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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 27th, 2023

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  • Oh. I hate it here. I’ll never be back. My wife is here for work and convinced me to fly out for a long weekend.

    It’s awful. I don’t party or gamble or smoke or really do much but outdoor and educational, and I particularly hate people trying to extract more money from me.

    I’m fine with paying what it costs, even if that’s a lot, but once I’ve paid, you don’t talk to me about money again.

    Plus everyone’s smoking inside and smoking weed and driving and lower class than even Myrtle or Daytona Beach.

    The airport was bad, then we realized that the Lyft driver ran up the meter on us by going the long, more trafficy way. I didn’t even know that was possible.

    Plus I now am away from home without a pair of glasses and with a case of pinkeye (bilateral, which I’ve never had before) that I must’ve picked up at the optometrist on Wednesday. Plus I can’t seem to trick Google or this new kagi thing into telling me how common this is. It keeps telling me that optometrists can diagnose but not treat pinkeye in most jurisdictions. Of course it must be common.


  • 👍. I like science.

    You wouldn’t just drop mass along side you in space. It would just continue to float along beside you.

    You definitely have to throw it behind you, like you said, but that’s what rockets do. They throw mass behind them to make them move forward. That’s a rocket.

    When you throw mass behind you at one point in your orbit, you raise the height of your orbit on the opposite side of the orbited object (this is simplified).

    So you’re basically right, it’s partially about the mass of the object, but it’s mostly the firing of the rocket.

    You’ve got some pretty good intuition though. That’s basic orbital mechanics.



  • That’s a pretty good answer. I was definitely overthinking it.

    A little correction. They would be slingshotting around either Venus, Mercury, or both to lose energy.

    Going around the sun is like just bouncing a perfectly elastic ball.

    Close enough for this mental model, though.

    Edit: in my own defense I am in Vegas doing minor Vegas things.

    While I’d really rather be talking about orbital mechanics or some other geek shit, I do get to see an annular eclipse in totality in a beautiful national park. That’s certainly a once in a lifetime event.



  • So, it doesn’t work the way you think.

    It’s only going that fast because it’s near the sun. The same way a satellite close to Earth needs to move faster than one farther away. You can’t really use that velocity to go elsewhere. It had to lose a lot of energy to get as close to the sun as it is. It would need to gain that back to get to earth.

    I’m really blanking on a way to explain this concisely and I can’t explain orbital mechanics in a Lemmy post.

    If you play Kerbal space program, you can definitely use that to get a very intuitive understanding of this concept.


  • How old is your son? I imagine I’ll do the same, but this is the only magic trick that I’ve really wanted to learn. My son has some fine motor delays so he won’t be able to do this.

    I realized that I’ve interacted with you a few times here, so I ended up looking at your comment history. We seem to share a lot of similar characteristics.

    I noticed that you’re trans and had a Q&A. I’m cis-het and I missed that session. I hope that we’ll interact again. I want to understand T as well as I understand LGB. I just don’t know anyone T.