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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • mkwt@lemmy.worldtoMicroblog Memes@lemmy.worldThe speed of light
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    3 days ago

    There’s a convention in theoretical physics to adopt so-called “natural” units. In the natural system of units, measures of length, time, and mass are chosen so as to make the speed of light and the gravitational constant 1. Or sometimes it’s the speed of light and Planck’s constant.

    Anyhow, this makes the resulting measures of length, time, and mass completely nonsensical to any human scale problem. But it makes physics equations much shorter to write down, because you can drop all of the c’s, G’s, and h-bars and whatnot.

    For example, the famous E = m c^2 becomes E = m. Energy is mass. Voila.


  • These planes are modified airliners with a giant spinning radar thingy stuck on. One of them can provide radar coverage over an entire region and tell all of our other planes where to go and what to do. That is too say, these planes are extremely important to modern air warfare, even if they don’t carry their own offensive armaments.

    These planes also have a very custom, very unique design, and that makes them very expensive. You can’t just go buy more at the store, even if you have unlimited money. For starters, there aren’t many working Boeing 707s lying around any more to convert.

    The US started this war with a fleet of 16 total airplanes. We now have 14, with one that appears to be a total hull loss, and another one confirmed to be damaged.

    As an American, I am unhappy about this. This puts us in a significantly worse position if this shit escalates into the world war that some are saying has already started.



  • mkwt@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzafter you pi
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    8 days ago

    The proof is not that ancient. Pi was proven to be irrational in 1761, and proven to be transcendental in 1882.

    For a long time the problem was known as “squaring the circle”: Given a circle in a plane, construct a square with the same area using a compass and straightedge. This was a famous unsolved problem in mathematics from antiquity all the way through the renaissance.


  • IMAX film is twice as wide as standard film. 70 mm instead of 35 mm. The IMAX film platters are physically ginormous. All that extra film gives you a bunch of extra resolution compared to regular film.

    The first catch is that “IMAX standard” may not be real IMAX. I don’t know exactly what that means. Perhaps it could even be digital projection that aims to be comparable to IMAX in some ways?

    Second catch is that a lot of films that are shown in IMAX theaters were not actually shot on IMAX originally. If a film was shot on 35mm, say, and then printed onto IMAX, you don’t get all of the resolution benefits, and you may also get letter boxes or pan-and-scan because the aspect ratio isn’t the same. IMAX cameras are massively more expensive and logistically difficult than regular film cameras.


  • Just to be clear: with a marginal tax rate, if your income is $10,000,001, you pay $0.70 tax for the $1, and the rest of the $10,000,000 is taxed according to the lower tax brackets.

    The first $50,000 of that $10 million is taxed just like the guy that only made $50,000.

    The US tax system is slightly more complicated than this, but there’s no situation where you can get stuck with a huge additional bill because you edged slightly into the next higher tax bracket.






  • Usually in these stories, Batman or whoever leaves behind enough evidence to support a successful prosecution, along with the tied-up bad guy.

    The vigilante broke the law to gain evidence, so all the evidence the vigilante obtained would be thrown out,

    That’s actually an interesting situation. The fourth and fifth amendments put restrictions on the government, not private vigilantes. So if the cops just happen to find evidence in plain view, there won’t be a direct constitutional reason to suppress it.

    Now if the local prosecutor has a pattern or practice of deliberately turning a blind eye to the unlicensed private investigators that routinely supply them with illegally obtained information, there’s probably a claim there. But it’s a lot more complicated to make that case than a straight-up 4th amendment case.