And we should name a crater “Elizabeth Rose Halligan is a Poopypants.” Just because as the only indigenous people of the moon, we fucking can.
Annoying
Puzzling Lack
Physicists think they’ve resolved the proton size puzzle.
This story. Oof. They should have someone who understands quantum mechanics write about it. So many problems.
But quantum mechanics gives us a much more precise (albeit weirder) description. The electrons aren’t really orbiting the nucleus; they are technically waves that take on particle-like properties when we do an experiment to determine their position. While orbiting an atom, they exist in a superposition of states, both particle and wave, with a wave function encompassing all the probabilities of its position at once. A measurement will collapse the wave function, giving us the electron’s position. Make a series of such measurements and plot the various positions that result, and it will yield something akin to a fuzzy orbit-like pattern.
“They are technically waves….”
Nope. Electrons are not ordinary classical waves like ripples in water. They are quantum objects described by a wavefunction. That is a totally different thing. There is a quantum state in Hilbert space, represented in position space by a wavefunction, whose squared magnitude gives the probability density for finding the electron at different locations.
“Take on particle-like properties when we do an experiment….”
This is way too crude to be accurate. That suggests the electron was truly a wave and then becomes a particle only because we took a look at it. Quantum mechanics does not work that way. What it predicts is that measurements yield discrete, localized outcomes. That is different from saying the electron was previously just a classical wave. (It wasn’t.)
“While orbiting an atom….”
In modern quantum mechanics the whole point is that atomic electrons are not moving on definite classical orbits. They occupy orbitals, which are stationary quantum states with definite energy, angular momentum properties, and spatial probability distributions. Quantum state, not orbit.
“They exist in a superposition of states, both particle and wave….”
Not conceptually sound. “Particle” and “wave” are not usually the two states in a superposition. Superposition refers to combinations of quantum states such as different energy eigenstates, angular momentum states, spin states, or position states. Wave-particle duality is really not well described as “being in a superposition of wave and particle.” That doesn’t make a lot of sense.
“With a wave function encompassing all the probabilities of its position at once….”
That is imprecise. The wavefunction does not directly list probabilities. Its squared magnitude gives the probability density for position. More generally, the wavefunction encodes the probabilities for many possible measurement results, not just position.
“Make a series of such measurements and plot the various positions that result, and it will yield something akin to a fuzzy orbit-like pattern….”
This is misleading in two ways. First, repeated position measurements on the same electron do not reveal some hidden orbit. That’s just not how reality is, unfortunately. The measurements disturb the state. Second, what you recover from many measurements on many identically prepared atoms is the orbital probability distribution, not an orbit-like path. It is not revealing of a blurred trajectory around the nucleus. It is a cloud-like spatial distribution characteristic of the quantum state.
My corrected, accurate version of that portion would read:
“Quantum mechanics replaces the antiquated picture of electrons orbiting the nucleus like planets orbiting the sun. In the quantum way of doing things, an electron in an atom is described by a wavefunction, which encodes the possible outcomes of measurements and their probabilities. Bound electrons occupy orbitals, which are standing-wave-like quantum states with discrete energies. These orbitals are not paths through space. They are stationary state descriptions whose squared magnitude gives the probability density for finding the electron at different locations. When a position measurement is performed, the electron is detected at a particular place as a localized event. Repeating the experiment across many identically prepared systems does not reveal a smeared-out orbit, but rather the characteristic spatial probability pattern of the orbital. The electron therefore does not fit neatly into the classical categories of either a tiny orbiting particle or a literal extended wave. Instead, it is a quantum object with behavior that shows aspects of both, depending on how it is probed.
If you measure position across many identically-prepared atoms and plot the results, you recover the orbital’s probability distribution, which looks like a cloud or density pattern, not a fuzzy track traced out by an electron in orbit.”
They Excel
Have you met Gen Z? I’d say that’s accurate. They are terrified of everything, including the outside, sex, each other, and any form of confrontation.
They only thing they don’t seem petrified of is being giant loser weak-ass dipshits. At that, they excel.
No Validity
Anyone who says generative AI is a “plagiarism machine” should be immediately discounted as they know nothing and understand nothing. Their opinion is as valid as hippopotamus’s about Parcheesi.
Drama Mine
I think there is something to that. Epstein was a scumbag, but that doesn’t explain the extreme focus on him. There are tons of other louts and criminals out there, some far worse.
For many women, Epstein is a dark fantasy figure — Christian Grey in the real world. It’s related to the “belief” that many women have that they are always on the verge of being kidnapped from the Target parking lot and then sex-trafficked. It’s a dream of being so alluring, so gorgeous, that a man or group of men just cannot help but do horrible things to you. And before you criticize me, take a look at how many women admit to having rape fantasies1. And then realize that many people lie on surveys, so it’s probably a lot more than that who actually do.
That said, some of the dancing is decent.
Not Walter White
Where I grew up, the biggest thugs got with the most women by far. It wasn’t even close. Hell, I got with more women after I broke bad.
It’s just a fact of life.
Scared Of
How to stop being scared of men.
This is a great example of a woman interacting with men who are almost all going to be weirdos, creeps and clowns and then concluding all men are that way.
To be fair, at least she’s trying to change her ideas and perceptions. Most never even attempt that. She deserves some real credit for that.
As one commenter said, “‘All I do is hang out in a garbage dump. Why is the world just full of so much garbage?'” And the thing is, this is what most women do.
Men need to (and are trained to) control their aggression. Likewise, women should be taught to control their excessive neuroticism. But this is considered out of bounds to express, though it should not be. Women need this acculturation just as much as men need to be educated on how to rein in aggressive tendencies.
False Acc
Contrary to feminist propaganda, women do in fact lodge quite a lot of false accusations when it’s advantageous for them to do so. Because, duh, they are are human and that is their leverage. People exercise power where they think they possess it.
The best way to avoid those is to not be anywhere or do anything where that could occur. Which means good men will act in accordance with that, and women will only have experiences with the bad ones who do not care about social niceties. Pretty predictable end result of consensual sex between grown-ass adults being de facto criminalized by “feminists” IMO — and of all men being branded as rapist predators for being attracted to attractive women.
Strait Up
Well, yeah, the Strait of Hormuz has extremely strong currents which makes it difficult to effectively mine. This is not some failure of Iran. This is just a natural feature of a strait like that. No one knows where those mines are now and probably never will.
New Golden Rule
If you let a buncha feral third worlders into your country, you’re gonna have a bad time.
Real Wrong
This is not really (heh) correct. At the least, it’s lazy thinking. But truly, it’s just wrong enough to seem pat and true to Mastodon types but is even more misleading than the supposedly-confusing ideas it’s attempting to illuminate.
The problem is that complex numbers are not secretly just real numbers. Though they are a larger algebraic system that can be faithfully represented using real pairs or special real matrices, the posts above confuse the fact that you can represent complex numbers using real-number machinery with the incorrect idea that complex numbers are truly nothing but ordinary real numbers. A metaphor that perhaps this doof could understand: GPS coordinates are not the city. You can encode every place in a city with two numbers, but the city is not secretly just a system of coordinates. The coordinates are a way of keeping track of something else. And the same is the case here. A real pair or matrix model is a way of (only) encoding complex numbers, not a proof that complex numbers were ordinary reals all along. I mean, duh. If you’re not a dipshit.
So that part of the posts is 100% wrong. A representation is not the same thing as an identification. Encoding complex numbers as pairs or matrices does not somehow convert them back into the real numbers. All it shows is that the complex numbers can be realized as a structured extension built from real components.
And I know this at least partially because standard quantum mechanics requires complex numbers. There are indeed physics-equivalent reformulations using only real quantities, but these work only if you add extra structure that is basically smuggling in complex numbers by the back door (that don’t correspond to the world as it apparently is), so just reals is not enough.
I hate this typical Mastodon intellectual clownishness. So fucking worthless.
Chili’s
Anyone read this 49 day SSL expiration thing and think they would rather just retire?
Yes. It’s such a fucking clownish, useless idea that is going to make my life worse and many other people’s too for absolutely zero real-world security benefit.
The shit-for-brains set of doofuses who thought of this should be run out of the industry and be require to work at a Chili’s in Duluth until they expire from despair.
What a huge waste of time and resources that is going to lead to more security issues, not fewer.
Never Accept
That’s the same as clowns screaming, “Climate change is fake!” as they die in a climate-change-caused natural disaster.
The Screech
It is amazing to witness the BlueSky screechers caterwaul — meanwhile, we have AIs finding solutions to previously-unsolved math problems, discovering so many zero-days the results couldn’t even be released, and just generally doing all manner of useful shit.
There’s being a bit behind the times and there’s being a complete clown idiot. For some reason, the left has chosen the latter and then doubled down every day since.
Cropshare
Mostly agreed. I’ve of course personally never owned slaves, and my family has mostly been poor since forever. It’s doubtful anyone in my lineage going back hundreds of years had anything to do with slavery — my grandfather on my mom’s side in fact grew up a sharecropper in rural Georgia, which is just a step or two above being enslaved.
Western societies get a bad rap for colonialism because those who can attempt to extract resources from where those resources exist. While there were some genuine evils perpetrated, most often, though, the civilizations already present were even worse.