#orthogonal

[cryptologicalmystic]

there was no straight explanation for tullia and years after reading im still so mad she died. like out of all of yalda's feminist friends to kill off for worldbuilding, egan specifically picked the one with all the lesbian subtext. hell i can barely even call it subtext, tullia and yalda basically got to weird alien second base onscreen

[is-this-scientifically-accurate]

how accurate is The Clockwork Rocket by Greg Egan

Anon sorry for taking so long to answer your ask.

Time and Space - How Are They Related?

The book takes place in an alternate universe, where the laws of physics are slightly different. In our universe, velocity and time are inversely related - going very fast causes you to experience less time than a stationary observer. In the book’s universe, velocity and time are directly related - going very fast causes you to experience more time than a stationary observer. This effect is called time dilation and is predicted by Einstein’s special theory of relativity.

This universe also doesn’t have a universal speed of light. Instead of using our laws of relativity to determine how much time will pass for a stationary observer (which involves a complicated equation with a fraction under a square root) you can just use the Pythagorean theorem. One of the sides represents the distance traveled, one represents the amount of time experienced by an observer, and the hypotenuse represents the amount of time experienced by the traveler.

We aren’t sure at the moment if other universes exist or if they even could exist. If they do exist, they could have different laws of physics than the ones in our universe. Article about this

Rating: speculation

If we follow along with this ruleset, time and space have drastic changes. You now experience much more time compared to an observer if you were going very fast (rather than less as it is in our universe). You would also see weird other changes, like a colorful trail of rainbow light from the stars in the sky and a noticeable absence of black holes. This follows the ruleset of the story, but since it is still so foreign to what we know I can’t really justify a rating of scientifically true or scientifically plausible.

Rating: Scientifically possible

The author’s website is a great tool if you want to get deeper into the topic and learn more as well! He can explain it much better than me :)

[sciencesolutions]

[wordgoods]

orthogonal | ôrˈTHäɡən(ə)l

of or involving right angles; at right angles.

STATISTICS (of variates) statistically independent • (of an experiment) having variates which can be treated as statistically independent.

[digitalcreationsllc]

What is OFDMA (orthogonal frequency-division multiple access)? | Definition from TechTarget

What is OFDMA (orthogonal frequency-division multiple access)? Orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA) is a technology of Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) that lets access points serve multiple clients at the same time. OFDMA follows a set of rules created for the transmission of data between multiple terminals or clients over a transmission medium. The terminal could be any device at the end of…

[minterupt]

Brick Exterior in Austin Inspiration for a large contemporary white one-story brick exterior home remodel

[fipindustries]

world building concept for an old stuffy aristocratic society:

transitioning is perfectly allowed and this society makes space for trans people but it works in very repressed ways. you are supposed to come out privately to your parents who will then make a formal announcement that their heir has "found a job abroad". you will take a trip to a little hospital/boarding school/retirement home far into the countryside where you will live for a year with other trans people transitioning, you will be given all the medical assitance needed as well as classes on how to properly perform your prefered gender. how to dress, how to talk, the little social niceties needed, etc.

afterwards when you return home your family will throw a little party to reintroduce you into society and to welcome you back where they will claim you are a "distant cousin" that [deadname] found abroad that your family now wants to sponsor and is going to become part of the family. all the needed paperwork is quietly taken care of in the background by very well paid lawyers.

absolutely everyone knows what "finding a job abroad" and "distant cousin" actually means but it is extremely impolite to ever bring it up out loud. at most some people will gossip about behind closed doors. no mention of your previous identity is ever made again, you are supposed to act as if you are 100% cis.

[wojakgallery]

what is it about wojaks that so succinctly portrays the full spectrum of human emotions

I think that may be the biggest mystery about wojaks.

Rage Comics tried to do it first, but they were basically just emotions and responses. Why has Wojak persisted? I don't really know.

Maybe because users saw in Wojak a lot more possibilities of more characters, and with those characters, real or fictional, all of the emotions and possible or impossible situations or events. Rage Comics just seemed way more limited, so it became discontinued.

Will Wojaks ever die like Rage Comics? Probably, but I don't think any time soon.

[cryptologicalmystic]

[ID: "Tullia began writing. Two bodies, one skin. Yalda left the words unread; she could entertain herself later with the awfulness of the essay. Now, she simply let the shapes flow from skin to memory, feeling a sense of rightness to them on a different level: each symbol on its own was elegantly constructed, each page was beautifully composed. Let the words give Ludovico the empty flattery he craved, while she and Tullia smuggled the true meaning past him." end ID]

Rereading the Orthogonal trilogy by Greg Egan and I'm still amazed at how naturally "academic plagiarism as an act of radical liberationist lesbian sex" flows in a narrative that's otherwise largely about relativistic physics.

[destroyer-of-monsters]

GODZILLA ULTIMA

VS

JET JAGUAR

I remade some of my old GIFs of this fight, and added two new ones as well. Such a tremendous ending, i remember being shocked the moment Jet Jaguar became giant and being like NO F#CK WAY THEY ACTUALLY DID IT!

[fshoulders]

I feel bad for Brian Thompson.

You know, Brian Thompson? The deep-voiced, muscular actor who guest-spotted in a bunch of episodes of Star Trek: the Next Generation and DS9, played several villains on Buffy, and before allllll of that asked the Terminator if it was wash day when he turned up in 1984 buck nekkid.) He was also the Alien Bounty Hunters (when not shapeshifted) on The X-Files.

Last week this burly mainstay of 90s TV had the search results page for “Brian Thompson” all locked up, and now this asshole CEO is all up in his SRP.

You get (presumably) the first SAG credit under your super-common first name and last name and you think you’re set for life, and then something like this happens.

Also, he probably has inconsiderate friends making “it’s about you! You’re dead!” jokes like Sarah Connor’s coworkers did in the aforementioned Terminator.

Let’s remember to keep Brian Thompson in our thoughts. He just played the bad guy on TV.

[togglesbloggle]

Is this what the lads are calling 'environmental storytelling'?

[gay-mathematician-portmanteau]

a college algebra student asked me to prove to her that any line with slope \frac{-1}{m} is perpendicular to a line with slope m. in my infinite hubris, i confidently launched into the dot product proof. about halfway through, i realised that i'd forgotten that adding non-zero constants to your column vectors' y-terms completely ruins the dot product. i absolutely flubbed it and will suffer for eternity as penance. send me to linear algebra hell.

[mappinglasirena]

The Stairs Under the Bridge

If you've been following my blog for a while, you know that one of the many mysteries/points of discussion that come up repeatedly is: what is happening in the space under La Sirena's bridge? There's a door leading there from the mess hall and we see Picard walk through it in S01E06, "The Impossible Box", but we never find out what that space is being used as.

(At least, we don't know what its in-universe use is. We know from set plans that in the studio, the space apparently held the playback setup.)

We got a glimpse of a cross-section of the ship in the Blu-ray set tour, which has some impossible geometry happening under the bridge...

(That is not a proper floor and something is definitely clipping through it!)

... and if you remember my post from a while back, I speculated that the most likely explanation is that the model has an extendable ladder there, that would allow people to board/leave the ship by a means other than the loading ramp. This would fit with the early idea of the season 1 writers to have Picard board La Sirena in a space port, rather than beam him on board while she's in orbit.

Well, a couple of weeks ago, we got confirmation that this is indeed what the production team originally intended.

Dave Blass, the production designer for PIC Seasons 2 and 3, tweetet some images showcasing a cross-section of the Sirena set/model:

As you can imagine, this gave me enormous joy (and a not too small amount of glee)! I have long insisted that the panorama windows, i.e. the exit the Motley Crew use to get off the ship once she crash-lands on Coppelius, don't really work as a proper access point to the ship. There is a three foot drop right inside the window the crew needs to bridge, no proper hatch, no ladders, etc. The only reason it makes for such a convenient exit is that Sirena is buried in a few metres of dirt, bringing the window level with the ground.

And indeed, La Sirena has, or at least was originally intended to have, a proper access to the front of the ship, one with a ladder and hatch and everything! And it's located in the mysterious space under the bridge!

But, me being me, this schematic also immediately raised a question: Isn't that ladder a bit too short?

If you remember this post, it seems like one of the changes made during Sirena's design process was that the wings were dropped quite a significant amount. Where the early concept art has the ship sitting fairly low to the ground, she is raised much higher when she reaches her final form.

Essentially, we went from a configuration that might have looked something like the version on the top to the actual model on the bottom:

This change increased the ship's clearance significantly.

For the non-imperial-measuring among us, the height of the ladder given in the schematic shared by Blass, 14' 10 1/2", translates to about 4.8m. However, when you line up the orthogonal view of the ship with the cross section, the length of the ladder is not really enough to reach the ground once the ship has landed.

(The green line indicates the bottom of the stairs.)

There is some speculation that maybe Sirena can fold up her nacelles for landing, and that might be true. There are rooms extending into the wings that would end up at an odd angle, but I suppose with artificial gravity, anything is possible -- if somewhat unlikely.

Still, if we presume Sirena's wings are rigid in general, the distance from the tarmac to the belly of the ship (here: the stage floor in the schematic) is a bit larger than 4.8m.

I wanted to adapt the ladder accordingly, but getting good measurements by converting between feet, pixels, and metres is a bit of a hassle. So instead, I simply used the measurements already on the schematic and extended the ladder so that the ship's clearance would be 5.5m or around 18ft.

This brings the total length of the ladder to about 21ft or 6.5m, and overlaid on the orthogonal ship view, it looks like this:

(The green line once again indicates the bottom of the stairs.)

As you can see, this length requires for the outer engines to fold up a little bit and would have the lowest point of the nacelles basically sitting on the ground. I personally think that would make a lot of sense, and in season 2 we did see that the outer engine pods are on hinges and can definitely fold down.

(It's subtle, but they do move back into their resting position towards the end of the gif.)

It was never confirmed that the engings can fold farther up as well, but looking at how they're attached, I think it makes sense that they could.

Now, in the adjusted S1 concept art of Sirena at the space port, the outer engines are in their normal positions and the wings are actually fully off the ground, with the ship resting on extended landing gear:

So, my extended ladder is the absolute minimum length needed to account for the dropped wings. In all likelihood the ladder would have to be even longer than that, because the clearance would be over 5.5m.

One thing that playing around with all of these views and measurements made me realize, though, is that La Sirena is quite a bit larger than I usually picture her. I have this realization about once every two or three months, so to make it easier to internalize, I asked the wonderful @regionalpancake to assist me.

Google helpfully suggests that 5.5m / 18ft is about half the size of a telephone pole or of three Michael Jordan's standing on each other's shoulders. It is also the size of...

... one average adult giraffe. (This is more or less helpful, depending on when you last went to the zoo, but I really enjoyed that as a visual aide.)

And because Regionalpancake is a good sport (and extremely proficient at adding animals to La Sirena), she also gave me this second edit:

(She also helpfully removed the spacedock workers who were a little to tall in comparison to Sirena. Hopefully, the friendly Averagely-Sized Adult Giraffe will make the ship's real dimensions slightly easier to gauge.)

So, now we have an idea of what might lurk beneath La Sirena's bridge!

I imagine in-universe, there is more stuff stashed under there than just the stairs, though. Perhaps the space gives easier access to the phaser banks in the nose of the ship, or to some other flight control or power distribution machinery. And there's still the question of why Picard, after a very emotionally draining conversation, chooses to head into this space rather than going straight upstairs to his cabin or to his study on the holodeck. (Yes, I know the Doylist answer is because it was the more dramatically satisfying blocking/staging choice, but on this blog, we like to dig for Watsonian explanations, too!)

My personal guess is still that there's some communal washroom down there, because those have to be somewhere on the ship, and that space would actually make sense, being in such close proximity to the bridge and mess hall.

But, since we never saw any of it on screen (and won't ever see La Sirena on screen again), I guess the space under the bridge will always remain a canonical mystery -- and thus available for any interpretation your writing /mapping/ headcanon might require ;)

[churchofthecomet]

greg egan novel bingo

[fatestayyuri]

been drafting fanservant concepts recently