Yeah, it’s sooooo funny… it’s heeeeeeel-larious! I don’t know about you, but I for one can’t stop laughing!

The way language is used or abused creates patterns in the mind.
I strongly suspect that this way of using language is not healthy at all, for an individual nor for a community.

The One Salmon Universe Hypothesis!

Then by year two of his lockdown, Newton was inserting a tiny lever under his own eyeball, inside the eye socket, to try and figure out how the eye captures and processes light.

Damn, they got to him before he could get it out.
Curse you, lizard overlords!

He might have won the very first Nobel Prize, had he not passed away just a few years prior, and much too young, wasn’t he in his late-30s or early-40s?

In fact, I believe that had Hertz remained alive and won his prize, the Nobel Committee would not have felt obliged to give it to Marconi a few years later.

Marconi was a back-stabbing asshole who became one of the wealthiest men in the world by abusing the gentlemanly trust of others, and coasting on someone else’s technology - particularly the way crystals oscillate, and some of them serve nicely as a sort of “translation point” between electromagnetic waves and the physical apparatus that transmits and/or receives the signal.

Euler and Gauss… the lads.

I’m under the impression that if the proton does not decay - and there is still no evidence that it does - whatever matter is left in cold, dead stars that didn’t fall into a black hole, will slowly quantum tunnel their way into becoming spheres of iron.

Also, I thought that B-E Condensates have been created in the lab, by freezing lithium atoms to a fraction above 0K, their electrons slow down, to compensate and still satisfy the Uncertainty Principle, their orbitals swell and overlap, becoming the condensate. Then when they fire up the photon gun and shoot bosons at this gel or whatever it is, they’ve been able to slow them down, to freeze them inside the Condensate.

So fast forward to cold stars supposedly working their way through the quantum tunnel towards iron… won’t the orbitals of these atoms also swell, essentially turning the stellar remnant into a massive sphere of B-E Condensate?
If the answer is YES, there’s gotta be some emergent properties in systems such as this.

Imagine a sci-fi world, far in the future, where there are enough old unearthed pennies to be used as currency, but they are scarce enough to acquire great relative value.

“Hey, that must have cost a small fortune!”
“A hundred and twenty five pennies, to be exact.”
“Damn!”

boolean root beer float

One step at a time there, cowboy!

At first a neutrino oven would be prohibitively expensive for a regular household, we’d be seeing the first commercial model installed by some restaurant in Las Vegas, that’s quite a gimmick: Neutrino-Zapped Food!

Then in the lounge by the casino, stand-up comics would be making jokes about steaks coming in three flavors: electron, muon and tau.

Then for some reason, I’m seeing all this in black-n-white.

This is countered by the fact that neutrinos almost never interact with normal matter.

Follow-up question, then:
When they do in this extreme supernova scenario, are they frying their meat via direct impact (whatever that means at those scales) with the nucleus, or via the Weak Force?

Because none of that energy is going to be transferred electromagnetically, a very strange thing to think about.

Here’s a question to give you a sense of scale:

Which of the following would be brighter, in terms of the amount of energy delivered to your retina:

1. A supernova, seen from as far away as the Sun is from the Earth, or

2. The detonation of a hydrogen bomb pressed against your eyeball?

Applying the physicist rule of thumb suggests that the supernova is brighter. And indeed, it is … by nine orders of magnitude.

Well… I wasn’t expecting to read something like this today. Nor indeed, tomorrow and yesterday!

EDIT:

Then there’s this, pointing out unbelievable stuff along the way, effortlessly. You gotta love Randall Munro.

Core collapse supernovae happen to giant stars, so if you observed a supernova from that distance, you’d probably be inside the outer layers of the star that created it.

Like a guy said to me in college:
“Man… if you lived during the Flintstones, you’d be driving a sportscar.”
Yeah, that was one I’d never heard before, I had to shake the guy’s hand and congratulate him for originality.

Best known for being produced by Brian Eno.

“Hey man, did you hear the latest James album?”
“What? No. Why, should I?”
“Check this out, man… produced by Brian Eno.”
“Get the fuck outta here! Are you serious?”
“Yeah! It’s… it’s pretty damn good, check it out.”
“Interesting…! Yeah, I think I will, thanks for the heads up, man.”
“Sure thing, buddy.”

What’s the name of that station?
I’ve only been to NYC once, about ten years ago, but I did pass through this stop and if memory serves, it’s called Mets-Willits Point… I think? It’s the last or next to last stop before the Flushing terminus, that I do remember.

Because neutrons are what you get when an electron and a proton love each other very very much…

What occurs to me now that you put it that way, is from way back during the very early days of galactic formation, when so much hydrogen gas got blasted by radiation (was that caused by Population I stars?), stripping the electron away and leaving most of the hydrogen ionized - a fancy way of saying “lone protons floating in space”.

Now what would happen if some ionized hydrogen clouds happened to collapse into massive stars during this window of time, before the universe became re-ionized? Massive stars with mostly protons and very few electrons?

Is this a valid hypothetical object? Then if it collapses under it’s own proton weight, where are you going to get the electrons to merge with the protons to transform into neutrons?

“Scratch” his itch for some of that killer skunk weed, the devil’s lettuce!

Did Sagan say that in writing? I know he wrote a few things about his experiences with pot, but those were informal, anecdotal writings, and this sounds much more formal, almost like a public statement meant for publication, or a speech.

Back in the early 00s, I had the supreme pleasure of discovering Alec Guinness as George Smiley in the BBC’s miniseries masterpiece Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy from 1979, then the sequel and conclusion three years later, Smiley’s People, not as transcendent but then again, how could it equal, let alone surpass, perfection.

Around 2010, my first reaction upon hearing of a remake was of complete disdain - “here is an already perfect miniseries, what is it with this incessant compulsion to remake everything?”
So I didn’t watch the Gary Oldman movie until a couple of years after it came out, it was playing on TV and decided to give it a try.

To my utter astonishment, I realized I was watching what was to become my favorite film of the entire decade. What an achievement!
Now I love the film and the miniseries equally, as separate mountaintops.

Imagine getting drugged at some seedy nightclub and you wake up without a kidney… then a week later you get drugged again and wake up with the same defective kidney stuffed back inside. A full refund!