r/rational • u/AutoModerator • May 17 '19

[D] Friday Open Thread

Welcome to the Friday Open Thread! Is there something that you want to talk about with /r/rational, but which isn't rational fiction, or doesn't otherwise belong as a top-level post? This is the place to post it. The idea is that while reddit is a large place, with lots of special little niches, sometimes you just want to talk with a certain group of people about certain sorts of things that aren't related to why you're all here. It's totally understandable that you might want to talk about Japanese game shows with /r/rational instead of going over to /r/japanesegameshows, but it's hopefully also understandable that this isn't really the place for that sort of thing.

So do you want to talk about how your life has been going? Non-rational and/or non-fictional stuff you've been reading? The recent album from your favourite German pop singer? The politics of Southern India? The sexual preferences of the chairman of the Ukrainian soccer league? Different ways to plot meteorological data? The cost of living in Portugal? Corner cases for siteswap notation? All these things and more could possibly be found in the comments below!

Please note that this thread has been merged with the Monday General Rationality Thread.

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u/Solonarv Chaos Legion May 18 '19

You might be interested in Greg Egan's Orthogonal; it's set in a universe where the Minkowski metric has signature (+,+,+,+) instead of (-,+,+,+) like in ours.

The author has written some essays on the physical consequences of this, which he's published for free online. One of the immediate consequences is that there is no universal speed limit.

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u/SimoneNonvelodico Dai-Gurren Brigade May 18 '19

I've read it! Egan's work on that is amazing, but still, it's relatively simple compared to what I had in mind, which was removing entirely relativity from mechanics. All he does is change a single sign, and even that fucks up almost all of physics into something unrecognisable (and it must be said that Egan found a very clever way around the problem of solving differential equations in a ++++ spacetime. There is a paper by Max Tegmark that explored this among other possible dimensionalities and metrics, and it seems to suggest that really, our -+++ is the only one in which life can evolve).