• 0 Posts
  • 21 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: August 8th, 2023

help-circle
  • You are aware that what Israel is doing in Gaza is comparable to the nazi treatment of e.g. the Warsaw ghettos… right?

    Take a step back, and look at the Israeli soldiers mocking Palestinian dead, mistreating the wounded and captured, and shooting at clearly unarmed civilians for fun. All this while they brag about it on video. Look at that and tell me that it doesn’t give you a sick feeling to your stomach of the type you haven’t had since you saw photos of concentration camps.

    There are dozens of children that have literally STARVED TO DEATH in Gaza because of Israel’s actions. They’re dying the same deaths that Jews were put through in concentration camps. Don’t you see the horrifying irony in this?

    Israel is at a point where humanitarian workers from recognised international organisations have been targeted and killed, and they brush it off as a “mistake”.

    I cannot think about anything in the past 70 years that compares to what Israel is doing, and I hope beyond hope that some force will smite their government and armed forces such that the slaughter will stop. Because it is a slaughter. It’s not a war when Israel is counting its dead on its fingers, while there are enough missing Palestinians in the rubble to fill a football stadium. It’s just Israel wilfully bombing, burning and slaughtering, with nobody stopping them.

    All this, and you have the fucking audacity to talk about antisemitism? Take a look at the world, and ask yourself how calling for an end to this can have anything to do with the religious beliefs of the perpetrators.



  • I mean, in a perfect world, yes. The issue comes up when someone wears out or breaks the drill, and it needs to be replaced or repaired. Whoever spends time and resources ensuring that we have a drill needs to be compensated somehow, because that’s time they’re not spending on making sure they have food and shelter.

    Follow along that line of reasoning for a couple steps, and you end up with some kind of economic system, and likely some kind of enforcement system, so you’re suddenly back at an early stage proto-state/government.


  • You’ll survive for quite a while once you’re below 6000 m. In free fall that would take you around 90 s, assuming a fall from 11000 m, and that it takes 200 m (5 s) of fall to reach terminal velocity of 200 km/h.

    This is quite rough, but gives an appropriate order of magnitude. In those 90 s, you would be very likely to pass out and be guaranteed to get severe frost bite. We’re talking major amputations levels of frost bite, as you would be moving at 200 km/h, exposed, in temperatures in the -50 C to -10 C range. I’ve seen people get frost bites moving at 40 km/h in -15 C for a couple of minutes with just a sliver of skin exposed.

    So short answer: You might survive getting into the survivable range, but at the very least you will require intense and immediate medical attention upon landing. Seeing as there will be potentially a couple hundred people spread out over a large, possibly remote, area requiring this attention, it’s unlikely that many, if any, would survive the ordeal, even if most people survived the initial 5000 m of fall into the survivable altitude range.









  • Cool! I didn’t know about the pelvic tilt either, and it’s interesting to hear that both mtf and ftm transitioners (is that the right term?) have similar experiences regarding emotional accessibility. And thanks for opening for questions, I’m going to fire off a couple right away:

    Have you experienced any change in sleep patterns?

    Any significant change in appetite? If yes, how? Both regarding amounts, and what kind of food you “crave”?

    I’m assuming you don’t menstruate, but do you have any kind of hormonal “cycle” that would be similar? If so, how is it?

    PS. It’s veery late in my time zone, so I have to sleep now, but I appreciate any answers I get, and I’m looking forward to reading them :)


  • I’ve also always thought it may have to do with social conditioning, but possibly on a non-sexual level. My thought is that guys are (generally) conditioned to be more quiet about intimate things, or things that are good, and more loud in “aggressive” situations. This fits well with the factual observation that men are less likely to talk about personal problems with a friend, and more likely to push the boundaries (be vocal) in an interview. In my head, it’s an extension of the “strong, silent” stereotype, which is often regarded as positive. Women, on the other hand, are (typically) socially conditioned to be more vocal about feelings in general. I wouldn’t be surprised if these conditionings bleed over into how vocal people are during sex.

    With that said: I’m a guy, and my gf likes it when I make noises. Once I got used to it, I also learned to enjoy grunting. Grunting is highly recommended.



  • Haha, wow! Thanks for a really well thought out reply :) I think you nailed down where we were talking past each other, and I had no idea that the math world was divided on the sizes of uncountable infinities. Like you, I’m going to say that if the mathematicians are divided, I’m probably just going to accept that.

    As for the “number of universes”: I agree on the possible ways we could have multiple universes, without having one for every possibility. But I want to spin a bit back to what we mean by “multiple universes”. I like the idea that if we assume that the universe is infinite, but we know that our observable universe is finite, that implies (without the assumption that “multiple universes” were created in the Big Bang) that there can be en infinite number of “observable universes” that fit within our infinite universe, that are simply moving so fast away from each other that they are completely separated (space between them is expanding faster that the speed of light).

    That, in a way, leads back to one of your (our) questions: Does an infinite universe contain a countable or uncountable number of finite, observable, universes? Intuitively I would think the answer is “uncountable”, just like there is an uncountable number of finite, non-overlapping intervals on the real numbers (I think?). That leads us back to your (our) other question/condition: Can uncountable infinities have different sizes? And like you said: If the mathematicians are divided on that, I’m not even going to try to answer.

    So I don’t think we’ll get much further until the mathematicians conclude, but it’s fun thinking about the possibilities :)


  • Now we’re speaking the same language, I’ll try to reformulate what I was saying.

    Let’s say you have the set [0,2], and I have the set [0, 1]. To check which is bigger, we play a “game” where you pick a number from your set, and I respond with a number from mine. Whoever runs out first has the smaller set. What I do, is that every time you say a number, I just divide it by two, and respond with what I get. That way, I can find a number in [0, 1] for every number in [0, 2], so [0, 1] can’t be smaller. If we flip the situation, you can take whatever number I say, and multiply it by two to get a number in your set, so [0, 2] can’t be smaller. Since none is smaller, they must be the exact same size.

    Now I’m on thin ice, but I would love to know if there’s an error in the following argument: We play the same “game”, but now you have the set [0, 1] + {2}. For every number you say, I can still divide it by two to get a number in my set, so my set still isn’t smaller. For every number I say you can:

    • Multiply it by two if it is in {1, 0.5, 0.25, …}, i.e. a power of ½
    • reply with the same number otherwise

    That way, you can get every number in your set from a number in mine, and opposite, so the set [0, 1] + {2} is the same size as the set [0, 1]. In other words, an uncountable infinity + 1 is the same size as it was before (might have something to do with the uncountable part).

    I believe what we have done is create a bijection, that is: find a way to map every unique number in one set to a unique number in the other.


  • Hmm, I’m not sure about the first part there: For every number between 0 and 2, I can divide that number by 2 to get a unique number between 0 and 1, so there must be exactly the same amount of numbers in [0, 2] as in [0, 1]. By the same argument, for every number in [0, 1], I can multiply it by 2 to get a unique number in [0, 2]. Infinities are funny like that, but I’m not a mathematician, so there may be a hole in that argument.

    From that, I don’t see the argument that there wouldn’t be a universe for every possible option. If there is an infinite number of universes, than for every possible random event (at the quantum scale if you will), the probability is 1 that any outcome happened in some universe, in fact every outcome should occur in an infinite number of universes. The probability that any two universes remain “aligned”, or in the same state, decreases extremely rapidly of course, but that doesn’t matter, because there are infinitely many of them, so an infinite number will always remain “aligned”.

    For example, if there are (right now) an infinite number of universes that are perfectly identical to ours, and I flip a coin, there will be infinitely many where it lands heads and infinitely many where it lands tails. If we follow that argument backwards, that for every random event there are an infinite number of universes experiencing every possible outcome, we’ll get back to a moment in time where there were an infinite number of identical universes right after the Big Bang.


  • Just to play around with the idea: If we assume that an infinite number of universes were created at the moment of the Big Bang, and these only differ in random outcomes of quantum fluctuations, the would imply that there exist an alternate universe for every conceivable choice made, simply because there are infinitely many universes. They didn’t appear when the choice was made, but they just happen to diverge from our own in some specific moment.

    Hell, just presuming that the universe is infinite actually implies that there are an infinite number of “observable universes” outside our own observable universe. That in turn leads to the same result: If there is an infinite number of “observable universes” then there must be one universe that diverges from ours exactly ant the moment of every coin flip and every decision made.

    Someone please tell me why I’m wrong, this hurt my head a bit.


  • Thinking like this just works against those of us trying to fight racism. Racism is, at its core founded in a belief that some people are inherently more valuable than others, based on ethnicity/how they look.

    A factual statement about a group of people can be true or false, but in order to be racist it must also (explicitly or implicitly) say something about those peoples worth.

    Saying “group A has lower IQ than group B” can be factually correct, and part in an analysis into why, and how the differences can be evened out. Saying “group X is dumber than group Y” can also be factually correct, but can be said in a context and with an implication that this makes them less valuable as people. Purely based on the statements themselves you can’t tell if either is racist. You need to look at the implications, context, and intentions behind the statement.

    One of the horrors of slavery was, in fact, the forced “breeding” of slaves. Even thinking about it makes me feel sick. That doesn’t mean the statement “group X was bred differently from group Y” inherently racist. The racism comes in if that statement is said with the implication that the people in question were subhuman, or otherwise less (or more) valuable as people.

    A good example that another commenter mentioned is the Ashkenazi Jews, which systematically eradicated a genetic disorder by tracking who should not have children. Saying “they bred the disease out of the population” may be imprecise and a poor choice of words, but it is not racist. It is a factually correct (albeit poorly phrased) statement about an impressive medical feat that has (presumably) improved a lot of lives.

    In order to fight racism you need to be more nuanced than what you are being when you say that “statement X is racist, regardless of the intention behind it”. A statement being poorly phrased can lead to it being misinterpreted, not to it being racist.