LillyPip

That’s not what I mean….

I was just listening to a biologist podcast about tardigrades and learnt we've been subjecting them to all the extremes to see what they can tolerate: super-fast speeds, radiation, you name it we've done it to them...

Think if super-advanced aliens did this to us. Oh. Oh god. 'How much velocity to squish us?' 'How much sound to shake us apart?'

Suddenly anal probing doesn't seem so bad.

e: ‘we’ll stick an appropriately-sized thing into an orifice that seems made for that’ sounds downright friendly by comparison.

It’s really good at making us feel like it’s intelligent, but that’s no more real than a good VR headset convincing us to walk into a physical wall.

It’s a meta version of VR.

(Meta meta, if you will.)

This may or may not be associated with music stands or equipment. I can’t remember.

I just emptied and re-did my music/video room, and found this bracket in a small box with no labels or anything. I can’t remember what it’s for. I think it’s either audio or video related, but it doesn’t seem to match any of my mic or equipment stands, though it might be. It’s devoid of any branding or part/serial numbers. No markings of any kind.

It folds like this:

More pics:

There’s a sliding mount screw on the bottom:

Thanks!

(Sorry for poor lighting, MacBook Pro 15” for scale)

Captain archer was linked with his own future, and he was almost religiously against transporter tech straight out of the gate, to a degree that seems weird if he didn’t have a reason to be.   

I understand the narrative reasons for this, but looking at him as a person, he seems overly Luddite with respect to this specific tech, in a way he isn’t with most others we can see.  He’s actually pretty progressive with respect to his society in many facets.  

That’s a bit weird, unless we consider his life includes time travel as a core concept, so he knew Scotty would lose Porthos, and though he couldn’t do anything about that, he had an almost innate distrust of transporters.  

Does that make sense?  

(I mostly mean the events of ENT and some TNG, VOY, all new movies since 2009, etc in that timeline, but perhaps the other, too)

We all know WD-40 works for making things move when they’re seized, but it also works better than anything for getting rid of all traces of adhesive left behind after peeling off stubborn stickers from things you buy.

It works on nearly all surfaces* – even coated paper! (just be sure not to leave it to soak into the paper.)

Instead of peeling slowly for ages with your fingernail or doing that peel-stick-peel-stick thing for half an hour, soak a paper towel in WD-40 and dab it on the offending sticker remains, wait a few minutes, then wipe off. (*if on coated paper, don’t let it soak, just gently rub it.) Clean the item afterwards to remove the oil left behind.

*it’s best to test a small area first if the object is painted or porous, and be careful with items meant to be food safe, because WD-40 is obviously not food safe.

This is something I wish more people knew, because soooo many manufacturers and retailers put stickers in the worst places and with near-permanent adhesive. I hope this helps you!

Excerpts:

The Facebook message that popped into her account started as a flirtation: "Hey, how are you?" 

She had newly arrived from Bangladesh to study for her master's in information technology on a student visa in 2022 and wasn't interested in a relationship. 

She liked the message. Then he texted again a few days later, "Hey, I have tickets to a Broadway show."  

She had never been to a Broadway show before, so she went — and their whirlwind first date quickly turned to love for her and then marriage. […]

Her new husband filed for a green card for his wife. A temporary one was granted, and she moved to his family's house in Brooklyn.

The future seemed bright. […]

Now, just a little more than a year later, the 31-year-old woman, who asked CBS News not to use her name due to safety fears, has separated from her husband after alleging abuse — and is now worried about being deported.

[…]

Crystal Justice, chief external affairs officer at the National Domestic Violence Hotline, told CBS News in a statement that they have seen abusive partners "threatening to deport a partner or their family or withholding legal documents to limit a person's ability to travel."

Full story on CBS News

This post in /r/AskHistorians apparently caused a mod conflict and confused sub users.

A couple of highlights:

Hello everyone wondering where the answer is […] We are not asking anyone to completely re-write something to suit our tastes, but to contextualize what is written within the reality of the times. As this question hit /r/all, it’s very clear that there is a large audience reading it, with various degrees of knowledge about the period and the novel/film.

They did, though, and people called them out, to be met by some confusion, followed by another mod response:

In sum, you had the poor timing of posting right at the point when the mod team ‘turns over’ several times - US slips off to Bed and then Europe wakes up. It meant that you were dealing with, essentially, a string of mods in different time zones and different “shifts” which created something of a Moderator game of telephone about what we had been expecting out of an answer in the thread.

General confusion ensued.

There were several conflicting mod DMs that weren’t captured publicly, too, but were responded to in the OP. Asked to include all races, then asked to narrow it down, asked to include a disclaimer (I did, at the bottom), then asked to move it to the top, asked to remove things, then to include those same things. It was maddening.

E: re-reading, I don’t think I’ve ever used race words so often in my life, jesus.

e: I only included this photo because I couldn’t seem to submit this post without a photo for some reason. It’s only tangentially related to the Reddit post, but this is an example of my education on the subject.

Compare my first link to this: https://www.reveddit.com/v/AskHistorians/comments/69670k/did_southern_girls_around_the_civil_war_really/

Thank you for that link, @NotAnotherLemmyUser!

For decades, theoretical physicists tossed around the idea that time reflection, also known as “time mirrors,” might one day be demonstrated in a real-world experiment. This idea seemed too big and wild, yet it kept popping up in serious discussions of quantum mechanics where equations hinted at surprising behavior.  

A team led by Hady Moussa from the Advanced Science Research Center at the CUNY Graduate Center (CUNY ASRC) in New York City has now confirmed that these mysterious events actually exist. They pulled off a successful test by changing the properties of a device in a quick, uniform way so that signals reversed direction in time.

** Understanding time mirrors**  

This sort of time flip has been described as looking into a mirror and spotting your back instead of your face. It sounds like science fiction, but it has a basis in real physics.   

Researchers had predicted for more than 50 years that sudden shifts in a wave’s environment could trigger such reversals.

Time reflections differ from everyday mirror views in one crucial way. Instead of light or sound bouncing back in space, the wave is forced to reverse its flow in time. 

That shift causes the frequency of the wave to change, sparking a chain reaction of interesting phenomena in the system.

In normal reflections, you see an immediate image or hear an echo. A time reflection, on the other hand, makes part of the signal run backward.   

There is no need for any speculation about time travel, though, since these effects involve a swift flip in the medium’s physical traits.  

** Time mirrors and metamaterials**  

To achieve this, the group used an engineered metamaterial designed to control electromagnetic wave behavior in unusual ways. Metamaterials allow scientists to manipulate waves far beyond ordinary mirrors or lenses.  

By carefully adjusting electronic components on a strip of metal, they introduced a sudden jump that reversed the direction of incoming signals. They filled the strip with electronic switches hooked to capacitor banks.   

That arrangement supplied the necessary burst of energy to force the wave to flip direction in time, an effect that used to be considered nearly impossible with accessible power.  

The outcome was a time-reversed copy of the original wave, appearing just as predicted but never before seen with clarity.  

Adjusting the system’s impedance at the right instant was key. Impedance is a measure of how much a structure resists electric current, and doubling it turned out to be the trick for flipping the wave in time.

By pulling this off in a lab setting, they proved that the energy hurdle can be overcome when conditions are precisely controlled.   

Past attempts had failed because uniform shifts across the entire device were tough to generate, but the new approach surmounted that barrier.

** Why does any of this matter?**  

This achievement signals a leap for people studying wave manipulation. Time reflections are no longer just hypothetical constructs but events that can be triggered and measured with specialized hardware.  

Some enthusiasts see this as a step toward advanced control of signals for communications and computing.   

A wave that can jump to a new frequency and then rewind might open new possibilities for data transmission at different ranges of the spectrum. It could also reshape how certain sensors and imaging systems are designed.  

The results also hint at potential ways to explore time boundaries in photonic devices. Future designs could pair multiple time interfaces together, creating “cavities” in time that bounce signals back and forth for unusual interference patterns.   

Such concepts might spark fresh ideas about how to engineer wave behaviors that were once locked in theory.

Others consider these findings a reason to revisit older theories in physics that talk about reversing processes in time.  

Even though we are not dealing with a flux capacitor, the underlying math could illuminate unanswered questions about the flow of energy in complex materials.

** Next steps for time mirrors**  

Physicists worldwide are eager to probe the limits of these time mirrors and see whether larger-scale applications might emerge.   

They would like to push the frequencies higher or adapt the technique to different wave types, such as acoustic or even spin waves.  

More experiments are bound to follow, especially since new versions of tunable structures keep appearing. 

Early projects focused on controlling electromagnetic properties in narrow bands, but broader setups might let signals take on an even wider range of frequencies.   

Some labs are eyeing ways to refine the switching process itself, ensuring the transformation is as uniform and abrupt as possible.  

One question involves harnessing time reversal effects to handle wave interference in a creative manner. Combining two or more interfaces in the right sequence might lead to wave signatures that display patterns never seen before in standard reflection setups.

A few researchers also wonder how these techniques might tie into advanced memory or logic systems. If a wave can trace itself back, that might open a path to novel data storage elements, though making it practical remains a challenging task.  

The study is published in Nature Physics.

Took me a while and an AskLemmy post to figure this out, since I initially thought Lemmy was auto-modding commenters (which kinda made me panic), but this is what I see:

I am the only mod in this community, and others aren’t seeing this flag everywhere, so commenters aren’t actually modded.

Is this a bug with Voyager or with my instance?

Is this a Lemmy thing? Something with lemmy.ca? Something about Voyager?

I tried looking it up but found nothing that might explain this. I have a community that’s super niche and I don’t post there much, but I do on occasion. I don’t care that it’s not that active – it’s enough for me.

Over the past couple of days, I’ve had a tiny amount of interaction, and everyone who posts seems to be automatically flagged as a mod. What’s happening?

e: this is what I see:

This relativistic, time-travel spacetime is everywhere metrically flat, excepting a conical singularity. Observers following timelike geodesics can eventually encounter their past selves, aging in the opposite time sense. The spacetime is not time orientable.

“A conical singularity is unlike more familiar curvature singularities,” said Norton. “No matter how close you come to the singularity in this spacetime, the spacetime geometry remains flat and regular with no indication locally of something pathological.”

A spaceship, traveling in a well-behaved region of spacetime, might then encounter this singularity and find its timelike geodesic to be deflected into its past. It would then return to the earlier, well-behaved region of spacetime and the spaceship occupants would encounter their past selves aging in the opposite time sense.

The author anticipates this model being a useful tool for teaching technical aspects of relativity theory.

“The full geometry of this spacetime model can be recovered using rather simple methods,” said Norton. “In addition to seeing the nature of the conical singularity, the analysis requires that students treat spacetime coordinates with extreme care, since they do not have their usual default physical meanings.”

Source: “A simple Minkowskian time-travel spacetime,” by John D. Norton, American Journal of Physics (2025). The article can be accessed here.

It looks like they’re actually tier 1 (they seem to be standing on a white platform), but what, if any, weight is each layer above them? I can see narrow platforms, but are they all taking most of the weight?

I’m not sure whether this was meant as an athletic or purely aesthetic display – since they’re billed as ‘acrobats’, I assumed skill was involved, so what would be the best and worst case scenario those 8-10 in the narrowest tier would be supporting?

e: was there any kind of structural support in this? I’m not finding much about it.

Here’s a Snopes article about this event at the 1980s Olympics in Moscow.