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Cake day: June 24th, 2023

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  • You can say you can expect, but you really can’t, because if you’re talking about momentum you’re talking about velocity and you need a reference frame to define velocity and therefore momentum. Let’s pick the sun for instance with the assumptions of A. So if we just have one portal pointing one direction and one portal pointing up and chell walks in, you should blast out straight up at 66,000 mph plus the speed she was walking then. I think you could make the reference Frame to earth and try and get a, but that would create problems too.

    I think B, velocity relative to the moving portal, would be the only way to maintain some kind of consistency in game if you were going to have moving portals. Your examples are most consistent with B. A portal falls on chell, how fast does she come out? The speed the portal fell on her of course. And then she stops going out once the portal stops moving because it hit the ground and has stopped moving and they no longer have any relative difference in velocity. You could also say in the platform example that the platform was sitting still and the portal was moving down, you would emerge out the portal at the speed the first portal was moving down. Both should be equally valid ways if you want to maintain some consistency. But all of this is probably why they don’t allow moving portals in the first place.

    In the end though these are definitely strange unknowable physics, portals don’t exist, so really you could make the game however you please, either one is perfectly valid, you could just say any velocity on the other side is whatever it was in relationship to the earth before going through, but that’d be weird, because how fast do the people move out of A then? Do they fly out at the speed of the moving portal and then suddenly stop mid air and plop straight down? If you’re not moving faster than a moving portal does is become brick wall and smash you out of the way so you don’t gain any velocity in relation to earth so A can be maintained? There’s no way to test it in the current games. Hence the endless arguing. But I think B would be most consistent and allow for some really interesting puzzles though, especially if you had two moving portals! Or maybe 3d portals that can sit in the air and allow full movement through them in any direction to help make it possible. Portal 3? In VR with depth perception to accommodate?



  • The reason this is so confusing with different answers is that the portals don’t really exist, so inherently whether you say a or b is gonna depend on assumptions. In game they aren’t allowed to move so we have nothing to base it on to match game physics.

    Here’s my take, momentum is a product of velocity. Velocity needs a reference frame. Without it, there’s no real difference in saying the portal has a velocity of 0 and the people tied up have a the velocity and therefore momentum, or the other way around. If we assume velocity with respect to the portal is what matters and is the momentum carried forward, then it should be B. If it’s relative to the earth or tied up people, then A.





  • It shouldn’t be a big deal, but prior to the Biden administration, Betsy Devos under Trump was doing everything possible to block even already available student loan forgiveness and throwing up as much roadblocks as possible. The department education had to be sued in court to get loan forgiveness granted for things they should have been helping with not blocking. And even after all that they repeatedly failed to follow their own settlements and court orders for years, just refusing to grant forgiveness. So even though a lot of forgiveness was technically already on the books, having a administration actually helping this process instead of actively trying to prevent it is a huge breath of fresh air. They also previously changed many terms in public service loan forgiveness to help it apply to more people and made lots of other positive changes that luckily the supreme court did not block. At least not yet.


  • Just to be clear, it’s not like a protective order for their person (though Jack Smith and others already have to travel with large security details because of the stochastic terrorism of Trump and most other Republicans), but a protective order of the evidence in the case given through discovery. So before the trial the prosecution has to show the defense all the evidence it has, which is called discovery. The prosecutors here are concerned that Trump is going to leak that info in some way, like witnesses lists, so that his supporters can harass and intimidate witnesses on his behalf. Or maybe even bribe them or something. What the prosecution is seeking is a protective order to prevent trump from releasing publicly any evidence that they obtain through discovery. Normally there wouldn’t be anything preventing a defendent from releasing that info, though most sane people wouldn’t generally want their incriminating evidence released publicly. If the order is granted and Trump violates it, he could theoretically be held in contempt and go to prison where he no longer can violate the order.


  • Exactly, Putin is constantly describing Europe as a vassal state of the US and tries to drive wedges between European and US cooperation, especially when our interests clearly align like in Ukraine. In fact the biggest per capita contributions to the Ukrainian defense effort come from European countries. It’s not like the US dragged Europe kicking and screaming to defend Ukraine, it’s pretty obviously even more important for Europe than for the US. This is why so many European countries like Germany have made major ramp ups in military spending and defense. All these calls about Europe being a vassal state are basically telling Europe to shoot itself in the foot to show how independent it is. If they want a more unified foreign policy, the answer isn’t stopping cooperation with the US and the defense of Ukraine. The answer is they have to work on more cooperation with their own member states so they can speak with a unified voice. Something Russia in reality actively works to prevent, using influence in countries like Hungary to drive a wedge in the EU and preventing unified foreign policy in the EU and from them becoming a more independent player.


  • This is a huge bummer. I wonder if maybe a consortium of some of the biggest library systems in the country could band together and make a platform that they control to use instead. It seems like libby/overdrive is only going to keep getting worse and more predatory.

    Something has to be done to regulate these leveraged buyouts too. Providing no real value and then just vandalizing and destroying companies.


  • They don’t need amendments to the constitution to adjust the supreme court, only laws, as long as those laws don’t conflict with what is written in the constitution. For instance, the reason we have nine justices and not eight or ten, is because of a law passed by congress. So congress can change that anytime it feels like. The number of justices is not set in the constitution. There’s actually very few details about the supreme court in the constitution, so congress has a lot of latitude to regulate and make changes to the supreme court.

    One thing that’s popular that would likely require a constitutional amendment though is term limits for justices, because the lifetime appointment is a detail specified in the constitution. So basically, congress regulates and sets up the court system through passed laws, most changes to the court system including to the supreme court don’t need constitutional ammendments. Alito is talking out of his ass when he says congress can’t do this.

    Unfortunately Congress’s only real recourse if the supreme court declares themself above the law and ignores congress like Alito wants them to, would be for congress to get off its butt and impeach some justices, which seems very unlikely. I would hope Roberts and at least one other would want to avoid a constitutional crisis though that would risk a total collapse of supreme court authority, but I’m not sure. The corruption seems to run deep with a number of them.



  • Yeah the article is a little rosy and overstating things by using words like carbon free which obviously isn’t the case, but fta:

    “Retrofitting a propeller plane with fuel cells and liquid-hydrogen tanks would result in a nearly 90 percent reduction in life-cycle emissions, compared to the original aircraft, according to the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT), a nonprofit think tank. That’s assuming the hydrogen is made using only renewable electricity —not with fossil fuels, the way the vast majority of hydrogen is produced today.”

    Battery powered commercial airplanes are a pipe dream right now, batteries are just too heavy for anything practical with flight. Solid state batteries might reduce it some but probably not enough. We’ll still need some kind of mass long distance travel in the future. Once they’re able to scale up renewable energy sources even more, hydrogen made with those sources could become an important storage medium for getting that energy to power planes or other things where batteries are impractical. So it makes sense to at least be exploring these technologies.

    Even for right now natural gas has a higher energy to co2 ratio than other types of fuels, so it’s possible there may even be a current efficiency boost, though I don’t know that off the top of my head.

    If every new technology was attacked saying, well it’s not perfect right now so don’t even bother trying, we wouldn’t have electric cars or all sorts of other innovations. I agree with you on the article though, I hate when they say stuff like “look we have carbon free airplanes now” when obviously we don’t.


  • Understandably people have been pretty aghast that Barr is saying all this stuff while being non committal about whether he would still vote for Trump. I wonder if it’s possible he’s avoiding saying that publicly for now in case he’s called on to testify in the triak. If he’s on the record on public TV saying he’s voting against trump, possible on the witness stand on cross examination trump’s lawyers could try and argue he’s partisan and his statements are politically motivated. Or he’s a coward I don’t know, just a thought.





  • As much as I hate meta/Facebook, don’t get me wrong, I don’t think these laws are right either. I don’t think you should have to pay to simply provide a link to another website. This runs antithetical to the whole idea and structure of the internet. If they’re taking the article or photos and republishing it on their own website that’s different and they obviously should have to pay for that. The linking to news sites is actually good for news sites though and increases profit for publishers by driving traffic to their sites, it doesn’t take profit away. The news publishers are free to have a paywall or put advertisements on the page being linked too and get revenue from that. This feels like publishers wanting to eat their cake and keep it too, they want big search engines and social media to link to their articles so the news sites get traffic and revenue from advertisements/subscriptions, and then they also want the search engines who created that traffic in the first place to pay for linking too? I think publishers are shooting themselves in the foot in the long run lobbying for these laws all for a pittance of cash.

    This idea could also affect things like lemmy too eventually and make them impossible, if you need to pay to simply provide a link to a news story or other website.


  • Until recently the US preventative services task force had been recommendeding low dose aspirin to petty much everyone over a certain age for prevention of heart disease and ischemic stroke. They recently ended this catch-all recommendation for everyone above a certain age, but there are many situations in which a low dose aspirin is still going to be helpful for certain people. Low dose aspirin has a low risk of major side effects, but if what it’s preventing is also rare then it might not be worth it for everyone. So it’s no longer a catch all recommendation above a certain age, the decision needs to be made in conjunction with a patient’s doctor based on their particular health situation and risk benefit balance. Age is another thing that may affect this balance, for instance this study was specifically looking at older adults where bleeding events are more common than in younger or middle aged adults, and shouldn’t be generalized to all adults.

    For secondary prevention (like someone already has evidence of heart disease or a past ischemic stroke), there’s volumes of evidence showing it’s benefit. Sometimes even two different antiplatelet drugs, like aspirin and clopidogrel, are even used together.


  • Very important stipulation here just so it’s clear before everyone chucks their aspirin in the trash, this is a study on just giving low dose aspirin to people who are totally healthy. We know aspirin is helpful for ischemic stroke prevention for people who are at higher risk for strokes, including people who’ve had an ischemic stroke before. Many people have risk factors for stroke and cardiac disease. People should talk to their doctor about whether or not they should be on a low dose aspirin.