So yes, it seems at least some of them can.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19645720

Points: 95

# Comments: 181

This discussion might help where my ability to answer your excellent question is failing: https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/937/how-does-gra...

So you had Farrah’s and others playing the usual “Hey struggling masses, all of your problems are those immigrant’s fault” game. Over time the political success of UKIP and internal strife within the Tories led David “The Chinless Pudding” Cameron to promise that he would hold a referendum on the issue of re-elected. At the time he assumed that he would win by the same narrow margin he had previously and once again would enter into a “power-sharing” deal with the Liberal Democrats. He could then blame the LibDems for blocking the referendum, defuse the Tory civil war, and shut Farage up for another election cycle.

Then he won, decisively, and the LibDems tanked. So Cameron had no excuse to not have the referendum. He assumed that people who had been openly pro-remain such as Boris Johnson would put aside their personal ambitions and support Remain, but of course that didn’t happen. So what you had was a group of highly motivated people such as Boris who used this as a means to get power, people like Farrage being populist demagogues, and the ERG playing ideologue while just looking to get even richer. Cameron quit and literally walked away humming a little tune, and the Tories went to war with themselves. In the end everyone “died” and out of the ashes rose the silent one, Theresa May, who had switched from staunch pro-Remain to equally staunch Brexiteer mode overnight.

The rest is history. In a sense at the highest levels where Brexit isn’t about gaining short-term power and settling grudges, it’s about the long-term goal of being able to capture UK regulatory bodies. “People” like Jacob Rees-Mogg see how the business class can rob the state in the US, and they want a slice of that. The EU would prevent much of it, so they want out of the EU. The details of why individual people (who bothered to vote at all) voted to Leave is a lot less interesting and has less to do with Brexit than the political reality.

Remember that this applies everything where r≤1. As far as “flat” worldlines I think you might be thinking of a geodesic approaching r=1 in terms of a null geodesic, which isn’t necessarily true unless we’re dealing with a photon or graviton. Regions I,II of the Classic Kruskal-Szekeres extension illustrates this pretty clearly.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kruskal–Szekeres_coordinates...

The total mass of the black hole (and all other information possible about it) can be described in terms of the boundary at r=1, so there’s no problem with mergers or accretion. To answer Wallace’s original question, we see no information escaping the black hole. What we’re seeing is sort of like shining a light on an absence of information, and observing the shadow cast. That’s not quite right, but it’s close.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19629293

Points: 30

# Comments: 6

I realize that Black Swan is popular here, but it was horrendous. A single essential premise which, instead of support, rested for chapter after chapter on assertions. That’s not evidence, it wasn’t an argument, it was the sound of someone having one good idea and then realizing they lacked the capacity to support it.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19618116

Points: 18

# Comments: 1

In short, you’ve ignored both the issues of impurities and cutting agents in illegal meth, and the important stereochemistry.

The issue of mentioning MDMA, while it may offend your sensibilities, does make sense in terms of being in the same family as methamphetamine and amphetamine. They do have different effects, but they share a similar chemistry.

http://www.emcdda.europa.eu/publications/eu-drug-markets/201...

In addition both substituted amphetamines seem to be neurotoxic in similar ways. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3231568/

The difference in outcomes between meth and MDMA abuse may well have more to do with typical patterns of use and abuse rather than a fundamental difference in pharmacokinetics. If you’re going to feel as you put it, “triggered” by an article at least be so as a result of valid concerns based on the science.

Of course if you compare HN to /politics then HN is vastly superior, but then if you compare the average non-technical thread here to anything in /science HN comes off the worse for it. Even putting aside ideological pissing matches bikeshedding, semantic arguments and language wars, you get a lot of weird self-help stuff here that would be funny if people weren’t so desperately sincere about it.

tl;dr HN is great at some things, and for the rest is just as good or bad as the rest of the internet, just with less humor and self-awareness.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19586919

Points: 2

# Comments: 0