observantTrapezium
@observantTrapezium@lemmy.ca
- Comment on The Mighty Hummingbird 2 weeks ago:
Not sure this statement is true if “more closely related” is understood as shorter combined time between the two species from their most recent common ancestor. Hummingbirds and brachiosaurs had a more recent common ancestor than brachiosaurs and triceratopses (albeit probably still quite close to the dawn of dinosaurs in the Late Triassic ), but the latter pair lived closer in time to the common ancestor of all dinosaurs (while hummingbirds are from the Oligocene).
- Comment on What's your favourite Star Trek theme? 2 months ago:
My top intro music shows: TNG, VOY, DS9, DIS, SNW, LD Honorable mention: ENT Top movie theme: First Contact
- Comment on Why does trump try to alienate black voters than expect them to vote for the dickhead? And why use Kamala's race as even a talking point let alone even a thought? 2 months ago:
Playing 4D chess /s
- Comment on perspective 3 months ago:
They are quite similar to electromagnetic waves, but also quite different. They are produced by masses accelerating (just like EM waves are produced by charges accelerating), and indeed cause orbital decay. But this orbital decay is only important in relativistic systems (so the Earth, which is orbiting the sun at 0.0001 the speed of light, is not going to fall into the sun because of gravitational waves).
- Comment on perspective 3 months ago:
See my response below to Captain Aggravated about how dilute those large stars are.
It’s an interesting question whether anybody would actually feel spaghettification 😁 I actually don’t know. You can use physics to calculate the proper time derivative of the tidal forces, but you need biology to define the start (and end…) of the process. My intuition says that it probably happens too fast, so once the tidal forces are strong enough to be perceptible, they grow strong enough to rip you apart before you realize (again, just a hunch).
- Comment on perspective 3 months ago:
Yes, but red supergiants differ from the sun in that their photospheres are extremely dilute and don’t have a sharp transition to the corona. I don’t know the details of this particular star but take Betelgeuse as an example (it’s probably not particularly large for this catrgory), it’s radius is ~640 the sun’s per Wikipedia, which gives a volume of ~260 million that of the sun. But it is only x15 times as massive as the sun, so on average ~20 million times less dense.
- Comment on perspective 3 months ago:
Yep, you got it right. The accretion disk is actually really flat. Those images are produced in simulations that take into account the curved (and very complex) paths light takes in the vicinity of a black hole. These images really depend on the angle between the line of sight and the disk.
- Comment on perspective 3 months ago:
In the case you are unlucky enough to encounter the black hole “heads on” and fall into it radially, the proper time timescale to spaghettification is the size of the event horizon divided by the speed of light. The most supermassive black holes will have a horizon of around one light day, so that’s what we’re working with, a matter of days. If you come in on the most tangential orbit possible though, I guess you’re buying some time but I’ve never heard that it’s supposed to take many years of proper time (I doubt that claim a little bit, but haven’t calculated myself).
- Comment on perspective 3 months ago:
Astrophysicist here. Yes, space is crazy, but interesting things to keep in mind:
- The size of a star is determined by something called the photosphere. With those extremely massive stars, you can be hundreds of millions of kilometres “inside” and not yet know it.
- Similar story with supermassive black holes, from the perspective of an astronaut falling in, they wouldn’t really be able to tell when they cross the horizon because the tidal forces there are very small (they will inevitably fall towards the centre and get spaghettified at some point)
- Comment on Epoch fail!!! 3 months ago:
Haha, that’s right. Immediate noticed that.
- Comment on What has he done to deserve this? 3 months ago:
I think younger people in Canada only know °F if their thermostat is set to it and they can’t or don’t bother to change. My stupid fridge is in Fahrenheit and that can’t be changed (even though the handbook shows the display in Celsius! A variation of the model is probably sold abroad).
I think Canada properly adopted Celsius, kilometres, litres and millilitres (at least here in Toronto), but all other metric units are the underdog. Even CBC, that is probably the only media outlet that tries to stick to metric will specify people’s height in feet and inches. Shameful.
- Submitted 4 months ago to [deleted] | 1 comment
- Comment on Irrational 5 months ago:
The premise here is completely wrong.
- Comment on Learn long and prosper: U of T’s Fisher Library becomes ‘eternal archive’ on Star Trek: Discovery 5 months ago:
On behalf of UofT, what an honour /s
It caught me by surprise. When they filmed the short trek some years ago there was a university-wide email about filming going on, but this time nothing.
Both DSC and SNW are filmed in Toronto, and we’ve seen landmarks from the city before (e.g. Aga Khan Museum, Ontario Place); and of course “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow” took place entirely in the city in the 2020s and featured it heavily.
- Comment on How is the hydrogen made? 7 months ago:
Hydrogen was made approximately 400,000 after the big bang in a process called recombination, as the universe cooled down enough for stable neutral atoms to exist.
- Comment on \_🫨_/ 7 months ago:
Egyptian hieroglyphs used to be painted, what we see now is usually (but not always) completely faded.
- Submitted 7 months ago to startrek@startrek.website | 7 comments
- Comment on Ultimate Chronological Star Trek Viewing Guide 8 months ago:
It’s interesting, but I don’t think viewing order has to be chronological. If someone is adamant about watching everything, I’d recommend they go by production order.
- Comment on Self Hosted Calendar 8 months ago:
Not sure it satisfies your requirements but I’m quite happy with Baïkal.
- Comment on Backup solutions 8 months ago:
Borg is great.
- Comment on ‘Star Trek: Discovery’ Season 5 To Debut With 2 Episodes On April 4 9 months ago:
Maybe fifth time’s a charm…
- Comment on Splitwise alternative 10 months ago:
Abrechnung is really good and actively developed and improving. The UI is already pretty satisfactory, and there’s also an API which is needed if for example you want to bulk-import a spreadsheet, for now you have to code it a bit.
- Comment on Joplin alternative needed 10 months ago:
Came here to say just that. The WebDAV synchronization target is great.
- Comment on What's your favorite note-taking application? 10 months ago:
Joplin as well, syching my 3 devices with the WebDAV option. I checked a few other options about a year ago and Joplin seemed the best.
- Comment on i made this to express a recent self-hosting experience. 11 months ago:
A mid-late 24th century Starfleet runabout?
- Comment on Good free TTS (text-to-speech) options? 1 year ago:
Piper is my choice. Very easy to use from the command line, fairly good sounding voices. Prior to that, for years (decades?) I used espeak-ng, had a very robotic voice but articulated almost everything very clearly, and I got used to it so didn’t actually mind.
- Comment on PasswordManagement: which one of these options would you choose? 1 year ago:
I’m very happy with self-hosted Vaultwarden.
- Comment on What do you prefer for a self hosted calendar? 1 year ago:
Baikal is lean and great. I use it and sync to my Thunderbird (using the TbSync extension) and Android phone (using DAVx⁵).
- Comment on They also sound like the computer... 1 year ago:
Majel Barrett played both Nurse Chapel and Number One in the original series, but these two actresses in SNW look nothing alike.
- Comment on Why you might not want to use whatsapp anymore 1 year ago:
I joined WhatsApp after many years of holding out, there was simply no other practical way to keep in touch with many people. The ways I mitigate the privacy concerns are:
- I got an international eSIM, for the purpose of cheap roaming abroad but since I now had this extra phone number not tied to my identity, I used it for WhatsApp.
- I installed WhatsApp using Island so it has access to just the contacts in the “work profile”, that is, just people who have WhatsApp anyway.
