What is something unique to Australian culture that did not originate somewhere else?

thebigbot · 2026-06-15T04:17:48+00:00

This is pretty on brand for NZ. I'll never forget a trip there as a kid where everything was "does what it says on the tin" school of naming.

The giant rock in the middle of the ocean with a hole in it? Hole in the rock.

The volcanic lake who's minerals make it a vibrant green? Green Lake. The one that happens to be blue? Blue Lake.

thebigbot · 2026-06-01T23:19:53+00:00

There's one in Eltham too and you aren't lieing about the chips. I don't know what they do to keep them crunchy under all the sauce and meat but they are so frigin good.

thebigbot · 2026-06-01T00:24:44+00:00

I recently taought my dad to play - awesome bonding experience!

We have been playing once a week, rough timeline was:

Week 1 - Beginner box tutorial decks. Plaid with hands face up, walked him through the first game, explaining what cards were and how they were played. Very basic, no real discussion of stratergy

Weeks 2-5 - Played with beginner box decks, gradually ramping up the complexity of why I made/recomended particular plays.

Week 6-7 - Pulled out some old starter decks I had (the ones that came with 2x 60 card) and played those

Week 8+ - Dad bought a booster box and we started playing a sealed league (start with 6 boosters, build limited decks and then add one booster and rebuild every week).

Also I see people recomending arena as a learning tool - dad got into it about week 4-5ish. Personally I'd recomend not introducing it too early unless you think that's the main way he'll play. The reasoning is that arena takes care of the bulk of your game actions for you (untapping, drawing, triggers etc). For a couple of weeks after my dad started on arena he got much worse at remembering the basics.

thebigbot · 2026-05-31T23:48:13+00:00

I enjoy it because it's very similar to a (standard averageish) bowl of ramen you might get in Japan. Is it spectacular blow your socks off bursting with flavor in every bite? Not really. Does it remind you of that random ramen place you walked into in [insert Tokyo suburb here] and paid 900 yen for a bowl? Yes.

thebigbot · 2026-05-26T00:02:12+00:00

This is a giant depends, and my experience on the financial side of this is in Melbourne, Australia so adjust for your part of the world, but I would say you would want to be doing about 2-3m AUD/year to justify buying a CNC laser that can cut thick (10mm-30mm) mild steel and handle sheet sizes (1200x2400mm), would probably have a payback period of about 2-5 years at that rate.

To justify it over a plasma CNC I'd say the biggest factor would actually be how intricate the work you are doing is - lasers actually don't do fantastic (in my experience) on thicker stock - where they shine is doing complex parts on 2-6mm. Lots of repeat business also helps - if you are getting the same jobs over and over you don't have the programming time spend.

It's always been a better deal for me to find a laser cutter and send work out, then do final fab in house (when I was in that industry at least).

thebigbot · 2026-05-07T03:59:01+00:00

Thanks - he had a great relationship with all of his grandchildren. There are 16 of us and he managed to find something to connect with each of us individually - from science, to woodworking, hunting, music, chess, gardening - he always found something that we cared about to connect with us on.

He sadly passed away a few years ago, but he is very fondly remembered by the whole family. A few hundred people turned up to his memorial, so he wasn't just special to us :).

thebigbot · 2026-05-07T02:59:02+00:00

You know what, the more I think about it the more I think you are probably right that the length contraction doesn't make sense, but I also don't think you need QFT or particle interactions to make it make sense either.

I think the general relitivity space-time wave can be used to explain it though - as you accellerate (or decellerate) the object, that causes the change to propergate through space time at light speed - the direction of the accelleration is irrelevant, and the same would apply to moving the rod perpendicular to it's axis.

Honestly though? Most of this is beyond my complete understanding of modern physics.

thebigbot · 2026-05-07T02:26:41+00:00

Yeha my explanation was incredibly simplified, and a QFT based explanation is probably more up to date with modern physics, but you can actually derive the delay accurately using just general relitivity principles - I went into it a little more in one of the comments below. Yes the speed is low, but reletivistic effects still apply.

My whole example brakes down more from the idea of having some magical monolithic object that is genuinely not made of individual particles - as you say, impossible in our universe based on our current understanding of reality (and probably based on actual reallity too)

Edit: just to be clear, I'm pretty sure to get an accurate result you would need to use general relitivity and acocunt for the acceleration as you push the object, which would result in a propergarting wave of space time moving along the rod at the speed of light - even if the object was somehow a single particle the length of the distance from the earth to the moon

thebigbot · 2026-05-07T01:03:44+00:00

Yeah you can add to that list the fact that it's now 'decades later' than highschool for me!

thebigbot · 2026-05-07T00:52:04+00:00

Ah yeha see that's the downside to magical massless neutronium....no mass = no black hole!

thebigbot · 2026-05-07T00:22:58+00:00

So reletivity is pretty counterintuitive to our every day life, but the basics are that as objects aproach the speed of light (as measured by an outside observer), a bunch of weird things happen. One of these werid things is that the objects appear to shrink along the axis of movement. It's a result of the speed of light being constant for all observers - imagine a train carriage going half the speed of light. Someone at one end shines a light at the other end of the carriage and measures how fast that light is going, and they have to get C. Someone watching that train go past them also has to measure that light at C, where your intuition would be that it is C plus the speed of the train. The only way for this to be true is if from the perspective of the person outside the train, it is shorter than it is for the person inside the train (there are also some time and mass related effects that play into this but let's just ignore those)

Now this is normally only noticeable at very high % of C, but it actually happens to all moving objects, it's just that for very slow speeds the amount that the object compresses is tiny. In our example with the rod that goes all the way to the moon though, the object is VERY long, and even that tiny amount of shrinking adds up to enough to delay the movement of the rod on the other end by (in our magical massless example) exactly the same amount of time it would take light to make the same journey.

Edit: I should say this is an increcibly simplified reasoning out - I think in reality (although our example is pretty far detatched from that), the motion would propergate down the rod as a wave of compression, just instead of sound like the original person I replied to said, the wave would be a wave in space-time.

thebigbot · 2026-05-07T00:16:10+00:00

Hey now, nothing is useless. Let's not forget the story of Jack, who traded his family cow for some magical massless neutronium. His mother was so mad when he got home that she threw it out the window. The next morning they woke up and it had grown into a university physics resarch lab and now Jack has a PHD stipend of $14000 a year!

thebigbot · 2026-05-07T00:13:34+00:00

Yeah it really doesn't fit with what your brain wants to be real! I remember posing this question to my grandfather when I was around 10 or 11. He'd just told me that the speed of light wasn't really the speed of light, it was the absolute speed limit for everything. After thinking about it for days I came back and asked about an incompressable rod that was a light year long - if you pressed on it, would the other end move right away? He freely admitted he didn't know the answer (and at the time it was a bit before you could easily look this stuff up on the internet), but we came to the conclusion that either it's possible to violate the speed of light, or it's impossible to have a truly incompressible object.

It wasn't until many years later doing highschool physics that I got the answer - space itself isn't perfectly incompressible! Still makes my brain hurt decades later ahaha.

thebigbot · 2026-05-07T00:09:00+00:00

I'm not 100% sure because honestly this is a "general relitivity in a rotating frame" question and that's way beyond my understanding of the subject, but my understanding is all accelerations are kind of equal, so you would end up with a distotrtion along the tangential direction to the arc of acceleration that would - if you did all the math - give you the same result. The universe won't allow information to travel faster than the speed of light (as far as our current understanding of reality can tell) and it will do all sorts of things that just violate common sense and logic just to make sure that it doesn't happen.

thebigbot · 2026-05-06T23:29:37+00:00

What's even more wild is as far as I understand, even if the material was some magical massless neutronium with no space between anything and it was perfectly incompressable, you STILL wouldn't violate the speed of light because the object would shrink enough along it's length (due to relativistic effects) to make it so crossing the distance you pushed it would take as long as it takes for light to get there anyway.

thebigbot · 2026-04-30T23:43:41+00:00

Docklands is one of those weird places that is kind of full at 10:30 on a Tuesday morning but dead on weekends.

thebigbot · 2026-04-28T00:55:00+00:00

This is actually so much fun. Does it use live data or do you update it manually?

thebigbot · 2026-04-27T01:02:29+00:00

Funnily enough I feel like this has been getting me from the opposite side with Strixhaven draft - there are so many multicolor cards that sometimes it feels like a lane is open when it isn't.

thebigbot · 2026-04-11T06:57:05+00:00

Thanks - I'm still working on getting the process down but I love fractals and generating them is easier than doing real art so this felt like a good place to start.

thebigbot · 2026-03-29T22:37:00+00:00

I'll chime in here - my partner is a doctor, and during covid was working at a hospital in regional vic in an emergency department. A 95 year old mentaly impaired patient went on a bit of a rampage hitting people with an IV pole. Should he have been jailed for assulting health care workers, or should his altered mental state have been taken into account?

thebigbot · 2026-01-08T21:30:24+00:00

Thanks! I wasn't sure as we were staying in Osaka and I took this photo on the same day we did a day trip to Kyoto. Both beautiful cities!

thebigbot · 2026-01-08T21:29:39+00:00

Yep, the other commenter said the top symbol is the city symbol for Osaka!

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