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Cake day: August 4th, 2023

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  • I don’t know who really got that trend going. I’ve enjoyed up to hour-ish long videos on more or less anything, but a few years back the first truly excessively long video I remember is Whitelight’s 7 hour long overview/miniseries on Death Stranding. And to be fair, I did find that faster and more enjoyable than playing Death Stranding.

    (Also I get why folks make them: more ads plus having that much watch time heavily biases the algorithm towards you so it’s more money overall. And the kind of person that watches 7 hour long reviews in the background (or while sleeping), aka me, certainly help weigh the scales for super long videos.)

    But also, I kind of like when shorts are like a minute long or less so I can watch one when I’m like, on the shitter and not accidentally end up with a video essay. I mean 10 minutes used to be the limit of every youtube video! Will they introduce a new, even shorter format? Bring vines or blips back?





  • Codex@lemmy.worldtoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldI'm going insane
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    2 days ago

    Huh, never saw this one but in high school I had a dream just like this. I met a beautiful woman, perfect in every way, we got married had some kids, I even got some ways into middle age. Then, I was sitting in chair and noticed that my vision seemed… blurry at the edges, in a very “vignette filter” kind of way and I immediately knew I was dreaming. Woke up just as the existential collapse started. For several years after I’d try to remember her face, what our love had felt like, any of the details that had seemed so solid and tantalizing real for those few sleeping hours.

    In retrospect, a lot like that Rick and Morty episode with the life simulator game. I wonder if one of the writers ever had that dream too? Brains are weird, and I haven’t any dreams nearly that all encompassing since.







  • So photons, the particle of light, can interact with matter (atoms) in different ways. It could be absorbed by an electron, and then the energy transfered could knock the electron off the atom. That’s the photoelectric effect. It could also excite an electron into a higher orbital but not dislodge it, and often the electron will emit a new photon when it drops back down to ground state. That’s phosphorescence. The photon could also hit nothing and travel straight through.

    If you shot a photon (using a laser) through a cloud of atoms, you could watch for these interactions. Normally, light seems to slow down when passing through a medium (air or water) because the photons get absorbed and re-emitted. In bulk, this causes light scattering and slows travel.

    In this experiment, the cloud is made of ultracold rubidium. Rubidium is quite reactive and a pretty big atom, but i dont know specifically why it is used. What surprised the experimenters is that they could measure both the excited states of the atom and the emission of the photon. Sometimes, the atoms would seem to stay excited even though the photon had already been emitted, and also sometimes atoms would get excited even though no photon had been absorbed.

    This is interesting but kind of makes sense to me. The quantum properties of reality don’t disappear when we move up to bigger scales and aggregates. Rather the quantum properties seem to just “average out.” But this has weird effects. Electrons, for example, aren’t little balls in orbit around the nucleus. They’re waves of energy that get probabilistically smeared out over an “orbital”, an area around the nucleus where that electron is likely to be located. When atoms combine into molecules, the orbitals also combine into complex orbitals over the entire molecule. And when lots of atoms get arranged into a crystal (like in metals) those orbitals smear out over the entire aggregate. That’s kind of what it is to be entangled with other matter, to be bound up in the same quantum probability function.

    So to my mind, looking at how one atom reacts with a small number of atoms in a supercooled cloud doesn’t make sense, and gives weird results like negative time. The wave function of the photon must account for the wave function of the entire cloud. The single photon has infinitely many possible interactions through the cloud, which in aggregate always amount to taking longer to pass through while exciting some electrons along the way.