[-] [email protected] 10 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 19 hours ago)

There is some popular knowledge about Soviet-era science-fiction, but although there are several books you can find in Western libraries like Obruchev's Plutonia, Tolstoy's Aelita, or the Strugatsky Brothers' short stories, the discussion about Soviet science-fiction books specifically always remains in the shadows of movies like Stalker or Solaris. I think this is only partially due to a Western bias and has more to do with the fact that Soviet leadership has always emphasised the importance of cinema as a medium all the way back since Lenin.

[-] [email protected] 5 points 3 days ago

Lucky boy, his teacher takes him on all these field trips

[-] [email protected] 4 points 3 days ago

Counterpoint: There will be much more work to be done in socialism and communism than in capitalism, because our cultural standards will be much, much higher; a socialist world is one where everyone will have first-world problems. Just like living in the cramped and damp huts of the dark ages seems unthinkable today, it will be inconceivable to socialist society to live in an empty room painted eggshell. People tomorrow will not be content with derivative sequels and machine-made mince music, and they won't wear pants that can't survive the month. To support billions of people with luxury quality that has low environmental impact is a thing that can and will be made possible, but it requires much more work than supporting a deadbeat proletariat that is economically clinging on for dear life and teetering on the brink of ecological extinction.

[-] [email protected] 12 points 3 days ago

The question is a bit misleading, since it is not about relative acceleration but relative velocity. The relative velocity of the 4-year-old man is key to determine his momentum, and hence the kinetic energy of his impact upon the bullet.

With that out of the way, we first note that adulthood starts at 18, which must be due to a significant time dilation in the reference frame of the man. We have the formula for the time dilation t' = γt, with the Lorentzian gamma factor γ = 1/sqrt(1 - v²/c²), thus 1/γ² = 1 - v²/c², and we get v = sqrt(1 - 1/γ²)c for the velocity. If the man is four years old in one reference frame and 18 in another, then γ = 18/4 = 4.5, and after plugging in the value, it follows that v = 0.975c. Therefore, the man had an incredible speed of about 292500 m/s when he and the bullet mutually obliterated one another.

[-] [email protected] 12 points 3 days ago

When I followed my passion and taught Calculus 2 as a student, I got paid so poorly that I was losing money after rent and health insurance. I didn't care then, I still don't care, and I would do it again if the university would actually let me do it after graduating, because the pay is literally so low it is illegal for outsiders to do under national labour law. When your bank balance no longer represent your entitlement to survival, you'd be mad wasting your best years working on it

[-] [email protected] 27 points 1 week ago

So China is not a threat? Great to hear, can we start deescalating now?

[-] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Remember the time when Washington DC was invaded by men in high heels, wigs, bows, and colourful dresses? They are still living the trauma of 1812

[-] [email protected] 11 points 2 weeks ago

'); DROP TABLE no_fly_list

[-] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago

It is right to see dialectics in science, but it appears after the fact as a consequence of observation and theory rather than as an epistemological requirement. Certain scientific theories, such as relativity, do not admit a dialectical interpretation due to a lack of actors to play out the dialectical process, or of contradictions between them.

[-] [email protected] 10 points 2 weeks ago

This is correct, but it's not like there is ever a contradiction between mathematical and dialectical methods. Natural scientists only prefer to work with mathematics because their subject is benign enough to admit mathematical descriptions yielding precise, quantitative results, while social scientists need dialectics because their mathematical models suffer from crippling vagueness and complexity and are quickly outdated. Where mathematics can describe a system to which dialectics happen to also apply, e.g. phase transitions, it naturally produces models that mirror the dialectic because they both describe the same thing.

[-] [email protected] 12 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

You are in the midst of committing a category error. Dialectics is the model that describes changing historical, social, and philosophical systems and processes. Analogies from physics are frequently used to explain how dialectics work, but that doesn't mean dialectics govern physics, only that dialectical thinking has historically been inspired by physical processes.

The logical role that dialectics fulfills in social science is fulfilled in natural science by mathematics. So rather than taking the dialectical method and filling it with natural objects and laws at random, you should study the mathematical relationships between measurable quantities and interpret the dynamic expressed in the equations governing them. I know you might not want to hear this because mathematics is hard, but the only way to understand the inner workings of gravity is to sit your ass down with a book about general relativity and do the exercises.

[-] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago

"Surely they can't kill me if I help them win"

57
submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

Costa Rica is a tropical country and has only two seasons; a dry season from January to March and a wet season during the rest of the year. It is geographically impossible for there to be a Four Seasons hotel in this country. If anyone has sold you a stay at such a resort, you have been scammed! Contrary to what is advertised, you will not experience autumn, winter, or spring in the way temperate latitudes do, nor do these hotels undertake any actions to emulate such an experience.

25
submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

As the abstraction of the act of streaming from its individual particularities, NPC streaming presents the distillation of the streaming profession, resulting in maximal efficiency in revenue generation. A quantitative increase in this kind of stream will eventually result in a qualitative transformation of the industry where it will be sublated by an entirely novel mode of production, namely the streamer-capitalist who relies entirely on the viewer for both the production and the consumption of their product, and who will eventually become a node in a never-ending tree of subcontractors.

1
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

Comrades, today I had the pleasure of participating in our city's First of May demonstration, and to purchase two books from the local chapter of the MLPD (Marxist-Leninist Party of Germany). One of them is pretty well-known, it is the Dialectics of Nature by Friedrich Engels; the other was an obscure philosophy tract written by one Mr Oscar Creydt where he attempts to reframe the entire history of the universe from a ML point of view, which is why I went in there with high expectations, namely that it would use recent discoveries from natural science to develop new ML philosophy.

Unfortunately for me however, whilst the book started promising and ambitious and it does demonstrate a good grasp of the historical developments of quantum mechanics, by page 60 of 220 it occurs to the author that he wants to deny Einstein's theory of general relativity, arguably the most well-tested and internally consistent theory in all of physics. But this was only the hors-d'oeuvre of the work, he goes on to try and reduce every single phenomenon in the universe to the vibration inherent to photons (which he calls "radions"), he spouts metaphysical nonsense about why the speed of light is constant, he declares the cosmic microwave background radiation to be the "primitive stage" of this vibration because Big Bang cosmology isn't real either, and he makes no attempt to explain cosmological redshift, gravitational lensing, or the perihelion precession of Mercury with his mental construction.

Now bear in mind that I don't necessarily want to accuse the author of being bad at science. The foreword of the book explicitly remarks that due to the anticommunist Stroessner regime in Paraguay, he couldn't rely on qualified people to empirically test or mathematically proofread his work, it is possible that the libraries he frequented just didn't have reliable books on the topics, and even the best scientists might publish utter drivel after having to work in isolation for decades. However, it is obvious that the mistake with this approach is that you cannot start with your own interpretation of dialectical materialism, and then change science to fit into it. This is a misconception of ML philosophy which many theoretically-minded comrades have already exposed, including on this very website. The refutation to it is that rather than relying on some rigid dogma formulated by humans, nature begets the shape of her own dialectics via her own interactions with herself; which is why we must study nature to arrive at natural philosophy and not vice versa.

The last thing I want to remark is that, if instead it had been let's say a Christian fanfic of science, one would immediately have noticed from the lack of footnotes and historical background knowledge, the presence of biblical and other nonscientific references, the use of odd figures and diagrams derived from gnosticism, or the extensive use of all-capital letter words. Here, there were no such signs. Marxist-Leninist scientific malpractice is especially worrisome because you might not even notice it until several pages into the book and even then the errors are of a much more subtle nature and require background knowledge.

1
Rare Balkanisation W (lemmygrad.ml)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

btw China has quadrupled its green energy production since 2008

3
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

It is now over a year since I have sadly had to depart from my university upon obtaining my master's degree in mathematics. I have since obtained a job as a programming contractor, however classical mathematics done with pen and paper is still the love of my life. Luckily enough, I still live within two hours of my old campus, and I was able to obtain an external library card, which is my ticket to look into all the topics I missed out on for want of time (not all mathematical).

If anyone among you has a similar experience, I would like you to share your techniques, too. Be advised that my way might not be very efficient nor lend itself to people who still need to study for exams or have deadlines, because I am no longer under these pressures.

Scouting. The closer a field is to my interests, the more books I already know to be suitable or unsuitable for me to learn from. For me, the most important criterion for a maths or theoretical physics book is to have numerous exercises on many different levels of difficulty and abstraction. I also prefer the books that use familiar notations to my lectures, and those that are written in my native language. Least importantly, a little pet peeve of mine is that I don't like it when books are set in Times New Roman because I find the font hideous and I honestly can't bear to look at it for long periods of time.

Frequency. Due to my day job, I am usually unable to clear more than an hour each day to sit down and study. I tend to use this hour to either read through a chapter and fill in the blanks between the formulae and draw pictures, or to attempt to do the exercises when I am done with the required reading for them. If an exercise seems boring and not what I wanted to learn from the book, I still tend to look up the solution rather than not considering it at all.

Intensity. Because I am no longer under the pressure of cramming and deadlines, I might take longer or sometimes lack the motivation to learn a topic, but I also have the liberty to take a minute and ask questions about it for which there was no time during my student years. Unless there is an elephant in the room requiring more urgent attention, I always tend to go through three things to look for: Examples and applications, characteristics of the generic case and the singular cases, and analogies in the language of other fields.

Surroundings. I tend to learn at my desk for when I need to write or take notes, and from my bed when I don't, although I reckon that the latter is a bad habit. Although during my earlier time at uni I used to learn with classical or Latin music or even commentary, I now tend to find it too distracting and prefer silence for learning. For obvious reasons I learn alone now, but I have always found it more fun and also easier to have a study buddy.

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HaSch

joined 3 years ago