The diffraction effects from a pinhole camera are not what make them work.

I didn't say this, you did. You're chasing your own tail.

Is this wit or a genuine request that one of us explainsthejoke.com?

The ratio of the size of the image to the distance from the pinhole is the same as the ratio of the size of the sun to the distance to the sun.

A pinhole camera has no lens. The effect here is like a pinhole camera, but a pinhole camera is nothing at all like a lens. Pinholes diffract light. Lens refract light.

EDIT: Of course you can't resolve an image through diffraction. That's not how pinholes cameras work. Diffraction negatively impacts image resolution, but it absolutely happens when light passes through them. But, although lens do use refraction to resolve an image, that same process also has unintended negative effects on image resolution (spherical aberration, chromatic aberration, etc.). I didn't bring up any of that because it was ultimately a distraction from the important part: narrow gaps diffract light, lens refract light, and pinhole cameras do not work like lens.

I think our brains are pretty good at ignoring or abstracting/simplifying things we see that we don't understand, almost too good. That's just magic, optical illusion, or hallucination. Getting high is like chemical circuit bending. I feel staring into the void alone won't be enough drive one mad, it's when the void stares back and forces awareness, or knowing, that one has to worry. The non-euclidian architecture of R'leyh is just unsettling, but the stare of a multidimensional being can't help but bend your circuits beyond their limits.

There was that one short story though about FTL travel, wherein the conscious passengers must be asleep for the journey through hyperspace (or whatever that story called it). Some people stated awake through the trip and came out the other side mad. The hyperspace itself wasn't enough to break their brains though, it was just that an instantaneous trip from the sleepers' perspective, became an infinitely long (in time) trip from the waking conscious perspective. At that point, what they saw didn't really matter, it was a forced perception or awareness without the solice of "not knowing" that broke their brains.

None of this is science, just rambling nonsense.

Can this keep num lock engaged? I swear my biggest frustration with windows lately is it's habit of randomly and arbitrarily turning off numlock after I've turned it on. I never turn off numlock while working. I never use the number pad arrows. I prefer the number pad numbers and use them practically all day. And yet, several times a day I find my cursor moving around the screen instead of typing a number because windows decided that it got to control the numlock function instead of me and the dedicated light up key designed for that function that has worked fine for me for decades before.

They may have used the word wrong, but getting parodied by Weird Al is actually more prestigious than winning a Grammy. Not because Weird Al parodies are rare, but because he only parodies songs that are actually pretty good. I have trouble believing that if the song were actually bad, playing it on accordion with jokey lyrics would be an improvement. There's no Weird Al parody of a Nickelback song, that I know of.

Give em The Harkness Test

I don't ask people about their politics. I just act like true things are true, e.g.: human instigated climate change, COVID, the efficiency of a single payer healthcare system, a oblate spheroid earth, and the moon landing. I'm politely understanding of the flaws in their world view, but I NEVER pretend that any of it is even up for debate. You can balance not being rude with not backing down from the objective reality you live in by showing an genuine fascination with their weird cult beliefs.

Conspiracy theories, religion, myths, and magic are all very comfortable fantasies that wither in the face of the existential dread from understanding that the universe is horrific and absolutely indifferent to your personal suffering. Being excellent to each other and maintaining faith in the potential of humanity (tempered by knowledge of our depravity) is our only hope of survival both physical, philosophical, political, and spiritual.

Ok, sorry that turned into a rant. This shit matters though, so not that sorry.

"Sensors" sounds like a magical solution that hasn't been thought through, but the marketing guys already sold it and won't listen to the engineers explaining how difficult it is to actually build such a thing.

Similarly, there are a lot of really lazy bad maps out there that are trying to make some point about a statistic, but are really just population density maps. Give your up votes to the person that links the appropriate xkcd.

If I was about to go on tour with my best friend and he said something stupid that put us in danger from real life lunatics with guns, I'd fucking cancel the tour too because I cared about us both and our relationship. Besides, if you can't tell your friends they're wrong when they're wrong, they're not really your friend. This isn't necessarily the act of betrayal you're making it out to be.

I'm betting that making this statement publicly makes it easier to break the tour contracts, rather than backing out of the tour without saying why.