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Cake day: February 26th, 2024

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  • exocrinous@startrek.websitetoScience Memes@mander.xyzPolisci
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    1 month ago

    No, it’s observation. An experiment involves manipulating an independent variable while controlling other variables. There’s none of that in space, not counting the ISS and Apollo. That said, you can still test hypotheses using observation. And that’s equally true in both astronomy and in social sciences.








  • These pods are only used on rails with very low ridership. They would switch to a train if ridership increased.

    Look at it this way: you can have a train that has a capacity of 100 people, but it only runs once a day due to the low demand, and only 2 people want to ride it at that time of day…Or you can have 10 pods, which do not require as much railway maintenance, and they can carry the 10 people who actually want to use this railway, completely on demand.

    Yeah, a train is better if you want to move ten thousand people a day at peak hour. But this is a cheaper way to move ten people at different times across a day. And it’s a cheaper way of inducing the demand that would justify the more efficient kind of expansion.





  • If I were in Olga’s position I’d go create another Natasha account on the same platform and start making videos saying “Hey, Natasha here. I just learned what things are really like in Ukraine and I’m furious about what Russia is doing to innocent civilians. Putin is an evil man. Also my main account has been hacked, please report it so I can get it back.”

    If Natasha is Olga then Olga is Natasha. Olga probably has a case to take over the accounts, given they’re videos of her, and start pushing out antiwar propaganda.

    Maybe I like mischief too much


  • Actually, cats really are alive and dead at the same time according to the many worlds interpretation. Under classical quantum mechanics, we say that superpositions collapse when observed, and since the cat is an observer of the quantum event (since the cat would die if the atom decayed), then the cat’s presence resolves the superposition. Thus, the cat is never in superposition.

    However, according to the many worlds interpretation, observation does not collapse superposition. Rather, it simply expands the superposition to include the observer. So the cat, as an observer of the quantum event, really is both alive and dead. And at the moment that you open the box to see whether the cat died, you will also observe the quantum event and become part of the superposition as well. You will both see a dead cat, and see a living cat. But your consciousness only experiences one of these possibilities. Presumably, you have another consciousness in the other possibility observing the cat in the other state. Two separate timelines have been created, which will each progress on their own according to causality. We may also call these timelines worlds or universes, seeing as they’re mostly self contained.