to me “sea” doesn’t mean anything except for “general water region, smaller than an ocean”. I don’t think that there’s anything wrong with considering those three to be “gulfs”, but I think that people don’t usually think of them that way because unless you study the geography carefully, you might not even notice that they actually are connected to the rest of the ocean.

by the way, fun fact: there is actually a sea that isn’t connected to the ocean and why we don’t call it a lake, I really don’t understand. but that’s the Caspian Sea.

The “arm Britain and prolong the war” sign reads to me like the person holding it is campaigning to prolong the war for as long as possible, and the best way they think that we can go about it is by arming Britain.

Does that mean the composer of a symphony is not an artist because (especially the most successful ones) don’t usually often get to control the gestalt of the performance? The ironic thing is in music composition trying to control the gestalt of the performance too much is considered tacky, like a screenplay with too much scene direction. Ironically, we also have the question by this reasoning, if the author of a screenplay is an artist.

as a multimedia artist, I have long been frustrated with the philosophical shallowness of pure visual artists’ understanding of what art is because it never actually is something that is inclusive of plenty of things that everyone agrees is obviously art. Like almost everything in performance art (performing/producing/composing music, directing films, theater in general, etc) for instance. And in the performing arts we’ve understood for literally thousands of years the difference between the artwork, which is the execution of a concept, and the artwork which is the concept itself.

The biggest irony, though in my opinion, is that during the mid 20th century, the visual arts had a movement which is still ongoing (and as actually produced several notable modern works of art that you probably have heard of before, like the banana taped to the wall called “Comedian”) called conceptualism, which directly challenges, the exact sorts of ideas you’re expressing about art. One of my favorite artists of all time is called Sol Lewitt. He was a conceptual artist and one of his most famous works was a series called “the wall drawings” which were just illustrations that exist existed only as sets of instructions for people to follow, the idea that every “performance” of the concept is just as valid an art artwork as the concept itself. Which by the way is literally how we think of music and live theater as art already so there’s precedent for this, clearly.

“The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.” -Sol LeWitt. Really wonder what this guy would have to say about AI generated images, like imagine showing him a piece which is one of his wall drawings as rendered by several different generative AI models just to really make you think about the nature of art itself and what it even is. and in my opinion that’s really what art is about: connecting with people and sharing your ideas with them, using literally any means that are at you’re disposal. and if it’s really thoughtless, and you just used cheap tools to generate something really fast that ripped off pirated media in a manner that would get any one of us sent to prison, that doesn’t make it not art. it just makes it probably really bad art. But why are we so insistent on this exclusive definition of art? I don’t really understand.

if Trump is pledging to kill the federal EV incentive and this truck is an answer to it then the article should provide the price without incentives. But even if it’s just under $20,000 with incentives, I still feel like it’s unfortunately paying more for less at the moment. Although if there’s tariffs, it might actually be cheaper than literally anything else you could get so in that situation, why not?

I read a lot of technical material that has lots of diagrams and it’s difficult with an E reader paging back-and-forth between the text and the diagram that I’m trying to understand

I never understood why nobody made an E reader that you could read “like a book” that just had two screens and a hinge

Intensive Battery Brooding by Carcass

This is a funny comic, but I dislike how it perpetuates a common misunderstanding of stoicism that it’s about suppressing or ignoring your feelings, when it’s actually about engaging with your feelings as deeply, mindfully, and intentionally as possible. It’s about trying to understand why you feel the way you do, and also trying to understand how your feelings can lead you to acting in a manner which contradicts your values. A stoic master wouldn’t ignore their anger, especially if their anger is the result of witnessing their own teachings being misrepresented and used to further injustice. They would just be careful not to let their anger lead them to acting rashly and doing something which will ultimately undermine the virtues they want to cultivate in themselves and in the world.

The idea that the velocity of a person walking forward on a train is simply the velocity of the train plus the velocity of the person walking with respect to the train is called “Galilean relativity”.

Einstein realized that Galilean relativity has a big problem if you take for granted the idea that the speed of light is the same for all observers, regardless of reference frame, and people had a lot of reasons at the time to suspect this to be true.

In particular, he imagined something like watching a train passing by him, but on board the train is a special clock which works by shooting a pulse of light at a mirror directly overhead which reflects back down and hits a sensor. Every time the light pulse hits the sensor, the clock ticks up by one and another light pulse is sent out. People usually call this the “light clock thought experiment” if you want to learn more about it.

Anyway, Einstein realized if he was watching the light clock as the train passed by him while he’s standing on the station, the path the light beam traces out will take the form of a zigzag. Meanwhile, for a person standing on the train, it will just be going straight up and down. If you know anything about triangles, you will realize that the zigzag path is longer than the straight up and down path. So if everyone observes the speed of light to be the same exact thing, it must be the case that it will take the light a longer amount of time to traverse the zigzag path. And so the person standing on the platform will see that clock ticking slower than the person on the train will. This phenomenon is called “time dilation”.

From this point, you can apply some simple trigonometry to figure out just how much slower things would be appearing to move on the train. And it turns out that the velocity the person watching the train observes the person walking on the train to have is not the velocity of the train plus the velocity of the person walking on the train. But rather, it’s something like that velocity, but divided by 1 + (train velocity)•(walking velocity)/c^2, where c is the speed of light (and this is called “Lorentzian relativity” if you want to read more about it).

It’s important to notice that since trains and walking come nowhere close to the speed of light, the value you’re adding to one is very small in these kinds of situations, and so what you’re left with is almost exactly the same thing you would get with Galilean relativity, which is why it still is useful and works. But when you want to consider the physics of objects that are moving much much faster, all of this is extremely important to take into account.

And lastly if you wanna read more about this stuff in general, this is all part of “the theory of special relativity” and there’s probably helpful YouTube videos covering every single thing that I’ve put in quotation marks.

Hand restoring cream only works if you once had a hand.

Wild to think that a sentient anything would relate to something else on the basis of how it derives energy more than on the basis of how it personally experiences the world.

is there any particular reason you’re saying that besides cynicism? I am having trouble finding specifics, but there’s a lot of reporting that the MTA is expecting to raise $15 billion from congestion tolling to fund public transportation repairs and improvements and pretty much all of the proposals for this in the past required all of the revenues to be earmarked for use by the MTA

The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

-Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

The irony is, I like proton because I don’t think you should trust literally any business to behave altruistically, including proton. By structuring the business in the manner that they have, I don’t just have to trust them. I just have to trust that the people in charge don’t want to go to jail or get fined, which is literally not true for any business owned by private individuals.

First of all, I did not say that proton is opposing capitalism. I said that to oppose capitalism does not mean you have to be opposed to free enterprise. As in, you can be opposed to an economy comprised primarily of capitalist institutions without being opposed to the concept of free enterprise. Proton is simply an example of such a business, which can be used as evidence for the fact that it is entirely possible to start businesses in a free market economy which are actually interested in solving problems as opposed to using the existence of problems as a vehicle to enrich a class of shareholders.

Second of all, “it’s filling a niche created by other companies’ poor privacy policies” is essentially nothing more than a restatement of the second sentence I wrote, which I will repeat here: “I pointed out that as long as it’s a for-profit corporation, it would have not have any financial or legal incentive to continue pursuing its mission if it ever achieved a certain level of market share.”. You’re right that them adopting a nonprofit structure doesn’t change that, but it does change their ability to sell out their customers at the discretion of a class of shareholders, unlike any business which is owned by private individuals.

I remember one time I criticized proton for positioning itself as community oriented while still being a for-profit corporation. I pointed out that as long as it’s a for-profit corporation, it would have not have any financial or legal incentive to continue pursuing its mission if it ever achieved a certain level of market share. But then several months later, they actually announced that they were going to put their money where their mouth is, and transition to a nonprofit structure.

I think that proton is perhaps the greatest example at the moment that to oppose capitalism does not mean you have to be opposed to free enterprise, and people should always think about this sort of thing when they listen to any kind of business leader try to convince them that it’s actually really important that they be allowed to cash out whenever they want.

I can’t imagine that their set up is perfect, but I definitely am going to have to give this offer serious consideration.

Scranton was an industrial manufacturing powerhouse in the first half of the 20th century and still had a population of like 120,000 people by the time Joe Biden and his family moved away in 1953

I think it’s wild how much job security professors often have and yet they let themselves get dicked around like this constantly

Because telling people capitalism began in the 16th century creates a confused and misinformed understanding of history that makes it more difficult for people to reason about the world.

Capitalism began in the 18th century, not the 16th century