Even though I find it likely that you detected an actual bias in the design of the meme, I don’t see any explicit indications of Manjaro’s, Fedora’s or Alpine’s genders.

Yes, you are mostly correct. In some sense, it is more a cultural thing. If your Arch breaks, the expectations for your ability to deal with it yourself are a bit higher. There are good instructions and people willing to help, but the latter (both inside and outside of Arch community, I think) may tell you that you shouldn’t be using Arch if you don’t meet their expectations.

Anyway, another aspect of it is the fact that with my system, I am a bit of a tinkerer.

You know, the kind that insists on using Arch, despite being slightly (or more) below the skill level one should have before using it.

I did some numerical differentiation, with ten thousand points between 0 and 10. Negative values appeared in the third derivative. The attached figure zooms into them. While I think those sudden spikes may very well be numerical artifacts caused by float rounding errors or something like that, there is a clear negative slope around them, further confirmed in the fourth derivative. So, this function is not what I hoped it to be.

Could you approximate derivatives by finite differences?

Yes. I will try that.

Could you write your own code implementing the the derivatives?

No, I don’t think I could.

You can think of the convolution as a process to smooth the function g by making its values at points around each t affect that at t. So, tau is the distance between t and another point, and Psi(tau) tells how much the other point contributes to the smoothing at point t. In a more decent situation, the integral in (7) would have been properly solved and tau would have disappeared, never to bother us again.

That’s what I thought too, but it turns out that is not true! Here’s a couple of interesting links: Non-analytic smooth function, Bump function, Flat function. EDIT: Fixed the links and added another one.

Ooh, thanks for the tag! This is great!

That’s interesting! My first, hasty reading of that was that the work would be done by the deceleration, but that must be wrong also, as the frame becomes inertial at the end of the acceleration, even at the full speed. So, I am still unsure where the work is done, but as far as I understand, this confirms my intuition that if some particles are brought back, the observer provides the energy needed for those particles to “become real” in the frame of reference of those waiting at home.

Thank you for the correction (and the confirmation of the rest).

You do make some good points, but also seem to have misunderstood a couple of fundamental things. I’ll share my understanding, whatever it’s worth. Basically every sentence below could be appended with “if I understand correctly”, but I’ll omit those as redundant.

There is an actual disagreement among physicists about whether things like virtual particles are “real” or just a notational convenience. However, the different notations are equivalent, and in a sense our models and notations is all that we humans have. There is no objective perspective to the world. But all this is philosophy, irrelevant to the actual measurable facts.

As I was taught on my first quantum mechanics course, any question about the interpretation of quantum mechanics can be answered with “shut up and calculate” (if asked by a theoretical physicist) or “shut up and measure” (if an experimental physicist).

But the consequences of the theory are measurable. The Unruh effect can be measured (an article was linked in another comment). Hawking radiation is an equivalent phenomenon and can also be measured (but IIRC hasn’t been at least yet). And one way to describe Hawking radiation is with virtual particles coming into existence at the event horizon, one half of the pair falling in and the other escaping. There the escaping particle is as real as a particle can be.

The gecko comparison doesn’t work. The reason for quantum fluctuation of zero-point energy not being harvested is not that it doesn’t exist, it is that such harvesting is fundamentally impossible by definition (despite what some pseudoscientific interpretations claim). There are multiple arguments for this, on differing levels of fundamentality. The virtual particles are not energy coming from nothing, they are manifestations of the energy that is already there. And that energy can’t be taken away from the vacuum, as it is already at the minimum level. That minimum just is non-zero. On a more practical level, any device, however optimized and whether manufactured or biological, would spend at least as much energy in the harvesting process as it would gain.

One might think that Hawking radiation goes against what I just said, but it doesn’t. It is an integral part of the theory that the black hole loses equivalent mass (i.e. energy) as it emits. So the virtual particles don’t create new energy. Still, they (or the same phenomenon described differently) are necessary for the mechanism of how that mass can escape the black hole. What I suggested in my original post, that the energy from the Unruh effect particles comes from the process of acceleration, is a similar idea (but a completely nonrigorous guess, so it might work differently).

The things I ran into were Nassim Haramein and his “International Space Federation” claiming to have combined quantum mechanics and general relativism and aiming to use that for harvesting infinite free energy from vacuum or something like that (and on the side also claiming that consciousness is a fundamental property of physics, of course).

There are about three practical ways to make measurements related to Unruh effect, I think. Black holes are one way, as Hawking radiation is an equivalent phenomenon. Another thing is studying some classical systems with equivalent phenomena, like sound waves in some fluids, IIRC. The third way is the particle accelerator approach used in the paper linked to in another comment. The experiment I suggested would be utterly impractical to actually perform, I think.

Yeah, Lynch seems to have published multiple related papers in the recent years. Superficially the science seems valid, but I haven’t spent enough effort to confirm. Nevertheless, I accept that this kind of evidence should be sufficient, but in some layperson sense it lacks the concreteness of my (impractical) suggestion.

Suomi mainittu, torilla tavataan!

Anyways, this is a really good translation, although all those “spread” things could use more idiomatic single-word translations. I applaud!

Vocative is an interesting thing. When I first read about it, I dismissed it as useless. However, since then I have used it in my largest conlang project Shiofaioth (linked to in another comment) and also here, because it’s just so nice.

Thank you for your interest! There are couple of ways in which I try to accomplish that goal. First is the verbal pre- and postpositions, which force you to be open about your sources and the degree of voluntariness of what you describe (of course nothing prevents straight up lying, but at least whatever you claim is explicit and ready for inspection). There’s another thing that I now realize I haven’t even documented yet, even though it has been one of my main ideas. That is the lack of single word ways to say one “must” or “should” or “may” do something, with the expection being taht you explicitly say who orders or allows the action. Of course there are always ways to go around this, but the aim is that if you try to hide authority behind words, it would be clunky and noticeable.

Here is an example I have worked on: https://github.com/SurrealPartisan/shiofaioth

I applaud your effort in translating that. Your translation does not perfectly match my original intentions, but it is close, and I guess there is supposed to be a subjective aspect to these things.

Anyway, I’ll send you a link to our Discord.

https://www.science.org/content/article/how-easy-it-fudge-your-scientific-rank-meet-larry-world-s-most-cited-cat

When I read the title, I thought “Surely this Larry cannot be more cited than the famous F. D. C. Willard”. But then I read the article and it turns out that’s very specifically the record Larry broke.

The data is based on manual inspection of the strips published on https://thetortoisewebcomic.net/. The graph was made in Python using the NetworkX package.