macarthur_park

macarthur_park , 8 hours ago to news in Trump floats UFC-style migrant league amid border crisis

“But actually, it’s not the worst idea I’ve ever had,” he continued.

Yeah I believe that.

macarthur_park , 2 days ago to news in Rolling Stone Lawsuit Forces Release of Henry Kissinger's FBI Files

Rolling Stone’s Freedom of Information Act request, filed hours after the announcement of his death in November 2023, seeks expedited processing of FBI files related to the former Secretary of State and National Security Advisor to President Nixon.

If this were anyone else I’d criticize Rolling Stone for acting like hungry vultures. But it’s Henry “War Criminal like ten times over” Kissinger. Have at him.

macarthur_park , 2 days ago to technology in NASA finds humanity would totally fumble asteroid defense

Link to the NASA study

macarthur_park , 2 days ago to news in Couple drowns in rip current while on vacation with their kids in Florida

This site has a few photos that illustrate what it looks like.

mypanhandle.com/…/panama-city-beachs-rip-currents…

You can see that it’s fairly narrow, which is why swimming parallel to shore works.

macarthur_park , 3 days ago to science_memes in Elsevier

When will scientists just self-publish?

It’s commonplace in my field (nuclear physics) to share the preprint version of your article, typically on arxiv.org. You can update the article as you respond to peer reviewers too. The only difference between this and the paywalls publisher version is that version will have additional formatting edits by the journal.

If you search for articles on google scholar, it groups the preprint and published versions together so it’s easy to find the non-paywalled copy. The standard journals I publish in even sort of encourage this; you can submit the latex documents and figures by just putting the url to an arxiv manuscript.

The US Department of Energy now requires any research they fund be made publicly available. So any article I publish is also automatically posted to osti.gov 1 year after its initial publication. This version is also grouped into the google scholar search results.

It’s an imperfect system, but it’s getting much better than it was even just a decade ago.

macarthur_park , 6 days ago to asklemmy in What's a Lemmy question/post you wish had more answers or replies but doesn't seem to have been paid attention to yet?

Yeah, it’s quieter so there’s fewer overall responses even in “popular” posts, but it doesn’t feel like anything gets ignored. If a post is interesting, you’ll get at least a few replies even if it takes a few days.

That part is kinda nice - the lower turnover on the “front page” means you’ll have people reading and commenting on discussions for days. If you reply to a 1-day old post on Reddit the only person who might see/reply to you is the person you replied to.

macarthur_park , 6 days ago to til in TIL Hunter S. Thomson got an early honorable discharge from the air force in part because, "Sometimes his rebel and superior attitude seems to rub off on other airmen staff members."

I’ve gotta hand it to you, that’s a good comparison

macarthur_park , 10 days ago to news in Pro-Trump influencers fire up fears of migrant 'invasion' ahead of U.S. election

But it’s kind of hard for Republicans to complain when they reject implementing what they want.

I agree with you in principle, but clearly it’s not that hard since they are actively complaining and polls show voters trust Trump and Republicans over Biden to handle immigration. Somehow, they’re never really constrained by reality.

macarthur_park , 12 days ago to news in Washington man allegedly kills teen because he mistook an airsoft gun for a real firearm - ABC News

he approached the teens with his gun out and told them to put their hands in the air, but no one complied

Well yeah, he’s not a cop. He’s a random lunatic with a gun.

macarthur_park , 12 days ago to news in Martha-Ann Alito Condemns Pride Flags, the Left, and the Media

This sounds familiar.

Nearly 30 years ago, Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair magazine, described Trump in Spy magazine as a “short-fingered vulgarian.”

“To this day, I receive the occasional envelope from Trump. There is always a photo of him—generally a tear sheet from a magazine. On all of them he has circled his hand in gold Sharpie in a valiant effort to highlight the length of his fingers,” Carter wrote. “I almost feel sorry for the poor fellow because, to me, the fingers still look abnormally stubby.”

source

Is being thin skinned, petty and spiteful a requirement for MAGA conservatives?

macarthur_park , 13 days ago to memes in Elections

I’ll only be a carnivore on day 1

macarthur_park , 14 days ago to science in Why do matter and antimatter annihilate?

There absolutely are, but I’m not super familiar with all of the consequences of majorana neutrinos. /u/[email protected] might be able to provide a better answer. My background is experimental nuclear physics, so I’m familiar a lot of experiments searching for beyond the standard model physics, but less so with the theory motivation.

One consequence of neutrinos being their own antiparticles is that it breaks lepton number conservation. This also breaks chiral symmetry, since all neutrinos are right-handed and anti-neutrinos are left-handed. This observation would also imply that neutrinos have mass - which is assumed but would be a really big deal to prove.

macarthur_park , 14 days ago to science in Why do matter and antimatter annihilate?

Yeah it’s one of those terms that’s unfortunately been co-opted for another definition. Definitely made some of my google searches in grad school feel icky… The physics terminology came first though!

macarthur_park , 14 days ago to science in Why do matter and antimatter annihilate?

Despite space being “empty” there’s still a surprising amount of stuff streaming through it. There are protons, electrons, carbon nuclei, etc constantly slamming into the Earth’s atmosphere, producing showers of radiation. These cosmic rays are the reason so many sensitive physics experiments ( like dark matter and neutrinoless double beta decay searches) are located deep underground. The earth is a good shield against these cosmic backgrounds.

Even if there was an “isolated” antimatter galaxy, it would get bombarded with matter in the form of cosmic rays. The annihilation photons are a really distinct signal that would be hard to miss. There are a number of gamma ray telescopes in space that map out sources of gammas, and they would have detected an antimatter galaxy if it existed.

If the antimatter galaxies are so far away that they’re beyond the visible universe, then there’s still the big question of why there was a segregation of matter and antimatter early on.

macarthur_park , 14 days ago to science in Why do matter and antimatter annihilate?

You’re not alone; matter-antimatter asymmetry is one of the big open questions in physics. Most particle processes treat matter and antimatter identically, but there are a few areas where matter and antimatter have slightly different interactions. These occurrences are violations of Charge Parity symmetry aka CP Violation.

There must have been a certain amount of CP violation during the early phases of the Big Bang to explain our matter-dominated universe. But the known amounts of CP Violation are nowhere near enough to explain the asymmetry in matter and antimatter. There are some proposed mechanisms that would violate CP symmetry in sufficient quantities, but these haven’t been experimentally observed. There are ongoing searches to detect these processes, or related processes that would be possible if these existed. Neutrinoless double beta decay searches are one example of these detection efforts.

In summary, there’s a guaranteed Nobel Prize to whoever can answer your question.