Sasha [They/Them]

Yes, that Sasha 🍉

Transfemby 🏳️‍⚧️⬛🟪⬜🟨🏳️‍⚧
They/them

Anarchist/your local idiot with a guitar

If you’re occupying land in so-called “Australia”

If you eat food

And if you live on Earth

Introducing Trans Action Network Naarm! 🏳️‍⚧️
(Part of a wider solidarity network too!)

  • 1 Post
  • 371 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: December 12th, 2023

help-circle
  • Cool yeah, dug through the maths and took the time to understand the situation you were describing and I understand now.

    I thought you were describing a something else, and then slightly confused myself by only considering the metric and not the global picture. I was trying to abuse some old heuristic techniques and they don’t quite work for this case, though it was fine for what I was picturing, where Jane and Alice are symmetric about Bob.

    Thanks for taking the time to convince me.

    Actually reading back over this is hilariously dumb, forgive my bad reading comprehension, that is how redshift works.


  • Would you agree that, at the moment they pass each other, Alice and Jane would see different points in Bob’s history as being simultaneous in their respective reference frames?

    I wouldn’t say that’s necessarily true, no. It’s only true if their speeds are different, the direction they’re travelling doesn’t factor into it. In either case, their lines of constant time are the same because space is rotationally symmetric. I’m not thinking of them adjusting their calculations to some “true” sense of simultaneous, if that’s what you meant in your edit, because there isn’t one by definition.

    And it’s related to distance because the further they are from Bob, the greater the discrepancy in their calculations of Bob’s relative time will be.

    That really depends on what you mean by time shift in your original comment. If you mean the shift in what they perceive as simultaneous, then it’s not, but it seemed to me that’s what you meant. If you mean the difference in their age then I honestly can’t remember how it factors in for the accelerating case, I haven’t had to think about SR problems in a while.


  • I don’t think this is true, you’re right that what’s considered simultaneous changes*, but it’s not related to distance and that’s not how redshift works.

    At best Alice could use the redshift to work out how fast she’s moving relative to Bob, if she’s moving towards and away from him at the same speed, she’ll always get the same result. She’d actually think the same moments are simultaneous regardless of direction.

    The time difference is only accumulated during her acceleration so it can only be measured during it.

    *but only when her speed is different


  • If you want to get really technical, it’s because the symmetries of the Minkowski metric are the Poincaré group. Which includes only rotations, translations and boosts, none of which correspond to acceleration. Meaning it’s inherently impossible to make acceleration look like being stationary because of the geometry of spacetime.

    If Alice flies by Bob at some relativistic speed, then there’s a very simple coordinate transform (a Lorentz boost) that flips our perspective to Alice’s pov; she’s stationary and Bob is moving.

    If Alice were to accelerate and we did the same thing, we’d end up with a “momentarily comoving reference frame,” in which Alice is only “stationary” for an instant and Bob is moving at a constant speed as before. Or we could create a non-inertial reference frame which would look nothing like Bob’s perspective, but Alice would be stationary.

    Physics in non-inertial frames behaves differently, as a simple example: if stationary (or constant speed) Bob dropped an object while floating in space, it would remain there. If accelerating Alice tried the same thing, it would accelerate away from her. You can test this out in an accelerating car or train or whatever and see that it’s fundamentally asymmetrical even before considering SR.

    In terms of things like length contraction and time dilation, these are a little more complicated mathematically, but it’s just an extension of the above asymmetry when spacetime is Minkowski rather than Euclidean. The difference in observed time is clear when looking at each person’s worldline, Alice’s isn’t straight like Bob’s and so she unambiguously experiences a different proper time and proper length.

    Ultimately this means that even if Alice accelerates then passes Bob at a constantly speed, they’ll both see one another’s clocks running slow by the same amount, when Alice decelerates and returns to compare her stopwatch with Bob’s they’ll have very different totals which corresponds to how much time Alice lost during her acceleration.

    Short extra

    My favourite feature of this asymmetry is that Alice could accelerate at a constant rate in her reference frame forever, while from outside she would appear to accelerate slower and slower as she approaches the speed of light (which is famously constant).




  • It’s just a regulated amount set by the government of each region, the manufacturers want to make them as profitable as possible, but the regulations say they can only be so profitable. The thing is, if you’re losing 2% per game, it doesn’t seem like much, but the point of slots is you play a lot of games, people sit there for hours and hours and the machines can run multiple games at once in some cases. You can lose all your money quite quickly.

    I never worked on physical machines so I can’t really answer any questions about coins, I just got data sheets with the reels on them and info about stuff like custom rules and bonus rounds.





  • I very briefly had a job as a mathematician for a company that certifies pokies (slot machines). I was technically also a software dev, but my job mainly consisted of calculating the theoretical average returns for each machine, writing basic code to simulate the machine for millions of games and then making sure those two numbers matched. I’d pass that on to a physical testing team who hack them to run real games.

    It was a horrible fucking job and I got out basically a month after I finished my training. All we did was prove the machines were exactly as profitable as allowed in whatever location they were going to be deployed at…

    Now I work as a regular software developer and it’s also a horrible job.








  • It’s always going to be a personal preference kind of thing. Personally I don’t really care much about “passing” and I’m usually completely okay being outwardly trans, unless it’s being used to harass/bully.

    I had a weird experience the other day when getting an ultrasound where I told the tech I was obviously on HRT which she immediately denied. I get she was trying to be supportive, but it kinda just made me feel worse because of how awkward it was lol.


  • I love this stuff, I always put it on my face. It’s just enough to stop feeling like my skin is as dry as paper and it’s not oily, it feels more watery than anything. I switched to it years ago, use it after every shower and now my skin is so nice, presumably just because I’m not leaving my face all dried out, I doubt there’s anything special about this stuff.

    That said, I do also use a very gentle sorbolene body wash and hand soap because my skin was too fragile for normal soap. If I don’t, I tend to get lots of sores on my fingers.


  • A favourite phrase of mine that comes up in so many different areas of life is: “soft on people, hard on structures.” Individuals tend to be pretty good, genuine and caring people.

    It’s much like how an atheist might be a great person, but the new atheist movement became a festering cesspool of anti-feminist right wing bigotry. Having a religion doesn’t change much really, shit people are universal.