Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT
WCDT Strips 3206 to 3210 (25 to 29 April 2016)
Storel:
--- Quote from: hedgie on 29 Apr 2016, 09:35 ---
--- Quote from: oddtail on 29 Apr 2016, 03:07 ---If nothing else, I know very few people who drink vodka (and vodka is a pretty popular drink in my country) without any sort of chaser. In fact, the fact that I don't bother with chasers leads, more often than not, to people giving me funny looks
--- End quote ---
Actually, I got a round of Grey Goose for a friend and some people she knew for her birthday and when they all wanted a chaser, I would have at least teased them if it weren't for the occasion. I blame it on them being inexperienced drinkers, though. Living in a university town now compared to a major city, I do see fewer people drinking their booze neat (usually only the regulars at the sole remaining working class bar actually eschew a chaser). It seems as though many at that age want the effect and not the taste.
--- End quote ---
Straight vodka tastes like rubbing alcohol smells.* :grumpypuss: I don't want a chaser with my vodka, I want a mixer. Preferably something that can hide the taste of the vodka, like orange juice, tomato juice, or cranberry juice.
And don't try to tell me that good vodka has no taste. I am one of the small minority who can taste alcohol... which is probably the reason I never developed a liking for alcohol.
____________
*Which makes sense, actually, because around here rubbing alcohol = 70% isopropyl alcohol, 30% water. If you replaced the isopropyl alcohol with ethyl alcohol, you'd just have 140-proof vodka. The 80-proof stuff is bad enough.
--- Quote from: Case on 30 Apr 2016, 03:13 ---
--- Quote from: Akima on 29 Apr 2016, 17:49 ---That building on the edge of a waterfall looks more like a cathedral than a castle.
--- End quote ---
Yup, that's Cathédrale Notre-Dame-de-l'Assomption de Clermont-Ferrand in the Auvergne region of France.
--- End quote ---
It may have been inspired by the Clermont-Ferrand cathedral, but it isn't actually that cathedral (or a copy). The picture on that wikipedia page shows it only has two towers -- the one on the waterfall has four or five.
Kugai:
--- Quote from: sitnspin on 30 Apr 2016, 12:42 ---There is no outside the universe. The universe is literally everything.
--- End quote ---
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1gBLX7ihaA
JimC:
I've now found the artists original image here. Its got a lot more top and especially bottom. There are also some of his work up sketches.
http://www.laberge.qc.ca/fred/gallery/displayimage.php?album=20&pid=73#top_display_media
The various copies seem to have been cropped to remove all the identification. I dunno, the vision of the new world we had of the internet back in the day didn't include relentless ripping off of creators by both corporations and individuals...
Storel:
Thank you! It's nice to see the full image, and I appreciate your restoring the artist's information, too.
--- Quote from: sitnspin on 30 Apr 2016, 12:42 ---There is no outside the universe. The universe is literally everything.
--- End quote ---
Then what is the expanding universe expanding into?
Case:
--- Quote from: Storel on 30 Apr 2016, 15:09 ---
--- Quote from: Case on 30 Apr 2016, 03:13 ---
--- Quote from: Akima on 29 Apr 2016, 17:49 ---That building on the edge of a waterfall looks more like a cathedral than a castle.
--- End quote ---
Yup, that's Cathédrale Notre-Dame-de-l'Assomption de Clermont-Ferrand in the Auvergne region of France.
--- End quote ---
It may have been inspired by the Clermont-Ferrand cathedral, but it isn't actually that cathedral (or a copy). The picture on that wikipedia page shows it only has two towers -- the one on the waterfall has four or five.
--- End quote ---
Snark aside: You're right. I guess one has to make stuff more pointy for northern Americans to feel it's gothic enough. Even the actually gothic stuff ...
Re: Finite Universe or not - We don't know. Here's some interesting discussion by people I think are competent - most of them talk "physicese" competently enough.
The scales involved are so large that we can't really be certain whether spacetime is more-or-less "flat", or has a small positive curvature that is merely too small to measure with certainty. Einsteins field equations allow for several different large-scale topologies - we might be living on the surface of a humongous, "Universal Doughnut" - we can't measure precisely enough to be absolutely sure.
Humans observing a sailing ship appear from "under the horizon" could see the Earth's curvature with their own eyes, without instruments- a civilization of hyperintelligent Ants would have to reach far further into the technological box of tricks, use more precise instruments. And the poor microbes may never know for sure.
(click to show/hide)When talk about physics, I should be honest about my credentials: I admit my expertise is more in quantum field theories as applied to solid state physics than General Relativity - while I understand some of the concepts, I'm not really that fluent in GR. ZoeB or Cesium133 may be more qualified to clarify.
Enough however to know that all those nice images of steel balls on rubber surfaces etc. can easily be misleading - e.g. seduce one to think of space-time as being "embedded" inside a higher-dimensional space (well, it is if you look at it from the POV of string theory, but that's not really in the way I mean here), just like that image of a two-dimensional space-sheet being curved because the steel ball distorts it in the third one - That's ... as illustrative as it is misleading. Nobody can visualize four dimensions, not even Hawking or Ed Witten.
When Cosmologists talk about the curvature of spacetime acting as the "Force" that we call gravity, they mean 'curved in spacetime', not curved in the spacial coordinates alone.
That's one habit that non-physicists should be aware of: Physicists are always eager to emphasise similarities between the mathematical structures used to describe different phenomena by using terms developed in one framework when talking about the other - analogies help the brain make connections & generalize known concepts. Much of the math behind General Relativity came from the study of the properties of a curved two-dimensional surface (that surface you are resting your feet on, right now) - a "differentiable Manifold" - embedded within a three-dimensional space.
Spacetime is ... different. The "tangent manifold" (*) is a "flat" four-dimensional Minkowski-space, not a flat Euclidean space. It's spacetime, not space & time.
And it's also four-dimensional - there is no "extra" higher dimension in General Relativity, no fifth dimension that spacetime is curved in. The distinction is between a "flat" 4-D space, which is a local approximation that obeys special relativity (the lil' brother of the General one - he makes light & magnetism and stuff), and the larger, non-flat space it approximates.
Flat only means: No gravity/curvature -> in that case, special relativity is valid "as far as the eye can see" - literally like the sailor who perceives himself to be standing on a flat surface, while knowing that ships can appear from "under the horizon" any minute. He pretends that there are only 180° degrees inside a triangle, e.g. when he navigates, although he knows it's ever so slightly more - but the error is small enough not to bother. At least not today - tomorrow he'll have to use a different pretend-triangle that looks exactly like the last one.
There is such a thing that acts as a curvature of spacetime - but it's gravity. The existence of gravity in itself doesn't mean that the Universe is "periodic" - that you come back to your origin if you travel long enough in one direction, like you would on the surface of the Earth if you sail due west for long enough.
(*) Hold a flat sheet to a sphere, so they contact in one point. That's your tangent manifold. Within a small region around the point of contact you can pretend, with good accuracy, that everything is nice and flat and the inner angles of triangles sum to 180°, as they should. Stuff gets interesting when you want to talk about two different points, each with their own tangent manifold sheets, and how to translate from one into the other - then comes parallel transport, and metric tensors, and Christoffel symbols, Cartan or Levi-Civita connections ...
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