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As it should be… Navigators could determine latitudes pretty accurately by using astronomy. It was the longitude that was a big problem (maybe that’s part of the reason Japan is placed in the middle of the Pacific).

Some natural cushioning is needed to appreciate the comfort of the floor, I imagine. I’m too boney for that.

I’m pretty sure I’m in my fourth pair now.

That may be relativists (they would actually measure anything in units of mass, with everything else defined through G = c = 1). Astrophysicists commonly measure mass in solar masses, long distances in parsec (or kiloparsec, megaparsec), short distances in solar radii or AU, and time in whatever is relevant to their problem (could be seconds or gigayears)

I’m sitting on an Aeron at work, it’s good, but I can’t in good conscience pay that much for a chair. I was recently on the market for a new office chair and extensively researched it. It really looks like it’s a hit or miss with every chair in every price range, and I was very seriously considering replacing my Hyken with another Hyken. I decided to go with the IKEA Markus and have been sitting on it for about a month. I’m only moderately happy with it, may even return it before the year is up although I’d hate doing it.

That is almost certainly Staples Hyken. Comfortable chair but cheaply made, mine started disintigrating in a couple of years.

My top intro music shows: TNG, VOY, DS9, DIS, SNW, LD
Honorable mention: ENT
Top movie theme: First Contact

Playing 4D chess /s

Rumania and Makedonia probability the closest to the country’s native name.

EM and gravitational waves are seen as analogous because as I wrote, they are produced by acceleration of charges and masses, respectively. The physics behind them is very different (described by Maxwell’s equations for EM and Einstein field equations for GW), but all systems that have waves in them (including sound in the air, waves on the surface of water etc.) can be approximated as linear for small perturbations, which means that they satisfy the wave equation at that regime.

It’s not me who didn’t use a tool, it was the other guy.

Only because we are used to it.

I just had to coordinate an online meeting with some guy at a company, I had no idea where he’s based but he suggested time slots in EST (I’m in Toronto). I asked him twice if he’s sure, thinking he may be based outside of North America and doesn’t know that Toronto currently follows EDT which is GMT-4h, and he just responded “Eastern Standard Time”.

And of course he actually meant EDT. Turns out he is based in North America, just dumb.

Fuck timezones, but more than that fuck daylight saving time. You want an extra hour of sunshine after work in summer? Shift the work schedule, not the fucking clock!

It’s a map of the AƧU

The balrog was already awake, but maybe wasn’t paying attention 😜

They are quite similar to electromagnetic waves, but also quite different. They are produced by masses accelerating (just like EM waves are produced by charges accelerating), and indeed cause orbital decay. But this orbital decay is only important in relativistic systems (so the Earth, which is orbiting the sun at 0.0001 the speed of light, is not going to fall into the sun because of gravitational waves).

See my response below to Captain Aggravated about how dilute those large stars are.

It’s an interesting question whether anybody would actually feel spaghettification 😁 I actually don’t know. You can use physics to calculate the proper time derivative of the tidal forces, but you need biology to define the start (and end…) of the process. My intuition says that it probably happens too fast, so once the tidal forces are strong enough to be perceptible, they grow strong enough to rip you apart before you realize (again, just a hunch).

Yes, but red supergiants differ from the sun in that their photospheres are extremely dilute and don’t have a sharp transition to the corona. I don’t know the details of this particular star but take Betelgeuse as an example (it’s probably not particularly large for this catrgory), it’s radius is ~640 the sun’s per Wikipedia, which gives a volume of ~260 million that of the sun. But it is only x15 times as massive as the sun, so on average ~20 million times less dense.

Yep, you got it right. The accretion disk is actually really flat. Those images are produced in simulations that take into account the curved (and very complex) paths light takes in the vicinity of a black hole. These images really depend on the angle between the line of sight and the disk.