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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • Not OP, but mine was really pretty manageable. 2 days of sitting in an easy chair and icing my balls, 2 days of “walking is fine, but avoid any sudden movements,” and a week of “it’s a little sore, but it doesn’t really hurt.” After that, it was about 2-3 weeks where I didn’t really notice it unless I moved the wrong way too suddenly (whereupon I’d get a quick twinge, but nothing too bad).

    Really a pretty small cost for the benefits. I don’t really like painkillers, but I do recommend some THC gummies for the first week and a fresh series to binge



  • So, one observer will see those oscillations happen faster than the other?

    Not quite. In each observer’s frame of reference, time appears to pass the same; it’s only when you try to reconcile the between two objects that are not at rest with respect to each other does relativity show up.

    Basically, when you bring someone back to Earth, the observers will find that their watches don’t match up even though both observers experience time passing the same way as normal (because the oberserver is by definition at rest with respect to their own frame of reference).

    TL; DR: Relativity is a pain in the ass and makes no sense in everyday terms.

    edit: disclaimer - I am not a physicist and have not taken physics classes in a decade plus, but I do teach science at a college. I’m going mostly on half-remembered lectures and some random one-off discussions I’ve had with my buddy in the physics department over the past few years.



  • It’s been a long time since I took modern physics, so I’m not positive, but I think you’re right that the moon would have time moving slower, and if your 50ms/day is right (edit: I based this on the moon traveling faster than the earth, but I don’t know anything about gravitational relativity, so that’s probably wrong) then you’d need to do something like skip a second every 20th day on the moon to keep pace with Earth. We could call it an “anti-leap-second”

    Programmers, that seems pretty simple; what’s the big deal? /s


  • No, the moon’s rotation isn’t on a 24-hour cycle. I’m not an astronomer, but I pretty sure since it’s tidally locked to earth and on a 28-day cycle around the earth, a lunar day is actually 28 Earth days, but I’m not actually sure how that would factor into the number of time zones (I’m pretty sure it would be more complicated than just 24 time zones to match 24 time zones on earth, though).

    Plus, I think the speed of the moon relative to the sun is different enough from Earth that you need to take relativity into effect, which is the real headache here.



  • Even though weed is legal in Canada the legal stuff is the worst and most expensive.

    Give it time. I’m far from a connoisseur, as these days I mostly just partake in edibles 1-2 times per week, but California has some pretty sweet weed prices, at least compared to my college/grad-school days. I saw an ad on a billboard just yesterday for 10 USD Eighths at a pretty reputable shop in my town, and I think I usually pay 35 USD for a pack of 10 2-dose THC:CBD gummies (compared to 40 USD for an eighth of mediocre bud in the early 2000’s).

    As people get less paranoid about enforcement and local governments ease up on restrictions, the price should come down and the quality should go up (although this probably depends a lot on local government, so who knows, really)


  • I wish this was true for me, but I only have one record shop within 45-minute drive of my house (and their prices and selection are far from competitive), so I wind up buying pretty much all my records online through Discogs. Frequently, the new represses are just flat-out cheaper than the vintage vinyl, especially for a lot of the more esoteric albums I buy. For instance, even though they’re not really hard to find, for Black Sabbath’s first four albums I paid just as much for mediocre, water-damaged copies of Sabbath and Volume 4 as I did for brand-new represses of Paranoid and Master of Reality. If you actually buy your vinyl to listen to, buying used online can be a pretty big gamble as far as quality, so for the same price, I frequently wind up consciously choosing the new vinyl over the used copy.

    Even though I do frequently manage to package one or two cheap used albums with each new album purchased to take advantage of that sweet “media mail” shipping, it’s not even close to a 10:1 used:new ratio.

    Edit: I suppose now that I think about it, I’m starting from a pretty decent used vinyl collection from my days in the early 2000’s as a hipster music snob before used vinyl got nearly so expensive, so my collection overall has much more used vinyl than my current buying habits would indicate (I probably have 200 albums, of which 30-40 were purchased new in the past 3-4 years)





  • The idea that humans need the diverse micro ecology of earth in order to not become ill over the course of generations is pretty interesting.

    Really pretty well-supported by current science, too. I teach chemistry at a community college, so maybe I’m an outlier, but I read a ton of current research about the importance of diversity in “gut biomes” and the damaging effects of monoculture on global ecology, etc.

    It seems pretty clear that even if engineers could solve the physical and chemical issues with a generation ship, the limiting constraints are almost certainly going to be biological and ecological, and KS Robinson’s estimates for the upper limits seem pretty reasonable based on current knowledge




  • My unrepentant serial killer of a feline absolutely decimates the ground squirrel population on our property (and if we’re talking literally, “decimates” might not even do it justice). Luckily, she has little to no interest in song birds (and they are even tougher and larger than the rodents in my area), so I don’t feel too bad about the environmental impact of letting her roam the area.

    My compassion for the wildlife generally ends at the footprint of my house, especially when the mice and voles are getting into our pantry every goddamn fall and spring.


  • late 2000’s here; I went to one of the private, strict christian schools in the area, so no house parties or Greek scene for underage drinkers. So, what did we do? We learned to drink in TJ! IIRC, I think we went down 1.5x per month for two years or so until all of our friend group turned 21 and moved off campus. Luckily, we were usually smart enough to make sure one of us was 100% stone sober while we were across the border (and we always parked on the US side, obvs), but we had friends that still had some close calls.

    I had a friend who drove down with a different group that got shaken down when one dumbass got caught by cops peeing in an alley on the way back to the border, and another acquaintance that spent a few weeks in jail on the Mexican side for having two (poorly made) fake twenties in his pocket. As I recall, he didn’t even try to spend them, but got searched for something unrelated and was then held without trial until his parents could get together ten thousand dollars to buy him out.

    So, from 2006-2008 or so there still weren’t card readers coming back as a US citizen, but it was definitely getting sketchy. My privileged white-bread ass managed to stay out of trouble (mostly), but I definitely got lucky and wouldn’t recommend it to others. Although, during the daytime it was pretty safe as long as you didn’t get blotto, and going for cheap, delicious tacos and margaritas was a great day trip.


  • And let’s not forget the Giants’ amazing reliever, Pablo Sandoval (0.00 ERA and 0.00 WHIP)!

    For those not in the loop, he was a (seemingly) overweight 3rd baseman who made phenomenally athletic plays and hit monster home runs (especially in the postseason, leading to 3 World Series trophies and a WS MVP), earning the nickname “Kung Fu Panda.”

    Then, in the twilight of his career, he also pitched 2 innings without allowing a baserunner, becoming a bit of an SF meme, including at least one “Let Pablo Pitch” bobblehead.