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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • It’s weird to me as well. A base understanding of their history shows that while they’ve been having a really bad time since the fall of the Ottoman Empire, for most of history they’ve been one of the major cultural, financial, and generally civilizational hubs of the Eastern Hemisphere. Discounting them is like discounting China or India.

    A common claim is that they’ve been at war with each other for thousands of years. This is really funny coming from Europeans and their descendants, considering we were the savage backwater hell bent on killing the shit out of every neighbor we saw and also them for the entire middle ages, meanwhile they spent the period with some armed conflict against each other, but far more focused on peaceful trading.






  • So voting puts you in the wrong mindset. Think of it more as consensus decision making of a group of bishops who have the special honor of being the ones who get to vote on this (that’s the only official difference between a regular bishop and a cardinal), but with everyone secluded to prevent campaigning or discussing their votes.

    Theologically this is supposed to ensure that everyone ignores politics and spends the days praying to try to figure out who their god wants.

    Practically this does what good consensus aims to do and generally gets someone everyone can live with. Francis was generally seen as pretty radical, but everyone seemed to understand that Benedict had gone very poorly and that the church needed increased modernization and appeals to the international community. The fear last year was that a far right cardinal would be chosen to try to halt the rising schism in the church, but instead Leo was chosen as someone who had been in Francis’s camp but was seen as more moderate.

    And yeah, because of the isolation at conclave they’re supposed to be incapable of campaigning. In reality, as the pope gets older and sicker you start seeing increased campaigning from cardinals and by the time the pope dies it’s known who the main candidates are. Upsets can still happen, especially if the main candidates are all unacceptable to another faction, but we knew Leo was a possibility when Francis died.






  • Everyone is saying no, I want to explain why.

    Black holes are a gravitational phenomenon. Basically too much mass in too small of an area distorts spacetime so heavily it prevents even light from escaping, though it does emit hawking radiation.

    Antimatter is on the other hand a concept relating to a different fundamental force: electroweak interaction. Antimatter can be summed up as matter with the opposite charge. In an anti carbon 6 you’ll find six anti protons (negatively charged particles the same size as protons and made of antiquarks), six anti neutrons (neutrons made of antiquarks), and orbiting around it will be six positrons (basically electrons but positive). It will have the exact same mass as a regular C^6.

    Antimatter is relatively common these days, being produced in most major hospitals to be used as part of PET scans. It can be weaponized in theory, but volatility and volume to cost and transportability say it’s unlikely to ever actually be used that way. This is risking an explosion of less force than a toddler’s punch. And even an antimatter bomb big enough to send the earth to simultaneously collide with mars and Venus wouldn’t open a black hole in it’s explosion because explosions are in a force body sense, the opposite of a black hole. These things can feel mysterious and magical, but like everything else they’re just physical manifestations of the math and physics our universe operates under