When I said "ray" I just meant an imaginary line that could be drawn to extend in a given direction, not a literal particle escaping. It was mostly to think of a way you might conceptualize an orientation of an object that may not have any dimension. As in, if the matter just outside a singularity rotates, perhaps you could consider it to rotate? But I'm not sure that would be accurate to say anyway. My grasp of the physics of black holes is obviously pretty loose. :)

Thanks for taking the time to explain!

Technically couldn't a ray emanating from a singularity rotate? Like, the point could have a sort of orientation without having any real measure?

Not saying that's the case here, but I think it could happen.

I have tried something like that before and absolutely hated it. But for your sake, I hope it catches on.

All through grad school, my running joke was that "Teen Talk" Barbie did nothing wrong. Math class IS tough. 😭

Depends how many holes you have in your socks. :)

Or whether your coffee cup has a handle.

Aptly named!

That's encouraging. Hopefully they'll give it up. It's ridiculous that anyone pursued this in the first place.

You got it! You're welcome, I am still learning a lot myself. 😄

Edit: I may be a little confused about what you mean when you say narrower aperture. When you focus stack, you will be using a relatively wide(r) aperture, if you are not, you will need a somewhat narrow(er) aperture to get sharper focus.

Focus stacking is usually done in post. The option in your camera will most likely just take a series of photos with the focal point changing slightly every time, and you can stitch those together later. Photoshop will do it automatically, or you can do it yourself with masking on different layers.

There are some cameras that will do the stitching for you. I know the OM-1 (the camera I generally use) does this, and probably other models. I tend not to use it though since it saves the end result as a jpg and I prefer to process my own images from RAW.

I am in the same boat, not a pro, so my explanation may not be the best:

It's more to do with the fact that when you are taking macro shots you are generally very close to your subject, and unless it is a very thin object on a single plane parallel to your lens, you often really have to stop down to get the entire subject in focus (like f/8 - f/11). If you are shooting at f/2.8 you might only get a single petal on your flower in focus.

So if you see a shot of a small object with some depth to it, which is entirely in sharp focus, but then you have a super creamy bokeh on objects that are only a couple inches further away, there is a good chance that it was achieved using a wider aperture and stacking the in-focus bits of several shots. That's what I look for, anyway.

Hope that helps. B&H has good articles on DOF in macro photography and focus stacking that explain it better than I can!

When you have a really shallow depth of field on a macro shot, yet your entire foreground subject is tack sharp, it is often achieved by focus stacking. Otherwise, it can be quite difficult to blow out the background while having your entire subject in focus (even though it is quite small). I have done it with flowers before, so I think I am just used to the look. It has a sort of isolated, dreamy quality.

It is also great to take makeup off or products that build up (like sunscreen).

I've seen hairspray used on a clear filter to create a similar bloom effect!

Only if it contains no complex entries.

Very well done!

Beautiful! Are you using focus stacking here?

To be fair, I've written plenty of useful code as a hobbyist with the help of Chat GPT. Not good for writing anything factual or creative, but it's a decent assistant at my level.

That was how all image macros looked in back my day, and we liked it!

Thank you so much! Not sure how I missed that. Most of the time I bookmark things on mobile so I can read them later in browser, so this helps me a lot.

If you're looking for a relaxing tea, I highly recommend lavender. I use a tea ball filled with dried flowers that I bought in bulk online. Honey optional. Chamomile is nice, but it has never done much for me beyond "a cup of something warm is relaxing".

I also find that lavender oil works really nicely in an oil diffuser, but it turns out that my husband is terribly allergic to it, so I don't use it that way anymore.

Do you also happen to know if there's a way to see our bookmarked threads? I can see them on the Liftoff app pretty easily, but in the browser version of the site, I have no idea where they are.

There are nowhere near enough demotivational posters being dug up from back in the day.

I did find that the fake article titles were often too "on the nose" to be believable, so I guess that's one level of filtering. But you are right, if you can't explore the article and its sources, you are just guessing whether it is true based on whether it sounds or feels true.

I have another issue with the fact that a headline can be a "real" news headline, from a source that may have a veneer of reputability, but could still very much be full of bias. Is it "fake news" if the article exists and technically contains some verifiable facts, but is otherwise full of propaganda? It gets blurry.

https://yourmist.streamlit.app/

This is the direct link to the MIST itself, if you want to take it without going through the article/account process.

Yes! This stuff certainly raises a ton of questions. I know some, maybe all, of it is probably random "noise" but I've always wondered if peripheral states of consciousness let us perceive things that are "real' (somewhere out there). That's the great mystery I want to see unraveled in my lifetime.

I think you are making the right call. I frankly hadn't even thought of all of the potential legal difficulties that small instances might get dragged into, but you make a good point. I simply don't trust Meta not to trample thoughtlessly over everyone else in the fediverse.

Thanks once again for explaining your reasoning and keeping the discussion open.

I have a lot of dream related phenomena that I experience regularly (sleep paralysis, out of body experiences, etc.) but I generally chalk that up to the fact that I probably have some kind of sleep disorder.

But there was one dream I had that I cannot easily dismiss. A few years ago, my grandfather was living alone and declining in health. He and I were extremely close when I was growing up. We (my mom particularly) would go check up on him during the week, and he had home health aids that checked in as well.

One night, I had an unusually vivid dream where I saw him - in blue robes, in a heaven-like setting, happy and healthy and strong. When I woke up, I made sure to journal the dream, as I keep track of significant dreams. Just a few minutes after I finished writing, my mom calls me and tells me that my grandfather's health aid had showed up and found him lying on the floor; they had thought he had a fall during the night. They sent him to the hospital, but he wasn't really coherent and was pretty obviously reaching the end.

I visited him as soon as I could and said my goodbyes, and he died the next day. I felt like the dream gave me some sort of closure, like his spirit reached out to me and let me know that he was ready to move on?

I actually had a few dreams after that where he visited me, but we both knew he had died and couldn't stay. I at least got to share the news with him that I was expecting a child (I found out I was pregnant about 4 months after he died). I have not seen him in a dream since.

Perhaps it was a hypnopompic hallucination? I ask because I have many experiences waking up from nightmares and hearing bizarre sounds or seeing bizarre things. Like ice cream truck sounds outside at 3am. Or seeing the face of an "alien" standing next to my bed.

Hopefully your experience was just a trick of the mind!

I had a roommate once who kept walking in and contributing to conversations with no idea what was happening, so "You're out of your element!" became a staple.

Thank you for reminding me why I stopped at masters, haha...

I once saw someone describe graduate school as a "youth amputation", and I think about that a lot.

I really love this! It sort of reminds me of Kandinsky. Lovely color harmony too!

Welcome!

Repo! The Genetic Opera. I could not get into it at all.

I am glad I am not in the dating game at this point in my life. I know I very easily could have been an anxious wreck of a hermit if I was completely on my own. Hopefully not a conspiracy theorist, but I can't honestly say I don't have tendencies that could put me there.

The poor relationship between the sexes is something I have morbidly kept my eyes on for a long time. I married pretty young, but I have a good handful of inexplicably single friends, both male and female. None of whom seem to be compatible with each other, or frankly even living in the same perceptual universe. They are all good people, fairly successful, and not being unreasonable in their standards as far as I can tell. But there is just some complete lack of trust or faith in the opposite sex on both ends. It hurts to watch.

I think best case scenario is that matchmaking services and "arranged marriages" (by this I mean voluntary setups through families and social networks, nothing coercive) begin to catch on. There has got to be a way to pair up people who are at least somewhat vetted for trustworthiness and seriousness in seeking companionship, outside of the confusing and alienating social landscape we have developed, or the meat market of online dating. But maybe I am naïve to think that would work.

Both are fascinating to me. I have also met a lot of people who are interested in both. I don't think it's a coincidence. There's something really interesting about the way we can use symbols and signifiers to encode and transmit and preserve information. Any kind of information.

Coding requires you to say precisely what you mean. Give clear instructions. Define exactly the pieces you are working with. There is really no room for ambiguity, and there's something really satisfying to the logical side of my brain about that kind of rigidity.

But that's exactly why linguistics is interesting to the other side of my brain. Human language is full of fuzzy categories, changing definitions, unwritten rules, unspoken connotations, creative repurposing, borrowing, taboos... You can add dimensions of meaning with text, your voice, your eyes, the movement of your body. You can pack so much nuance into a single word or phrase; a subtle hint can mean so much more than what you are literally saying. You can intentionally encode a message so that it is NOT understood. There is infinite malleability in human language.

This is why it's so exciting to see such progress in natural language processing. Large language models kind of blur the lines and begin to "understand" and respond to the ambiguities of the way we use language (at least in a kind of probabilistic sense). But they are also learning our programming languages. Right now, we can converse with AI models that can write (basic) code for us and with us, and make changes based on our conversational language. Imagine one day programming in plain language without that intermediary step!

Does the planet in question orbit one star at a time? I'd be curious to see if there's ever an alignment condition where one half of the planet is bathed in blue light and the other half in red. Something like this (a clip I saved from a Processing project where I was learning about directional light):

That would be something to see!

I love this! It makes me wonder about all the phenomena that have never been seen or described due to different configurations of stars and planets. It would have never even occurred to me that a "double eclipse" could happen.

I have been specifically looking for bad softcore porn from the 90s, and would gladly take any other recs you have to give.

I did also discover the Full Moon streaming service just the other day, which largely seems to have porn films with most of the actual porn edited out. It's surprisingly watchable.

• Night Feeder: featuring The Nuns, it's a very bad movie that was clearly made with a lot of love
• Hobgoblins: MST3K classic
• Blood Theatre: the music is somehow catchier than it has any right to be
• Undefeatable: Cynthia Rothrock "masterpiece"
• just... all of the American Ninja movies

Edit - I made this list and completely forgot about two of my other favorites worth mentioning:

• The Sphere of the Lycanthrope (RIP David Stay)
• The FP