There is some popular knowledge about Soviet-era science-fiction, but although there are several books you can find in Western libraries like Obruchev’s Plutonia, Tolstoy’s Aelita, or the Strugatsky Brothers’ short stories, the discussion about Soviet science-fiction books specifically always remains in the shadows of movies like Stalker or Solaris. I think this is only partially due to a Western bias and has more to do with the fact that Soviet leadership has always emphasised the importance of cinema as a medium all the way back since Lenin.

On Saturday, Stauffenberg’s assassination of Hitler will turn 80, I’m excited to see how German mass media will spin this without sounding like complete Nazis

Lucky boy, his teacher takes him on all these field trips

Counterpoint: There will be much more work to be done in socialism and communism than in capitalism, because our cultural standards will be much, much higher; a socialist world is one where everyone will have first-world problems. Just like living in the cramped and damp huts of the dark ages seems unthinkable today, it will be inconceivable to socialist society to live in an empty room painted eggshell. People tomorrow will not be content with derivative sequels and machine-made mince music, and they won’t wear pants that can’t survive the month. To support billions of people with luxury quality that has low environmental impact is a thing that can and will be made possible, but it requires much more work than supporting a deadbeat proletariat that is economically clinging on for dear life and teetering on the brink of ecological extinction.

The question is a bit misleading, since it is not about relative acceleration but relative velocity. The relative velocity of the 4-year-old man is key to determine his momentum, and hence the kinetic energy of his impact upon the bullet.

With that out of the way, we first note that adulthood starts at 18, which must be due to a significant time dilation in the reference frame of the man. We have the formula for the time dilation t’ = γt, with the Lorentzian gamma factor γ = 1/sqrt(1 - v²/c²), thus 1/γ² = 1 - v²/c², and we get v = sqrt(1 - 1/γ²)c for the velocity. If the man is four years old in one reference frame and 18 in another, then γ = 18/4 = 4.5, and after plugging in the value, it follows that v = 0.975c. Therefore, the man had an incredible speed of about 292500 m/s when he and the bullet mutually obliterated one another.

When I followed my passion and taught Calculus 2 as a student, I got paid so poorly that I was losing money after rent and health insurance. I didn’t care then, I still don’t care, and I would do it again if the university would actually let me do it after graduating, because the pay is literally so low it is illegal for outsiders to do under national labour law. When your bank balance no longer represent your entitlement to survival, you’d be mad wasting your best years working on it

So China is not a threat? Great to hear, can we start deescalating now?

Remember the time when Washington DC was invaded by men in high heels, wigs, bows, and colourful dresses? They are still living the trauma of 1812

'); DROP TABLE no_fly_list

It is right to see dialectics in science, but it appears after the fact as a consequence of observation and theory rather than as an epistemological requirement. Certain scientific theories, such as relativity, do not admit a dialectical interpretation due to a lack of actors to play out the dialectical process, or of contradictions between them.

This is correct, but it’s not like there is ever a contradiction between mathematical and dialectical methods. Natural scientists only prefer to work with mathematics because their subject is benign enough to admit mathematical descriptions yielding precise, quantitative results, while social scientists need dialectics because their mathematical models suffer from crippling vagueness and complexity and are quickly outdated. Where mathematics can describe a system to which dialectics happen to also apply, e.g. phase transitions, it naturally produces models that mirror the dialectic because they both describe the same thing.

You are in the midst of committing a category error. Dialectics is the model that describes changing historical, social, and philosophical systems and processes. Analogies from physics are frequently used to explain how dialectics work, but that doesn’t mean dialectics govern physics, only that dialectical thinking has historically been inspired by physical processes.

The logical role that dialectics fulfills in social science is fulfilled in natural science by mathematics. So rather than taking the dialectical method and filling it with natural objects and laws at random, you should study the mathematical relationships between measurable quantities and interpret the dynamic expressed in the equations governing them. I know you might not want to hear this because mathematics is hard, but the only way to understand the inner workings of gravity is to sit your ass down with a book about general relativity and do the exercises.

“Surely they can’t kill me if I help them win”

Gas Gas Gas

The better a country becomes at using surveillance technology, the better it also becomes at hiding that it does. Until recently, China has had very little such experience, and thus everything it did was in plain sight. While in the West, intelligence agencies were already watching your moves, listening to your phone calls, and evaluating your metadata through your appliances, you could still see the massive security cameras from the past century on Chinese crosswalks. This is not a question of ideology or economics, every major country and organisation will inevitably try to keep pace as best it can with the evolution of vulnerabilities and threats. The perception of being a surveillance state, on the other hand, depends on the aesthetics of its technology, on the degree that you have the feeling of being stared at by it. Once China replaces the last of its last clunky old cams with more elegant models, citizens and tourists will eventually let go of that perception.

I sometimes read nothing for months and then binge a 2000-page novel over a single week

I just bought a VR game set in medieval Europe, why is there nobody you can pay to cover you with their clothes while you shit in a bucket in the middle of the town square? I demand to relieve myself in the comfort of a human outhouse, it is crucial to my enjoyment of the immersion

If they have something we don’t have, it’s theft; if they know something we don’t know, it’s fraud; and if they do something we don’t do, it’s sabotage

Maybe I’m not American enough to understand this, but how does this get bought? How do you store and cool this big-ass jar once you open it, how do you use it up without getting sick of the stuff, why wouldn’t you just buy it in a tube or a bottle, and why would anyone spend 20 bucks on a condiment?

Stock markets are to economics what bouncy castles are to architecture