The Official Random Video Thread!

I have some pretty strong opinions about that movie...

The actual Wolf of Wall Street, based off of Jordan Belfort, is a guy who has always been a pretty greasy, grimy scammer who is currently using his newly found fame from the movie (now that he's out of prison) to speak at events, promoting really shady financial opportunities, which have no proven success, and touting them as legitimate ways for making quick and easy profits so that he can collect huge speaking fees; with many of these "opportunities" looking a lot like pyramid, Ponzi or pump and dump schemes. He basically gets paid to promote the financial product and usually never even uses it himself.

As one might expect with a Hollywood movie, the actual story of Jordan Belfort isn't particularly exciting or interesting beyond how clever and unique (at the time) many of his fraudulent methods were. Now, I don't know about you, but the last person I would want to take financial advice from is an ex-con who defrauded investors out of over $200 million dollars by hyping up stocks/securities (while holding his own large positions) and then, once the price appeared to be peaking, he would sell everything, sending the price plummeting, followed by panic selling, driving the price down even further, resulting in immense losses for everyone who he conned into buying it. Let's also not forget all of the money laundering.

He also ended up pleading guilty and snitched on everyone who trusted him for an extremely light sentence of four years in Club Fed. At one of his speaking events not too long ago, since gaining his freedom, he tried hyping up the crowd by doing that same guttural humming schtick (that was shown in the video you shared) while banging on his chest. It was pretty cringeworthy.

Don't get me wrong, I loved the movie Wolf of Wall Street, but it glorifies a man who defrauded people out of -- in many cases -- their entire life savings, betrayed people's trust, manipulated markets, it gave him a reputation as being someone we should actually care about/someone who was a masterful trader (both completely untrue), and he is someone who should never have been allowed to participate in the world of finance again. It's the story of a terrible person who got rewarded by being paid huge sums of money so that their story could be turned into a movie, and having it retold in a way which is so far removed from what actually happened that now this asshole is a celebrity with respect from anyone who doesn't realize how the movie glorified him to the most extreme extent possible.
I started watching that movie and turned it off after 10 minutes. It seemed to glorify some of the worst character traits. Just a turn off.
 
If you have any interest in this, the links in the description are worth clicking also.



Visualization: A Black Hole Accretion Disk
Visualization Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Jeremy Schnittman
Explanation: What would it look like to circle a black hole?If the black hole was surrounded by a swirling disk of glowing and accreting gas, then the great gravity of the black hole would deflect light emitted by the disk to make it look very unusual.The featured animated video gives a visualization.The video starts with you, the observer, looking toward the black hole from just above the plane of the accretion disk. Surrounding the central black hole is a thin circular image of the orbiting disk that marks the position of the photon sphere -- inside of which lies the black hole's event horizon. Toward the left, parts of the large main image of the disk appear brighter as they move toward you.As the video continues, you loop over the black hole, soon looking down from the top, then passing through the disk plane on the far side, then returning to your original vantage point.The accretion disk does some interesting image inversions -- but never appears flat.Visualizations such as this are particularly relevant today as black holes are being imaged in unprecedented detail by the Event Horizon Telescope.



Singularity Impressive: It's Black Hole Week at NASA!
Tomorrow's picture: famous black hole
 
@lxskllr Yes I'm very interested in stuff like that but......should I click on it?? Virtually every single article I read re black holes, quantum topics, physics etc etc is able to teach me nothing, it's all way too technical and not explained for a true layperson. Maybe its just me but yeah nah.
 
That's the big problem with physics, its trying to explain the rules of the physical world around us, which unfortunately is proven with a bunch of increasingly complicated math. And how it works is completely insane btw because it usually doesn't follow what you would logically think would happen, but rather what they've proven experimentally and mathematically, the smartest minds for centuries working on the same basic problems like "how does gravity work?" Basically what happens is that our understanding of gravity on the large scale isn't the same as what happens on a tiny scale, and stuff really gets weird when you go really fast. If you were to go really fast time literally slows down relative to where you came from, so you can actually travel to a future time by simply being on a really fast spaceship. You wouldn't think time changed from your perspective, your clocks would have been working normally the whole time, but when you came back time on earth would have passed much faster so you would literally be in the future. They actually did that as an experiment to prove it, and have to account for that difference with our satellites and gps systems.

That's what Einsteins theory of relativity is, which Oppenheimer used to prove black holes exist by doing.... math, decades before they were discovered in 2016, 100 years after Einsteins published his theory. By using calculus to do all of this (which Newton invented to explain how gravity works in the first place, talk about smart) time is expressed as the "forth dimension," the other 3 being up/ down, left/ right, and forwards/backwards, aka where you are in space, aka 3 dimensional space. By using 4 dimensions (what they call spacetime) you can pinpoint where something is and what time it was there. Newton came up with some equations that work really well for gravity as we see it, but they don't work for everything so they're wrong, close and useful for calculations but not fully correct. That's what Einstein tried to fix, it's still wrong but it describes almost everything until it gets really small (and even more complicated and super wierd). Einsteins theory basically says that by moving really fast you actually bend (when the math is graphed out) where you are in space and time, because if it didn't bend it you would be creating or destroying matter, which you can't do. A bunch of math (differential equations to be specific, which btw frig that shit lol) with these limitations in mind gets distilled down to the famous E=mc^2 which accounts for all this beautifully, and even explains chemical reactions and the like, but it's still wrong because it doesn't work out on the atomic scale, but it's dead on for anything bigger.

Black holes are basically so massive and dense that light can't even escape the gravity of it, and they think all galaxies have at least 1 in the center of them. As you go in one (pulled by their gravity) you would be pulled apart, but if you could survive the visuals of what you see is because the gravity is doing wierd things to the light around you, basically accelerating everything in freefall until you hit the speed of light and disappear into the unknown. We're just now getting to some of the experiments and observations of black holes, so it's quite likely that our understanding of them will take another huge leap forward soon, and so will our understanding of the world around us. Einsteins theories and the experiments that proved them brought us into the atomic age and all the modern advancements in the last 100 years, and finally solving this problem will likely push us forward an even greater amount.

But I'll agree it's escalating in complexity, i did have quantum physics in college and i have no clue about some of the discoveries they're making today, simply past my ability to understand at the moment. Most notably:

 
I actually capiche the stuff in your post, and your link was more or less undertandable, thanks for posting.

I searched unsuccessfully for the recent article I read to support my case but couldn't find it, maybe better luck later
 
@lxskllr Yes I'm very interested in stuff like that but......should I click on it?? Virtually every single article I read re black holes, quantum topics, physics etc etc is able to teach me nothing, it's all way too technical and not explained for a true layperson. Maybe its just me but yeah nah.
They could do a lot better job of explaining that stuff to laypeople, so it's not just you. It seems to me like their presentations leave you with a lot of questions because they don't know, or they want to try to blow your mind so they feel smarter, or they just suck at presenting things in a way laypeople can understand.
 
I'm paraphrasing, but someone somewhere once said something along the lines of, "If you claim to understand quantum physics, then you don't understand quantum physics."
Now that makes sense
 
Some things are hard and require a minimum level of knowledge. If they get simplified any more, it's just wrong, and it's better to say nothing at all.
That's the problem, they over simplify such that they give you a false idea of what is going on. And then they throw in some jargon or math without explanation, so it sounds like they are simplifying it while keeping it too complex to understand. If they would explain the concepts represented by the math and how they arrived to understand certain particles or properties of Physics, that would go a long way. Quite often things can have a double meaning that is left undifferentiated or undefined, which just adds to the confusion. Like when they talk about seeing or observing something. Do they mean what is really happening to the object in question, or do they mean what appears to be happening based on the photons travelling from the object to the sensor (or your eyes)? I've heard about the confusing double slit light experiment, and they say light does one thing when observed, and another when not observed. What they didn't tell you is that they fired a particle or something at the light photon to see what it was doing. Of course it will act different when interfered with, no mystery there.
 
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