“Scratch” his itch for some of that killer skunk weed, the devil’s lettuce!

Did Sagan say that in writing? I know he wrote a few things about his experiences with pot, but those were informal, anecdotal writings, and this sounds much more formal, almost like a public statement meant for publication, or a speech.

Imagine getting drugged at some seedy nightclub and you wake up without a kidney… then a week later you get drugged again and wake up with the same defective kidney stuffed back inside. A full refund!

Curse you, Noneuclid!

Maglevtoad, named after early 20th century physicist Dimitri Maglev.

The existence of a connection on a manifold enables one to reason consistently about geometric concepts on the whole manifold.

The geometry of the cosmos itself. Tracing good ol’ fashioned circles and triangles with the full extent of the visible universe and even beyond. This stuff blows my mind, even just the mere fact that we’re doing it, let alone the fact that we’re getting such incredible, counter-intuitive results.

Picture yourself having a time machine, going back to visit Euclid or Pythagoras, or even Kepler or Galileo, and blowing their mind with four words: The Geometry Of Spacetime.

Not only does time itself have a geometry, it must curve and contract to accommodate the absolute speed of light… nuts I tell ya.

Then there are at least four spatial dimensions, but there may be as many as eleven. To think that Copernicus thought epicycles were weird, wait till he gets a load of THIS!

Spinoza? Meet quantum entanglement with no hidden variables!
“Oy vey!”

moria (at) midwest (dot) social

Saruman’s palantir runs on Deepseek!
orthanc (at) lemmy (dot) ml

Holy Minkowski spaces, Batman! It’s the old man himself!

Yeah, but is it a wave or a particle, eh, Einstein? Answer that!

Put a monocle on him and make it The Speed Of Causality.

It Egg Even States

IS THAT A TWISTED SISTER DELTA PLEDGE PIN?!!
ON YOUR UNIFORM?!!

I wanna ROCK

(insert banjo twang here)

Ah yes, cue Monocle’d Pooh!

DFWTDNA
(don’t fuck with the dna)

Imagine the terminology if instead of it coming from the study of the Hawaiian volcano system, it came from the Icelandic one.
Then we’d be memorizing words like herliaphongoffjlyur.

I’m gonna rephrase that for both of us, I think (hope):
We understand better what it is we don’t understand about them.

But physics turns out to NOT be a smooth gradient, there are steps, aka quanta, that’s why they call it quantum physics or quantum mechanics, quantum electrodynamics and quantum chromodynamics.

At certain steps - not every step, but at certain mathematically defined points - thresholds are crossed and things behave differently, more energetic or complex phenomena emerge.

You joke, but it’s still a valid way of doing it.

If we are going be inquisitive in a systematic manner, we have to measure things in comparison, and to start doing that we had to start somewhere, in every single different field. Eventually we got to the speed of light as a constant, figured out the 1/137 fine structure constant, the helical configuration of DNA and RNA, etc., all starting from arbitrary suppositions, getting honed and adjusted by laboratory and thought experiments.

translations of bronze and iron age holy texts

Wait, what do you mean by that? I know Tolkien borrowed a lot from old texts like the Norse and Icelandic sagas, but I have read only the four popular Middle Earth books, and have dipped up to my ankles in Icelandic sagas, so that’s as much as I can say for certain.

There’s also Beowulf - of which I have read a version, a translation - and the myth of Arthur and Camelot, what I know is what I’ve seen in Excalibur, which is one of my all-time favorite movies, in my personal Top Twenty to be sure.

But Bronze Age and Iron Age? To put the history of Middle Earth in these terms is blowing my mind a little bit over here, as I have only recently understood the differences between these two surprisingly different eras.

Ancient was ancient and it was all one blurry smudge of names and land and years counted in negative numbers. Then I started to delve a little bit, particularly on YouTube, and it’s like the past popped into 3D and in color, in my mind, to suddenly understand the difference between Sumerian and Akkadian, or between the Medic and the Punic wars.

And frankly, I find the Bronze Age to be much more fascinating and compelling, the first great spurt of civilization, suddenly finding itself with time for organized contemplation for the first time, as well as that most astonishing of inventions - writing, allowing the arts, engineering, infrastructure, sciences, etc. to flourish.

The old Greeks themselves codified this concept into their mythologies:
Kronos (Time) + Mnemosyne (Memory) = The Muses (the inspirations of man).
When that memory got transferred to clay tablets or papyrus scrolls, the curve of knowledge started going exponential, more knowledge in ever shorter cycles.

To now realize that there is a similar level of depth perspective in the Silmarillion, is making Middle Earth pop a bit in 3D and in color in my head.

The different ways in which numbers slide up, down, sideways, diagonally.

Is the example in the post part of the fifth type of arithmetic?

1. Addition +
2. Subtraction -
3. Multiplication x
4. Division /
5. Modulo %

The first time I learned about modulo as its’ own branch of arithmetic was long out of school already, I had only hazily heard of it, on a PBS Nova documentary in the 1990s about Fermat’s famous theorem and when it was proven after centuries of failed tries.