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[–] 1 point 1 year ago

spent years reading/drawing schematics. simplified bridge rectifier circuit used everywhere. like your phone charger. magically keeps face glued to phone

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  • [–] 182 points 1 year ago (6 children)

    looks at schematic

    FULL BRIDGE RECTIFIAH!!

    eyebrow dance

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  • [–] 62 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    it gender transitions the AC to DC

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  • [–] 64 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    Lightning would be wild magic

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  • [–] 22 points 1 year ago* (3 children)

    Makes sense. Could be harnessed to do something probably but incredibly dangerous to do so.

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  • [–] 43 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (9 children)

    Squint at this (from this wiki page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_demons_in_the_Ars_Goetia) and these might be either ancient sigils or electronic symbols*.

    EDIT: Fixed a typo

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  • [–] 25 points 1 year ago (6 children)

    This one's a bit interestingly shaped...

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  • [–] 34 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    We always joked it was black magic but its literally on the name.

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  • [–] 32 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    It's chemicals that make signals jump between neurons in your head. Electricity acts entirely withing single neurons.

    Also, that's a control spell, not a summoning one.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 child)

    that's crazy to think about. which NT is responsible for sending a signal along my vagus nerve to my brain? what NTs regulate the functions of the sympathetic nervous system? how can transport as quickly as my body reacts? I need to know more!

    how quickly do NTs even travel? it feels like electricity because it's nearly instantaneous! how do they do that so fast???

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    it feels like electricity because it’s nearly instantaneous!

    It takes hundreds of ms for a signal to go from your brain to your foot. Electricity on wires travels several times around the world in that time.

    But for most of the distance the signals do travel as electricity. (At least the ones that get to be electricity, our brain has several kinds of signals.) It's just a particularly slow form of electricity.

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  • [–] 26 points 1 year ago* (2 children)

    Paraphrasing Arthur C. Clarke: Any technology is indistinguishable from magic, to the sufficiently ignorant.

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  • [–] 22 points 1 year ago

    You think a rectified transformer is a magic circle? Get a load of the Smith Chart

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  • [–] 22 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    That diagram is just heat with extra steps.

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  • [–] 60 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Said it before and I'll say it again: just because you understand the magic doesn't make it any less magical. A wizard may know the ins and outs of their spells, but they're still spells. Our entire universal is fucking magical, we just happen to have a decent understanding of why (some) of it functions the way it does. Jiggle a quark here and another may jiggle the same way somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse, that's fucking wild and magical and incredible, and just because we have some level of understanding behind the mechanics doesn't make it not magic. It just makes it a hard magic system.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Like the way you think Dharms

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  • [–] 20 points 1 year ago*
    [–] 20 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    That summoning circle is gonna need some filtering... Jus sayin...

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  • [–] 14 points 1 year ago

    Um akshually, that's a rectification circle.

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  • [–] 13 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    The mages of Electrical Engineering reseach the tools and formulars to control the magic. The mages of Hardware Engineering develop under great effort the sigils and rituals of how the rocks must be processed. The Warlocks of the CPU use the near infinit possibilities of algorithms and the power of the evolved rocks to create worlds nobody could ever have imagined (in exchange for the ability to go outside).

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  • [–] 12 points 1 year ago* (1 child)

    Yeah but it's too realistic, I want something convenient! Let me read one book and gain the power to create floating ice! Not read like 5 giant books and stufy for years so that I can create a microwave 😔

    No shade to microwaves, one of my favorite magic items

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  • [–] 12 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    For me, the weirdest thing is that when a charged particle moves through a magnetic field, it experiences a force perpendicular to the direction of motion; this results in the particle tracing out a curved path through the field. Like ... what the actual fuck? Why in hell would the universe be this way?

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (3 children)

    That's... huh...

    Hey!!! Physicists!!! Can we get your input???

    (Unless you're a physicist, in which case... fuck)

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    I mean, imagine if friction worked like this. You'd push a heavy object ... and it would move to the left (or maybe the right?) like it was on ice.

    FWIW I do have a Physics undergraduate degree. It doesn't help in this case.

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  • [–] 12 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    When we figure out how to manipulate elctro-weak at scale, it will be magic.

    Electro-mag is pretty crazy already, I agree. The ICP can't even figure out how they work.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (4 children)
  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    When the environment is energetic enough, the electromagnetic force and the weak force unify into the electroweak force. The weak interaction controls radioactive decay.

    We can control electromagnetic force "at scale", IMO. It's not freely, but we have networks of electromagnetic systems that span continents.

    If we could control the weak force at the same scale... I'm not sure what wonders we might unlock. At the very least, I imagine we could "clean" instead of just "contain" radioactive waste, at least low-level stuff.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago* (2 children)

    If we had control over the weak force:

    • We can likely turn elements into other elements at will
    • We can manufacture safe decay sources for a new class of nuclear energy
    • We can probably create safe "decay batteries" tuned to their specific use cases. Batteries that last for tens of thousands the lifespan of current chemical ones.
    • Potentially engineer with neutrinos. Imagine communication via neutrinos, you could transmit straight through the earth.

    I mean, with control over matter like that, at the scale of electricity, Star Trek matter replicators would be a thing.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago* (1 child)
  • [–] 20 points 1 year ago (7 children)

    We don’t know what the fuck consciousness is.

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  • [–] 33 points 1 year ago (6 children)

    In any case, it's powered with electricity.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (5 children)

    Is it even something that’s powered?

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    Yes, because if you take the power away it stops existing.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    But if you turn it back on the conscious doesn't return. Electricity is the energy conscious runs on, but it's not consciousness.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    The trouble is that even the consciousness maintenance needs power. If the power is out for too long the infrastructure is too damaged. So it actually does return when you turn it off. It just has to be done quickly enough.

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  • [–] 10 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    But the summoning circle doesn't do anything on its own, you have to build it and then go and find the electricity to plug into it yourself

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    [–] 10 points 1 year ago

    RF engineer here, living the life of magic in the air and space!

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    While I fully agree, I thought the distinction was unbreakable rules.

    The laws of physics can’t be broken, even, under any circumstances, everywhere, at any time.

    Whereas magic is more like there is an exception to every rule kind of deal. It’s far more like software, as in it’s mostly fully logically consistent except for random spots where devs took some shortcuts to make life easier.

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  • [–] 18 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    I think the “exception to every rule” part is really dependent on which type of magic the writer is using. Many writers do establish hard rules for their magic. In those cases, it’s less “magic is the exception” and more “magic is engrained into the laws of physics.”

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    I don't think magic is objective; I think it is in the eye of the beholder.

    If the audience don't understand it, or can be distracted from seeing the truth of it, it's magic or a miracle or whatever to them. And the magician - if they know what they're doing - can wield power over the rubes.

    So before you understand - say, magnetism - better, lodestones can be seen as magical or heaven-sent.

    There'll be physical phenomena today like 'spooky action at a distance' or something where even quite learned observers might not 100% know the laws of physics. Some exploit of that can appear as magical until the laws are figured out and well communicated.

    If it turns out that the underlying laws are stochastic rather than deterministic, then there's always going to be some grey areas i think.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Full bridge rectifier¿

    Thick eye brows intensifies!

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago

    I'd expand it to electromagnetic fields or something instead of just electricity.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago

    It's the motive force! Not some heretical warp magic.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago

    Well, there's actually a sourcebook for Arcane Engineering

    Small tiktok video from the author

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago

    the diagram is an AC to DC converter.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago*
    [–] 6 points 1 year ago

    I like to think of circuits as aquaducts for electricity. Electroducts if you will.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Hm, the stuff in wires is electrical current, but the stuff in nerves is static electricity based on an electrochemical gradient. Yeah i guess that all falls under the heading of electricity. No quibbles, carry on.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    Casually asserting physicalism as their first bullet point 🧐

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Let's go back to rocks and sigils...

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