Board Thread:Off Topic/@comment-26877467-20180804023530/@comment-26877467-20180809163249

Thoughts about the Alexis x Sweg ship?

Makes me slightly uncomfortable, but I'll put up with it as long as Ender and I still get a piece of Sweg. In my opinion, Sweg deserves someone better than Alexis, who claims to own him as property and is really obsessesed with sex.

I would be fine with joining the ship in a ASA triangle congruence theorem, but then that would involve me being in a ship that isn't gay for once. That's new territory, and that's spooky.

From a scale of 1 to 10 how much do you love Sweg >_>

That's an invalid question, since my love for Sweg can't be described by the real number line. It requires a minimum of a quaternion to become describable at the simplest level.

Show me some of your knowledge about time.

What is time?

Well, we know it's a dimension. You can exist at a place at a time.

What is movement?

That's when something is at one place in space at one time (x1, y1, z1, t1), but at another place in space at later time (x2, y2, z2, t2), and, generally, the transition between the two points is continuous.

Time is intertwined with the three spacial dimensions to make something called spacetime. Spacetime often gets distorted, most notably by being around large masses to create gravity and time dilation and when masses move quickly to create time dilation and contraction.

Can time travel be achieved?

Maybe. We might need a “secondary time dimension” in order for it to work. The second time dimension would have to behave differently than our “primary time dimension,” since if it behaved the same then the effect would be the same. Why would you need a second time dimension? Well, let’s imagine a 1 dimensional universe, with just 1 dimension of space and 1 of time. You’re a dot, and there’s another dot to your right. You want to get onto the other side of that dot, but you can’t go around it since there is no such thing as “around” because you’re 1 dimensional. The only way to get to the other side is to teleport. If there were suddenly two dimensions, you could easily get to the other side of the dot by going around it. Time travel would probably require something similar.

Let’s say you drop an egg. It hits the floor and makes a mess. Rather than cleaning up the mess, you decide to just time travel back and make you not drop the egg.

You’re about to drop an egg, but your future self appears and tells you “Hey, don’t drop that egg.” So you don’t drop the egg. Now you need to time travel back to warn yourself to not drop the egg, in order to not drop the egg.

Why was your future self there? Since your past self time traveled. Why did your past self time travel? Either because the egg made a mess or because they saw the future self and decided to become the future self.

But your past self didn’t have to time travel at the same time each time. They could have waited a minute and then time traveled, and still have arrived right before you would have dropped the egg. The universe will keep playing out.

You could wait as long as you want before you time travel back. You could wait ten years. You could wait fifty years. You could have your great-great-great-great-granddaughter synthesize a clone of your current state, and then time travel back.

What if you don’t time travel back at all? Rather, what if you put off time traveling back forever? If you wait until the end of the universe where time has no meaning anymore, then what future is your future self from?

So, now what happens to your future self from no future? Are they just deleted? Can there be an effect with no cause?

Well, let’s list the possible solutions.


 * 1) Your future self still has a cause, which is from an inaccessible timeline where you dropped the egg. No time travelling back is necessary.
 * 2) Your future self has no remaining cause, and once an infinite amount of time has passed, the universe will revert to the instant you time travelled to and delete your future self. In this example, this solution would result in a negative paradox, which could destroy the universe or just make the universe alternate between the two states of “egg cracks” and “future self prevents egg crack.”
 * 3) Your future self has no remaining cause, but that’s okay. Nothing special happens.

y u so verbose

It makes me look unnecessarily intelligent and makes me look like a jerk

what

Allow me to translate:

"Ask questions time: with Airtoum (cake is not finished)

Hello! Give questions about Airtoum, and Airtoum will answer your questions if you give him time. Standard Wiki rules apply. Questions about personal information are bad. Almost everything else is fair game, though. And remember, I'm Airtoum. Everything else is fair game."

What does Earth really look like?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lR7s1Y6Zig

Hey, Vsauce. Michael here.

This point of light in the sky is

Earth as seen from the surface of Mars.

And this is Earth as seen from Saturn.

Here's an image taken only 45,000 kilometres away,

the famous Blue Marble. But what does

Earth really look like?

Well, it depends on how you define "look".

The word look comes from the old Breton word "lagud",

mean eye, the human eye.

And that's part of the problem. Images like this are based on light

humans can see. But we don't see

everything. There's a fantastic episode of Radiolab that uses

sound to illustrate just how different other creature

visual spaces are from our our own. When we talk about the way something

physically looks

we are talking about the visual perception of emitted

or reflected electromagnetic radiation.

Specifically, visible light.

Light we perceive as red has a longer wavelength

than blue or violet. But what if I crank the wavelength

even shorter? Does it stop being light?

No, it just becomes light

you can't see - ultraviolet, X-rays,

gamma rays. Going the other way, you get infrared,

microwaves and finally, radio waves.

In principle, the spectrum of possible

electromagnetic wavelengths is infinite.

But even within the range of wavelengths we observe,

the breadth is breathtaking. If the entire

practical spectrum of wavelengths was laid out

linearly from New York to Los Angeles, the visual portion we see

would only be the size of

100 nanometers. Small enough

to slip through a surgical mask. Point is,

when it comes to what their is to see, our

eyes miss out on lot. For instance,

take a look a remote control. Many of these things communicate with light

of wavelengths we can't see but mobile phone cameras

can. Try this at home. Push a button on a remote control and you won't see much

but use a mobile phone camera to detect wavelengths you can't see

and have them rendered visible. There's a whole lot going on

we miss out on. Our night sky is full of

frequencies we can't see with our eyes alone

but Chromoscope.net allows you to extend

your vision. This is the Milky Way as we see it,

the visible light it gives off. But slide

to see how it would look if our eyes sensed other frequencies.

Of course, we are having to represent these other frequencies

with visible colours because even electromagnetic pretend time

is bounded by our puny limits.

As for Earth, if we only saw infrared frequencies it might look something

like this in our minds. Ultraviolet and extreme

ultraviolet vision would return unrecognizable spheres.

With X-ray vision auroras around the poles would shine brightly

and gamma ray vision would give Earth a bright edge

from high-energy electromagnetic radiation hitting the atmosphere

at a shallow angle.

So, which view is correct? Is there an

absolute true appearance of the Earth?

We haven't even started yet.

Look back at the Blue Marble. What's with the tyranny

of "north" meaning "up"? Perhaps,

it's because we often equate "up" with "better"

and many early map makers were from North of the equator.

But upside-down maps are equally true,

no matter how strange day may seem to us. Funny enough,

the famous Blue Marble itself is a product of North equals

up bias. It didn't originally look like this.

The crew of Apollo 17 originally took it

like this. NASA rotated it to

fit our traditional idea of up after the fact.

Here's a visual birth that comes from the US Naval Observatory's live

animation of our planet. You can see exactly what parts are

in its shadow at this very moment. Other shadows fall

on Earth as well, like the Moon's shadow.

Last week @BadAstronomer shared this image. The dark smudges on the left is

actually

the Moon's shadow during a Solar Eclipse

as seen from above Earth. There's another problem with

the Blue Marble - it's flat and the Earth

is three-dimensional. A globe is the best way to represent the Earth

but globes are difficult to carry around and even when displayed in two

dimensions,

well, you just can't see everything at once.

A flat map of the Earth is really convenient

but requires projecting a globe onto something

flat. And a sphere's surface cannot be represented on a plane

without distortion. The West Wing famously pointed out

the limitations of flat maps.

There's no such thing as a perfect flat map of the entire

world. Some maps are useful for some things and other maps for other things

but it is really fun to pick on the Mercator projection,

mainly because it's so popular and is even used by Google Maps,

mainly because it's so easy to zoom in on.

It preserves shape decently well but suffers

when it comes to area. As I've shown before, Africa

is huge. Its area is so large the entire contiguous United States could

fit inside of it, along with all of China,

India, Japan and much of Europe.

But on the Mercator projection scale near the poles

is pretty wonky, distorted, which means

Greenland appears to be as large as Africa,

even though in reality it is only 1/14th

the size. There's more.

Check out Alaska and Brazil on a Mercator projection. They appear almost

the same size but in reality Brazil

is nearly five times bigger than Alaska.

Areas near the equator are minimized, whereas

areas closer to the poles are exaggerated.

To have fun with this problem, play the Google Maps

Mercator puzzle. The red pieces are countries projected outside of their

usual

locations. Now, what the heck is this

weird shape? Well, let's pull it away from the North Pole, where scale is distorted

a lot

and now it's Australia.

You can see how the math behind map projections distort Earth

by interacting with them on Jason Davies'

brilliant site. Notice how small Greenland appears on the Mercator

projection when pulled down to the

equator and how exaggerated it becomes when moved to the edge.

To be fair, the Mercator projection is great for navigation.

If you want something that is more fair when it comes to area,

try the Gall–Peters. Here,

landmasses are the right relative size

but shape is sacrificed. Everything looks a bit

too narrow.

Enter the Mollweide. This projection shows

equal areas and is a bit more pleasant shape-wise.

If you interrupt the Mollweide around the oceans, relative area is preserved

and the shape of land masses becomes even more

accurate. When it comes to the shortest route between two places on the surface

of the Earth, Gnomonic projections are really cool.

Every straight line journey taken on Earth's surface is actually part of a great

circle. On Mercator projections actual straight line paths

look curved. But every straight line

on a Gnomonic projection is also a straight line

in real life - the shortest route. If you want

a compromise between shape and area, you might try the pleasant

Winkel tripel, which the National Geographic Society has used for maps it

produces

since 1998. Or a beautiful butterfly map

that could be a ball until it's flattened, say, under a pane

of glass. The Dymaxion map can unfold

to show how nearly connected Earth's landmasses

are. It's a great way to visualize human migration

overtime. It's quite impressive how far and wide

humans have traveled on earth, but it remains a bit of a disappointment

to realize just how narrow our slice

of visual perception really is.

But don't feel bad. This brings us to the story of

Julian Bayliss.

Yes, hello, is this doctor Julian Bayliss?

[ON THE PHONE:] Yes, speaking.

Bayliss told me about how one day, while using Google Earth, he

spotted some dark green vegetation.

It looked like a rain forest. An expedition was scheduled

and it turned out to be just that - a rain forest

we had previously never seen. I asked him more.

So, what have you found there?

[ON THE PHONE:] That day we found about 12 new species

just from Mabu. So we found about 3 snakes, 2 chameleons and

about 4 butterflies, 2 new species of plants

and we've only really just been into the forest edge. So, I read, read a paper

the other day, a scientific paper. They estimate that there's maybe 8 million,

8.5 million species in this world but we've only actually discovered

1.5 million or between 1.5 and 2 million.

So, we've actually only discovered maybe one fist of everything that's living on this

planet.

Wow, our eyes only see

a tiny fraction of what there is to see.

But within that tiny fraction there are still

an enormous number of things left to find. So keep searching, keep looking.

[ON THE PHONE:] And as always,

thanks for watching.