fox [comrade/them]

Extremely common trip and fall hazard, frequently in the homes of old people with bad balance and fragile bones

It’s from a series Anne Weston at the Francis Crick Institute did. Scanning electron microscopy. The full series is pretty cool.

Firstly, a black hole isn’t an object, really. If you manage to compress enough mass in one place, gravity becomes the dominant force and the mass collapses into itself, eternally compressing and densifying. This is the singularity at the center of a black hole, and we use the term singularity because it’s describing a single unmeasurable point in spacetime.

Next point: high gravity curves space. Light only travels in straight lines if it can get away with it, so when light bends in space it’s because the space being traversed is deformed by gravity. Like, the Earth is, as far as it cares, going in a straight line that happens to curve back to where it started. If gravity is strong enough in a region, all possible “paths” through space become bent inwards to higher gravity. Like, even a perfectly straight line away from the black hole will be forced inwards again. That’s the event horizon, the region in space around the singularity where nothing can escape anymore: all paths go deeper into the black hole.

Third point: weird shit happens inside the event horizon. We’re well into Math now because we can’t actually see inside these things, but we can use math to theorize and describe the inside of a black hole. Basically, time and space switch places inside the event horizon. Because every possible direction you can move in only takes you deeper, that means the future is the singularity, and as you move forward in time you move closer in space to it.

So in net: they’re not really holes and they’re not really physical objects: they’re regions where every path in space is forced into going towards the singularity, which is itself infinitely small and infinitely dense.

Anyways, you can accurately calculate the precise size of the region. It’s called the Schwarzschild Radius, and it’s the size of the black hole that any particular amount of mass, if forced to collapse, would become. Turns out that if you calculate the size of the black hole that contains all of the mass and energy in the universe, it would be about the size of the universe, but not quite precisely. That’s all that’s been calculated.

The only places it seemed to work were those that were already established as the centers of capital and were thus benefiting from the expanding frontier of exploitation. Capitalism has run out of land and run out of people outside the imperial core to further exploit and so turns inwards to devour its once-beneficiaries. Internationally and especially in the global south it has served no purpose, ever, except to brutally oppress and exploit.

That’s crank nonsense unless you’re able to describe it with quantum electrodynamical equations that also accurately define gravity, and the whole point is that we cannot reconcile gravity and quantum physics yet.

It’s mostly the plants tbh, dietary fiber is frequently ignored in macro discussions but absolutely critical

It’s more that the lobster plan (long body) is really quite good in many niches, but the crab plan (wide body, no exposed tail) works better in more productive ecosystems that have more predators. So anything lobster shaped coming up from the deep mud will have to reduce its tail or get sniped by a fish

There’s very likely applications in algorithms that try to maximize resource usage while minimizing cost

Don’t conflate Israelis and Jews, that’s antisemitic

The pages are plain html so it’s just a couple KB per request. Much cheaper than loading an actual site.

F35s are basically a grift for the military-industrial complex. Developing them blew through every budget because putting the strategic needs of different operators and different environments on one airframe is dumb, and they need loads of parts constantly to keep the mill churning. As a desirable side effect, if the US decides to not let you use F35s any more, they can stop shipping parts and your fleet will quickly become nonfunctional.

If you stuffed that box with neutronium then:

1. Funny event: it’s so dense the Earth itself is basically a thin gas in comparison and it immediately falls through the floor, the ground, and the mantle to oscillate around in the core.

2. Funny other event: It’s so massive it dominates gravity nearby and everything within a couple of meters gets turned into Cool Physics from aggregating onto an incompressible box really fast and hard. Maybe the nearby atmosphere ignites from being compressed into plasma against the box.

3. Real physics step in and the neutronium immediately decompresses and the mass equivalent of an inland ocean in neutrons and angry high-energy high-mass decay products sterilizes everything through to the horizon with a gamma ray burst, also triggering massive seismic events from the blast as well as killing everything on Earth since the atmosphere is now radioactive and a lot thinner

The last record-holder, Strom Thurmond, would shit in a bucket in a coat room while keeping one foot in the Senate chamber and still talking. He was attempting, of course, to filibuster the Civil Rights Act.

The US isn’t even able to produce enough bombs for their proxy wars, never mind actually fighting peer powers

An island in Florida facing the Atlantic, Xi doesn’t need to do a thing that a hurricane won’t do first

Dr Angela Collier has done a video essay on why aliens won’t be silicon-based. She’s not a biologist but an astrophysicist but the focus of her video is mostly about how carbon chemistry and cosmic abundance is better suited to producing life.