2882: Net Rotations

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Net Rotations

Title text: For decades I've been working off the accumulated rotation from one long afternoon on a merry-go-round when I was eight.

Explanation

This explanation may be incomplete or incorrect: Created by a DIZZY ROBOT - Please change this comment when editing this page. Do NOT delete this tag too soon. If you can address this issue, please edit the page! Thanks.

This comic may refer to a thing that some people with OCD do, which is to spin around to get rid of "net rotations," hence the title of this comic. Cueball (perhaps representing Randall?) takes this one step beyond the typical person with OCD - he calculates the net rotations each day and spins around at the end of the day to cancel this out.

The caption at the bottom of the comic suggests that it is another one of and says that it is healthy and necessary/highly recommended to do this. However, most people don’t ^{[citation needed]}, and most people are still ok ^{[citation needed]}l

Transcript

This transcript is incomplete. Please help editing it! Thanks.

[Cueball is standing on one leg in front of a whiteboard with his arms crossed, thinking to himself. There are circular curves around Cueball indicating rotary motion. The whiteboard contains two vertical helix-like curves crossing over each other at multiple points and other notes shown as rows of illegible scribbles, the bottom one of which is circled. There is a thought bubble over Cueball.]

Cueball (thinking): ...and three lefts for going down the stairwell at work, two rights from cloverleaf interchanges, minus one for the Earth's rotation...

Cueball (thinking): Okay, that's a net of 17 right.

[Caption below the comic:]

Spacetime health tip: Remember to cancel out your accumulated turns at the end of each day to avoid worldline torsion.

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Discussion

Wait, so I'm not the only one who thinks about this? 172.71.167.177 23:28, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

No, I also do it, just I do it right after I do the turns so I don't have to remember them all. B for brain (talk) (youtube channel wobsite (supposed to be a blag) 17:24, 19 January 2024 (UTC)

I used to do something similar in the schoolyard. 172.71.131.75 07:23, 25 January 2024 (UTC)

Second! Still, I'm surprised that there are no edits yet. 172.70.210.160 23:58, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

This sounds like the premise of the 1966 sci-fi story The Revolving Boy by Gertrude Friedberg. I recall reading it sometime in the 1960s or ’70s. I wonder whether Randall has read the book too — https://solarbridge.wordpress.com/2011/05/19/the-revolving-boy-gertrude-friedberg/ I'm drawing a blank. 162.158.158.68 01:05, 18 January 2024 (UTC) I had precisely the same thought! But I couldn't remember the title of the book - thanks! (172.70.90.191) Likewise; I read it long ago and would have had to do some net searching to uncover the name. 172.69.189.166 17:48, 20 January 2024 (UTC)

I feel like the "worldline torsion" line needs to be explained moreso than the OCD thing, since "worldline" is a word people might not know and it's the crux of the joke. 162.158.62.50 02:47, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

A worldline is a relativistic concept, the track of a particle (or anything, by extension) through 4D spacetime. Randall is imagining it as a physical object (not a mathematical abstraction) and thus whenever the actual object rotates, its worldline is twisted. Presumably these physical worldlines would build up torsional potential energy as they twisted, and could eventually be damaged if too many twists/year were present.Nitpicking (talk) 02:57, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

Yeah - something like that needs to go in the explanation.172.70.85.47 09:44, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

I would love to know what my net rotations is. Not enough to actually keep track, mind you. 172.70.178.126 02:53, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

I had a season pass to an amusement park a few years ago, and the time I spent on the Scrambler would probably make mine quite difficult to calculate, even if I knew how many times I rode it. 172.69.247.57 04:41, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

Probably depends a lot on whether you suffer from Zoolander's Syndrome. 172.70.91.62 09:48, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

isn't this a refernce to spacetime torsion and the einstien-cartan theory? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein%E2%80%93Cartan_theory

When I used to do plasma donations (they draw blood, centrifuge it, extract the plasma/platelet fraction and return the red and white cells) I would, when telling someone about it, jokingly say that the only side effect was, then I would jump and spin. RIIW - Ponder it (talk) 08:17, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

This comic makes sense in 2D because the space of rotations has fundamental group ℤ, but in 3D wouldn't you have at most ℤ/2ℤ corrections to make, since SU(2) double-covers SO(3)? cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plate_trick Ncf (talk) 09:27, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

Considering the plane in which you are doing your rotation changes during the day due to Earth rotation, I think that it doesn't make sense in 3D at all. But thanks for link. -- Hkmaly (talk) 21:00, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

Is it worth mentioning the real medical conditions of torsion, e. . a torsion fracture (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torsion_fracture)? Nitpicking (talk) 12:43, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

I immediately thought of medical conditions, too, in my case a torsion of the spine https://www.osmosis.org/answers/sacral-torsion . But the exercises that are supposed to alleviate back pain & torsions caused by one-sided movements (like always twisting/bending left when carrying a load, and twisting/bending right without a load) usually don't involve full rotations. Transgalactic (talk) 00:30, 19 January 2024 (UTC)

Remember that, to do it properly, any turns made in your car also have to be reversed in your car, to account for the rotation of the car's atoms. Go do a full loop through a counterclockwise cloverleaf! (Finding one is left as an exercise to the reader.) 108.162.238.82 13:05, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

Don't think it’s worth adding to the article but thought I would mention it here, anyone who has experience spending a long time in a VR headset will almost certainly have had to do this at some point to untwist the tether. To the point that there are apps you can run that show you how much your rotation has changed from the set 0 orientation. TomW1605 (talk) 13:13, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

Actually I think it's worth mentioning that the line to your virtual world (not quite a worldline, but close enough to make a pun?) will indeed suffer torsions unless you cancel out your net rotations. :-D Transgalactic (talk) 00:30, 19 January 2024 (UTC)

The CPSC recommends merry-go-rounds be limited to 13 ft/sec. https://www.sportsplayinc.com/images/cpsc.pdf For a 10 ft radius, that would be one rotation every 4.8 sec. Over "one long afternoon" (which I'll take as 6 hours) that would amount to 4,469 rotations. If you compensated for this with a mere one rotation per day, the excess rotation would be completely offset in 12 years and 3 months, so "decades" is quite an exageration. User:Loeb

If your merry-go-round had a 20 inch diameter, though (the minimum at which those recommendations apply), at one a day it would take you nearly 147 years.172.69.195.60 09:42, 19 January 2024 (UTC)

It makes me think a lot about 162: Angular Momentum 141.101.98.34 19:45, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

2883 is out, bot's down... someone, i guess^{(talk i guess|le edit list)} 03:05, 20 January 2024 (UTC)

It's always nice to unwind at the end of the day (sorry)172.69.214.5 14:12, 21 January 2024 (UTC)

I might be a little OCD, but not to the degree of this comic. When the internet began and I first started using a browser, I would make sure that I always used the back button to return to the home page because I didn't want to use up computer memory space by accumulating too many links on the "back button" stack. Rtanenbaum (talk) 17:42, 22 January 2024 (UTC)

Who removed the incomplete tag? It's still incomplete, the mouseover text is still unexplained.Danger Kitty (talk)

The answer to that. I must admit, I usually rereview it when our "tidy-uppers" (all honest fellows/fellowesses, I hesitate to add!) think they're right to tidy this aspect up, a number of times the removal of the Incomplete tag has actually gotten me to tweak things (not that it should happen like that), but I seem to have missed this instance, or not spotted any remaining incompleteness if I scanned its post-tag state..

I also think that the importance of the Incomplete tag is now less linked to the actual incomplete state (although obviously it still is, at first), and that it doesn't hurt to leave it up longer, but obviously opinions on that vary. Community opinion may be a bit blurred on this issue. 141.101.99.33 19:26, 2 February 2024 (UTC)

Actually, if you consider rotations along other axes (which you must on any day roll out of bed or get out of it weirdly), then its only coherent to speak of the PARITY of your total torsion, since SO(3) = Z/2Z. Unlike SO(2) which is Z. So good news guys, you only have to turn around at least once! Terdragontra (talk) 01:59, 2 July 2024 (UTC)

Shoot, I don't read close enough, someone already noticed! Terdragontra (talk) 02:01, 2 July 2024 (UTC)