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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • zkfcfbzr@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.worldWhy I ditched Gmail for Proton Mail
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    2 months ago

    Hi, this is Andy here, the Founder/CEO of Proton. As former scientists, we don’t do what we’re doing to make the most money (otherwise we wouldn’t have picked science as a profession). There’s no price which we would sell Proton to Google or Facebook. We also don’t need to because thanks to the strong support of the community, Proton has the resources to thrive and grow as an independent organization. Safeguarding this independence is how we ensure that over the long term, we can always put user interest above all else.

    -Protonmail Founder, 2 years ago, for what it’s worth.




  • Heat transfer works both ways - so if they feel you as cold then you’d feel them as warm. In my experience dogs usually don’t stand out to me as being particularly warm so I’d guess their fur is a good enough insulator to prevent much heat transfer during normal casual contact. It’s been a few months though, maybe I’ve just forgotten how warm the embrace of a dog is.



  • Plus even that isn’t enough: 10/3 has an infinite decimal expansion (in base 10 at least) too, but if π = 10/3, you’d be able to find exact circumferences. Its irrationality is what makes it relevant to this joke.

    A mathematician is also perfectly happy with answers like “4π” as exact.

    Plus what’s to stop you from having a rational circumference but irrational radius?

    Writing this, I feel like I might have accidentally proved your point.



  • Touching on the second question, since the ship would never actually reach the speed of light, the trip would not seem instantaneous to the people on board. However, the trip would seem much shorter to the people on board than it would to external observers. The people on board the ship would experience length contraction in the direction of travel making their destination closer to themselves, while external observers would notice the people onboard the ship moving slowly, ie, experiencing time at a reduced rate. Either way, the effect is that the people on board perceive the trip to be much shorter (in terms of both distance and time) than an external observer watching their ship. In principle you can get the perceived length of the trip (both distance and time) to approach but not equal zero, though in practice this would involve killing everyone on board and destroying the ship (and maybe even the galaxy).

    I agree with the other commenters that the people on board will experience a consistent acceleration of 9.81 m/s² in your described scenario. It might help, conceptually, to imagine an external observer watching someone on the ship jumping up and down at this near-light speed, taking into account the severe time dilation they’d be experiencing: The difference in perception comes because, from the external observer’s point of view, the person on the ship is moving in extreme slow motion.