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Cake day: May 14th, 2024

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  • Also known as a sidereal day. Check the animation. It’s pretty cool.

    This topic also touches upon the concept of reference frames. When people say that the earth takes 24 h to make a full revolution, it’s in relation to the sun. From a universal perspective, the heliocentric reference frame moves and rotates. From the heliocentric perspective, the usual earth based reference frame also moves and rotates. Nothing is truly stationary, and measuring revolutions is impossible unless you define your frame of reference.

    If you say a full revolution takes 24 h, it’s not wrong, but it’s only true in one reference frame.


  • Ethiopians are clearly very smart people. Take that white supremacists!

    Ancient Romans just loved convoluted systems, which were later inherited by the rest of Europe. The French revolution fixed most of that mess by simplifying it and getting rid of the quirky designs. They also tried to fix time units and the calendar, but that just didn’t stick for some reason. Meanwhile, Ethiopians were already using a sensible calendar that has a good way to mitigate the messy properties of Earth.


  • I approve of this system. It should make calendars nice and simple for the most part. For example, salaries would be pretty simple since the period wouldn’t fluctuate wildly.

    It’s just that not all things respect global holidays, so calculating energy production, water consumption and other things like that would still have to deal with weird inconsistencies. Regardless, this would still be far superior to our current train wreck of a calendar.




  • That addresses the calendar problem, which is another pet peeve of mine. Oh, where do I even begin. The calendar system is just the next level of curses and barrels of rotting worms.

    At least time units have fixed, but inconvenient conversion multipliers. Months and years involve numbers that aren’t even constants!

    Just when you thought it couldn’t possibly get any worse, someone reminds you about time zones. That’s just pure cosmic horror.

    It’s a miracle we don’t trigger a nuclear meltdown every week while using a system like this.


  • Time units are just as cursed as American units.

    Conversion between days, hours, minutes and seconds is a total mess. If you never have to do anything with those numbers, you don’t need to worry about it. The moment you need to do calculations or compare devices you run into completely unnecessary problems that would have been easy to avoid. Just think of pumps and fans with units given in l/min or m^3/h.

    Just pick the standard time unit and stick with it. Use prefixes to deal with big or small numbers.



  • It’s also about motivation. During the first years, you just study all the boring stuff nobody cares about. It takes years to get to the cool stuff, but by that time most students are already completely fed up with maths.

    The problems in the books were extra dry, so I prefered to come up with my own problems and solutions. Like, one day I was wondering how long it would take for a super fast train to go from one side of the planet to another. What if you accelerated half the way at 1 g, and then decelerated at -1g. How long would it take? What would be the maximum velocity? I had so many questions, and that’s why I had plenty of motivation to figure it all out. That’s how I learn weird and random stuff.

    What if you had a powerful laser that was able to evaporate stone? Let’s say you wanted to use it to drill a hole through stone, but you need to do it with the same rate as with a regular drill? Would you need a nuclear reactor just to power your super laser? My head is full of bizarre questions like this, so learning never stops.










  • Well what if you need to keep on producing more common metals in the meantime, and REEs are a byproduct. You would need to keep the REE factories running too.

    If you end up with 100 tons of terbium and yttrium oxide sitting in bags out in the rain, it’s going to lead to some serious quality issues further down the line. Well, just shove them in a warehouse then?

    You’ll need a big warehouse, and you need to keep building more of them every year as the stockpiles grow. Needless to say, there are some serious logistical problems with a total export ban. A partial restriction is more viable, because it gives China some time to figure out how to adapt.

    In any case, the rest of the world needs these metals, and they are willing to bend to knee long before China runs out of mitigation strategies. It’s going to be a problem in China as well, but at least they’re not totally screwed.