Auroras on Jupiter, captured by NASA 3 comments
niriel
· 8 years ago
Just for people who aren't familiar with astronomical pictures: this is a composite image. Your tiny weak-ass lame eyes, which are sensitive only to light between 0.4 and 0.8 micrometer, wouldn't see that. The electromagnetic spectrum extends way beyond these puny numbers in both directions. The glowing stuff you see on the north pole is either seen in ultraviolet (invisible to your eyes because too high frequency) or in decametric (invisible to your eyes because way, way, way too low frequency). Does that make this image a lie? No. Reality has no obligation to fit into our shitty senses, and everything that makes you understand stuff is worth looking at.
8
·
Edited 8 years ago
Dalai lama has the best approach to religion 2 comments
niriel
· 8 years ago
Then it's high time for him to retract or update his books. He was so close to getting things right, but he messed up nonetheless. Reading his books was anticlimactic; it was almost like general semantics, but not, and it just does not match reality. Cannot blame him, though, any closer and it wouldn't be a religion but just science. Too bad he is sticking to the 'religion' (vaguest meaning possible) bit of his philosophy.
▼
As an IT Professional 6 comments
niriel
· 8 years ago
Write code that works, boss thinks the task was to easy. Your colleagues make a mess of fractal buggery, they get a raise for working so hard fixing their shit.
1
The different poses of a photographer 9 comments
niriel
· 8 years ago
My girlfriend's a model, I regularly see photographers rolling on the grass, crouching under tables or climbing on WC seats. I hope they've good a good insurance.
10
Should we learn taxes... 16 comments
niriel
· 8 years ago
To be fair, I use parabolas much more often than I do my taxes.
▼
·
Edited 8 years ago
Priority placement 7 comments
They know what goes down ;) 5 comments
niriel
· 8 years ago
Why would anyone need that? Maybe I'm clueless because in my country, 22°C is considered a hot day.
3
The nato phonetic alphabet 8 comments
niriel
· 8 years ago
Thank you for highlighting either the first letter or anything but the first letter, alternatively. You were so close to making sense but you fortunately decided to fuck up. I now have a new example to show to user-interface students.
Sometimes something good does come out of the Internet 55 comments
niriel
· 8 years ago
If you cherry pick, or reinterpret the scripture after the fact to match empirical evidence. Science makes prediction, scripture makes postdictions ("look, it was written there all along, we just hadn't noticed until now").
Sometimes something good does come out of the Internet 55 comments
niriel
· 8 years ago
He hasn't based his belief on science, but on his gutt feeling. Unless you come up with well defined properties and consequences that are unique to a specific kind of god, and then gather evidence supporting that, you haven't done science, you're just making stuff up. I have felt awe and transcendence (I'm also a physicist by trade), but I don't go deciding magical stuff for the whole universe, I'm too humble for that.
▼
·
Edited 8 years ago
This movie and many more 14 comments
niriel
· 8 years ago
Old. I was finishing my master's thesis when this one came out. That's not even two decades ago.
8
Taylor Swift's Typical Love Story 6 comments
Sometimes something good does come out of the Internet 55 comments
niriel
· 8 years ago
I wasn't taking about religion dividing people, but religions dividing themselves. There are schisms, new interpretations, so what is today a single denomination will tomorrow become two. You can draw it as a tree whose branches keep splitting into more branches as time goes. Sciences, on the other hand, started as many disjoint bits of knowledge but every day we find common underlying principles that actually unify them into one big self-consistent model of reality. If you draw it, it's an upside-down tree: it started with many branches but we're getting closer and closer to a single trunk.
▼
I f**king hate the summers 11 comments
Irrational hate leads to irrational decisions 11 comments
niriel
· 8 years ago
And the Statue of Liberty is a present from France. I'll keep eating my liberty fries, thank you.
1
When you try to argue with religious people 119 comments
When you try to argue with religious people 119 comments
niriel
· 8 years ago
You can believe in whatever you want, indeed. You're entitled to your own opinions and beliefs, just not to your own facts. The good thing with the products of the scientific methods is that they're true whether one believes in them or not.
20
You are forbidden to die 6 comments
