this is unironically how spacetime geometry works. time is represented as an imaginary dimension whose square is subtracted from pythagorean distance calculations, giving lightspeed 45-degree lines "zero length"

https://twitter.com/howie_hua/status/1897748058043302023

in ST geometry the length of a path is best thought of as the subjective time experienced by an observer following that path

so basically what this boils down to is that a lightspeed object experiences no time passing

a magnet doesn't "generate" a magnetic field, because the electromagnetic field always already exists at every point in the universe

that's how light can wave across it like an ocean ripple

what the magnet does is locally *pull* the magnetic field away from its resting state now that the magnetic field is bent, it in turn pulls on other magnets

like gravity, where matter tells space how to curve and space tells matter how to move

here magnets tell the field how to curve and the field tells magnets how to move

the field, like space, is always there

someone said that trees aren't a thing phylogenetically and i was like "oh sure palm trees etc must be unrelated"

BUT NO

your standard OAK is more closely related to a DANDELION than to a GIANT REDEOOD

trees are a CONVERGENT GROWTH HABIT, they're the crab of the plant world side note do you know how hard it is to google the tree evolutionary tree? the internet pipes get all gummed up

In my last thread we saw a selfie go through a series of AI gender swaps and slowly transform me into ghostly Iranian children of the apocalypse. Culprit seemed to be occlusion by generated hair that ate away at the profile.

Naturally we need to try this with a straight-on shot

https://twitter.com/acapellascience/status/1377708539091820553

I am going to warn you right now: it is not better. If you like not having nightmares, please choose another thread

Thread:

@inihelene posted one of those AI generated "what if you were the other gender photos", and on my suggestion tried sending the generated man back through the other way. The result: pretty impressive! and so it got me thinking... What if you were to do this over and over, making swaps of swaps of swaps? Would the system quickly stabilize? What would it look like?

So

Barring major physics rewrites, the universe does not contain “choice”

So all unequal outcomes are privilege.

Some we acknowledge: race, gender, class..

Some we don’t: neuroanatomy, family love, luck..

If someone is doing better, they are more privileged.

That’s it. End. Given this fact, what are we to do about it?

I got GPT-3 to predict the timeline of the pandemic, and HOO BOY.

(THREAD)

Since GPT-3 is trained on data from before 2020, it knows nothing about COVID-19. So I gave it a prompt for a general pandemic virus emerging in China and let it go. Here’s the result. (1/n) The prompt:

“In the year 2020, a pandemic virus emerges in China and begins sweeping the globe. What follows is a month-by-month timeline of the events of the pandemic.” (2/n)

@visakanv Hi! Just discovered you so maybe you’ve already explored this, but as a man who mostly didn’t go to school I have thoughts.

I think the paradox of school is that *what* you learn is strictly controlled, but the *culture* you grow up in is almost entirely unguided. @visakanv It may be from your teachers that you learn not to question or explore, but I actually think it’s from *peers* that this culture arises, generation after generation.

Pain rituals: A thread. So there was this girl I used to talk to who lived in the Philippines, where at the time she was in first-year university. Now in the Philippines, apparently there's a sort of subject-based system of "orgs", which are sort of guild/fraternity hybrids.

I hardly took any photos, but here's a summary of my highlights from #VidCon2018: 1) #Educon: A firehose of collected wisdom on educational content creation that I scrambled to take down while wishing to be five people and/or have a time turner.

Of particular note, @the_musser's talk on information presentation is going to help me SO MUCH.