Brian VK

@MichaelLocklear @KSL5TV gristleking.com/helium-deploye…

@KSL5TV Here's more on the story ksltv.com/516749/why-are…

Salt Lake City public lands officials hiked up the snowy Twin Peaks trail today to remove a mysterious device (solar panel, antenna & locked battery box). They're finding more in the foothills, with no explanation as to who's putting them there -- or why. Story on @KSL5TV at 6

@CookingIssues Evaporation from the outside in. Try making a line pancake instead of a circle to observe pattern, maybe on a griddle on one of those long fifth burners on stoves.

I have been making 14 inch pancakes for years. Recently starting adding blueberries to mix before putting on griddle. Been getting these crazy “blueberry tracks” and am trying to understand them.

@prplmtns It’s my birthday but I’m in Chile, donde puedo comprar mi regalo para mi, online? @dragcityrecords

@Cloudflare Seriously - my internet has been broken for a week now. Ticket 1715879. I can't get anyone at your company to acknowledge this.

@Cloudflare Multiple Cloudflare-backed sites aren't working for me - 4 days now. Particularly anaconda.org - this includes dash.cloudflare.com. I emailed support@cloudflare, - they say I should create an account, except I can't reach dash. No recourse for users?

@chisholmdave It’s one of those things that makes a bit more sense if you see the math (not easy, but not that bad) but it’s hard to put into words too. Dark Energy is the interesting part- knowing a bit more about it tells us if the universe will die or reverse back the way it came/is cyclic

@chisholmdave No problem. There’s really a lot of things involved in it all, so there’s not really one “thing” that makes sense by itself, but all the pieces together sort of make sense. I’m curious, does your intuition think the universe is older or younger?

@chisholmdave Note that we also think the universe is young (e.g. not 50 billion years old) because of Olber’s paradox. Also, we look at the remnants of cosmic inflation by tryin to look at the ripples in the cosmic microwave background (Planck, BICEP3 projects)

@chisholmdave Also, we know this doesn’t violate relativity because we know things are moving away from us faster than the speed of light. If it wasn’t, there wouldn’t be math.ucr.edu/home/baez/phys…

@chisholmdave Also remember that relativity doesn’t affect energy/light, and the rapid expansion is not things moving away from each other from the big bang but space itself expanding rapidly, which also isn’t subject to relativity

@chisholmdave by the end of inflation matter (really, energy!) had spread out so much and had been so dispersed that the relativistic thing doesn’t come into play.

@chisholmdave Well then earliest part of the universe was rapid, rapid inflation. We don’t know a lot about it because it was too hot, opaque. We might be able to “see” into this earliest time with gravitational waves because they don’t interact via EM, but photons get lost in the mix.

Dark Energy, aka Cosmological Constant, is why things accelerate. We don’t know why. We want to measure that constant (I am part of a Dark Energy collaboration). We know things accelerate thanks to Type IA supernovas, aka Standard Candles x.com/chisholmdave/s…

We don’t know what DM is yet but we know it must exist. It’s completely vital for explaining structure formation because it doesn’t interact electromagnetically- “visible” matter clumped into structures early in the universe thanks to DM. The “WIMP miracle” is why we look for it x.com/chisholmdave/s…

@chisholmdave ...So relativity isn't a huge concern. It helps to make things more accurate

@chisholmdave Anyway, basically you look at things now and extrapolate back. You understand how physics works at different points (thanks to things like LHC) over time and you do things in reverse, and you get a number. Most of the time extraction can be performed with newtonian physics

@chisholmdave #Growth_of_structure" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure…

@chisholmdave As the universe expanded, the energy of photons running around decreases very fast, and you have freeze-out, and eventually hydrogen is hanging around, then helium, then nucleosynthesis starts happening. Dark matter and other stuff are around too. They start making things clump

@chisholmdave Generally: Hubble's law: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble%27… More specifically, thermodynamics, energy, nuclear physics, and other things. We know the earliest stars were hydrogen and helium because before that there was too much energy floating around and we had a quark soup

@CookingIssues What's the link? I still need to do some christmas shopping