a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment by Devac
Devac  ·  1260 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: A sober discussion: Aliens on Earth

It gets better: I emailed some of this to an old lecturer to have someone sanity-check my interpretation.





kleinbl00  ·  1259 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Hey if you end up discovering faster-than-light travel it was worth it man

Devac  ·  1259 days ago  ·  link  ·  

So, the good thing is that I'm non-trivially wrong. Essentially, I wanted to see what would happen with the spacetime curvature around tachyon-containing bubble of elecromagnetic field. My messup is very mathy, but traces to a discontinuity at the spacetime point at which tachyon originates.

Oh well. My bad, learned something, it was fun. I still think there's a lot of potential here, though.

kleinbl00  ·  1259 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Yeah that discontinuity is the big ugly problem as I understand it.

At least I ain't asking the forest service to move the moon.

am_Unition  ·  1259 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Thank Christ Gohmert (R-TX) is there to out-science scientists. I never thought of finding over 71 brazillion gillapetbytes of fuel for the 359 googellian Watt-erages of energy to boost Earth to a 1.01 AU semi-major axis!

Seriously, the Trump energy budget of a nuke vs. a hurricane was wayyyyy less of a discrepancy than Gohmert's (lack of) understanding here.

It's sad that lawyers constitute such a huge percentage of Congress. Maybe scientists should start flexin'.

Devac  ·  1258 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Wow, I didn't get kb's comment until reading this. It's certainly something to make up plans like that. He's like an exquisitely dim-witted Bond villain.

    It's sad that lawyers constitute such a huge percentage of Congress. Maybe scientists should start flexin'.

You, and many many others, were saying that since that March for Science. There's too much inertia, not unlike with the Moon.

kleinbl00  ·  1258 days ago  ·  link  ·  

My wife showed me a thread in one of the Facebook groups she subscribes to as a naturopathic physician. There were maybe 50 people worrying over the fact that keys stick to them now. There were only a couple people going "did you ever try sticking your keys to your body... before you were vaccinated?" There were zero people going "have you checked to see if your keys are, in fact, magnetic? With like... a magnet?"

One of the two political parties of the most powerful nation on earth has evolved to embrace the following platform:

- knowledge is suspect

- science is false

- infectious vulnerability is virtue

- social protections are evil

And granted, once you've started down that road it's really hard to turn off of it. But it's also really hard to recruit new members to your cause.

b_b  ·  1258 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Is he that stupid or do you think he was trolling? One could read the subtext to be, "Climate change is a fantasy so here's a fantasy solution." I am probably giving him too much credit, but I just can't believe that he's ever asked a question whose premise stipulates that climate change is even a thing.

goobster  ·  1258 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Oh no... Gohmert is dumb as shit. Here's an article from FIVE YEARS AGO showing just some of the batshit crazy things he has said.

Here's another - entirely different - list from 2013. This is when he said that Texas native caribou would go on dates next to the oil pipeline for the warmth...

The worst part? He knows he's the dumbest man in Congress.