Skip Navigation

InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)C

cynar

@ cynar @lemmy.world

Posts
2
Comments
462
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • A new study found adaptive traffic signals powered by big data reduced peak-hour travel times by 11% in China’s 100 most congested cities – saving 31.73 million tonnes of CO₂ annually.

    Jump

  • Interestingly, some lights are set up to deliberately slow down speeders. If you are above the speed limit, they turn red, just to slow things back down. Unfortunately, most of the people involved never put cause and effect together.

  • Removed

    Entropy

    Jump

  • Entropy is the tendency of systems to move from order to disorder. It's intrinsically tied to energy and its flow.

    Basically, if I gave you a box with 1000 dice, all showing 6, bar 1 showing 5, it has an extremely low entropy. If you shake it, the entropy will tend to increase. You'll likely get an event spread of values. This is a high entropy state. The chances of all 6s is tiny, and gets everything smaller as the number of options gets bigger.

    Gas expanding into a space is another example. The entropy of the gas increases as it expands.

    The rule of thumb is that entropy always increases in a closed system. If it seems to decrease, you've likely missed something.

    Increasing entropy can also be harnessed for energy. An expanding gas can drive a piston upwards. We can even work out the amount of energy that can be extracted from a system, based on the entropy change involved.

    That about covers the basics of entropy, without diving into the maths.

  • Removed

    Do people in America actually believe Vaccine cause autism or is bad for health? Or Is it a joke?

    Jump

  • More like he pivoted to the money when his scientific work was dismantled.

    At the time he was selling a vaccination. He was willing to throw (autistic) children under the bus to make more money off of it. The fact he was then willing to jump on the anti Vax train doesn't surprise me.

  • If only other cables were this easy to make, like HDMI :(

    Jump

  • Back-coiling is a game changer. Every other coil is reversed, leaving a net zero in coils. It just pulls out straight.

  • If only other cables were this easy to make, like HDMI :(

    Jump

  • The engineering requirements are also a lot higher. It's the difference between a nut, bolt and spanner, compared to a welding machine.

  • Removed

    Do people in America actually believe Vaccine cause autism or is bad for health? Or Is it a joke?

    Jump

  • Wakefield wasn't anti Vax. He was against the MMR jab specifically. He was also invested in one of the alternative vaccines, and faked data to make money.

    His (false) message got garbled crossing the pond, and gained traction in America as a general anti Vax movement.

  • Observer

    Jump

  • What is a particle, what is a wave? QM entities are neither. They are a 3rd thing. A quantised wave is the term my university professor used as a short hand. The nature of that wave is described by the Schroeder equation + its constraints. Certain interactions will bound it heavily, and so make it look particle like, others emphasise the wavelike properties.

    You require the maths to actually do anything useful with it, but not to get the basic concepts. It's no different to the rest of physics, in that. E.g. you can understand the concepts of orbital mechanics, without being able to calculate them.

  • Observer

    Jump

  • While I'm rusty as hell, my physics degree was actually focused quite a lot into QM.

    It's perfectly possible to get a reasonable understanding of what's going on without going head first into the maths. There are definitely areas however that we don't have a good conceptual model of yet. For those, the maths definitely leads the way. 90% of QM is comprehendible with relatively little maths. You only need the maths when you start to get predictive.

  • Observer

    Jump

  • QM entities are quantised waves. You can make a wave look very close to a particle quite easily, a particle can never behave like a wave.

    Dumping the mental short hand of particle interactions is one of the main reasons most people can't get their heads around it.

  • Observer

    Jump

  • So why are you so upset with us trying to fix it?

    I personally find the anti science, anti learning crowd has gone from amusing, to annoying, to terrifying.

  • Observer

    Jump

  • I disagree with it being hard to comprehend. The maths is an absolute bitch, but the basic premise is fairly simple. Everything is (quantised) waves. The rest clicks, once you get your brain to accept this. Everything else is a consequence. Those consequences can lead you down deep dark tunnels, filled with evil maths and mind bending results, but the basic idea is simple.

    I have a bit of an issue with memes that are actively misleading.

  • Observer

    Jump

  • That is part of what bugs me.

    Quantum mechanics isn't magical or unknowable. It's just an area of physics where some of our base assumptions/approximations break down. It's not even that hard to wrap your head around, it just seems most people don't want to try.

  • Observer

    Jump

  • So was "Donald Trump for president" and look at the damage that has caused.

  • Observer

    Jump

  • Perception and observation are different things. Air molecules can be "observers" when looking at electrons etc.

  • Observer

    Jump

  • This sort of comic always bugs me. Observation in QM is not the same as observation in layman terms.

    Best think of it as hit it and watch the pieces fly. When you get small enough, you can't approximate out the impacts. It's akin to studying road traffic by sending an overloaded freight truck the wrong way and counting tires that hit the verge. It might also affect the current traffic's motion.

  • France runs fusion reactor for record 22 minutes

    Jump

  • That's part of the reason a moon base could be viable. The sun outputs a reasonable amount of helium 3, which is great for fusion reactions. Unfortunately it tends to sit at the top of our atmosphere and get blown away again. On the moon, it gets captured by the dust in collectable quantities.

  • France runs fusion reactor for record 22 minutes

    Jump

  • I never said it wasn't useful, just a very low efficiency reactor. Then again, if it was better, it would burn out faster, which would be bad for life on earth.

  • France runs fusion reactor for record 22 minutes

    Jump

  • Even the core only has an output of 200-300W/m^3.

  • France runs fusion reactor for record 22 minutes

    Jump

  • The amusing thing is that the sun is actually quite a shit fusion reactor. It's power per unit volume is tiny. It just makes it up in sheer volume. A solar level fusion reactor would be almost completely useless to us. Instead we need to go far beyond the sun's output to just be viable.

    It's like describing one of the mega mining dumper trucks as an "artificial mule".