applebusch @ applebusch @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

No momentum at all relative to what? Relativity tells us that there is no fixed frame of reference. In practice what that means is there is no universal zero velocity. You only have velocity relative to other things. The implicit assumption in your argument is that you would have no momentum relative to the earth, which in itself is problematic. After all, the earth spins at a rate of 360 degrees per day, so not moving relative to the earth would mean moving 463.83 m/s relative to the surface of the earth at the equator, which is supersonic. But maybe you mean relative to the surface of the earth. What if you go to the moon? Or mars? Or into orbit? Maybe you mean relative to the nearest big thing. If you could somehow teleport from the ground into a plane, would the plane count as the nearest big thing? What about a bus? That's on the ground, so maybe the nearest big thing would be the ground, if the mass of the thing matters in how the nearest big thing is determined. You can see how this can quickly turn into a mess of rules and special cases.

We can make some estimates for what would happen. The specific enthalpy (basically energy per kilogram) of air, modeled as a diatomic ideal gas, would be 7/2RsT, where Rs is the specific gas constant of air and T is the temperature. The specific gas constant of air is 287.05 J/(kg K), so at 293.15 Kelvin (20 C, ~70 F) the air would have 294kJ per kilogram. An average human displaces about 0.06522 cubic meters (65.22 Liters, 17.2 gallons), and air at standard conditions has a density of 1.20 kg/m^3, meaning you displace about 0.078 kg. This means an average person teleporting would create an energy difference of about 23kJ between the vacuum they leave behind and the surrounding air. That's as much energy as a 1kg mass moving at 214 m/s (478 mph, 770 kph) or about Mach 0.62 at sea level, or a 1000 kg mass moving at 6.78 m/s (15 mph, 24.4 kph). So imagine getting crushed against a wall by Grandma driving a small sedan at a human running speed, except the wall doesn't take any of it. That is also a bit more energy than a .50 BMG bullet, which apparently is used to shoot down helicopters.

If you teleport really close to your starting position, we can assume the total energy would be doubled. Also consider that this analysis is conservative. The faster the teleportation happens the more energy you're going to release. This only accounted for the energy of the air itself, not the kinetic energy of all the air that would rush in to fill the vacuum, or the energy you add to the air when you pop back in, which could be significantly more if you pop back in really fast. So it could be quite a bit of energy. I always imagined that a superhero or villain that could teleport would need some kind of force field just to survive the process, and that they could develop their ability to teleport faster to use it as a weapon, or teleport slower for stealth and not destroying their destination. Looking back at Jumper the amount of damage they do when they teleport is pretty minor, considering the math. The energy released would only grow if you could take stuff with you.

Conservation of momentum is a law of nature, making it natural to assume it would still hold even with a hypothetical power. But you do you. It's ok to be wrong sometimes.

I feel like if we know enough to fix this with gene editing on purpose, we know enough to unfix it on purpose too. If we later run into a situation as a species where having high cholesterol is somehow a major improvement for people, we can give everyone high cholesterol pretty easily.

I agree with your choices but your logic for the teleportation doesn't hold up. You've assumed your momentum wouldn't be conserved through the teleportation in a weird way. Assuming momentum is conserved, you would still fall just as quickly. In fact, you would reach terminal velocity in short order, and would have to continually teleport to keep yourself from crashing into the ground. By itself that would be bad enough, but you moving through the air between teleports would cause the air to move as well, so assuming you could keep up and hold your elevation, your velocity relative to the ground would increase to some number higher than terminal velocity. Think Chell continually falling through portals. Now you're stuck unless you can also teleport slightly to the side without falling. Best case you go to one of those indoor skydiving places and get in so you can slow down without dying. I was going to explore what would happen if your momentum somehow wasn't conserved, but that would imply some absolute fixed frame of reference or magical mumbo jumbo, neither of which exist.

You could totally travel faster though, without even needing to walk. You would also be super dangerous in one on one combat sports. A well placed 7 inch teleportation can easily get the win in the right sports.

It's almost like when the writers are allowed to have an actual ending we get a good show or movie.

What are they training for, their sommelier world tour?

I only do it because the normal mic on my phone is shit and always cuts out ;_;

I doubt they could at this point. With how much time has passed since Blizzard was any good, the people and culture that produced their best stuff are gone. It's more like a company of theseus now, it's name being the only vestige of what once was.

Meteorology is really hard, but comparing it to politics and economics is false equivalence. Meteorology is governed by well proven mathematical models, and we can use them to make predictions. The problem is that the earth is really big, so we just don't have computers powerful enough to simulate it finely enough. Add to that it's a chaotic system and it becomes difficult to predict accurately very far into the future. Weather predictions have actually improved dramatically the last few decades, and I expect they will continue to do so along with advances in computing. Economics and politics may as well be random guessing, but is often worse than random guessing, because we have no reliable proven model for human behavior.

Say it

Yeah but the odds are only meaningful if someone was expecting Hamlett specifically to get written in the first place. Without that it ceases to be a significant event, and reduces to merely the event that happened. Just because one arrangement of molecules is unique doesn't mean it's special if any number of other arrangements is functionally the same. The same argument applies to any person. Yeah the odds of you in particular being born are astronomical, but that doesn't make you special, because if it wasn't you it would have been someone substantially similar to you. After all, your parents were making a baby either way.

Wow they're just straight up calling it theft now. They can't even pretend to understand the difference.

In my experience this most often comes from a failure to perform routine maintenance, and Windows being a bloated rotting whale, decaying on the beach, slowly expanding and spreading its horrid filth across the entire system. Give your computer a new life by cleaning out all the dust, reapplying thermal paste to the CPU, oiling fan bearings, and installing a lightweight Linux distro, or at least a fresh whale carcass (clean windows install).

I'll do a proof by counterexample. I have no idea how do to that, therefor there is in fact something stopping someone from finding out exactly who you are, which proves the premise to be false. QED mothafucka.

For some history, the original DOTA was a custom map in Warcraft 3. It pretty much defined the moba genre. From there lots of clones were created, and eventually some were made into full games. League of Legends is one of those, and became the most popular. So yes, they're all just Warcraft 3 with only the hero parts.

Not sure why you're implying induction is a rich people method. You can get a plug in induction cooktop for less than $100.

Bezos is estimated to be worth $150 billion. With a lavish lifestyle spending $500 thousand a year, and a life expectancy of 85, he theoretically has enough for 3529.4 lifetimes, or about 23.5 lifetimes per billion. Given that rich assholes tend to also be legendarily cheap, this is likely a conservative estimate for the number of lifetimes. On the average income in the USA of $63,214, that would be 186.1 lifetimes per billion, or at the median income of $44,225 it would be 266 lifetimes per billion. So every billionaire has enough wealth to support hundreds of people for their entire lives, from birth to death. An unfathomable amount of money.

Write me a prompt for a large language model that will make it write me a beautiful prompt for a large language model.

'Certainly! Here's a prompt to generate a beautiful prompt for a large language model:

"Create a thought-provoking and eloquent prompt that would inspire a large language model to craft a piece of writing that captivates and enchants the reader, leaving them in awe of the model's creativity and linguistic prowess."'

• GPT-3.5

"Compose a vivid and evocative narrative, rich with descriptive details, that transports the reader to an enchanting forest bathed in the soft, golden hues of the setting sun. Your task is to convey the profound connection between the serene beauty of nature and the human spirit, leaving the reader in a state of tranquil wonder, captivated by your poetic portrayal."

• GPT-3.5 responding to GPT-3.5