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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • What does it really mean to be supernatural? What’s the difference between, say, a ghost and dark matter? We don’t really know what either one is. Is it that we can reliably find evidence of dark matter, even if we don’t know what it is, so it’s not “super” anymore? It seems to me that “supernatural” is just a name for the ones we don’t actually believe in.



  • I’m a liberal. I’d prefer the government be functional and running. But these days the government is pretty dysfunctional even when not shut down, so I guess as shutdowns go… In any case, I place all blame for the dysfunction and the shutdown on conservatives, and anyone who voted for them. There is no correct course for dems in the government when they’re in the minority to a party that doesn’t operate in good faith; I’m fine with them either playing ball or not as they think is best in the circumstances.


  • Good question. I think what it comes down to is that the idea of someone being trans is just kind of foreign to me. I never met someone in person who was trans until I was close to 40, as far as I know. So for most of my life I categorized people, at least as far as attractiveness and dating goes, without distinguishing between sex at birth and gender identity.
    So while I treat (or hope that I treat) trans people as appropriate for their chosen gender, it doesn’t come completely naturally to me. It’s hard for me not to think of a trans woman as “a man who wants to be treated as a woman”, even though I know that’s not what they want. And while in day to day interactions I can just ignore that difficulty and treat a trans woman as a woman, when it comes to romantic interest it is not so easily ignored.




  • Aperiodic, in this sense, doesn’t mean that there aren’t any bits that repeat. In fact, if you pick any patch of tiles of any arbitrary size, that patch will be repeated infinitely many times. What it means to be aperiodic is that if you slide the whole tiling over so that one of the patches aligns with the repeated bit, there will still be something outside the patch that doesn’t align. Compare that with, say, a repeating grid of squares, where if you slide one square onto a different square then everything lines up, all the way to infinity; it’s impossible to tell that it’s been slid over.






  • This is not the same for all crypto currency, but a bitcoin represents a “proof of work”. When people “mine” bitcoins, they are consuming computational resources, and when they find a bitcoin, it is a certification of the work that was done to find it that becomes the value of the coin. And then, as others as mentioned, people just agree that that work has a certain amount of monetary value. But the proof of work is what limits the supply and allows that value to exist. 3Blue1Brown has a really good video that goes into the technical details if you’re interested.






  • HIPAA allows medical care providers to share your information with each other for the purposes of providing care (whether that sharing happens through MyChart or some other means). It does not require your consent (and this could be a good thing if, for example, you were taken to a hospital while unconscious). You simply may not have a lot of options for preventing this. As NOT_RICK mentioned, you could opt out of Care Everywhere at the psychiatric hospital to prevent them from sharing your information that way. You could also try to amend their record or request that they restrict access to your records, as per https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/privacy/laws-regulations/index.html#general. All of those options would require interacting with the original psychiatric hospital, so if you’re unwilling to do that, I’m not aware that there are other options available.



  • One of my favorites is the “ladder paradox” in special relativity, although I originally learned is as a pole vaulter rather than a ladder:

    A pole vaulter is running carrying a pole that is 12m long at rest, holding it parallel to the ground. He is running at relativistic speed, such that lengths dilate by 50% (this would be (√3/2)c). And he runs through a barn that is 10m long that has open doors in the front and back.

    Imagine standing inside barn. The pole vaulter is running so fast that the length of the pole, in your frame of reference, has contracted to 6m. So while the pole is entirely inside the barn you press a button the briefly closes the doors, so that for just a moment the pole is entirely closed inside the barn.

    The question is, what does the pole vaulter see? For him, the pole has not contracted; instead the barn has. He’s running with a 12m pole through what, in his frame of reference, is a 5m barn. What happens when the doors shut? How can both the doors shut?

    I will admit that I have never used this thought experiment for any practical end.