Hilariously enough, the co-author quoted in this article co-authored over 70 papers in 2023. That’s well above the 60 paper/year metric they are using to determine what qualifies as “extremely productive”.

While I agree that academia puts far too much emphasis on quantity of publications rather than quality, this is a mind-numbing level of hypocrisy.

Unfortunately they were only ordered to draw a new map, which they did. So they did indeed “comply”. The court can’t tell them how to draw the map, only that it needs to be redrawn.

It’s not a particularly smart system

Oh! I had no idea Fedora was officially supporting Flatpaks these days. I used Fedora from when it was Fedora Core 3 in 2004 until about 2015. Since it was the distro I cut my teeth on, I assumed I was familiar, but it’s wild to think it’s been nearly a decade since I’ve used it…

I completely agree that they should come up with a unified way for managing packages that they officially support. But also, a few years ago, if things weren’t in the default package manager then we had to build them ourselves because they can’t be expected to do everything for us.

So I don’t think we killed the killer feature. I simply think people have more options these days (although I see how some might see this as more rope with which to hang themselves)

I’ll update my original post to clarify that I was wrong

I think there is a lot of beautiful wisdom in the bible that sticks with me, but usually it only comes out when I (way more often that I’d like) hear someone who claims to be Christian acting in a way that is completely antithetical to what is in the bible.

No. (Or maybe yes. See Edit)

Ultimately, you are the one that decided to install things outside of your distro’s package manager. If you don’t like what happens as a result… then don’t do that.

You are completely able to use the built-in package manager to achieve what we had “a few years ago”. If you want something that isn’t available in the package manager you can do what we did “a few years ago” and install it separately yourself (from source, flatpaks, snaps, appimage). Or you could become a package maintainer for that package and get it added as a package for your distro. It’s completely up to you and in no way different frmo what it was a few years ago.

Edit: after finding out from @mfat@lemdro.id that Fedora does in fact officially support Flatpak, I do indeed think that they could do better in how they support that.

Right, there are some legitimate reasons to not split everything by population or affiliation. This can end up destroying the voice that some isolated minority communities have.

It’s a super hard problem to find the best solution, but also super obvious when people are proposing shitty solutions for obviously immoral reasons. It would be a decent first step if we could just get to where we don’t have an obviously shitty, and ultimately unconstitutional, map

I’d be down with that, FartsWithAnAccent! But the constitution would have to be updated with that clause. Right now, it just says that they have to do a thing without specifying what happens if they don’t do that thing

Great bot! But please see the edit to my post

It’s unintuitive, but super cool! There’s a great video by Physics Girl and Veritasium that explain it better than I ever could here.

First, the wavelength of the laser (think of it as the “color” of the laser) is chosen such that the energy of the photons is just under the energy state of the atoms that you are trying to cool.

Now, when the atom is moving toward the source of the laser, this causes the atom to “see” a higher energy. This is called Doppler shift and is a very well-known effect in anything that emits waves and is moving. In fact, you’ve experienced it before when you hear a car horn – as it moves towards you it has a higher pitch and as it moves away from you it has a lower pitch.

So, for atoms moving toward the source the see the energy rise just enough to absorb the photon and move to a higher energy state. Inevitably, the atom will want to move to a lower energy state (as all matter does) and will end up ejecting a new photon in a random direction. In order to maintain the conservation of momentum, this means that the photon will likely be ejected in a way that counteracts the direction it was previously moving, effectively slowing it down. Since heat is a measure of how fast atoms are moving, this means that atom has cooled down.

For atoms moving away from the laser source, they are unable to absorb the photons because the Doppler shift acts in the opposite direction, and they are completely unable to absorb the photons.

So as a result of all this, it is possible to slow down atoms moving in a very specific direction, without affecting the other atoms. This means you can systematically slow atoms down which means you can systematically cool things down.

Edit: Here’s a piped link to the youtube video above in case you’re privacy-conscious, however, Dianna (aka Physics Girl) has been bed-ridden with Long COVID for a while now so it would be great if you could contribute to her Patreon in lieu of the ad revenue

Yup. They just kept submitting maps that were getting rejected for being unconstitutional and eventually the court just had to let it go because you can’t just not have an election and they couldn’t do anything else about it.

We need to add some kind of recourse to the rules. Something like “if you can’t put together a constitutional map by the deadline, then the minority party gets to submit one for consideration instead”.

1. It was theorized that light could be a wave way before the double slit experiment. Like, a century before. So no, it wasn’t “assumed light is 100%” quantized before that experiment.

2. Anything that is a wave can be cancelled, so this idea was baked right into the wave theory of light, they just didn’t have the ability to control light precisely enough to prove it until the double slit experiment. You don’t need quantum mechanics to explain wave theory, it just happened that the double slit experiment, while proving that light behaved like a wave, also showed other characteristics that it was also behaving in a quantized fashion. The fact that light is quantized into photons has nothing to do with the fact that they cancel so you really don’t need quantum mechanics to explain it. The reason light can be cancelled is exactly the same as every other thing in physics that behaves like a wave.

3. The word quantum comes from the word quantization not “quantify”. Those two words mean different things

4. Light is a wave. It also happens to be a particle. So the “existence of waves” is not a different subject. It’s exactly this subject

Edit: Love the snarky edit to a post full of being confidently wrong. I’m going to go engage with others. Good day, sir/ma’am!

I completely agree with your third point where you said “in most cases”.

It was your first two points trying to create an analogy with light that I was responding to

Neither EM wave interference nor noise cancelling headphones are quantum mechanics. It’s not nitpicking.

This is fundamentally not true.

Light is made of electromagnetic waves. If you can control the timing of those waves precisely enough, you can add another light with the opposite phase (an inverted wave) that will cancel out the other light.

This is what happens in the famous “double slit experiment”. It’s also the same principal as noise cancelling headphones albeit with sound pressure waves instead of EM waves.

Scientists have actually cooled atoms very close to absolute zero by shining a laser at them

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My man, this is nothing like an abused spouse, dubious fart

They’re both great!

I personally like Star Trek better because it’s the OG and has better world building.

I must be a weirdo because I actually preferred the Orville more in the first season when the focus was a bit more on the comedy, as that brought something new and hilarious to the table. In the later seasons, they shifted to what feels extremely similar to TNG, which made it less interesting for me, although I do still enjoy the story. The similarity isn’t just in the style or themes of the show, either… I remember seeing multiple episodes of the Orville with plot lines that directly correlated to specific TNG episodes.

The most important thing, though, is that we get more Sci-Fi on TV. The more the merrier!