Sasha

Yeah it would fair point, I'll be honest I haven't touched Newtonian gravity in a long time now so I'd forgotten that was a thing. You'd still need to do a finite element calculation for the feather though.

There's a similar phenomenon in general relativity, but it doesn't apply when you've got multiple sources because it's non-linear.

Possibly?

A bowling ball is more dense than a feather (I assume) and that's probably going to matter more than just the size. Things get messy when you start considering the actual mass distributions, and honestly the easiest way to do any calculations like that is to just break each object up into tiny point like masses that are all rigidly connected, and then calculate all the forces between all of those points on a computer.

I full expect it just won't matter as much as the difference in masses.

I actually thought the answer might be never, but a quick back of the envelope calculation suggests you can do this by dropping a ~1kg bowling ball from a height of 10^-11^m. (Above the surface of the earth ofc)

This is an extremely rough calculation, I'm basically just looking at how big a bunch of numbers are and pushing all that through some approximate formulae. I could easily be off by a few orders of magnitude and frankly I didn't take care to check I was even doing any of it correctly.

10^-11^m seems wrong, and it probably is. But that's still 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times further than the earth moves in this situation. Which hey, fun What If style fact for you: that's about the same ratio of 1kg to the mass of the Earth at ~10^24^kg.

That makes perfect sense because the approximations I made are linear in mass, so the distance ratio should be given by the mass ratio.

This is not correct, the force on the objects is the same sure, but the accelerations aren't so you can't calculate them both in one go like this.

If anyone's wondering, I used to be a physicist and gravity was essentially my area of study, OP is right assuming an ideal system, and some of the counter arguments I've seen here are bizarre.

If this wasn't true, then gravity would be a constant acceleration all the time and everything would take the same amount of time to fall towards everything else (assuming constant starting distance).

You can introduce all the technicalities you want about how negligible the difference is between a bowling ball and a feather, and while you'd be right (well actually still wrong, this is an idealised case after all, you can still do the calculation and prove it to be true) you'd be missing the more interesting fact that OP has decided to share with you.

If you do the maths correctly, you should get a=G(m+M)/r^2 for the acceleration between the two, if m is the mass of the bowling ball or feather, you can see why increasing it would result in a larger acceleration. From there it's just a little integration to get the flight time. For the argument where the effect of the bowling ball/feather is negligible, that's apparent by making the approximation m+M≈M, but it is an approximation.

I could probably go ahead and work out what the corrections are under GR but I don't want to and they'd be pretty damn tiny.

Depending on the way it's modified, I think there's some environmental risk particularly for soil erosion and potentially cross breeding with non-modified crops.

I don't think these should stop us from making better food sources, but it does concern me because there isn't much corporate incentive to adequately test for these things.

This is possibly the worst week of my life, but frankly I've said that before.

I lost the love of my life to religious oppression, if I'd been born different it probably would have been the best relationship I could have possibly hoped for. But here I am again, born wrong and feeling like there's nothing left for me.

Probably proper knife skills. I've always been pretty good with a knife, but I've been taking my time to really refine the skill as I do a lot of cooking for large groups so speed is extremely useful. I honestly learnt a lot of it indirectly by just watching how chefs use them, but for the theory and all that I started with Lan Lam's video on knife skills over at the America's Test Kitchen yt channel.

I'm about to be going to an event where I'll be cooking nearly a thousand meals a day for three days, so I'm going to be putting it to the test. The one nice thing is we'll have a team of volunteers to help with ingredient prep, so it should be okay but daunting none the less.

Once again, Ada just does the right thing and someone got mad about being called out. Glad we've blocked NCD now

Thanks! I knew there was a real word out there

I don't like commercial "AI" period.

That said, I did find some use for chatGPT last year. I had it explain to me some parts of Hawking's paper on black hole particle creation, this was only useful for this one case because Hawking had a habit of stating something is true without explaining it and often without providing useful references. For the record, chatGPT was not good at this task, but with enough prodding and steering I was eventually able to get it to explain some concepts well enough for my usage. I just needed to understand a topic, I definitely wasn't asking chatGPT to do any writing for me, most of what it spits out is flat out wrong.

I once spent a day trying to get it to solve a really basic QM problem, and it couldn't even keep the maths consistent from one line to another.

Innuendo Studios has a good video on this in their alt right playbook series. Republicans will gladly appeal to the far right, Democrats want to distance themselves from the left as much as possible and are instead focused on also appealing to the right...

Ultimately, while a lot of the parties policies are different on the surface, Democrats still win when Republicans are in power because they're part of the same class, hoarding wealth works for both sides. Democrats seemingly only exist to make the system vageuly stomachable (is that even a word?) to the rest of America.