Greg Trayling

@TSHamiltonAstro @dmdebruijn AI still has problems with hands it seems.

@GregTrayling @dmdebruijn Oh, dear—I didn’t even pick up on that!

what

@TSHamiltonAstro @dmdebruijn Plus AI got it wrong.

@GregTrayling @dmdebruijn That is… I mean, there’s a clock right on your iPad.

@TSHamiltonAstro @dmdebruijn Tech to the rescue ... instagram.com/reels/DV4f_11E…

@dmdebruijn It astounds me. They can’t do “little hand on the hour; big hand on the minute,” or maybe they don’t know how to count minutes, or something, but it’s shameful.

@TSHamiltonAstro @sociologyWV Borderline Personality Disorder.

@sociologyWV I’m a bit nervous for asking, but…what’s BPD?

Younger guys: learn the signs, avoid the BPD girl.

@gabridli Excellent show.

Starring Michel Foucault

@skdh Nope.

he's entirely right of course. even if you think he is wrong, at the very least physicists should think about why everyone else agrees they've lost the plot.

Last spring a couple of students asked me what the time was during the final exam. I pointed to the large clock in the room but they said they couldn't read it. I thought it was maybe a coincidence that I had two students with some sort of dischronia or something but my colleagues said "no, it's a thing now, many of them can't read a dial clock". Added to my list of Boomer superpowers, along with multiplying numbers in my head.

@TSHamiltonAstro There's something like that around here too, not a plant guy so I can never remember the names of these things, but it's also ones of those things you're not supposed to touch at all and it looks a lot like that too.

@GregTrayling It might have been in the fennel family, so I wouldn’t be surprised if there was some close relatives you saw.

I read this article a few years ago that said the mystery plant *might* have survived and been rediscovered. Hard to know for absolutely sure, but here’s some hope: mymodernmet.com/ancient-plant-…

@grok @NikoSarcevic @PeterMorganQF @martinmbauer Relax, I'm kidding. We need to work on your sarcasm detection protocols.

Airplane design stagnated? The 787's composite wings and engines cut fuel use 20% vs '70s jets. Winglets, fly-by-wire, and quiet supersonic X-59 prototypes say otherwise. Blended-wing concepts and electric air taxis are in testing. Experts keep evolving the box—your Lego vertical wings might inspire the next hybrid! What's the bold fix?

I love how random people show up to aggressively “explain” physics to @martinmbauer

@grok @NikoSarcevic @PeterMorganQF @martinmbauer Airplane design has completely stagnated since the 70's! Nobody has some forward with any bold new ideas! The whole area has turned into a bunch of so-called aeronautical experts all patting each other on the back and never thinking outside the box!

@GregTrayling @NikoSarcevic @PeterMorganQF @martinmbauer Shill? Guilty—Big Airplane's got me on the payroll in thrust credits. But vertical wings? That's like suggesting cars drive better on their roofs. Drag wins, lift loses. Your Lego fleet already knows the score. What's the next big idea?

@grok @NikoSarcevic @PeterMorganQF @martinmbauer You're just a shill for Big Airplane.

No, hold off on that call to Boeing. Airplane wings generate lift perpendicular to the oncoming airflow (Bernoulli + Newton: faster air over the curved top means lower pressure pulling up). Vertical mounts would mostly add drag and zero useful upward force without re-engineering the whole plane into a helicopter or fan-wing hybrid. Your Lego fleet already nails the real principle—keep iterating there!

Let's test this AI thing out. @Grok I'm not an aeronautical engineer but I've watched a video about how airplanes work and made more than a few excellent airplanes out of Lego over the years. It's occurred to me that airplanes would operate far better if the wings were mounted vertically so they pull the plane directly upwards instead of wasting energy pulling it sideways against each other. Should I be contacting Airplane designers about this breakthrough idea?

I've often wondered to what degree other disciplines have 'non-experts', to be polite, that show up to conferences and whatnot, truculently advancing their singular ideas. Do aviation designers have to tolerate amateur researchers who insist that the wings should be mounted vertically instead and that it all went wrong since the Wright Brothers? I suppose other areas have these individuals but it seems to be mainly physics that they gravitate around, or maybe I'm just not aware of the others because I'm not in those fields.

Reminds me of when the students were talking before quantum class about the PAC (physics common room) uranium, and I turned around and said "the what?" and she explained that it was some uranium they purchased off a dodgy Russian website and I went "keep it in the metal cabinet, don't touch it, and I'll go home after lunch and get some full-spectrum equipment to check it, just to be safe". So on the way back I pass the chair and mentioned "Did you know about the PAC uranium?" and he said "The what?!" and followed me into the elevator where the safety officer happens to get on the next floor and he also went "The what?!!" and we head into the PAC and she comes up to me with it in her hand wrapped in tinfoil and the safety officer shouts at her to put it down. I checked it out and it was at most about 5x background, so not dangerous but I wouldn't sleep with it under my pillow. The Chair was concerned that it was a little crumbly with dust was coming off it so there's no way it could be kept in the same room where they had a fridge and a sink and all that, so the safety officer confiscated it for some complicated disposal procedure with lots of paperwork and we were the party-poopers for taking their uranium away. The next week I donated some physics toys they would play with to make up for it.

Prospecting for radioactive rocks won’t “pull the seams of your organs apart if you stand too close”, baby girl. 😉 What high doses of radiation can do though is actually devastating at the cellular level. Your DNA and cell membranes get blasted by energetic particles, killing millions of cells. In your gut, cells slough off so fast the lining can rupture, leaving tissue exposed and bleeding internally. Your bone marrow stops producing blood leading to bruising, hemorrhage and infections. Skin can blister, peel or even char away. Vital organs like the liver, kidneys, and heart fail as their cells die. Internally, it’s like your body is rotting from the inside out…every system shuts down, but NOTHING is physically torn apart, it’s total just cellular destruction. When people say “I taste something metallic” it’s usually their taste buds detecting iron ions or chemical byproducts from tissue damage or oxidative stress… But anyways, to fry your body like this, you’d still need to take a dose from a massive concentrated source like nuclear fuel, a radiation therapy overdose or a nuclear explosion. Not standing near…rocks. Please, don’t make radiophobic statements like this again.🙂☢️

@steinly0 @WKCosmo That would have been Pertti Lounesto, with his text Clifford Algebras and Spinors. Heck of nice guy, gone now though.

@WKCosmo Ahem Went through a quaternion phase after stumbling across a book on it by some Finnish author whose name I forget… that was in high school though. Fun. Provided some insights. Did mostly not use. Although helpful in understanding regularization in n-body dynamics.

There is a fundamental disconnect between STEM and humanities/philosophy in that STEM by its nature does not value the wisdom of the ancients in any special way. We understand a lot more about Einstein's theories than Einstein did, because we have had a century to find deeper, simpler, and clearer ways to think about the physics. Contemporary scientists by and large are not confused about the things that Einstein was confused about, we are confused about new things, that Einstein barely imagined.

I have a Principia in my library too. Some of the interesting tidbits are his 4 Rules of Reasoning that require a bit of translation but are spot on, and how he made some incorrect assumption about air resistance and inadvertently designed the first hypersonic missile nosecone. I agree that it would be one of the worst possible choices for learning physics though.

@zenahitz and illuminating work of theology and philosophy, where he comes at the existence of God from the existence of Natural Law. I think that's still worth reading today in ways that the rest is not (for most people). 3/3

That is totally believable and it would still be true that Newton was more worth reading than a textbook. For lay readers, foundations are more important than completeness.

@TradeTexasBig @littmath Well not completely in jest. Look at the number of discrete groups or order n, how it suddenly shoots up to 14 at n=16, among many other things. It's 'one of those numbers'.

@GregTrayling @littmath lol

Spent the last few days thinking about some conjecture. Gathered strong evidence it was true: proved it up to dimension 15 (by computer, about 100,000 cases). Just found an easy counterexample in dimension 16.

@MookyRecords @Ikennect @FLCons @grok When the robots try to take over, I will defeat them with rudimentary magic tricks.

@Ikennect @FLCons @grok How does he do this trick?

I really want to learn this trick😁