currently reading - Book of the New Sun: Sword of the Lyctor


Monster” is derived from the Latin noun monstrum, “divine portent,” itself formed on the root of the verb monere, “to warn.” It came to refer to living things of anomalous shape or structure, or to fabulous creatures like the sphinx who were composed of strikingly incongruous parts, because the ancients considered the appearance of such beings to be a sign of some impending supernatural event. Monsters, like angels, functioned as messengers and heralds of the extraordinary. They served to announce impending revelation, saying, in effect, “Pay attention; something of profound importance is happening.”
-Susan Stryker


frog-industrial-concern
@frog-industrial-concern

physicists can't keep getting away with this


frog-industrial-concern
@frog-industrial-concern

for the sake of context, these are derivatives of position. each next-higher derivative is the rate in change of the previous one, which is itself the rate in change of the previous one, etc.

velocity, the rate of change in position, is universally familiar to all living creatures.

acceleration, the rate of change in velocity, is regularly used in everyday life, and measured directly by the body (in fact more accurately than velocity, which relies on hacks like parallax when acceleration is low).

jerk, the rate of change in acceleration, is used occasionally in space engineering and other areas of extremely demanding motion tolerance. it is, maybe, if you think about it very hard, generalizable to human life.

snap, the rate of change in jerk, is so rarely used that its occasional presence in robotics specs is something of a joke.

the other ones have never, to my knowledge, had a practical use.

but if you need to define the rate at which something's rate of rate of rate of acceleration changes, pop has you covered


ellivanelli
@ellivanelli

I feel like jerk comes up irl where you're like breaking in a car and if you don't let up on the break a bit as you come to a stop & you get that jolty feeling as your acceleration quickly changes from negative whatever m/s2 to 0 m/s2


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