DontMockMySmock posted:

Fuckin' lol @ anyone who uses the acronym "EDC".

Lady Disdain posted:

I think that "spicy" is the word people use when they're overwhelmed by flavour, just because they have no other word for it.
I can't think of any other explanation.

DontMockMySmock posted:

Let's say I can throw a 60 mph baseball. So if I'm on a train, moving 50 mph to your right, and I throw a baseball also to your right, you, standing in the train station and looking through the train's window, see the baseball as going 110 mph to the right relative to you. In other words, the velocities combine through simple addition. Similarly, if I throw the baseball to the left, you'll see it moving 10 mph to the left.

But, it turns out, this is just an approximation. When speeds get near c, the math gets more complicated. Let's say I can shoot a 0.6c space torpedo. So if my spaceship is moving 0.5c to the right, and I fire my torpedo also to the right, then does my torpedo go 1.1c relative to you, observing from Earth? You've heard that nothing can travel faster than c, so this must be impossible. In fact, the torpedo would be going 0.846c relative to you. The formula isn't just:
v₁ + v₂
it's:
(v₁ + v₂)/[1 + (v₁*v₂)/c²]
but in normal everyday life, that denominator is so incredibly close to 1 that it doesn't matter. You will find that if the two velocities are between -c and c, then the resulting velocity will also be within that same interval.

So if you're going really fast, and you accelerate to try to go faster, what happens? Well, you get closer and closer to c. And since the way kinetic energy works in special relativity is also different, your energy still increases just as much as you'd expect, but that energy gets you less and less velocity, asymptotically approaching (but never reaching) c.

Inspector 34 posted:

I don't think I understand this well enough to describe a situation like that. I'm just trying to understand it conceptually at all. But I'll try.

If I have two ball bearings heading toward each other, one from from the left at 20mph and one from the right at 20mph, the energy of produced by their collision is equivalent to if one were standing still and the other was going 40mph, right? So the simple v1+v2 scenario. But at what point does that stop being true?

Assume they're going 100mph each, or 10,000,000mph each, why do I need to bring c into the equation? How fast do they need to be going relative to each other for that original 20 + 20mph to not work? That's what I mean by arbitrary, is there a specific point where that kind of simple equation doesn't work and we need to bring c into the equation?

Snowglobe of Doom posted:

That's a gaur, the largest species of wild bovid. The big bulls can be over 7 feet tall at the shoulder and weigh one and a half tons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaur


E: largest extant species, there was an extinct species of bison that was likely over 8 feet tall at the shoulder and had a hornspan of over 6 feet and probably weighed up to 2 tons.

Phanatic posted:

That's nothing new, and the medium of gas is still nowhere near dense enough for anything like sound to propagate through.

CzarChasm posted:

Ah, the days of Babe Ruth, when this dude was a top athlete

Dude smoked, drank, ate poorly, and cheated on his wife constantly.



Don't get me wrong, he was actually a star athlete. It's just impressive that he could do it while eating and acting like your old drunken unemployed uncle.

Atticus_1354 posted:

mind the walrus posted:

There's good reason he fell off quick in the mid-90s