xkcd

ijuin

What would the psychological reaction for a generation (or two) be when raised in a world with a solid belief that instant death can happen with little to no warning at any time, erasing life as we know it on the planet after a furious exchange of nuclear weaponry? We have mostly achieved “fear fat...

ijuin

The long-term problen is that making the children fearful may lead to some of them being in a state of perpetual fear where they lose the ability to function or start distrusting adults in general, or conversely that they get “fear fatigue” and simply shut down their fear response entirely in all si...

ijuin

Having flown across the Atlantic many times, I can agree that it is big. Very big. Jet airliners are very fast and it still takes them hours to get across. I don't know about the Pacific, though. I have seen the Pacific from California but I've never flown across. Everyone says it's much bigger tha...

ijuin

However, the creation of such fear and paranoia did serve to advance the agenda of Cold War profiteers. . .

ijuin

At the largest scale, the main distinction between corporations and organized crime is that government hasn’t banned the things that the corporations are doing.

ijuin

If they don’t want people gawking into their apartments, then I hear that there’s this marvelous invention called “curtains” that they could use.

ijuin

What the whole thing resembles to me is a Musk-style HyperLoop system, but with the tube being transparent rather than opaque. Aluminum oxide crystal would be a more than adequate material.

ijuin

What is this Gillick standard? It appears to be British legal terminology that is not shared by other legal systems. Anyway, in the USA, unemancipated minors generally have no right to defy the will of their legal guardian(s) unless said guardians are engaging in legally defined abuse of said minor....

ijuin

Also there's a big difference between boycotting companies from a country due to its foreign policies, and discriminating against people from that country. The government is not one and the same as the people. It is perfectly possible to oppose a government without holding malice toward its citizen...

ijuin

Sharks don’t breathe air anyway. They breathe water. There is no liquid water in space.

ijuin

you're less likely to die from a space launch than from a shark attack. Cause, y'know, everything else about space travel aside from the launch is perfectly simple and safe. 100% of spaceflight deaths to date have happened either during the launch phase or the entry/landing phase. Nobody has yet di...

ijuin

Perhaps more pertinent than giving your information to hostile foreign governments: also giving your information to a hostile domestic government, which tends to be in a stronger position to exploit it. That’s ridiculous—we ALL know that domestic governments are never hostile, right? *looks around ...

ijuin

No, the MOST disturbing part is that building and operating such a plant is expected to generate a profit. Just who is buying thousands of tons of dioxin per year? Is President Nixon perhaps planning to finally win the Vietnam War by spraying it onto the Viet Cong’s croplands?

ijuin

AFAIK it will generate lift, but not enough to overcome Earth’s gravity if it has to lift its own power source. If the area of the geomagnetic field convergence layer is large, use it to increase the geomagnetic field by 100-1000 times, if the coil uses a superconductor material and a larger curr...

ijuin

AFAIK it will generate lift, but not enough to overcome Earth’s gravity if it has to lift its own power source.

ijuin

The most effective means of speeding boarding would be simply to have multiple boarding points instead of having everyone boarding through a single hatch. Having passengers board through the rear hatches as well as the front would nearly double boarding rates, though it would require a dual gangway.

ijuin

Ok, most cells only keep enough ATP (the molecule used for on-the-spot energy delivery within cells) on hand to last for ten seconds at most. This can be supplemented by creatine phosphate stores, but that too will run out after another ten to thirty seconds. After that, cells turn to anaerobic ferm...

ijuin

Whether they get life or death, my first concern is that they never walk free again.

ijuin

The problem with methods of internalizing those external costs (e.g. via tradable carbon credits) is that the people who don’t want to pay for it (largely because they would need to buy the largest amount of them) have sufficient power to block the enforcement of such a system to begin with.

ijuin

Vote for BHG!

ijuin

In that case, we need some statistics (preferably from a source that is not directly connected to tge lobbies for either side of the argument) measuring the approximate fraction of incidents in which an armed defender results in escalation vs. de-escalation.

ijuin

The other underlying assumption is that when something extremely urgent comes along (e.g. Pearl Harbor attack), the parties put aside their differences for the moment in order to act in the combined interest of all. It is this part which has broken down over the last three or four Presidential Admin...

ijuin

If air pressure is adequate above the ice, then high-efficiency aircraft would be workable—either nuclear powered stratospheric jets or zeppelins could make the flight within days (supersonic) to weeks (zeppelin). If, however, the conditions are near-vacuum, then building a maglev rail line across t...

ijuin

I slept on a $100 futon for five years and was fine with it. That’s a Japanese style futon, mind you, meaning that it was the floor pads and covers without the frame that “American” style futons have.

ijuin

JohnTheWysard wrote:I think an awl would be a very impressive weapon, since of course Thor would have the Cosmic Awl.

No, Odin has the awl. That’s why they call him the Awl-Father.

ijuin

CorruptUser wrote:I dont know, I'd prefer to use Trump's head to smash into nails repeatedly...

We’d never get the bloodstains out afterward.

ijuin

It is worth mentioning that it is impossible to launch directly from a planetary (or other) surface into an orbit around that body that has a LOWER inclination than the latitude of the launch site. Essentially, the highest-latitude point of the orbit can not be less then the latitude of the launch s...

ijuin

IIRC, the distinction between burglary and robbery is that in robbery, the offender confronts the victim and uses intimidation pr violence to get them to hand over the goods, whereas burglary involves an attempt to abscond with the goods before the victims even know that a theft has occurred.

ijuin

You guys do remember that Congress can overrule a Presidential veto, right? If Trump remains intransigent, then a sufficient number of Republicans must vote in favor of passing the funding bill to make a two-thirds majority. Goven that the content of the bill is literally the same as one that they h...

ijuin

Also, given Luna’s slow rotation rate, the primary reason for an equatorial launch/landing site (free discount on delta-v needed to land or launch) is not a significant factor.

ijuin

Honor is nice, but the landlord won’t accept it as payment on the lease.

ijuin

Given that only six states seem to have elected Sheriffs, it may be the that some people in those states spend most of the time being unaware that the office of Sheriff is an elected one rather than an appointed one, and find themselves mildly surprised when they see it on their sample ballots becau...

ijuin

They will probably need to include a clause about it in the bill that provides for their back pay.

ijuin

I would say that the root cause is a culture of conflict resolution that views the total eradication of opponents as the preferred method rather than persuasion or reconciliation.

ijuin

Kids are about one hundred times more likely to be killed by traffic accidents than by shootings, but nobody is making a ruckus about the need to save child pedestrians from dangerous motorists.

ijuin

Pfhorrest wrote:Is that not an ocelot?

Impossible. He doesn’t have a revolver.

ijuin

No, but proponents of arming teachers would argue that the three day course is better than simply giving the teachers the weapons with no training at all.

ijuin

Nah, they just really hate having to pay the bills for somebody else. Whether that somebody else is wealthy or poor is secondary.

ijuin

C-137? I thought that we were Earth-1218?

ijuin

Given the slowness of transatlantic communications at the time, it was September before anybody in Britain knew about what happened in the American colonies on 4 July 1776.

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