“clicks”*

*latest fad

Eventually, my car from 2010 is going to bite the dust and I’m going to have to get a newer one and I’m preemptively pissed about it. I’ve got an ebike and use it when I can, but I live somewhere that it isn’t practical to use for all transportation and I need a car, unfortunately. 2008-2014 or so is the technological sweet spot for me: my car has power windows, remote start for when it’s 15° outside, and Bluetooth for my music. It also has no screens, no “assistive technology,” all analog controls, and can be worked on by a normal mechanic without special software. It sucks so much that all this shitty tech that makes cars less safe to drive and harder to use/work on is now mandatory. On the other hand, my wife drives an ancient Toyota pick up truck that’s older than I am, and it doesn’t even have power steering. It’s also a nightmare to drive, but one of a different kind (though you can disassemble the whole thing with a screwdriver and socket wrench, which is neat).

reign down

Extremely well, actually. I’ve got one student with a large amount of family in Iran (plus it’s a class on rhetoric and media), so it’s been on our joint radar for a while. A few of them had seen it, but most hadn’t. They’re still broadly critical of the Iranian regime (fine) but the contrast between the communication coming out of Iran and the communication coming out of the US regime–along with the behavior of each–is pretty apparent. They mostly landed on “this would be an amazing piece of propaganda if only Americans could read,” which is a very good take in my opinion. They pretty much all already thought the US was a dogshit empire though because they’re smart kids.

Going to make all my students listen to me read this out loud tomorrow.

It won’t pay for it, but it’ll service the debt they had to go into in order to pay for it for a while. Cutting your grocery bill to free up money to make your payment on your new Cybertruck.

Oh yeah, it’s quagmire time!

Ah, I misunderstood your question. Yeah, most of the overall energy goes into heat for sure. Since the accelerator is using massive particles in its collision, it’s probably not right to say that energy is being transformed into mass: the total mass of the system is conserved, and you’re just “whacking” an antiproton off the iridium nucleus via inelastic scattering. You could get that kind of transfer if the colliding particle were massless (like a photon), which happens with cosmic rays sometimes. It’s harder to control in a number of different respects though, and you’re not guaranteed to get the kind of anti-particle you want. By using a proton, we can guarantee we get the flavor we want, since all the quantum numbers are also conserved.

If you mean does it cost energy to produce it, then yes an incredible amount. The only way we have of making it is to smash particles together in an accelerator at enormous speeds. The LHC at CERN uses protons and, for this kind of experiment, probably some kind of dense metallic atom like iridium (though I don’t know off the top of my head). That takes a truly incredible amount of power to run–something like half the power consumption of a small city. That energy doesn’t disappear of course: some of it goes into the beam, but most of it goes into operating the magnets used in acceleration. The actual creation of the particle anti-particle pair conserves energy just like everything else.

Generally yes, they’re always produced in pairs (which is why it’s so hard to get them to stick around, as they tend to more-or-less instantly annihilate each other). There are some exotic exceptions to this mostly involving neutrinos that we don’t fully understand yet, but this kind of an experiment will generally get you a particle/anti-particle pair. When you depict the process with a Feynman diagram, the symmetry is really evident, which is part of why they’re such great representational tools for this kind of interaction.

To do this the model necessarily needs a deep and true understanding of the world as it is.

Incredible

Man, a First Law adaptation would slap if done well.

I definitely wouldn’t consider Graham Lineham a TERF. He’s just a misogynist ghoul who also hates trans people.

Definitely a sign that the war is already won.

It would be so fucking funny if Amerael attacking Iran was the small domino that eventually resulted in the collapse of the global fossil fuel industry.

The trailer looks more anti-AI to me. It also looks like pretty bonkers fun.

Markwayne Mullin

Oklahoma

Yep.