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if you were to crucify Lowly Worm, would you do it like this or like this?

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My edo period samurai roommate keeps telling me how i’ll bring shame and dishonor to our apartment if I keep forgetting to wash the dishes. Like whatever dude, I’m not the one carrying on a passionate yet illicit affair with the daimyo’s daughter whose hand has already been promised to another.

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emptying and reloading a gun with practiced efficiency so you think i'm an expert marksman but you later find out that's just how i stim

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– Larry Elmore

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Shell shock? What? Come on Corporal, get out of that daze. We have more pressing matters to get to. I have a very important question. Would you still love me if I were a worm?

Yes, sir. I would fill a mason jar with mud and carry you around in it at all times to make sure you were safe. (A shell goes off a few dozen yards away, throwing dirt and debris into the air. It lands with a series of soft patters in the ankle deep mud of the trench. I stare at the ground for an uncomfortably long time, watching the soil soak up the water and become mud. My thoughts are far far away. You wait expectantly. I finally look up.) Can I also be a worm?

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/hj is the funniest earnest tonetag in the world even without the handjob joke because it's ostensibly meant to clarify tone for autistic people, but the tone it's clarifying is "unreadable level of ambiguous seriousness that requires social context beyond what text can convey /glhffgt"

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Surf's Up

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call my bitch a golf course the way shes got 9 holes. thats right nine holes. niiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiine holes, baby!!! nine holes

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a while ago I read this sci-fi short story from the 50s where a guy is kidnapped and interrogated by aliens using a very sophisticated lie detector, but he realizes that the lie detector works off technical truth, and with some careful phrasing and misdirection, he manages to make them believe that humans are a race of immortal, overpowered, omniscient telepathic beings. and it works.

my favorite part is when he tells them that humans are "capable of transportation without the aid of spaceships or any vehicles, just by using mental power to control physical matter". it's true, we can. it's called walking.

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Okay so a guy in my solid state physics class was telling us about this muon scanning startup he worked at, GScan, and I'm going insane. I don't work there and I have no stake in the company, financial or otherwise, I just need to tell you about it.

Muons are short-lived subatomic particles, same charge as an electron but ~200 times more massive. On Earth, they're produced by cosmic rays colliding with the upper atmosphere, and they hit the ground at a rate of about ten thousand per minute per square meter.

They're moving extremely fast at ground level, like 0.99 c. So they careen right through matter, deflecting only very slightly around heavy atomic nuclei – they'll penetrate like a hundred meters into solid rock.

What do you do with this continuous shower of deep-penetrating charged particles, constantly blanketing every square inch of the Earth's surface?

(source)

The classic thing is use them to image the inside of massive structures, like we use x-rays to look inside living tissue – except instead of generating them yourself, you just use atmospheric muons. Muon archeology is a whole thing, they've used it to find hidden chambers in pyramids and stuff. Neat!

But this one Estonian company is doing some crazy bullshit and I love it.

Sandwich anything between a pair of portable muon detectors and get full 3D imaging of the interior, with sub-millimeter accuracy, by tracking the minute deflection of muons between them. Samples that are WAY too thick for x-rays, made of literally anything. Just put some muon detectors on some two by fours in a warehouse and call it a day.

You can just. Image anything??? Anything you want?? Completely passively!! Just detectors! No particle source! Put them anywhere. The detectors themselves are a mature technology, the company's tech is in the algorithms they use to get this level of spatial and elemental resolution.

You can detect failures inside cable-reinforced concrete bridges without cutting open the bridges.

Decommissioned Soviet nuclear submarine filled with concrete, with no drawings or documentation, that may or may not have spent fuel canisters in it? And you need to cut it up for storage? Just look at the muons.

One of the wackiest ideas is to put one detector under your bed and one on the ceiling, so you get a full 3D scan of your body every night, passively. I want one.