Discussion:

This is a great idea for a prompt I love it. Thanks OP.

A grad student of mathematics takes a rather esoteric approach to developing a thesis. The dean^† brings the student to discuss the paper since the faculty have been unusually distracted by the draft paper being passed around the building.

The student thinks he was brought in for disciplinary reasons, but the dean has other reasons.

^† we assume the dean acts as an administrator rather than as an expert if necessary for the story.

>Tribal elders call the mountain "The place where shamans dream." The tribes consider it a place where ancient ancestors emerged into this world.

>The mountain has been so significant to Indian spiritual leaders for thousands of years that they were reluctant to allow federal archaeologists Stanton Rolf and Cynthia Pinto of the Bureau of Land Management to put its secrets on paper.

https://m.lasvegassun.com/news/1999/oct/05/sacred-spirit-mountain-listed-among-historic-place/

The [Grapevine Valley Petroglyphs] were created between 1100 and 1900 AD. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grapevine_Canyon_Petroglyphs?wprov=sfla1

Around 10,000 years ago, as the last ice age melted away, the area that is today known as the Mojave Desert was a much wetter place. It was marked by lakes and streams fed by retreating glaciers and sustained by wetter weather patterns. https://www.treehugger.com/deserts-that-used-to-be-verdant-fields-and-forests-4868543#

So somewhere between 10,000 and 1000 years.

Beast machines was the beast wars sequel they produced. It wasn't as well received and was given the axe after 2 seasons.

The premise is that after beast wars, the cast returns to Cybertron- but something weird happens (warp travel problems). They wake up on Cybertron separated, missing several months of memory, the planet is empty, and an army of plentiful - but not sentient - transforming drones are out to get them.

After a bit of running around for an episode the crew (Optimus, black arachnia, cheetor, and ratrap) find a place to hide and figure things out. Optimus becomes a prophet of sorts to one of the Cybertron gods, and learns that all of the beast wars was ordained to happen to bring organic material back to Cybertron, and that it was now his job to restore organics back to the planet (in the form of organic/machine hybrids). The crew gets "reformatted" into new shiny bodies that look more like cybernetic animals then mechanical ones, and have to figure out what to do.

It was rather interesting - especially it's dive into lore. They explore the fossilized history of Cybertron, meet new does, get a few friends back, and get a new addition: Botanical (ashe had the beast wars treatment, but on a planet with sentient plants).

It was really interesting for the lore, but not as entertaining. Optimus ends up coming off as a bit too preachy, the young teenager cheetor grows up to pretend to be a stoic young adult (but ends up being a bit angsty), and a fan favorite comes back but some sort of off screen trauma gave them an extra dip in the grim dark bucket.

The 3d graphics has improved a lot: the scenery was great, the character models detailed, and the explosions more explosive. But they didn't have the power to do full organic creatures to robot transition nicely. Rather than having a robotic core in an animal shape that would transform in Beast Wars, they have the beast mode morph into beast machine by going through a glowy ball transition phase, so you don't see any transforming - the robotic parts just grow out of the organic bits and vice versa.

This worked against the toys, since they had a beast mode and robot mode in high definition, but no obvious transformations in between. The result was that the toys has to put seams and moving parts in wherever they could to get the transformation to work - but this left the two modes looking lumpy and disjointed - or they just went ahead and made versions of the characters that didn't look like the show. Example: https://tfwiki.net/wiki/Optimus_Primal_(BW)/toys#Beast_Machines -- Optimus didn't look like that.

I forgot about them.

Instead I was thinking of that one creature from Beast Machines. Its name was Noble/Savage, and its transformation from "beast to beast" was really confusing to the rest of the cast. Turns out the mystery was explained by >!No i'm not spoiling it for you!<

Not to mention Gwen tested all the other tomatoes for ripeness by squeezing them. So the remaining tomatoes are all squishy.

Is drew a transformer that transforms from tank to helicopter with no robot form?

I'd love to see a version of this with British history in addition to American. Britain didn't participate in the American Civil war, but they had their own wars in the mean time that may have affected things.

Wait, you want us to drink water? Like from the terlet?

I came to say this as well.

While making a small hole is near useless compared to actual teleporters, the exterminator managed to find a way to apply it to his job in a way that would probably make him a lot of money. People would pay a lot more if a person could eliminate the rats without cutting holes in their walls.

Is it just me, or has there been a lot of that kind of thing here lately? (And other similarly science subreddits)

I see the question now.

But that sort of info is exactly the kind of thing one should put in the "text" portion of the post.

Otherwise everyone will miss the point entirely.

I started a thought in another reply. But the question is, can the information exist on its own? Because in the universe we understand, the hard drive has mass, then you add energy to it to record information on it, so that information now has energy associated with it and therefore mass, and you transformed the energy you had into information.

I started an analogy saying that it was like an electron. Add energy to it and it gets excited and has more mass, but that extra mass can't exist that way without the electron - or at least, the mass of the higher energy state can't exist without the electron.

but the electron can emit the energy in the form of a photon, which carries electromagnetic energy. So the question is: can an information carrying object emit the energy of the information in a way that preserves the information? There by producing a "dark energy, informationish particle". Or, can the information carrying object only release the information energy in a way that destroys the information or combines it with something else, like by radiating the information out encoded as light, or dispersing into heat?

The mass information theory says that information itself has energy, which means it also has mass. So those changes imply the mass of the information.

But I don't know if the mass of the information can exist on its own or if it needs another mass to act on. Sort of like how an electron in a higher orbital has more mass than a lower energy electron because it has more energy in it. But that energy associated with the excited electron can't exist on its own unless it is emitted as a photon... Where it becomes a different form of energy.

I think the idea that information has energy comes from calculations involving the entropy of the medium the information is in when the information is there vs when it's not. So a hard drive filled with information would have a mass of M+I, while the hard drive that has been erased would have mass of M.

Am I right?

So it would be subservient to the energy/mass of the medium.

Unless anyone theorized about information existing without a medium... What would that even look like. How would it get there? How would it get out?

Could an advanced tech let you encode your porn onto space itself?

>At least one unknown suspect released the minks from a farm overnight Tuesday. Officials say they pose a risk to local wildlife and livestock.

This is literally the first line. The sheriff is investigating a person who released the minks, the government had nothing to do with it and didn't release them .

I'd love to see this as a time animated visual.

Pie charts are trouble since visually a person outs more importance on the larger areas than the small, so the days are the beginning of the month in the center look less than the last day, even if your mood on the last day wasn't as important.

Also, since the data itself is displayed by color, a pie chart makes it look like the areas next to each other are related. And while this is true radially (consecutive days are related), how are they related rotationally? Does your mood on the 5th of November impact your mood on the 5th of December?

What about October 2021 compared to Sept 2022? Are they related even though a year is in between?

What about December 31 and January 1st? They should be related but on the chart they are really far apart.

I suggest making it a line chart showing the progression over the days of the year, with some demarcating for individual months, notations for important events (i see a big red spot on the left there, what happened?), And the use of color on a vertical scale with a neutral in between color. I suggest red and green with white at neutral - since the extremes are just as important as each other. This would do well to show the time dependant relations and clarify the data while also showing the extremes of mood.

I concur. Should try running red to green with white in the middle for neutral.