mrpara's comments

Not a historian so I may be missing something, but how would one possibly differentiate between the origin being the Dead Sea or Jerusalem based on things like materials used? I mean, Jerusalem and the Dead Sea are less than 35km apart (according to google). Even thousands of years ago, it would have been a non-issue to transport materials or techniques between these two locations. I can't imagine that our knowledge of scroll-making at the time is so specific that we could possibly rule out a craftsman taking a camel from one location to another.

That's the one! Thanks.

The difference is, string theorists are trying. Everyone knows that it is a major problem that we cannot currently design experiments to falsify ST or other quantum gravity theories, and everyone is working towards it in the hope that one day we may. When it comes to interpretations of QM, there is not only nothing on the horizon, people don't even speak in these terms. No one is insisting on falsifiablity, and indeed every new interpretation seems completely hell-bent on just providing a "story" around the equations in a way that does not - and fundamentally cannot - make any predictions that contradict basic QM. I can count on one hand the number of interpretations I can think of that make experimentally testable assertions, and for those I have plenty of respect[1]. But the majority of interpretations and their proponents seem to deliberately stay within the comfort zone of non-falsifiablity, writing paper after paper whose actual impact on either physics or philosophy can be summed up with "yeah well, that's just like, your opinion, man". I did my MSC in physics under a professor who is a well-known proponent of MWI (though my master's thesis was not directly related to the subject). Two years of working side by side with him proved to me that the detractors of work on interpretations are, by and large, correct in their assertions about the proponents of them.

[1] There is this one theory whose name I cannot remember, where each particle in the universe gets their wavefunction multiplied by a delta function or very thin gaussian at random intervals, and whose sudden localization also causes a sort of chain reaction and localizes all particles it is entangled with. This theory is interesting because it helps set a (statistical) limit between microscopic and macroscopic interactions; basically, when you go past a certain number of entangled particles, everything will be well-localized virtually all of the time, but for small numbers of particles we'll see quantum phenomena. Unfortunately I recall this theory having too many holes, and perhaps it has already been falsified, but the point is that at least it made an effort to address inherent problems in QM (namely, wavefunction collapse) in a way that physicists actually should; by making testable claims.

Important nitpick: the equations that govern dynamics in quantum mechanics aren't random, and evolution is unitary. However, the process of "measurement" is described by a (obviously non-unitary) projection operator onto one state; the so called "collapse". If you, for example, attempt to answer the very real physical question "given two particles in with some total joined state Psi, one is measured and found to be in state Phi, what state is the other particle in?", you would have to use such an operator. There isn't anything interpretive about this, as such experiments have been done again and again. It's a standard part of the mathematical framework.

Now, whether the underlying physics is truly random, or whether it's deterministic and the projection only represents a sort of Bayesian update of prior information (a la MWI), that is indeed a matter of interpretation. And completely unfalsifiable by definition, and therefore not even really a question for physicists. It's philosophy at best.

Well, in the author's defense, they specifically stated that "Each assignment required a yes-no decision". I agree, though, that there really is no great lesson to be learned here since the real world doesn't work like that. The technical bit about channel capacity was honestly more interesting. It's a neat result (that should be fairly obvious to anyone who's worked with probabilities) with a not-so-great example to illustrate it.

Ah, yes, surely this man killed and raped little girls because he was influenced by cartoons, and not because he was born with a deformity into one of the most collectivist societies on earth and then ostracized for his entire life. We're so lucky that sexually normative people never rape or kill anyone.

Sarcasm aside, this is one of the many, many examples of choosing a scapegoat to frame an entire sexuality, race, or any group of people with a common interest as evil while completely ignoring any and all context. People are not animals and possess some degree of responsibility and the ability to tell reality from fiction. Unless someone presents some hard evidence that stylized drawings lead to actual attacks against real children (and to my knowledge, this simply is not true; in fact, it's easy to argue the opposite) we need to stop with this puritan outrage like we stopped blaming computer games for any and all violent crime back in the late 90s.

I haven't watched Hibike, but to my understanding the tv series has a lot of implied homosexuality while the movie is straightforward heterosexual romance. I also disagree that the shows that got them famous are the ones with homosexuality. They were already plenty famous after Clannad and Haruhi, and Koe no Katachi is at least as high-profile as Free or Maid Dragon. Let's agree to disagree on this one.

I don't think that's accurate to say, really. There's definitely some shows with gay undertones, but the vast majority of their post-2010 catalogue has either no romance or heterosexual romance (Hyouka, Chuunibyou, Tamako Market, Amaburi, Koe no Katachi, the Hibike film, Kyoukai no Kanata, VEG, and so on). Slice-of-life is pretty accurate, though. I don't think it's fair to say that they've changed drastically, either. VEG and their Key adaptations such as Clannad are really not so different in spirit, nor is something like Kobayashi's Dragon Maid really all that different from Lucky Star (which was SoL with heavy gay undertones all the way back in 2007).

I don't know about in-depth, but a cursory google search brings up plenty of results regarding animator wages[1,2]. If you want to know more about how the industry operates, not so much salaries but how production works, working conditions, who's responsible for what, etc, then I highly recommend that you watch the anime Shirobako. It's an anime about anime production, and it's both very informative and simply very good in terms of storytelling, humor, etc.

[1] https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2005-11-02/animator's-...

[2] https://80.lv/articles/how-much-do-japanese-animators-make/

Animation is still done on paper mostly for artistic reasons, not because they can't afford tablets. Drawing on paper and drawing digitally are different processes and skill sets. Same for manga. There are actually a lot of mangaka who work digitally these days, but it's less common in anime production. That said, I don't understand how that has anything to do with foreign distribution, to be honest.

It's still true. Japanese animators are paid by the pennies and work ridiculous hours. Since they're often paid on a per-frame basis rather than hourly pay, sometimes it adds up to less than minimum hourly wage. KyoAni was actually one of the few who were known to pay reasonably well, and they also had sort of dormitories slash training facilities for their animators. As for computers, generally speaking the frames are still drawn on paper and scanned, and then colored digitally.

It's accurate and not really vague at all, it's just not highschool level physics. I'll try to explain it in layman terms.

Imagine that you have a bunch of free particles that are not connected to each other in any way, and are far enough from each other that any interaction between them (such as electromagnetic fields) is negligible. Ignoring their own masses, the energy of the system is zero. Now imagine these same particles, bound together into a single atom.

Obviously, for the atom to be stable, you don't want it to be able to fall apart on a whim. You want a system where you have to input a lot of energy for the atom to fall apart. But as we just said, the state where the constituent particles are separate is the default, zero-energy state. Therefore, a stable state where you have to add energy to reach the default free state must actually have negative energy! To be specific, the binding energy is negative while the energy related to the mass of the particles, i.e. e=mc2, is positive. The atom is actually lighter than the sum of its parts!

An atom that doesn't have negative binding energy, i.e. has "excess energy", has nothing binding the constituent particles together, since they have more than enough energy to go run free on their own. Therefore it is unstable. Elements with a small enough binding energy, small enough that random fluctuations can overcome it and make the atoms fall apart, are what we call radioactive elements.