bric

joined 2 years ago
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[–] bric@lemm.ee 15 points 2 years ago

Now I kind of want to know what that tastes like. Like a big part of what we consider "spicy" is that it triggers the "very hot" sensors in our mouth without triggering the "warm" sensors that are usually triggered with it, so you end up with a combination that's usually impossible. Mint+ chilli powder would be like the next level of that, triggering both hot and cold at the same time

[–] bric@lemm.ee 3 points 2 years ago

These are the sorts of things where the line between zero and practically zero gets blurry, so people feel the need to emphasize that it might not be zero. Like, the chances of me finding a winning lottery ticket on the street without buying one might not technically zero, but the odds are low enough that not only is it not going to be part of my financial plan, but I also don't feel the need to justify why.

The odds of hyper drive aliens being on earth is zero. There might be an error bar on that number, but it doesn't practically matter

[–] bric@lemm.ee 1 points 2 years ago

Or the laws of physics are just the same between all of the multiverses, and it's impossible to travel between them. Maybe the walls between universes are so thick that nobody will ever even detect that the other universes are there at all, making it basically the same as there being no other universes in the first place

[–] bric@lemm.ee 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

Is there a similar strong will or intention in how a multiverse evolves?

Well, if we're talking about the many worlds theorem, then probably yeah, because both worlds came from a common starting point and evolve together. Like, imagine that I flip 100 quantum coins, creating 2^100 (1,267,650,600,228,229,401,496,703,205,376) universes in a multiverse. Every universe will be different, but the vast majority of them will have roughly 50 heads and roughly 50 tails. 7% of them will even have exactly 50 heads. There is one universe where every coin flip lands on heads, but it's only one universe among nonillions, you could spend your entire life searching universes and never find it. None of the universes are the same, but most of them are so boringly similar that you couldn't tell them apart. It's the central limit theorem, that lots of random events trend towards uniformity

nobody really knows, but if I had to guess I'd say that's probably the way our universe would be, our universe might technically be different from the one next to it, but it would only be different by a single electron on mars that decided to move an atom to the left. There might be a universe somewhere where all of the particles in a lotto wheel quantum tunnel to make the winning number be your number, but it would be outnumbered an infinity to one by universes where that didn't happen and it looks exactly the same as ours.

[–] bric@lemm.ee 9 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Yep! Pi might be a "Normal" irrational number, which is a really poorly named classification that basically means that the "random" arrangement of numbers in pi isn't weighted and so you'll end up with 1 in 10 digits being 1, and that that will be true for all bases. We're kind of at a point where we think Pi is "normal", but we can't prove it.

If it is "normal" though, then that means that you could find any arbitrary sequence of numbers inside of pi, somewhere. Meaning that in base 128, pi would contain the ascii sequence for every book ever written, every book that ever will be written, every book that could be written, the accurate date of your death, and anything else you could ever imagine. Again, that's not proven, but we think it's the case

[–] bric@lemm.ee 1 points 2 years ago

right, but some movies show universes with very different pasts that still show a weirdly similar present. As you said, the smallest of things in the past should cause the present to be even more different, but in many movies that's not the case

[–] bric@lemm.ee 12 points 2 years ago

The part they're misremembering is that if you used 39 digits of pi as pi (not 45), it would be enough to calculate the circumference of the observable universe with a forward error of less than the width of a hydrogen atom (not the distance between 3)

[–] bric@lemm.ee 15 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Just to prioritize download in limited bandwidth cables. Like a neighborhood might get 2Gbps total, but instead of doing 1 down 1 up they instead do 1.8 down and .2 up, then split that amongst a bunch of houses.

[–] bric@lemm.ee 33 points 2 years ago

This is innovation though, an internet wide DRM would be quite an impressive technical feat. It's just not innovation built to benefit you and me, it's built to benefit Google's true customers, advertisers

[–] bric@lemm.ee 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

But what you're missing is that being vegetarian wouldn't be possible without the conveniences of our modern world. You're relying on plants that have been heavily modified to be more nutritious to humans, and you're relying on a variety that would have been difficult to find pre industrialization, and absolutely impossible to a hunter-gatherer. It's not meat company propaganda to realize that human's evolved to eat meat, it's evident in everything about our physiology. From an evolutionary point of view, even farming is startlingly recent, an industrial world economy hasn't even registered yet, so even though we're living in a modern world, we're still dealing with bodies that were built to hunt. That's why so many types of overeating are such big issues, this farmed abundance just isn't something that we evolved to deal with.

None of that takes away from the fact that vegetarianism is feasible and healthy today, I think that it's great that we've reached a point where we can survive without meat. All that I'm saying is that we need to recognize it for the modern luxury that it is, instead of saying that it was ever the norm

[–] bric@lemm.ee 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

Sure, nobody ate anything in the quantities that we eat today, but that doesn't mean it wasn't a crucial part of our diet. It's amazing that modern industrialized humans are able to get enough calories and protein from a diet of varied plants, but if you're a hunter gatherer you don't have the luxury of a variety of genetically modified protein rich plants, you need meat if you're going to grow. That's the niche we evolved to fill, it's why we have a highly acidic gut, a medium length digestive tract common in omnivores, and teeth designed to tear meat. It doesn't take a lot of meat to meet a person's protein requirements, the occasional successful hunt is enough, but without any they would die.

[–] bric@lemm.ee 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Yeah, that's why I specified US, there are plenty of places where it's more of a gradiant, or where left and right are just two of many options. although unfortunately fptp is the norm in most of the world. The US is unusually polarized even among fptp countries, but countries that have better voting systems that allow for more than two parties are the exception, not the norm.

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