• 0 Posts
  • 180 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 17th, 2023

help-circle


  • For those who are confused. It’s an experiment to see if gravity is smooth or lumpy. Relatively assumes it is smooth, quantum mechanics says it is lumpy. By knowing what is happening, we can tell which is more wrong. Both seem hyper accurate in their realms, but neither allows for the existence of the other.

    Effectively, 2 pendulums are put close together and left to swing. Relativity says they will slowly move into sync. Quantum mechanics says they will move together in fits and starts. By checking at the end, they can see if the syncing is lumpy or smooth. They will also have to run it a huge number of times, to pull any difference out of the noise.

    Previous ideas for experiments relied on forcing 2 masses into a diffuse state, then letting them entangle with each other. Getting matter into such a state is hard however, let alone keeping it there for long enough to work. The new experiment dodges around this problem.




  • It’s not too bad. Relativity says that no frame of reference is special.

    • On earth, a second looks like a second, but a second on the moon looks too quick.

    • On the moon, the second looks like a second, but a second on earth looks too slow.

    Both are actually correct. The simplest solution is to declare 1 to be the base reference. In this case, the earth second. Any lunar colonies will just have to accept that their second is slightly longer than they think it should be.

    If it helps, the difference is tiny. A second is 6.5x10^-10 seconds longer. This works out to 56 microseconds per 24 hours. It won’t affect much for a long time. About the only thing affected would be a lunar GPS.




  • Don’t measure by just breeding, measure by how many grandchildren they have.

    An animal that has 10 babies, but they all die, doesn’t pass on its genes. A wolf that dies in its den, causing some of its offspring to die is hurting its own genetic heritage.

    It’s also worth noting that genes can be selected for at the tribe/pack level. You don’t need to breed, so long as your sisters/brothers/cousins/parents breed.well enough to compensate.

    At the extreme, you have things like bees. A normal bee is sterile. It’s completely reliant on its specialist brothers and sisters to propagate its genes.





  • Something that might be related is the burst of functionality that mammals seem to get, just before dying. In pack animals, an otherwise crippled animal can get up and leave the den. Biologically, this is to get the dead body away from the den site.

    Something similar can happen in humans. A dying patient will suddenly perk up and seem to make a miraculous recovery. Nurses unfortunately know that this is false. The patent will burn out and crash soon after. Patents in this state apparently get a feeling of impending doom. This is likely what drives other mammals from the den/nest site.

    What they are seeing might be related to this. The brain gives up on survival, in order to try and not risk the health of family members. Often the damage would be too severe, and so the patient doesn’t wake up. They just get a burst of neural activity as priorities suddenly change.


  • We actually use very little of our muscles full strength. In fact most of thee initial strength gain of weight lifting isn’t actually an increase in muscle, but of control. Under enough adrenaline the limiters come off. 5-20x normal is completely possible.

    The catch is the damage. Our tendons and supporting muscles are not built for the forces. Dislocations and tendon damage are severe, if full power is used. It also damages the muscle itself. A lot of the overhead is to allow for sustained functioning. Burning it all at once works, but it can’t be sustained without destroying the muscles involved.

    Basically, the body self protects. When required, emergency power can be unlocked, for a price.


  • An encryption scheme is only as strong as its weakest link. In academic terms, only the algorithm really matters. In the real world however, implementation is as important.

    The human element is an element that has to be considered. Rubber hose cryptanalysis is a tongue and cheek way of acknowledging that. It also matters since some algorithms are better at assisting here. E.g. 1 time key Vs passwords.


  • The purpose is to access the data. This is a bypass attack, rather than a mathematical one. It helps to remember that encryption is rarely used in the abstract. It is used as part of real world security.

    There are actually methods to defend against it. The most effective is a “duress key”. This is the key you give up under duress. It will decrypt an alternative version of the file/drive, as well as potentially triggering additional safeguards. The key point is the attacker won’t know if they have the real files, and there is nothing of interest, or dummy ones.


  • Hiding it would work. You just have to make sure you don’t miss any.

    As for the danger. There are levels of exposure. You could leak something damning, but that could be played off as a 1 off. You might also be sitting on a huge amount of paperwork that proves it’s endemic. That paperwork might also expose others who wanted things changed, but don’t want to be outed. In this case, an initial leak can test the waters. The additional info can be rolled out, if it’s needed, or the results justified.

    E.g. Initial leak proves they did something nasty. The additional info massively backs it up, but also implicates a VP in its gathering. You might not want to show that hand until later, either to protect them, or to gather more info on their reaction.


  • One of the less mentioned aspects is that a dead man switch should be difficult, if not impossible to detect and neutralise. If you are to the level of being unalived, you’re likely also a target for significant directed hacking. Such a dead man switch should be as resistant as possible to this. A simple email could let them detect and disable your dead man switch.



  • A minor nit pick. It’s worth noting that increasing mass is an inaccurate view. It works in the simple examples, but can cause confusion down the line.

    Instead, an additional term is introduced. This term, while it could be combined with the mass, is actually a vector, not a scalar. It has both value and direction, not just value. This turns your relativistic mass into a vector. Your mass changes, depending on the direction of the force acting on it! Keeping it as a separate vector can improve both calculations and comprehension, since comparable terms appear elsewhere (namely with time dilation and length contraction).