Grrl Power – Dabbler’s Science Corner #5
Yeah! Double portmanteau! Ouroboros + Organism + Orgasm = Ourobororganasm! Alert the… uh, people in charge of writing awards. Pulitzer! That’s the guy. Or the Nebula. Yeah. Alert Thaddeus Q. Nebula, which is is a fictional person I assume the Nebula award is named after, because of his resemblance to a gaseous stellar body hundreds of light years across.
If you wore an Ourobororganasm as a cock sheath while having sex, it would count as a very weirdly intimate threesome. I mean, if someone was inhabiting the Ourobororganasm at the time. I mean, otherwise, I’m not sure I see the point, unless one partner or the other was interested in the extra girth or something.
The Universal Speed Limit and the Speed of Light are the same thing, as far as I can tell. Basically every massless particle travels at the same speed, but as humans are most familiar with light, it won the naming competition. Dabbler tends to say “U.S.L.” because she’s aware of and works with all sorts of massless particles in her tinkering. Though “c” is the same thing. I think it’s a lowercase “c” specifically.
You know, since Supers don’t get fat, they could just eat donuts and stuff swimming in hollandaise sauce all day and not have to worry about it. The do, however, still have to keep up with proper nutrition. There’s definitely a Super or two out there that has gotten scurvy from eating nothing but cake. If only they had mixed it up with the occasional blueberry muffin and lemon scone.
I know cave paintings aren’t “technology” but… I mean, they kind of are? They’re definitely at the bottom of the tech tree, very slightly higher than “throw rock” but, you gotta start somewhere.
The new vote incentive is up!
Dabbler went somewhere tropical, in a very small bikini. As you might guess, it doesn’t stay on for long, which of course, you can see over at Patreon. Also she has an incident with “lotion,” and there’s a bonus comic page as well.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
That last panel…! AUGH my eyes! WHY?!
To make sure you FULLY understand how weird a place the greater Grrlverse is.
The internet is for porn!
©Avenue Q
Wow… I saw the WoWC remix years ago but had no idea it was a remix. Thank you for crediting the original!
This isn’t the broadway version, but still awesome: [NSFW Audio] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QiM9NUow3c
Ok, Ourobororganasm. So Frank Herbert’s Shai-Hulud (which includes the obligatory Vagina dentata). The horror, the horror.
Obligatory Queen of Wands link: http://www.queenofwands.net/d/20040121.html
Dangit. Now I’m sad. I miss that strip.
So the collars can also be used for advertisement.
Quantum Entanglement is instantaneous and therfore not limited by any “Universal Speed Limit”. The only issue being that it is not usable to transport meaningful information. Here’s a link to a layman’s explanation.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/chadorzel/2016/05/04/the-real-reasons-quantum-entanglement-doesnt-allow-faster-than-light-communication/
This. Einstein called quantum entanglement “Spooky action at a distance” and it’s probably one of the reasons he hated quantum physics.
Dabbler is apparently simplifying again. There are probably communication methods based on quantum entanglement which do work BUT are limited to U.S.L.
There’s no way to get non-instantaneous effects from entanglement, unless you count entangling particles and then doing things with them that are unrelated to the entanglement. (Where by “instantaneous” we of course mean “spacelike separated, and therefore simultaneous in some reference frame, and we don’t want to go any deeper in this rabbit hole.”) Anything non-instantaneous would imply that you can entangle particles and then measure them simultaneously in a way that will sometimes give an inconsistent result that violates some conservation law (since the measurements are out of communication due to the failure of effects to be instantaneous, and thus are independent).
I knew Dabbler was wrong about this but I didn’t know how to properly express it… but I also knew someone in the comments section would be able to so I want to acknowledge and thank you.
I tend to call the USL “the speed of time”, because it’s the speed at which events themselves propagate.
Similarly “time cone” seems to be a more fitting name for the light cone. Although time itself is not conic (or even cubic), being more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey wimey stuff.
I’ve heard it called “the speed of causality”.
Which happens to fit nicely with us using “C” to denote it, though it’s purely coincidence.
Cave paintings totally count as technology. You try making a paint/pigment that lasts 40 millennia from just the stuff you can get from the plants, rocks and animals around you using only tools made from the same. Primitive is not the same thing as unsophisticated AT ALL.
They did probably not intend it to last 40 millennia. Just some colors they used did. Other colors – we don’t know.
There are a couple of archeologists that go out in the public proclaiming “The cavemen did not use blue!”. But if you get a chance to ask back and delve into that it boils down to “We don’t know. Blue pigments available a t that time do not stand the test of time.” That “we don’t know” is enough to make a public statement of “They did not”. For some, not all. But often the louder ones.
I’m pretty sure that the sillier argument put forward is “ancient people couldn’t see blue”, when that’s not even humanly possible, the world around us (and them) has all sorts of blue things, such as the sky on a clear day and large bodies of water.
It’s also like equivocally stating “English-speaking people couldn’t see the colour orange, until the arrival of the orange fruit in Europe in the 15th century”, but of course they could see orange, but called it something else like “red-yellow” or “golden-red”.
You have to go back 35 million years before there is thought to be significant differences in colour vision among humanity’s ancestors as it’s thought the modern red, green, blue primate vision evolved from the earlier dichromatic red and UV vision around then.
So all ancient humans (even the most stretched definition can only justify 3 million years) have trichromatic vision.
The linguistics of it is a whole other question, as not all colours have names in all languages and there’s a distinct order the names of colours seem to appear – but even before then, the colours could be _described_ as e.g. “sky coloured” or famously “wine-dark”.
Though having studied colour for computer graphics it miffs me no end that people are taught that royal blue and cyan are the same colour (“blue”) when they’re as different as red and yellow!
An argument often cited for the “Ancients did not see blue” argument is that Homer described the sea as red. At sundown. Context is important guys.
We have evidence that some Romans were fond of the color Azure, which is a plant based blue. So at least those could very well see it.
The first durable blue pigment in Europe was Ultramarine which, as the name suggests, was imported across the sea.
Of course all that was much later than cave paintings. Those did not leave written sources. So the “we don’t know” remains standing. I am very sure, close to certain, that they could at least see blue.
Edit: Maybe it wasn’t Azure but a different Blue in roman times. Maybe Indigo? I am not sure any more. Misplaced my sources.
The Romans would have been familiar with lapis lazuli, the source material for ultramarine. After running into the Picts they would have been introduced to woad. The Egyptians had blue. Take a look at Tut’s burial mask. Once trade began around Europe and the Mediterranean there would have been plenty of sources of blue stuff.
There wasn’t a word in English for ‘orange’ for a very long time, historically speaking. The fruit wasn’t named after the colour, the _colour_ was named after the _fruit_ after it was discovered by Europeans, and the word has been in English only since about the 13th century. Before that, the colour we know as orange was just called ‘yellow-red’ or ‘red-yellow’.
It is a silly argument, but not nearly as silly as claiming that they could see blue because it was there to be seen. There are all kinds of things that are ultraviolet coloured and infrared coloured, and radiowave coloured around you right now but you can’t distinguish those colours. Insects and birds can, some of them. Our retinas can distinguish some ultraviolet but our eye lenses are opaque to them. Evolution is random.
Technology? True, everything a human learns to do to bend anything in existence into another form uses a form of technology.
Lasts 40 millennia? Confirmation bias. You don’t see painting out of caves because they only painted caves? Or because caves actually preserved the paintings from rain, wind and other wearing factors?
It’s the sames as saying: “They” don’t make things to last as “they” used to… because you can find tables, chairs, tableware from 5 centuries ago; doesn’t mean EVERYTHING made 5 centuries ago LASTED those 5 centuries.
To be fair though, practices which intentionally undermine technology lifespan for profit reasons have only been common recently, due to a combination of consolidation, globalization, and unremedied greed.
They (big companies) really don’t make things to last the way they (local companies or independent crafters) used to. Because they want to make infinite money, and you can’t do that if you can only sell someone something once.
That’s survivorship bias, not confirmation bias.
Pigments are very much technology. The last panel really puts a new spin on the phrase “Go F* Yourself”.
The very peak of the concept of effing yourself.
The climax of effing oneself.
Heh. Nice to see Dabbler’s ADHD kick in; I don’t recall seeing it often.
Grrl Power has FTL travel in various forms – that already means the “Universal Speed Limit” isn’t actually universal in Grrl Power.
Similarly, there are various forms of FTL communication, and apparently they fit in Sydney’s glasses, so they don’t seem prohibitively bulky or expensive.
Dabbler mentions these getting around the USL via tricks like wormholes, traveling through other planes, etc.
And there’s no guarantee Sydney’s glasses are capable of FTL communication. Yes, she can get messages from her space-boyfriend when he’s out of system, but it’s entirely possible Cora left a relay on/near Earth (or one already exists for the various aliens already living on Earth) that is what handles the actual FTL comms, then sends the information to Sydney by more conventional means.
Yeah the relay is mentioned a couple of times. Cora did said she was going to leave one/
If communication isn’t time sensitive then having the array wait for a ship or something else to form the FTL means isn’t unreasonable. Scanning the destination and sending a usb stick size probe to deliver non sensitive data should be viable. A coms hub satellite around numerous planets should achieve a basic network for this.
I think Sydney’s glasses communicate with the satellite that Cora left in orbit, and that satellite allows FTL communications
Isn’t quantum entanglement supposed to be one of the few things that violates the USL? Pretty sure that’s how it’s hyped.
It could be that Dabbler is simply letting us know that research did not go the way humans currently expect it to, though.
Quantum entanglement is not what is meant with “Spooky Action”. It actually is simple. A quantum state can have values +1 or -1. If entangled they add up to 0.
If you measure one you know the value of the other. Instantly. No matter the distance.
But that knowledge gain is not a quantum property. You can do the same with a picture of two persons. Cut it in half and send one to A, the other half to B. When A looks at the picture they know instantly what half B has. No matter the distance.
Quantum does have some strange properties. That entanglement measurement is not one of those.
Your (over)simplification of what is entanglement is unfortunately wrong because your exemple imply locality and this has been demonstrated to be false (baring hyper-determinism). See quantum non-locality. So there is indeed a “spooky action at a distance”.
This is a common misconception that does not describe quantum entanglement. Your analogy depends on hidden variables. Which half of the picture is sent to A is not undetermined until A looks at it; it is definitely one half or definitely the other. This is not true of entangled particles. The particles sent to A is in a superpostions of +1 and -1 until it is measured.
Scientists who were philosophically resistant to the notion of spooky action at a distance (such as Einstein, who coined the term) proposed interpretations of QM that included hidden variables such as you include in your analogy, but experiments based on Bell’s Inequality have definitely shown that QM does *not* include hidden variables. The 2022 Physics Nobel Prize was awarded for these results.
Quantum entanglement does act instantaneously across any distance, but it cannot be used to communicate information. For example, say you have two entangled particles of undetermined spin. You know that one has spin 1 and the other has spin -1, but until you actually measure one, it’s not that you don’t know its spin, but its spin is actually a superposition of the two states. So if I have one particle hear on Earth, and someone else has the other particle on Gliese 667 Cc, if one of us makes a measurement, they instantly know what the spin of each particle is.
However, there is no way to control the results of the measurement or use this phenomenon to send information.
small c: U.S.L
BIG C: Coulomb, unit of elektrical charge defined as 1 Ampere in one second
Or Big C for (electrical) capacitance.
Panel 7, 3rd balloon section.
*reach
oh look, a Grrl Power / Oglaf crossover!
I read an article once, too lazy to look up the reference right now, about how scientists had finally measured the speed of entanglement. Iirc they entangled 2 particles, carefully moved them to opposite sides of the world, then used incredibly precise synchronized clocks to measure how long it took for a measurement made on one particle to affect the state of the other. I think it was something on the order of a million times the speed of light, but I don’t know for sure.
I’ve also read articles from editors who did not understand what the scientists told them.
I highly recommend Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy, about humanity encountering an alien species that is very much dependent on unusually intimate threesomes. Be warned, though, it is rather unsettling.
I am 100% here for the term ‘ourobororganasm’, but there’s a little bit of my monkey brain thinking, “surely that kind of inside/outside model would be a Klein bottle?”
Just saying, the speed that signals go through nerves is *way* slower than the speed of light and the lag caused by this doesn’t cause people psychological problems. As long as you’re on the same planet you probably wouldn’t notice. Now, if there’s processing/conversion time that introduces *additional* delays, that’s another story. But we can just assume Harem doesn’t have to deal with that.
We’ve evolved to not have problems with that lag. Individuals who weren’t able to automatically compensate for it didn’t survive to reproduce. I’d wager that a technology that greatly reduced nerve signal lag would just as disabling as increasing that lag.
It really depends on what you’re doing. Lag in internet connected games is noticeable even when it’s small fractions of a second. Or try a fighting game on a 100Hz refresh rate vs. 60Hz.
Walking is not likely to be a problem. Running an obstacle course? Or fighting? Oh yes.
This could be mitigated with local storage for “reflex” moves, leaving higher level decisions to the network round trip.
Which would make it nontrivial for e.g. a martial artist to use this tech. There would have to be some sort of packaging and download of those moves to the body if his style isn’t standard.
And there may be trade secrets involved – do you know the “secret irresistible final move” of your martial arts school? Either you download it and risk it being copied, or you don’t and then you can’t use it if you need it…
Didn’t Harem have some issues when one of her bodies was on the planet that Sydney got stuck on because of how far away she was from herself?
Remember that when they finally recovered Sydney, 57 more days had passed on Earth than had passed for Sydney. Essentially, the end of the wormhole on that planet was 57 days in the future of the end of the wormhole on Earth. The difficulty Harem had was from the temporal displacement.
I understood it to be the time dilation due to the speed of Cora’s ship.
No. She had issues because there was too many of her.
New entry for MOST USELESS SUPERPOWER:
Your body produces vitamin C as a byproduct of breathing, rendering you immune to Scurvy.
It is a Z class superpower (a power you could have but is so subtle you could go your whole life without ever realizing you have it unless something really specific or a test of some kind discovered it) but one that would have been a very useful mutation, allowing for a species that could have explored and propagated at a much higher rate without reliance on eating very seasonal fruits for long distance travel with minimal food sources available.
Most animals DO produce vitamin C. Humans are on short list of exceptions who lost that ability.
Useful if you want to lead desert expeditions.
most vitamin C containing products rot easily(the vitamin C prevents it only a little)
Rule 34. The universal constent.
A few others it looks like have already brought it up, and I went down a re-reading of scientific theory articles rabbit hole to double check and the wording can be confusing.
Okay so Quantum entanglement, entangles two particles together, what is done to one affects the other instantly over any distance. Opposite sides of the planet or theoretically even opposite ends of the galaxy according to the math and observations involved. Without any visible or detectable means of communication…it doesn’t violate the speed of light because that is the speed limit (of moving within the universe), as there is no transmission there is no violation…however they are clearly affecting each other (spooky action at a distance).
Einstein and co back in the 1930s hypothesized a “sub-space” that allowed for faster than light transmissions as the basis for what they could observe nearly a century ago, which became a staple of science fiction and fantasy since then. As sci-fi and fantasy use real science as a kind of backbone or template and add their own nonsense onto it. Hence the glory of fiction.
However there was something recent, they won a Nobel prize for it where they disprove local reality or something and that there was no transmission through sub-space. But like a dozen+ theories are floating around to how this all works. Higher dimensions, universe is a hologram and the real distance is zero on the “outside layer of reality”, etc… basically people trying to wrap their heads around things the human brain did not evolve to visualize. Which is always a fun terminator for these discussions, that while we observe it happening, and can do some math, we are being held back by our own brains’ abilities to visualize and accept the data (more so some than others) as conflicting with how we experience reality.
But in the end the issue with using entanglement for communication is we have a hard time entangling particles, we can’t force them to…”transmit” (see that I can’t come up with a better word for wanting information in one spot instantly in another spot without using physical visualization language), its like we are cavemen figuring out how to use a computer and trying to describe it in terms we know, why we have to keep making up new terms for new discoveries.
But again the fun of sci-fi, when it comes to quantum technology. In reality we are basically at the steampunk level, we are theorizing the possible existence of analog audio on a film medium, vacuum tubes, and building sized reel to reel computers holding mega bytes of data. We can’t yet see a way past this to the quantum technology equivalents of solid state computers or billions of microscopic logic gates built into a hand held device that be used to talk, take photos, and send electronic letters. Back then all of this was the realm of sci-fi and limited to what could be visualized at the time, with head sets and holding a large phone with a screen on it etc..
no doubt a hundred years from now (barring any incidents) people could look back at our theories and understandings and go “oh they were so close, how strange it took *x* years to figure out what to us now is common knowledge and used in day to day technology.
But again the fun of fiction, we can use this stuff as a template but are not held to the current understandings of it and physics, make our own laws of physics and rules of reality, magic, dimensions, multiple quantum foams extra universal based cosmic life forms, planes of reality, discoveries in how energy, time, quantum foam, and reality in general work within the setting of the story. After all there were novels back in the day where people have jetpacks and levitation belts that used “anti-graviton zero propulsion” that would be laughed at by modern writers, or things like Aether Sails, etc…
Not an autofellatiorganism? Also with hentai biology+physics any anatomy can be all that inside and all that on the outside! No unique form required!
Wonder if there’s a type of maths that can do some truly unpleasant things to the surface it’s written on. Then again that’s more a Nanoha or Silver Age comics sorta thing.
Nono, an autofellatorganism suggests a creature that is part tongue. This recipe is quite simple – outside penis, inside vagina. No tongues. No licking. The orubourganasm only does fucking. Indeed, it is ALWAYS fucking itself.
Syd, she is NOT “looming”, she is showing off her magnificent cleavage, as she is instinctively driven to do. Respec’ the succ’.
Oh, I see. Dave is using the Science Corners to pad the time he needs to put extra effort into the Young Soldier Maxima reveal. I can’t wait!
FYI… they have been making onaholes with that description for years. Sometimes it’s a mouth on the “Hole” end tho.
Factoid: The Nebula award was named after Ray Bradbury.
a doughnut with hollandaise sauce sounds incredibly disgusting
Depends on how pregnant you are
I love how much D&D lore is going into this comic, and it amuses me how I understand Xuriel better than either of those two likely do.
In panel 7, it’s just “reach,” not “reache.”
Under the right theoretical-circumstances INFORMATION can at least travel faster-than-light, and probably more than just information… Imagine that you have a 2X4 (or a length of rebar, or whatever) that is 100 light-years long, with its far end on another planet, about one inch from a surface like a wall. On Earth you push the board one inch forward… 100 light years away the board strikes the wall and makes a BONK! sound. If you (on Earth) move the board back and forth in a certain way, you could transmit a Morse-code message more-or-less INSTANTLY across 100 light-years….
Yeah, it wouldn’t work that way. At a small scale, a ridged body behaves solid, but at that size, the shear momentum would be enough to ensure that any force you put on it would break the rod before it would move the other end. I’m not a physicist or even material scientist, but at that size, you should probably think of the collection of atoms that makes up a solid as fluid particles. The force that you put on one end still has to travel through the atoms to the other side.
Not even close to instantly. The board’s movement would only propagate at the speed of sound in that material, which is 3-5km/s, depending on exactly what kind of wood it is.
Unfortunately, this would only work for a perfectly uncompressable material… which is impossible.
a huge portion of advancement in animation came from people making overwatch porn …. porn is motivation
While porn does have a history of pioneering new media, I don’t think that particular claim about Overwatch porn inspiring “a huge portion of advancement in animation” is true.
The trouble with that claim would be distinguishing “making Overwatch porn” from “making any animated porn”. There’s an awful lot of it out there.
A different question, what brand of soda is Harem drinking here?
It’s called “Minding My Own Business And Not Getting Involved” cola. It’s schnozzberry-flavored.
U.S.L is speed of light in absence of matter. It may or may not vary over long periods of time, there is much disagreement on this matter.
Speed of light when transmitted through anything other than a vacuum is slower, and varies according to the “optical density” of the material involved. Otherwise, there would be no such thing as a lens. Explanations of this are fairly involved, usually getting into detail about the second or third year of physics undergrad classes.
You want a dose of THAT, here, have fun: https://academic.oup.com/book/40900/chapter-abstract/348994762?redirectedFrom=fulltext
I really shouldn’t put my p*nis in there but…
ANY way that information can move from point A to point B faster than light can be used to violate causality, regardless of if it is done by actually moving faster or tunneling through a different plane or some other method. Here’s a decent explanation:
http://www.physicsmatt.com/blog/2016/8/25/why-ftl-implies-time-travel
(I’m staring this for the readers who might be confused. Obviously your comic universe already has ways to violate causality given that time travel has occurred, and accepting that is a matter of willing suspension of disbelief).
That last panel proves Rule 34 is a universal constant
raising “Go F_ck yourself” to an art form
I like to give a shout out and recommendation to my favorite fanfic writer Jim Bader who sadly passed away years ago for suggestions on how Harem’s powers work.
Simple telepathy, the thoughts of the five bodies resonate in time with one another.
Since all five are the functionally the same person there is no hiding of thoughts, no denial of the inner her, no privacy, and no avoidance or evasion of truth. There is only clarity and understanding, the ability to perceive through having no ego opening herself up to the greater Unity of all. The mind of all five bodies are open to each other and their thoughts spill out into each other’s mind since as stated they are functionally the same person they aren’t able to properly barricade themselves against such outward perception.
She simply orients reality to record her impressions within the mind of another body, and all that body has to do is listen to that inner voice and it will grasp what she is sensing.
“The Universal Speed Limit and the Speed of Light are the same thing, as far as I can tell.”
I heard it called the “Speed of Causality”. We say “Lightspeed”, because Light was the first thing we knew that reached it.
“I know cave paintings aren’t “technology” but… I mean, they kind of are?”
The pain is definitely a technology. Much less paint that lasts for tens of thousands of years.
Caves are good for keeping stuff and stone is a lasting material, but that still has to be more then some berry juice.