The observable universe is constantly expanding as the passage of time allows light to reach us from more and more distant parts of the universe. So it’s less “we don’t know what’s outside” and more like (to a certain extent) “we have to wait and see.” And there’s nothing we’ve seen to indicate that these external regions that are being revealed are anything but more of the same kinds of things in our inner region of the observable universe.

The important thing in the balloon analogy isn’t what the balloon is expanding into, it’s just that every point on the balloon is drifting away from every other point.

One thing to consider, though, is that space may not even be a real physical thing. Maybe location is just a property of things, like mass or electrical charge. It could just be an inherent value that adjusts and influences other things according to the laws of physics. Maybe it’s less that “space is expanding” and just that “the location property of everything is constantly diverging.” There’s no need to worry about what anything is expanding into because our conception of space may just be a mental construct.

I would think you’d have to instantaneously accelerate because incremental acceleration doesn’t work the way we typically think it does at high speeds.

If you’re moving at 99.999% the speed of light relative to Earth, anything close to your speed is going to be moving quite slowly relative to you. When you accelerate some more, the change in speed relative to those close things is much larger than the change in speed you experience relative to Earth (it gets smaller and smaller as you approach light speed). But as far as I understand, there’s no such thing as moving at light speed relative to Earth but not relative to other sub-light speed things. You’d have to instantaneously move at light speed relative to everything (every sub-light speed thing).

It’s still an unsettled question if we even do

Ooh, great one. Here are my picks for each panel:

1. “The Weave”
2. Sharpiegate
3. Vaccine/Covid Denialism
4. Ukraine Blackmail
5. Election Denialism
6. January 6th

Well, famously, they’re waves and particles. The double slit which way experiment will only set off the detector in one slit, as if it was a particle. Yet, without a detector it will interfere with itself as if it were a wave that passed through both slits.

You’re right. But the thing that’s interesting about the double slit experiment though is that it works on only a single photon. It’s as if all the traffic was created by a single car. So classically you might not think that the single car should care if the freight truck is heading down a different lane than the car but in QM it does, because the car is in a superposition of occupying several lanes.

I’m probably driving the analogy straight into the ground of course

What are you trying to see exactly? There’s this video done with polarizers: https://youtu.be/unCXuRXpEhs Of course, it’s not an instant on/off but having an instant on/off doesn’t really change anything.

Wikipedia has a whole list of citations on this very sentence lol.

There is near unanimous consensus among economists that tariffs are self-defeating and have a negative effect on economic growth and economic welfare

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tariff

Tariffs are a net negative. Always. The things produced will not be competitive on the global market, if they were, we’d already be making them. The higher prices always destroy more jobs than they create. Retaliatory tariffs destroy even more jobs. The higher prices drive down demand and make the working class consumer poorer. Always.

There’s no economic upside to tariffs, over any time horizon. They create a small number of jobs in a specific sector at a very expensive cost. Some politicians might decide that the enormous economic cost is worth it for other reasons, but a net positive they are not.

Because the uncertainty in the measurement is related to the wavelength of a photon used to make the measurement and smaller wavelengths (higher frequencies) lower that uncertainty but are more energetic.

PBS Spacetime has an excellent video on this very subject.

To accurately measure the size or location of something requires energy. The more precise the measurement, the more energy is required. The amount of energy required get the precision below the Planck length would literally create a black hole.

Not American enough. I need it in football fields.

My place of work has a pretty high rate of pronoun signaling and I’ve found it immensely useful. Not just for the usual androgynous names line Pat or Elliott, but also I work with people all around the world, how would you refer to Jung Bae? Judging by the number of foreign people who have never seen my name, I imagine it goes both ways. And, yes, I also work with a number of nonbinary and trans people so of course it helps there too.

Some people refer to everybody, even those they know, as they/them and I honestly kinda like it. Been considering taking that habit on myself.

I wouldn’t base your decision on what Lemmy says. They’re pretty unreasonably salty about the game. Reviews from players are very positive and the game’s only $23 right now.

• Despite what they’re saying, there is actually a lot of legitimately interesting and sometimes fantastical biomes and this update has added even more.
• There are a lot of different parts of the game that you can pretty casually engage in. Various missions, settlements, settlement management, ship collecting, manufacturing, fleet management, trading, piracy, archeology, and more.
• It’s a relaxation game for me. Just hop on, pick a direction, and go. Do whatever piques your interest in the moment.

If “casual” and “relaxing” are dirty words for you, then it probably isn’t up your alley. It’s certainly not going to be intense and action packed (though it does have its moments). But it’s a good game if you, like me, sometimes get tired of the sweaty online shit, crunchy brain melting games, and the overall weight of life in the real.

My wife and I watch a lot of sitcoms before bed, often from the 00s. One had at least one anti-gay joke per episode. In one of the middle seasons, they had an episode where a character makes a gay friend and has to deal with their discomfort around gay people. Then the next episode, they’re back to gay bashing. Wild times.

Nah but here’s the real staggering part. It should be far easier for universes to form locally conscious beings than it is to form all the pieces necessary to naturally evolve conscious beings. These would mostly be very short-lived arrangements of energy with no hope of surviving but certain arrangements would even have false memories, making them believe that they have existed far longer than they actually have.

They may even have false memories of living on earth.

They may even have false memories of your exact life.

And they would be, by far, more common than any form of actual sustainable life. It is vastly more likely that you have experienced this post as a false memory created inside one of these short-lived consciousnesses than for any of this to be real.

There’s no good party for most people but that doesn’t stop many of them from demanding better from their parties. The story, though, is about how Christians are demanding their religious leaders change rather than demand better from their politicians.

I don’t mean to imply that Christianity is progressive. But how a person reacts when politics is at odds with their religious beliefs is illuminating. Do their political beliefs follow from sincerely held religious beliefs? Or do they contort their religion in service of their political beliefs? For much of the religious right, it’s clearly the latter.

It is definitely telling that when conservatism has come at odds with Christianity, so many Christians have chosen to abandon Christianity instead of abandoning conservatism.