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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 10th, 2023

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  • The thoughts experiment are no different from the maths and wouldn’t have occurred in any context, or at least wouldn’t have come close to yielding the same conclusions. The most famous one was Einstein imagining himself riding a beam of light iirc. As you say, he imagined time and space stretching. Why would someone have imagined that in the 1600s? What reason was there to think riding light was any different from riding a very fast stream on a boat? Who knew then that you couldn’t just add the speed of lights to other speeds like you do in every galilean frame in Newtonian physics? You conceded that Fizeau’s experiments were a starting point. These experiments would’ve never happened without the questions raised by the discrepancy between Newton and Maxwell’s laws! And if they had, someone with no prior knowledge of Maxwell’s laws wouldn’t have had any interest or use for these results.


  • I think several other people have a better claim to that title, like Galileo Galilei and Roger Bacon. Bacon is one of the first to spell out the scientific method and Galilei… Well, you know what he did. I’d say Galileo is more Jesus-like because he was persecuted by the dominant church. And Galileo moved things a lot. Remember, Newton was born around the time Galileo died, he was born in a period of scientific upheaval. Galileo also introduced concepts that played a big role in Newtonian physics, like Galilean frames, the relativity of speeds, the idea that speed is conserved in the absence of a force…

    You could argue there was also a slow acceleration of progress before Galileo 's time, and also that Copernicus is another good candidate for example, but if you really wanna emulate the Christ-like narrative, Galileo seems better. He’s even named after a region where Jesus might’ve lived.



  • No it shouldn’t? Without Mercury’s orbit having been noticed, there was no need yet to question Newton’s theory, they simply worked as far as anyone could see; so why complicate it? And without the Lorentz transformation, the math Einstein used wasn’t there. And without Fizeau’s experiment, the fact that the speed of light is the same in every frame wasn’t known, and that’s a huge part of the theory. And if he had intuited it somehow, the Maxwell’s equations were even there either. Special relativity is at it’s core a way reconcile Maxwell’s equations with the core tenants of Newton’s theory. There was no way special relativity could’ve been found even half a century earlier, let alone over two centuries…





  • Calvinism still has a notion of divine will, even if there’s no divine judgement. Maybe the notion of “will” can be dissociated from the notion of “feeling”, but that’d be a debate in itself, I personally tend to think that it can’t: Awareness can only indicate what is, not what should be.

    As for all the religions with an intermediate between God and men, either they represent God’s will… In which case, God does have a will; either they have their own will. And this just displaces the question, because if God has no will but his angels do, then the angels are effectively the Gods: They’re the ones whose favour prayers are supposed to get.

    Also, when I mention the “societal use” of a religion, what I mean isn’t how the religion is useful to the believer, but how it makes the believer useful to the state and/or clergy. My point was that religion with a personalized God who directly judge human actions tend to dominate because they’re most useful as tools to influence people’s actions.


  • The answer differs depending on which religion/sect/philosophy you adhere to, but God is usually attributed some sort of emotion, or at least a will, because without it the belief in God can’t serve a societal use.

    Say you assume a God without emotions. From this it results that nothing we may do or fail to do would impact them, so there are no sins, no divine laws, prayers and rites are useless… So your belief can’t be a religion; nor can it be used to control people. There’s no physical use to preaching belief in God, and not much of a metaphysical need either since God doesn’t care whether you believe in them. “God” becomes a concept like the laws of physics, there’s not even much meaning in considering it as a being. There’s little difference between an emotionless God and no God at all. So all religions will personify God to some extent.




  • Good question, but I guess it also goes down to what you think Jesus was. Do you think he was God Incarnate or had a divine nature? Do you think he was a prophet of God, but himself simply human? Or just a cool guy, but nothing divine? In the first case, you are a Christian, even if you don’t identify with any of the well known versions of Christianity. After all, many different conceptions of Christianity have existed.

    In the third case, I don’t think there is or should be a term for it. After all, is there a word for someone who thinks Marcus Antoninus was a cool guy? If that’s not something that constitutes an important part of who you are and how you think, why should you be called anything in regards to it? Maybe depending on just how much you like him, we might call you a Jesus fan. Jesus fanboy or fangirl at worst. But there needsn’t be a specific word.

    Now, the middle case, where you recognize Jesus as a prophet is an interesting one, because several religions would qualify, including Manichaeism, Islam and Druzism; and as far as I know there isn’t a term that englobes them all without also including Judaism… If I were to invent a term for that, I might go with “jesuic” or “yeshuaic”, by analogy with the word “abrahamic” that englobes those who recognize Abraham as a prophet.





  • If this is the context, I believe it has nothing to do with gays or twinks.

    Just a sad anime image meant to convey an emotional response, according to Tineye, first seen around 2016, on pages no longer reachable.

    First memetized around 2017, with the following image : même

    Translated labels from left to right : “Your new ‘waifu of the season’”, “you”, “Your waifu, to whom you’d vowed eternal love”. At this stage, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree: The meme is still aimed at the weeb community that saw its birth, and still makes use of the context implyed by the image.

    But to interpret what comes next, you must take into account the rise of “cringe” culture in the early 2020s. Former memes, deemed “cringe”, saw a new birth under several layers of irony to highlight their absurd nature. Here is another meme that underwent the same fate : https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/im-fine

    This era also saw the appearance of the words “pog”, “poggers” and “pogchamp”, all of which quickly became cringe. The above meme can therefore be interpreted as a pile of cringe meant to be absurd.

    What about burgers? The burger also has a place in meme culture. can I has cheeseburger

    Declaring one’s taste for a trash food or another belongs to another memetic trop, that of appearing relatable and whimsical. Most old memes using this trope appear cringe by today’s standard. The image may be a meta-meme about itself, describing the memer’s transition from pre-cringe to post-cringe culture, from “burgers” to “poggers”, and burying the image macros under countless layers of irony.




  • There’s been scientific and philosophical debates for a long time about which cognitive traits are specific to humans and which are shared across species, and which trait is specific to each group. This is just another element to add to this debate.

    If you’re wondering how this can be applied, it’s not the researcher’s job to know. A lot of the time, a discovery’s practical applications are only found decades after the discovery itself. Some are never used, but we can’t know in advance which knowledge will be useful.

    So ideally, those who work in fundamental research needn’t consern themselves with the potential use of their work, they seek knowledge for itself. If there’s useful stuff in there, applied scientists and engineers will pick it up later. Ideally, but unfortunately, researchers may need to convince a patron that their research will be useful if they need private fundings, which can be a problem. Sometimes, they’ll have to put a little bullshit in their pitch for companies. But since this probably wasn’t a very expensive study, maybe public grants were enough. Or maybe they convinced some company that they could use it to promote cat antidepressants.