OkayPhysicist

How recently were you in Vegas? I was blown away by how little smoking there was post pandemic even compared to 2018. Like, most casinos no longer reek of cigarette smoke. I'm sure that's partly explained by better air circulation installed to reopen sooner post-COVID, and probably taking the closures as an opportunity to replace some seriously steeped carpet, but the amount of smoking was way, way down. It used to be if you saddled up to craps table, at least one, if not two people would be actively smoking. Now you can look around the entire pit and not even see one. The combination of anti-smoking measures in broader society, and the uptake of vaping has wildly reduced the amount of smokers. We're talking a 60% reduction since 2000, and that was after the trend was already heading that direction.

Compare that to most places internationally, and the contrast is stark. The US has less than half the cigarette consumption per capita than the EU, with only the U.K., Norway, and Sweden having lower rates. China has a similar rate to the EU.

Just to drive that point home a little harder, the state with the highest number of smokers is West Virginia, sitting at 21% (the national average is 9.6%). That would be middle of the pack in Europe, similar to Italy.

That's just as true in real court.

If you have an absolute lay-up of a case (something like "my company fired me because I got pregnant, and lied about by pretending to change their mind about something they'd already approved of"), then you're going to win the arbitration case. Well, more accurately, the company's going to throw a pile of cash at you before it even gets that far, because they screwed up and the first time legal hears about it, the first words out of their mouth will be "you did fucking what?".

It is nigh impossible to cleanly fire an employee from the time you learn they're pregnant, to like a year after they come back from maternity leave. Unless they broke into your office and took a shit on the desk, the default opinion of every judge is going to be "I read about this exact scenario while studying for the bar, literally textbook".

Arbitration is not nearly as one-sided as people make it out to be. It's much more about making sure that the case can be completed quickly than it is about the company winning.

Smart people know that "the law" has little to do with morality, and vastly more to do with power. When evil people are in power, they make evil laws, and when you have evil laws, it is immoral to follow them. Following the law is never moral in it's own right; Legality, even in the best of times, only strives to shadow morality.

I've never met someone who wouldn't prefer to change the law rather than be forced to violate them. But only cowards and the intellectually incapable think that supporting the enforcement of an unjust law while campaigning for it's fix is someone a morally superior stance.

And to answer why America? Because if we can't do it, nobody can. What kind of yellow-bellied, unpatriotic attitude can you have to think "oh, let's just let some better country solve the problems we've created in the world through prolonged geopolitical control over the 20th century". Fuck that. If America is great enough to conquer the world, it should be great enough to solve the side effects that come with it.

If you want to ignore legality, then you need to keep a rifle for every man, woman, and child in your home strong enough to shoulder one, and enough black-tips to ensure the cops bring a chaplain along for the raid.

The photon travels a path, with a probability distribution that results in behavior that is identical to a wave, complete with interference. That's wave like.

> There is no interference pattern from a single photon as it hits the registration device at a particular place. But collect a big enough sequence of single photon measurements and it emerges.

The same could be said of the entirely unsurprising many-photon case. The individual photons aren't demonstrating the interference pattern, just the "big enough sequence of single photon measurements". Again, that's not the interesting part of the double slit experiment. We're perfectly used to the concept of a collection of many interacting particles having wave-like properties.

The double slit experiment has non-interacting photons demonstrating wave-like properties.

The whole point of the double slit experiment is that you get the interference patterns you'd expect from double slits, even when there is no more than one photon in the chamber at a time. One photon enters, one photon hits the detector, it's probability distribution suggests it's being interfered with.

The one-two punch of the photoelectric effect and the double slit experiment (the classic first two labs of QM) force you to accept that photons behave both like waves, and like particles.

Oh yeah, don't get me wrong "bargain-bin videogame" is a wild step up from "accidental amorphous horrors that defy description". It just jumped out to me as looking unusually bad compared to the other samples they provided. The stained glass deer, for example, was awesome.

That entire clip looks like it's straight out of a complete bargain-bin videogame. The weird smoothness of the ride, the pivot in mid air, the wings apparently don't have collision with the poles they fly past.

Definitely wouldn't have been one of my picks to show off my fancy new model.

Specifically, non-violent protest works by demonstrating your ability to organize large groups of people in defiance of obstacles put in your way, very much including the law. It carries with it the implied threat that some non-trivial subset of that group would take up arms if asked.

Legal, peaceful protests really only demonstrate that your opinion has some level of popularity. Which can be useful for winning over the merely apathetic, but it does nothing against the outright opposed.

Sure, but the probability of getting "4" as opposed to some number that might as as well be equivalent to latter as far as a causal reader is concerned is insanely small.

I think pass two is intended to introduce additional regions of concavity (mostly by replacing straight lines), which in effect introduces a bunch of inflection points, helping creating the organic "spiny" feel, as opposed to a "bubbly" feel. Without it, the resulting caves look a bit more like if you spilled liquid on a waxy surface, and less like thorns.

If you go into the javascript and replace "for(let p=0;p<3;p++)" with "for(let p=1;p<3;p++)", and then re-execute the block in the console, you can generate run through a bunch of generations without step 2

If he's the GABA Labs guy, then I'm pretty sure the pitch was basically designer GHB. Which really is a fantastic substitute for alcohol. Very similar intoxication effects, with far fewer downsides. My buddy took that approach to still be able to enjoy social drinking despite gastrointestinal issues preventing the consumption of alcohol. No hangovers, either.

GHB gets a bad rep because it's extremely potent (imagine the same intoxication level as a shot of liquor from 1/3ml of GHB), so it gets used to drug people surreptitiously, and most people aren't good at controlling dosages of liquids like that. Sold pre-diluted, it really wouldn't be much different safety-wise than alcohol.

They did make peace with the US. It was a whole thing, papers were signed, agreements were made, they pinky-promised to not make nukes, everyone walked away happy. Except the Israelis, who don't like their regional power status being challenged, and apparently Trump, who... didn't like that the Iranians gave up on their nuclear armament program?

Either way, the US and Iran were at peace right up until we decided to pull out of our disarmament treaty with them. And then executed a decapitation strike against them.