Russia's War Against Ukraine

[ArizonaTank]

From (apparently?) a Ukrainian Defense Ministry tweet: "The Ministry of Defense of Ukraine would like to remind everyone that the presence of occupying troops on the territory of Ukrainian Crimea is not compatible with the high tourist season." {shows photo of mushroom cloud rising over beach-party huts}

https://twitter.com/DefenceU/status/1557061408340287490

I thought that was a photoshop, but apparently not.  I did see a story about a week ago about Russian tourists vacationing in the Crimea. They can't go anywhere else.

https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/world/2022/08/10/crimea-russian-tourists-bomb/

[Gusington]

That could be the defining image of the first part of this century.

[Sir Slash]

"In Putin's Russia, you no smoke cigarettes. Cigarettes smoke you"!  :hide:

[GDS_Starfury]

might be missiles launched from Odessa:

https://twitter.com/rrichcord/status/1557169834215018496

[GDS_Starfury]

[GDS_Starfury]

the most effective Ukrainian ammo!

[MengJiao]

That could be the defining image of the first part of this century.

  And on the Sea of Azov?

Fire breaks out after explosion in Russian port on Sea of Azov
From CNN's Tim Lister, Josh Pennington and Anna Chernova

A large fire has broken out in the Russian port of Yeysk on the Sea of Azov, near the Russia-Ukraine border.

Yeysk is located across the water from the Russian-occupied city of Mariupol, which was targeted heavily during the start of the invasion.

Social media videos and images geolocated by CNN show a thick plume of dark smoke drifting across the town. One video shows a substantial explosion occurring.

Russian state news agency TASS said a fire broke out in a hangar building spanning 550 square meters. Emergency services are on the scene and there are no casualties, TASS reported, citing the Ministry of Emergency Situations in Krasnodar.

Local and regional authorities have not released any official comment.

[MengJiao]

might be missiles launched from Odessa:

https://twitter.com/rrichcord/status/1557169834215018496

  Holy Crap!  Magneto-acoustics?  totally new to me!  Wonderful!!!

[JasonPratt]

I plugged "...and there are no casualties" into the English to Russian to English translator and got back "...and there are body parts everywhere on fire".  ::)

[JasonPratt]

the most effective Ukrainian ammo!

I have to wonder how much better off the world would be if everyone had a kitten purring around them.

...on consideration, the world would be screwed, because kittens and cats are adorably psychotic at destroying productivity, figuratively and literally!  ::)

[ArizonaTank]

the most effective Ukrainian ammo!

Attacking with Schrodinger's cat?

https://naturenoon.com/schroedingers-cat-experiment-simple/

[MengJiao]

Attacking with Schrodinger's cat?

https://naturenoon.com/schroedingers-cat-experiment-simple/

  Wikipedia goes into more detail:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger%27s_cat

  Note that Schoedinger is using the example to make fun of the Copenhagen interpretation and that "observed" even in the Copenhagen interpretation is the
moment the quantized function represents an interaction which is more or less right away in most environments ( though a single radioactive atom or a metastable
electron state in a very thin gas could fail to interact for quite a while -- but since the atom or the electron would do or not do observable A, you would know B (the state of the cat)
or so its seems to me).

[Windigo]

thats a lot of smoking

https://twitter.com/i/status/1557009861040373760

Simultaneous HE smoking

[JasonPratt]

Re Schroedinger's cat and quantum indeterminacy: another way that works, is that quantum states are always being omnisciently and omnipresently observed.  ^-^

Most of it though is just a quirk in calculated detectability: the formula to specify the position of an election, to give a basic example, excludes knowing the angular velocity of an electron (or something like that, I've forgotten the high school physics formula in detail but it made sense at the time), and vice versa. But that's just an inherent limitation in human descriptions (even mathematical ones) of the reality of what's happening, due to how energy functions at that level of reality: the electron fields aren't actually indeterminately real in position and velocity.

As a very rough analogy, it's like how we can only see, at most, three sides of a six-sided rectangular prism at a time, such as a military history book -- or the fluid of a cat in a box! (There's a famous award-winning paper from a few years ago, humorously using cats to illustrate the properties of a fluid.) But the other sides are still there, 'doing' their structural functions and interactions with other reality, even though we can only detect those sides indirectly by extended inferences -- unless we shift our method of perception around to directly detect those sides, whereupon we lose direct perception of the prior sides!

Or as another rough analogy, it's like how it's impossible to illustrate 3-D objects in a 2-D way without either smearing the distinct shapes into one shape, or else distinguishing them into what looks like completely separate shapes. Trying to calculate the position and velocity of an electron simultaneously ends up being a "2-D" method of describing a "3-D" reality, so to speak.

Once we get down to the atomic level, and its interactions upward at the molecular level and downward at the fundamental particle level, "rough analogies" are the best we can do for descriptions, even for math in a way. Math can be more particular at the Newtonian level (only-2 apples added to only-2 apples will always total only-4 applies, other things being equal), but our language for description still won't be. (And even the Newtonian level, including Newton himself, recognizes limits to mathematic description of things like curves. That's why calculus is really that super-annoying "limit theory" taught first before going to the easier cheat methods for resolving calculus equations.)

As Lewis used to say, we can make our language drier, but we can't make it less metaphorical. We can only surround the reality, so to speak, with analogies and try to trim off the false parts of the analogies for more accurate descriptions. But even that description of the process is necessarily metaphorical. 


(Note: I say "most of it" near the beginning, because once we get down to zero-point energy things get a lot weirder and more... suggestive, let's say.)

[JasonPratt]

Those things will kill you!  ^-^

(Now for Surgeon General warnings...)