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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • I remember when gay people couldn’t get married. I remember when I never saw a fellow trans person on TV who wasn’t a fictional depiction of a serial murderer played by a cis guy. I remember when we almost never had cops caught on camera so their brutality was an open secret.

    But ‘steady’ is a bit inaccurate.

    I’ve seen actual people with family from Gaza online say that they want Biden re-elected because he may suck balls, but Trump will outright throw protestors into concentration camps.

    Like… Trump outright said he’s bringing the next Reich. And loves this murdering Palestine people business. So yeah, this is a trolley problem where on one track you run over some people, and on the next track you… run over those same people plus extra. So in this context, saying you’re going to refuse to switch tracks to save anyone whatsoever is indeed kinda demanding perfection in a situation where the only options are horrifically flawed and no one really wants to do them, but if we had wanted to really do something about it, we all shoulda fucking voted in the primaries.
    That, and also maybe this whole thing could have been avoided if Sanders hadn’t made some guffaws. I know he successfully pissed me off and all he needed to do was not go talk to a talk show host with known transphobia and that painful comment about Black southerners. Who knew it turned out that asking Sanders not to support transphobes was demanding perfection?111? /s





  • So, the Higgs is, if I recall right, sensitive to the masses of other particles, and I don’t think this has much to do with gravity per say (gravity just reacts to mass-energy to curve spacetime) but the fact that Higgs can decay to other particles and also feels the ‘Higgs’ effect/field of which the Higgs boson is kind of like a left over. The Higgs mass can thus ‘blow up’ from contributions from other particles, because in a quantum field a particle will potentially fluctuate to several particles and then back again, and of course, you can’t decay into something if you are less energetic than it. [edit: although that might not be important, if ‘virtual particles’ heavier than you vanish before anything can measure them. actually now that I recall I think it was mainly virtual particle contributions that mattered here.]

    I very hazily recall that it is possible to have some mass from non-Higgs effect sources, for instance quarks binding to each other contributes most of a proton’s mass rather than the Higgs effect, so the Higgs boson could have /some/ mass even if we turned off all the Higgs bits except for the boson itself, but my impression was that it was majority from Higgs interactions, from which the Higgs boson is relatively ‘unprotected’ from being ballooned up. A counterpart particle can provide counterterms to help keep mass low, like a seesaw, but the standard model Higgs has no such counterpart unless you introduce something extra.


  • Neutralinos and squarks are entirely theoretical counterparts as part of an extension to the standard model, which were expected to be observed at the LHC as ‘natural’ but weren’t and we have no concrete reason to think they exist; the Standard Model of normal matter still reigns supreme. However if there are really dark stars it does lend some actual support, and would be the first actual evidence.
    Basically the idea is there might be a symmetry between bosons (spin 1) and fermions (spin 1/2), a ‘supersymmetry’, so that every known (fundamental) particle has a secret doppleganger. I vaguely recall one motivation was providing counter-terms, as if you add more matter it can blow up the Higgs, but the irony is the Higgs is fine if you just… Don’t add any dark matter, like the asymptotic safety program pointed out and actually garnered a prediction of the Higgs mass with before anyone measured it. And everyone argued it would be more ‘natural’ if the new particles showed up at LHC energies. They didn’t.
    Personally I’m betting against it; supersymmetry has just actively had predictions working against it so far. The particles would end up introducing more parameters than they solve.






  • Communities should have categories/hashtags that users can optionally sub to, like the ‘metacommunities’ like plz1 said but optional and multiple. Mastodon does hashtagging and can be done on a post by post basis. The forum software Flarum has a ‘tag’/category system and an additional hashtag system, so what I’m thinking of is more like the Flarum system since it would be awkward to hashtag every single post in a community/magazine/whatever.

    So if I wanted to just get solarpunk tech I’d sub to that, but if I wanted that and even moar I’d sub to a generalized Tech tag. Make sense?