this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2025
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
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- The entire showerthought must be in the title
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- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
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If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
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Assuming the laws of physics still apply, work done is work done. You can improve efficiency, but that just means minimizing energy lost in the process. A boulder on top of a hill has X potential energy. Roll it down that hill, and that potential turns into kinetic energy that does work, like smashing a house at the base of the hill. If you move that boulder back to the top of the hill, the laws of thermodynamics say you need to put all that energy back into the boulder. Energy is always conserved. You have to do work to put the boulder back whether you use a bulldozer or a teleporter.
Even ignoring simple changes in altitude like this, you still have to consider momentum. We live on a big spinning rock. Let's assume you live at the equator. On your daily trip around the globe you are zipping along to the East, which seems like a constant to you, but it isn't. The direction East changes relative to the Sun depending on the time of day. At midnight, for example East is the same as the direction the Earth is moving in it's orbit. If the Earth were to suddenly disappear, you would be flung off along the Earth's orbit. At dawn, you are on the front of the planet in it's orbit and East is pointing towards the sun. If the Earth disappeared now, you would be flung off towards the sun. At noon East is pointing back along Earth's orbit and at sunset, it is pointing directly away from the Sun.
I'm rounding for convenience here. The Earth is about 24,000 miles in circumference at the equator. Since it spins once per day that means the surface and you are zipping along with it at about 1,000 miles per hour. Now, unless the warehouse teleporting your goods to you is very nearby, it will have a significantly different momentum. Let's say the warehouse is around 6,000 miles East of you. That puts it about a quarter of the way around the globe. When it's dawn for you, it's already noon for them. If the warehouse teleports something to you without accounting for that difference in momentum, the results would be dramatic to say the least.
Assume it is dawn at the warehouse. That means that their momentum is towards the sun at about 1,000 miles per hour. It's midnight for you so you are moving 1,000 miles per hour in the direction of Earth's orbit. When your product appears at your house, it is moving towards the ground at 1,000 miles per hour when it appears. If the warehouse were instead 6,000 miles West of you, then your shipments would appear and shoot through your roof at 1,000 miles per hour.
Similar things happen if you want to teleport to points North or South of you. As you move away from the equator, your relative velocity gets smaller and smaller the closer you get to the one of the poles. Someone standing at the North pole, for example, is spinning in place very quickly compared to someone at the equator who is whipping around the globe each day. If you teleport something from the equator to a point 6,000 miles due north of you, it will appear moving West at about 500 miles per hour because you are moving around the Earth at 1,000 miles per hour while the destination is only moving 500 miles per hour. Something teleported to the North pole from the equator will appear and fling off parallel to the ground at 1,000 miles per hour.
Yeah, really a lot of components in calculation of work.
And every component can be a separate research paper.
Good that I didn't try to articulate all of them.