Longest Running Thread EVER

[Cancer]

Saw bunny again last night as I was calling Fluff Butt in.

[Cancer]

On 3/6/2015 at 12:03 PM, Cancer said:

Yes, it was another entry on the list of reasons not to become a chemist.

 

On 3/7/2015 at 7:06 AM, Pariah said:

True, there are many fewer lab-related accidents in astronomy.

 

Well, that's partially because there are about two orders of magnitude fewer astronomers than chemists.

 

OTOH, one spectacular fatality happened on the Kitt Peak 4-meter telescope a few months after I had my only run on that telescope.  That fatality turns out to have been the result of a combination of several design failures in the telescope building, a long-established habit of all observing astronomers at the time, and an impatient observer too familiar with one of the misfeatures, all making an inevitable tragedy that required amazingly bad luck to occur at any given moment.  Being a n00b, I would not have made the mistake resulting in death (though I did make the much more frequent mistake of getting face bruises due to one of the design issues).

[L. Marcus]

And shoe polish on the ocular.

[Cancer]

... almost certain the 4-meter didn't have an ocular.

[L. Marcus]

Really? Well, standards are falling everywhere ...

[Cancer]

This would have been walking at speed in the dark around the catwalk, both to get my dark adaptation and get a handle on the sky conditions, and colliding face-first with the shutter of the dome.  One bad design misfeature was that the bottom of the shutter came all the way down to only 3 or 4 feet of the catwalk surface, a situation I have encountered nowhere else, so the first time I slammed into it blindly at full walking speed.  I didn't fall down, but I was stunned by any game system you ever experienced.

 

That shutter design was one of the fatal elements in the death a few months later.

[L. Marcus]

Ow ow ow ...

[Pariah]

Some of these look really useful...and fun:

 

WTF/Notebooks

 

[Cancer]

Trying to decide if I dare to send that link to colleagues at the university.  Probably not.

 

And  ... I already have a couple of those, though the labels are not on the outside of the notebooks.

 

 

[Cancer]

They seem to be missing an essential title, though:

 

List of people who go up against the wall once I am King of the World

[Pariah]

Volumes I, II, and III?

[Cancer]

I'd leave a blank for the volume number.

[Old Man]

...to be continued

[L. Marcus]

A work in progress. 

[Pariah]

This is a test, part 1.

This is a test, part 2.

[Cancer]

This is a use of the emergency broadcasting network.  This is not a test.

 

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!

 

What are you still doing here?!?  Aren't we all dead?

[Cancer]

No one seems to have solved the mass dogfight problem yet.

[Cancer]

Quote

A popular old wives' tale says that relativistic Navier-Stokes equations violate the basic physical requirements of equilibrium stability and causality, and therefore can not be used for practical simulations of relativistic fluids. In this talk, I will discuss why the tale is unfounded. There is not one, but infinitely many Navier-Stokes equations because there are infinitely many conventions that can be used to define what one means by "fluid temperature", "fluid velocity" etc out of equilibrium. The early works on relativistic hydrodynamics (Eckart, Landau-Lifshitz) have indeed adopted conventions that lead to unphysical predictions. On the other hand, when one adopts physically sensible conventions, the resulting relativistic Navier-Stokes equations are both stable and causal.

 

For those for whom this goes over their head, merely writing the phrase "relativistic Navier-Stokes equations" is like walking up to Hastur and poking him rudely in the shoulder between each of three pronunciations of his name.  Since the quotation is the abstract of a seminar to be given on-line next week, I am expecting eldritch horror to break loose in multiple places.  What I don't know is if it'll break loose at every location where the remotely-transmitted seminar is being watched, or if it'll be worse than that.

[Old Man]

3 hours ago, Cancer said:

 

For those for whom this goes over their head, merely writing the phrase "relativistic Navier-Stokes equations" is like walking up to Hastur and poking him rudely in the shoulder between each of three pronunciations of his name.  Since the quotation is the abstract of a seminar to be given on-line next week, I am expecting eldritch horror to break loose in multiple places.  What I don't know is if it'll break loose at every location where the remotely-transmitted seminar is being watched, or if it'll be worse than that.

This being 2020, would we even notice?

[Bazza]

I thought he came already. 

[Cancer]

Well, given the consequences of causality violation implied by an incorrect treatment of relativity, I think there's a good chance it HAS arrived, and is spread out over at least eight months of time.

[Bazza]

Relatively is relative. Also a theory that breaks the ontology of time. That probably did it. 

[Cancer]

Humans' perception and understanding of time is sharply limited, and often they mask this from themselves by engaging in self-deception.

[Pariah]

Time isn't what it used to be. And furthermore, it never was.

[L. Marcus]

Time ... enough.