We had it mostly nailed down 2000-some-odd days ago:

And:

The only questions are: low-frequency (edit: nope, high-frequency) acoustics or microwaves, and if microwaves, intent, because it could be unintentional (see details in previous threads).

I think Havana syndrome is a real thing, but I understand the suspicion. Were there a place in the world where the Russians would do this, it'd be Cuba. Not just b/c of Cuba's Russia-friendly regime, but because it's like 100 miles from continental U.S. soil. And it's tradition, hah.

Good friend of mine served as an adjunct prof, and suffered with low enrollment for a couple years. Then he offered a new course, an elective, on top of his standard PHYS 201 and PHYS 302 stuff: The Physics of Superheros. After that, he didn't have enrollment issues. I think people went through the course catalog and decided to have him as their prof for the standard stuff because he was teaching the superheros course, which filled up pretty dang fast. Marketing genius.

SCOTUS just declined to rule quickly on the question of presidential immunity, the crux of most of Jack Smith's prosecution.

Fuck SCOTUS.

kleinbl00, my push pins are probably going global. I'll do domestic and international.

Thanks. Yeah I'm still around, just too busy most of the time to post much.

My wife is a huge sci-fi fan. She read all 9 books and wanted me steeped in the lore. She's also watched the entirety of the show, which I started with her, but backed out after an episode or two because I didn't want it distorting my experience of the literature. My wife fucking rocks, obviously.

Yes, planes do tend to crash after being missile'd

lol I told this guy in some SoundCloud dm's a few years ago that he shouldn't go to grad school for neuroscience, and he didn't! Look what happened.

Synth programming and mixing is a skill.

And then also a nu-disco classic, because I have to.

I'm also excited because an old friend reached out and wants to work with me! I have literally every tool for making music, basically. I have been trying to collaborate with almost anyone for about 5 years, and people are just scared shitless of it, I guess. I dunno

Today's SCOTUS corruption updates:

Sotomayor is facing criticism for not recusing herself from cases involving the publishing company she used to write her book. This is long-public information, mind you, and is only being brought up now as a "whatabout", obviously. Yeah, she probably should have recused, and I hope she makes better decisions in the future. Sooooo I guess now conservatives are in favor of instituting a code of ethics for SCOTUS?? Just kidding. They only wanted to complain about a dem-appointed judge, but still do nothing that would involve keeping money out of politics. Very populist.

And also, breaking news today, as referenced by kleinbl00 downthread:

Clarence Thomas: mega-donor paid for great-nephew’s private school

People are still voicing their support for Thomas, btw. Literally tweets like "Who among us hasn't wanted to send their younger family members to a private school and accepted thousands upon thousands of dollars to do so from the same friend that also gifts us lavish vacations all the time?". Very normal stuff.

sigh Here's another new Exhibit A of GOP judicial corruption pertaining to the record-breaking $1.6 billion donation we heard about last year:

Leonard Leo used Federalist Society contact to obtain $1.6B donation

The funniest part, to me, is the byline:

The society’s close ties to Leo’s network raise questions about its nonpartisan, non-political status.

Fact: There is nothing like the Federalist Society on the left. So every time you hear someone on the right bitching about "activist judges", you're free to disregard anything else they allege.

Fact 2: SCOTUS has had a majority of GOP-appointed judges since 1969.

I agree with almost all of that.

16 million more Gen-Z'ers became eligible to vote between 2020 and 2024. And they seem pretty pissed, generally. The probably perceive a future more obviously crumbling before their eyes than it was for millenials like me, but at least the millenials wised up and aren't becoming more "conservative" as they age. So yeah, the eventual future looks like it could be pretty dope.

But that's like 10 - 15 years out, realistically, and in the meantime, the "rate of incineration" will be dialed up to 11. The sort of legally-adjacent, cold civil war between rural and metro is really taking shape. It's always hard for me to imagine what it'll be like, but I always know it when I see it. The Tennessee House story is the perfect example of what we can expect over the next decade. So is the mifepistrone thing. Dems still don't give enough of a shit about the courts, or they'd either politely tell Feinstein to fuck off immediately unless she can make it to vote, or circumvent the blue slip Senate confirmation rules. They'd hold a vote to impeach Thomas, even with the knowledge that it'll likely fail on a party line in the House. They'd have been more publicly curious about wtf was that Eileen Cannon thing?

I'm just saying, the gloves are gonna have to come off sooner or later. We got a small taste of that with Dark Brandon's Philly speech. There is no reason to pretend like appeasement is possible with reactionary fascists. Not enough establishment dems seem willing to understand. Then we can go back to pleasantries when the GOP extincts itself and the dems split into progressives and conservative dems.

We've given GPT a car, a P.O. box, and a gun.

Subscribe to see what happens next.

More like "Trump sets Tuesday as date to see how much shit he can stir up outside of New York courthouse".

But it's too late, at this point. If Trump is indicted, he'll drag the legal process out until past the 2024 election. He'll campaign and fundraise on it. Already is. If he or another republican wins, he'll get a pardon, provided he's even charged and sentenced before then.

This is all so fucking pathetic. I have lost essentially all faith in the justice system. The "takes time to build an airtight case" excuse is garbage. Cohen served time for this.

Presidents are above the law. A very appropriate observation on the 20th anniversary of the war on Iraq.

This is a big, BIG deal if it holds up to scrutiny over the next few years. And especially if it can explain some of the discrepancies between new JWST observations of early galaxy formation physics and once-established theoretical models.

Can we just begin building LUVOIR now? This shit alwayssssss proves to be invaluable.

This is such a fucking shitshow:

East Palestine Residents Told Water Was Safe After 'Sloppy' Testing Paid for by Rail Company

Apparently Mike DeWine feels so secure in his re-election chances there's absolutely no accountability whatsoever to the people of Ohio. What an amazing hypercapitalist demonstration this entire saga has been.

I'd say this post bought you a solid tenth of a second of hesitation before SydneyNet lasers your face into the back of your skull someday

To catalog how.. wonderfully... things are proceeding over at Twitter:

Now, if you fork over the $8/month for a certified Muskian Blue check mark, you buy your right to longform tweets.

So how is the implementation going? In the Twitter app (iOS):

And after clicking the link to be able to read the rest of the tweet?

It takes you to an instance of your phone's native web browser, and serves you a message that Twitter is better in the app.

I thought it might be an issue with my Twitter app version. So I updated it. The result:

There is no longer any way to access the rest of the tweet! No way whatsoever to read past the old character limit.

Oh, how I wish there was still a way to short Twitter stock.

edit: hmm, at least some long-form tweets seem to be loading properly. It's still a stupid idea, I think, because one of the appeals of twitter was to encourage succinctness.

I think this is all a big misunderstanding. You see, Trump and I share a love of nuclear physics, and it’s not really a big deal if we parse through the French method of Uranium confinement over coffee most Wednesdays. He’s actually an advocate of their torus geometry, for the core, but I’m all about spherical. Ahh, I remember, fondly, he would say “Mr. Fistassist, not-so-smart, you can do better neutron density with a linear shot delivery through a hollow core, people are saying”, and I replied “Well but you have to think about the ease of the manufacturing process and the shelf-life as well”, and then we would kiss. And we kissed like the French, too, baby. Every time.

Well guess what? It’s Wednesday, and you sickos have taken that away from me. We’d be playing nuclear (he called it) right now, but nooooooo. You should all be ashamed of yourselves.

I should have explicitly stated that I think the debt cancellation was a good idea, that's on me. And I do believe that demand-side economics largely works much better than supply-side. I also said myself that people would use a lot of the debt relief to pay off other debts.

Jesus, dude, did you think I converted to Nazism in the last 24 hours or something? Friendly fucking firing into the crowd, there.

College enrollment rates are now dropping faster than ever. I don't think saying "Oh that's just the market naturally responding to how expensive college is" makes for a good argument, because having an increasingly less educated populace can compound into other problems. Neither is fixing the natural inclination towards exclusivity and reputation easily accomplished, if that's even possible.

To state something else explicitly: The Problem is that our system of education is now serving as another medium through which to perpetuate wealth inequality.

I'm not accusing Biden of anything, but it would be nice if someone that isn't a Heritage Foundation-funded "think tank" did a study aiming to understand and potentially address the ballooning cost of higher education, and how it relates to wealth inequality. Maybe I just haven't seen existing studies, but surely we're at least due for a new one in the post-covid era.

I see your explanations of the problem elsewhere in these comments, and largely agree, but what is your solution(s)? I'm working on a "final solution", because hah, pranked ya, I was a Nazi this whole time after all.

I'm pretty good.

Limping my way through the end of grad school. Finding it difficult to plot my next steps because of how politically fraught I expect the future to be here in the states. Nice to have the option of working overseas, but I'd still be paying taxes back to the US unless I renounce citizenship, so maybe there's not too much of a point in leaving. And I'm not in a demographic targeted for oppression, so maybe it's my duty to stay here and fight the good fight. I'm considering ramping up a humorous anti-fascism influence campaign on YouTube. At least the audio will have some production value (robot/alien lyrics in the description).

What kinds of hobbies are you up to?

We came within 3,000 MW today of supply exceeding demand, or about 3.75%:

They don't usually let it get so close. Usually it's around a 7%+ margin at daily peak demand. I don't even think there were consumption warnings or recommendations issued today.

Why? Probably because it was just cloudier than usual and the forecast was for clearer skies. There was some extra contribution from wind, but not quite enough to make up for the losses in solar.

Farmer's Almanac predicts a very cold winter. Super.

Yeah no, it's perfectly clear, and Forbes is just shitty at journalism, at least in this arena of subject matter. One was an expired, regular citizen passport, one is a valid, regular citizen passport, and the last is a green "diplomatic" passport issued when he was POTUS to facilitate POTUS travels.

Also, just to gloat, and reassure myself that the system might yet hold:

Holy shit, DoJ s̶e̶i̶z̶e̶d̶ borrowed Trump's passports!!

B̶u̶c̶k̶l̶e̶ ̶u̶p̶.̶ ̶T̶h̶e̶y̶'̶r̶e̶ ̶g̶o̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶i̶n̶d̶i̶c̶t̶.̶ sigh

And to all the stupid pundits asking why the passports weren't included on the list of documents in the search warrant: U.S. citizens do not own their passports, the feds do, and the gov't can suspend or cancel passports at any time. I just read it. Page 5. Thus, they seemingly don't need to include passports in a search warrant.

Bear in mind that only Trump has made this claim, at the time of my comment, but I can't figure out why he'd be lying about this one. edit: to push the narrative of "MOST PERSECUTED, BUT BEST BOY EVER IN THE UNIVERSE", am_U, you fucking idiot.

I'm still blowing this thread up because this truly is a momentous thing to watch unfold. The way Trump and his defenders are reacting has me both very afraid and howling in laughter.

Trump's now asking for some of the seized material to be returned, citing attorney client privilege:

Sources familiar with the investigation told Fox News Saturday that the former president’s team was informed that boxes labeled A-14, A-26, A-43, A-13, A-33, and a set of documents—all seen on the final page of the FBI’s property receipt —contained information covered by attorney-client privilege.

Yeah, I checked the warrant, and UPDATE: Nvm, I had confused one of those, A-13, with 13A. The attorney-client privilege claims may not involve top secret info like I had initially thought.

I bet he announces his candidacy this week. He intends to use it as a shield against prosecution(s), and I think his time may almost be up. This is a very cut-and-dry case. Intent matters not. If you "accidentally" took nuclear secrets home with you, you're just as guilty as if you did it on purpose. If they indict him, I think more than one or two FBI field offices are gonna have some problems. DeSantis is also doing his best to aid in domestic terrorism, of course.

Speaking of which, there is almost certainly an investigation already underway into who leaked those FBI agents' names to Breitbart. Am I supposed to believe Trump wasn't involved in that? He had the only other unredacted copy of the warrant. The desperation is palpable.

edit: some of these takes are just hilarious. Fox’s Doocy: ‘It would be great’ if Trump called for end to threats against feds. LOLOL.

Shortly thereafter:

“Whatever we can do to help — because the temperature has to be brought down in the country,” he added. “If it isn’t, terrible things are going to happen.”

How the hell is there any way to interpret that except as a threat??? He'll never outright condemn violence and threats against the FBI, Doocey, you dumbass, it's one of his last remaining bargaining chips.

edit2: Apparently, after the above quote about wanting to help lower the temperature, Trump went on to make additional lies-based attacks on the FBI. Classic!

Ah yes, the interlock doors. Arguably the least impressive demo so far. We are informed they "basically close 95% of the way within 30 ms", which is about 2 frames of 60 fps YouTube video. It looks like this is actually kinda correct, but the thing is still flopping around, reverberating and unsealed, for another 100 ms or so. They will have the advantage of atmosphere pushing down on it when there's an actual pressure differential, to be fair. If they install it correctly.

If I (generously) assume a 20 meter length between interlocks, and Mach 6, 6 * 343 m/s ~ 2000 m/s, I end up getting a transit time of 10 ms for the ballistic. So at this stage of development, yep, the doors will be open at the same time, for the majority of the time they're open.

Here's one major overarching issue: When you instantaneously expose a volume at vacuum to a volume at pressure, you should treat it like a shock, using fluid mechanics. I think they are making a major mistake in thinking that the tunnel length is long enough that the atmosphere, presumably traveling at mach 1, won't have time to reach the chamber in 30 ms. Shocks can propagate well above the speed of sound, indeed, some shocks are of course caused by a bulk/fluid flow traveling faster than the sound speed. I'm not sure about this instance, I'm hoping to find some time later today to do the math. OH, not to mention, the sound speed is much higher in a vacuum. None of that's actually not the real problem, though. The problem is that shocks are non-linear. They could have a day of successful launches, and then the next day, a 7 mph cross-breeze seeds a micro-instability across the outer interlock that balloons into a disturbance that destroys the entire facility. But if you're intent on gambling with the butterfly effect (no tag! hah)? You're gonna want your geometry as symmetric as possible, like a perfectly cylindrical tunnel, in this case, and I just... I dunno. They might not know that. Should we mail in weekly suggestion letters? (no)

a capacitor BARELY BENDS OVER in 10,000gs

This was so funny, because he goes "it's just a bit of mass held onto the board by, y'know, steel", and I'm stuck wondering if they fucking welded components onto a circuit board, or the guy doesn't know that solder is made of tin and lead. Whatever. I can assure you that the reaction wheels weigh both too much and not enough, depending on which problem you're talking about.

Both options of "slamming the counterweight into an armored wall inside a vacuum chamber" and "re-opening the interlock doors for the counterweight ~ 100 ms later" have had me in stitches multiple times over the last few months.

They're doomed. And they know it. It's their grift.

Love that they did it last night, when they knew he'd be in New York to give a deposition.

I dunno about a grand strategy, but I don't think they'd take this step unless there's an overwhelming likelihood that he'll be indicted. Not even necessarily as a result of the raid, or indicted on charges related to classified documents, but just in regards to the relationship of trust with the public the DoJ is trying to maintain.

Yeah I was watchin' some Fox this morning too, hah. Awesome stuff. I wouldn't say I had "FBI raids Mar-a-Lago" on my bingo card, but I have thought for a couple months or so that DoJ will indeed move on Trump. I heard Buck Sexton on Jesse Watters's show (Jesse is on his own tier of stupid, btw) use the phrase "cross the Rubicon", which is a code phrase for "gonna need to use the guns" on Telegram, Parler, and TRUTH, which I've been browsing this morning. It's terrifying. I knew that Trump et al. would use any prosecution against him to rile up his base, but it's still always jarring to witness real-time.

The idea that the FBI or Garland wanted to do this instead of go through negotiations or a subpoena is pretty funny. Remember how NARA already confiscated records from Mar-A-Lago like a year ago? I'm sure they tried every other avenue. And so far, Garland isn't exactly a firebrand, either, at least in his public statements and posturing. Until now, at least, because this is a yuge statement.

I'm bumping up my timeline, I predict he'll be indicted by the end of the year, just after the midterms. He'll announce his candidacy in a month or two, much to McConnell's frustration, which is one more reason to do it, of course. Still don't think he'll ever go to prison. White House instead.

This is also my bet:

edit: lol the Trump campaign sent out fundraising emails last night, almost immediately after the news broke. Surprise. Also, random, but I've been almost impressed with the top-level embrace of "Dark Brandon".

Btw, the reaction wheels are for attitude control of the missile. Oops, I mean launch vehicle*!

Duh. Sorry, I was wiped last night.

The language that they've developed reminds me of how a fascist hijacks political language. "Highly iterative design process" is probably my favorite phrase, substituted for "every design so far has failed, and failed quickly". I wonder if jargon and framing is something they're coached on or if it's just the usual cultural business rot of the VC world? Maybe both.

I still can't figure out what payload SpinLaunch could hope to carry. It's seriously like "maybe we'll get lucky this time with a GoPro". Maybe Bezos is good for 10k g's? Let's try

I love that pinned comment so, so much.

Started the video at a random spot, and within 15 seconds "... as the vehicle is released, using a secret release mechanism that SpinLaunch hid from our cameras... ". Thought I could resist watching, not so sure, now.

To build on what Devac said, e.g. the "spooky action at a distance" (spukhafte Fernwirkung) of entanglement is actually a successful prediction and self-consistency of our existing quantum mechanical model of the universe. It's a very successful model.

two-slit experiment

We do know how (or why? unclear in this context) the magic happens. The photon's wave function collapse occurs if a measurement of the photon is made as it passes through one of the two slits; then it passes through one of the two slits localized in space, as a particle, and is thus unable to interfere/interact at the slits like a wave. If the photon isn't measured at the slits, there is instead a pattern of many peaks and troughs observed after the slits, because the photon is behaving as a wave, as indicated by the wave refraction physics and resulting interference pattern produced by the slits. The wave interference pattern is only significant/noticeable because the separation between the two slits is close to the photon's wavelength. At large, people-size scales, the same, small wavelength (say, visible) photon behaves more simply, and we are able to treat the physics more simply than with quantum mechanics, like with e.g. geometric optics.

And that's really the crux of all physics models, actually; It's always about scale-size. And sometimes a characteristic scale-time. Where I physics, it's the average radius of gyration and the average time an electron takes to gyrate around the local magnetic field (~1 km and ~1 ms, in my very specialized neck of the woods, about 11 Earth radii sunwards of Earth), but it's much smaller and quicker for quantum mechanical dynamics, typically, like modeling the way an electron recombines with an ion in a plasma to form a neutral atom, which usually occurs on scales of nanometers and nanoseconds (or faster!), approximately.

Bottom line is we know wave function collapse happens, and how to cause it, and how it's happening all the time, every moment, even just because your personal matter is interacting with the environment around you, on top of with itself. But who knows how to interpret it. Have you seen Everything Everywhere All at Once? I haven't. But the existence of the multiverse is one fairly common interpretation of wave function collapse. There are some other juicy and recent propositions Devac linked in response to my original comment, too.

Whether or not another, better model of the universe might unlock a very clever method of transmitting information via entanglement... is a question that I just thought of, but for now, we believe that it is impossible to transmit information using entanglement. Information transfer would require interacting with a subset of the entangled system, which of course causes wave function collapse of the entire entangled system, which then prevents instantaneously sending information between the spatially-separated subsets.

edit2: Hahah, gaming this out even more simply, I call my buddy, to whom I gave one of my two entangled matter boxes, and I'm like "ok so #1 is up!", and then wait to hear back "#1 is down, over here..". Ultimately, I am not able to exchange information more quickly (past lightspeed) than I would have been if the matter we're describing wasn't entangled. I didn't know mine would be up, nor did my buddy know he'd measure down, and I can't encode a message if I don't know (in the simplest case) if I've got the zero particle or the one particle. So, we think faster-than-light information exchange simply doesn't take place. But black holes get weird. And maybe other sectors of the universe, dunno.

So we can currently point at something that makes no sense and say "that's quantum entanglement", but we cannot say how it works or why

It makes some sense, at least. Not the most. How entanglement works or why? I have trouble like ascribing meaning to a coat hanger a panhandler bent into the shape of guitar that I display on the desk I play my guitar next to, so I guess I'm mostly sitting this one out.

I am gonna get back to Devac's other reply, but first I wanna go through my own (bullshit) cosmological model of the universe for a couple more days. And some other ideas.

is it something we can use in some way?

Oh do we ever already. There are so many applications of entanglement, including quantum computing. Some applications are intentional (lol bose-einstein condensates could never arise "in the wild" on the surface of Earth except for in our top laboratories), and some may arise as a side effect of requiring something like guaranteeing a secure method of quantum cryptography; If 1/2 of the entangled system's wave function was already collapsed before you measured it, someone accessed the information, causing the whole entangled system to collapse.

It almost sounds like gibberish, sorry, I know, but these are an attempt at concise, yet sweeping statements built on having suffered through some maths. Navigating the delineation between where the model ends and interpretation begins is a very healthy exercise, especially for experimentalists like me.

edit: Some of my QFT, standard model, and information theory isn't quite right, I think, and I'm looking forward to any corrections, no worries :).

This administration couldn't make the discovery of aliens walking among us seem exciting.

When Trump initiated the lie about the election being stolen, or summoned people to D.C. for the 6th via a tweet on Dec. 19th ("will be wild!"), or when he gave a speech around 1 PM on the 6th imploring people to go to the capitol just before thousands of people marched to the capitol, or when he later tweeted on the 6th that "Mike Pence didn't have the courage to do what needed to be done" (i.e. refuse to certify the vote) and just after it went live someone at the capitol read it to the crowd through a megaphone immediately preceding the chants of "Hang Mike Pence!".

I could go on and on but I think it'd be a bit overwhelming because I can now surmise that you've probably not been exposed to any of this information before. Which, straight up, is really weird. No one here gets their rocks off to MSNBC, or any mainstream liberal sources for that matter, but I'll do things like watch Tucker and Hannity every now and then, just to know what they're saying instead of walking into a debate perhaps missing one half of the story, erroneous and fatuous (and racist, a word that seems increasingly guaranteed to send every self-proclaimed libertarian into berserker mode for some strange reason) as I think their spew is.

There was ample circumstantial evidence at the time that there was some seriously shady shit that went down on election night. Not least of which was all the battleground states shutting down at the same time. Many reports of ballot harvesting, I can go on for weeks with all the anomalies.

Well, I've got some good news. We have weeks! All the weeks. I'm quarantined with covid in Switzerland on business, and when I get home, it's back to getting paid millions of dollars an hour to be politely mean to libertarians on this website. Ugh, now I don't know whether I'm on the clock or not.

And wtf does "Battleground states shutting down at the same time" mean? It's not often that someone makes a claim about this stuff that I haven't heard yet.

Mr. Potatohead, as incredibly uninspiring though he may be, wouldn't have the indecency to lie about an election being stolen when he knew it wasn't, simply to grift off the lie and use it to attempt to seize/maintain power illegitimately.

And truly, I have issues believing that libertarians are able to debate any of this in good faith, especially the full-blown anarcho-crypto types who don't believe that any shred of government should exist at all.

I mean look, you're clearly pretty smart. You can formulate sentences better than maybe ~90% of Americans. But consider the possibility that you've been consuming a diet of information so biased that it makes you easily manipulable to evil actors.

It's been a whole week, and I just want to say that the response of Biden and Harris has been a fucking JOKE.

The White House claims to champion a woman's right to choose what to do with her own body. I know that the executive is not the legislature. But I also know that they're fucking chickenshit when it comes to actually exploring policy possibilities, or even putting pressure on congress using public statements. It's FUCKING PATHETIC.

Did they miss when the draft of the Roe v Wade repeal was leaked, six weeks ago? Did they forget to meaningfully prepare for when the ruling was given?

And this is just one (albeit a MAJOR one) of several rulings passed down this season that the executive (OR Pelosi OR Schumer) could have responded to, tactically, that would have helped boost democratic turnout in the upcoming midterm elections, but, nah, these fucking idiots are living in an alternate reality where they don't have to sell themselves to the voters because they think a plurality is already on their side or something, and they don't have to do a goddamn thing? I've no idea. No fucking idea.

I'm done. I have to vote for these stupid fuckwits because the other side are Sith Lords, but fucking hell, enjoy the Jedi shit-temple being slaughtered by Anakin DeSantis or whatever.

FUCK