• 0 Posts
  • 5 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 14th, 2023

help-circle
  • Quanta is just a word (related to quantity) as in: “smallest divisible quantity of”

    So in the case of light we would be talking about photons, which are a quanta of light (e.g. discrete “packets” of light).

    Light behaves as a wave, e.g. we can talk about the frequency of light. But it’s also pretty different from macroscopic waves e.g. it’s not accurate to think of them as what your see on a typical sinusoid graph, as at that level things don’t really have a fixed shape or position, we’re talking more about areas where they “probably” are (see: superposition, HUP etc)

    It’s useful to think of light in terms of discrete photons for a number of reasons, e.g. in pair production, 1 gamma photon would be sufficient to create 1 electron/positron pair.

    Photons also exhibit other particle-like behaviour despite having no rest mass. But the idea of rest mass becomes less significant at that level anyway as the line between energy and mass (e=mc²) gets blurred. And any sufficiently high energy object will likely exhibit some massive properties (hence why we tend to use MeV - a measure of energy - instead of a measure of mass, even when performing calculations with massive particles such as electrons.


  • ceuk@feddit.uktoMemes@lemmy.mlUnpopular Opinion
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    58
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    Sorry but this is such a bad take.

    Linux is free to install, free to use and most importantly free to learn

    What is the alternative? How many people who are now in great jobs would have been unable to teach themselves the skills they need if IIS or another proprietary technology had won the server market instead.

    Something had to fill the space, would you rather it was a technology that created barriers for people with the fewest advantages in life?

    (Also as others have said, a lot of OSS development is funded by companies. Linux in particular being a great example)





  • I mean I don’t watch “normal” TV either but I can see the potential appeal.

    Most TV is just trash and a waste of time anyway so for some I guess the feeling of connection is more important than the particular content.

    Take Saturday night telly for example. There’s a really long street near me full of kinda posh-looking terrace houses and the living rooms are really easy to see into, especially at dusk before the curtains get closed.

    Sometimes I walk down the road on a Saturday night and you see such a diverse range of people from families to young couples to old people sat with a blanket on their own all watching the same program which there’s something quite nice about I think. Likewise with things like Strictly, Bake-off etc people seem to enjoy watching the episodes at the same time so they can discuss with their friends/on social media.

    I don’t watch sports either but I’m in a WhatsApp group with some friends and every now and again a message will just randomly appear saying something like “shit effort” and I know there must be a football game on. It’s kinda nice that they can just assume the others are watching.

    Basically I think when you’re watching for entertainment, being able to curate your experience more is really great, but there’s a social dimension to scheduled telly that I think some might still appreciate.