Thank you. Let’s hope the foo vendors don’t get hold of these ideas.
Watch this, if you haven’t.
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I’ve so far watched none of it and am precisely as ignorant as I would be if I watched half or all of it, but that’s because I’m fucking stupid around this kind of stuff.
Different groups of animals have evolved broadly the same senses again and again and again, and, as you know, if it’s useful to them, they evolve senses that extend well beyond human capabilities into wavelengths and stimuli we can’t begin to perceive.
I’ve seen it suggested that (e.g.) a species of ant can detect harmful radiation sources (but that may be a chemical signature, it’s hard to interview an ant), some migratory birds seem able to sense weak magnetism and ultraviolet light, some bats have not just weaponised doppler sonar effects (to the extent some can ‘see’ movement in surface water layers), but also detect infra-red and weed-out complex movement patterns of prey species which themselves are highly evolved to detect the bats and confuse them; most fish can detect and discriminate extremely weak and quite distant electrical fields and some can ‘smell’ and discriminate dilute concentrations of biological materials of interest in an absolute soup of very similar substances - and discern directional information from it too!
Curiously, probably the first ‘sense’ that evolved was likely the ability to detect gravity, just because, even if you’re a super-simple unicellular organism, you do need to know which way up you are at least some of the time, and to avoid disappearing too deep into the water column, or too shallow where you can be killed by solar radiation, heat, drying, stranding, &c. Detecting pressure is - for living things - harder to do than detecting gravity. It’s an understudied field in a fast growing overall subject area of animal sensory and cognitive abilities.
We’re all doing fundamentally the same thing though - filtering out the irrelevant from the welter of possible stimuli surrounding us.
Things are changing for humans, but it’s lossy because we’re finding ever more clever ways to keep genetically atypical humans alive and ensuring they pass those atypical genes on to future generations - X-Men they ain’t… Genetic engineering could equip us with novel senses, I’d guess it’d be relatively easy to splice-in some animal sense organs, but modifying our brains to be able to interpret the ‘data’ would require designing novel sensory and conceptual neural pathways - that, I suspect would be extremely demanding to do, never mind it being largely pointless beyond the dystopian ‘super-soldier’ scenario, where it’ll be way easier to design androids with those abilities.
Reality is the one true mindfuck. Humans have tended to bung god at stuff because the complexities, distances and sheer amount of time involved in understanding the Universe are so hard for our three-score-and-ten-years design life monkey brains to deal with! 
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Got to be a shout for the double slit experiment to be one of the greatest experiments of all time based on the general overall simplicity of the experiment versus the complete headfuckery and ramifications of the observations.
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The laser demo at the end was 
It’s one thing to know the theory, but to have it demonstrated that yes, that is really, actually how it works is
Even he seemed surprised, lol.
Interestingly , or not, I’ve been reading up on Simulation Theory of late and ultimately falling down the rabbit hole of “the brain in vat” thought experiment.
I’m now of the mind that we are in a simulation.
I have also discounted the multiverse theory.
The reason being that the implication would be that it would mean there MUST be a universe in which @Mrs_Maureen_OPinion is not a cunt.
The ramifications of that are just too much. 
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I was taught that the double slit experiment demonstrates particle wave duality, but this demonstrates that actually neither model (particles, waves) are accurate - both of those concepts are just abstractions to help understand some of this stuff.
For all the knowledge in physics, we’re a long way from understanding things!
Perhaps the same effect that causes matter/antimatter asymmetry is in play and he’s a cunt in every possible reality.
There’s probably a paper in it.
Yes, I guess that’s why I mention it really it’s still front and centre as our understanding evolves. [Tips hat to Feynmann for ever]
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Possibly for large amounts of undetectable mass, but I am not sure we can assign large amounts of otherwise undiscovered energy to his existence.
As a note, I do wonder if that experiment is just a diffraction pattern from light scatter onto the grating? ( @Valvebloke you’re the laser fiend) But that in no way invalidates the theory.
It’s hard to say exactly what’s going on. The intensity difference between the laser beam’s central spot and the light spots which are coming off the grating is striking. In fact it may be that hardly any light is coming off the grating because it’s quite likely that the central spot is heavily saturated in the video. To get a distinct diffraction pattern though you need a reasonably (spatially) coherent source and if the light hitting the grating was largely due to scatter off something like dust in the air, or even dust on a surface, its spatial coherence would be poor.
So I suspect that what he’s seeing is what he says it is - laser light which is travelling way outside what we normally think of as the beam’s transverse spatial extent. We’re seeing it via a camera of course, and that will have a lens on the front, so we need to factor in the effects of that imaging system too.
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Woof, woof
Happy pi day.
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That’s fascinating - I know there are a lot of different ways to calculate Pi, but that’s a particularly outlandish one. Love it.
I did recently have a play with writing a bit of code to calculate Pi via the Monte-Carlo method (essentially statistical sampling) which was quite entertaining. I’ll leave it as a little challenge for anyone interested for now. I did get a bit lost trying to calculate the confidence intervals for it.
Did I read an SF story once about the Supreme Being who’d created life on earth having encoded the first 100 digits of pi into a length of our junk DNA ? Her thinking was that by the time we were mature enough to read our own DNA we’d also be mature enough to handle proof of Her existence without falling out over the details.
We can read DNA now, so She miscalculated there …
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