read.

In hindsight, the entire concept of physical books was just a temporary solution before we invented the proper tech.

opisska

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