xkcd

ijuin

Space officially begins 100 km above mean sea level above every location on Earth, so it is indeed closer than just about any place that is more than two or three hours’ drive away.

ijuin

I have encountered enough people using “literally” as hyperbole that, when I want to ensure that people understand that I am NOT intending hyperbole, I use “actually” instead.

ijuin

I am not familiar with “fountain”—can you provide a reference for us?

ijuin

That speaks only of your ability to communicate the idea, not your ability to think of it.

ijuin

Even more nasty is Dioxygen Difluoride, also known by its molecular structure as “FOOF”. Not only does it react with nearly everything, but it is HIGHLY unstable on its own and must be kept at just above its melting point (110K) or else it will explode by itself.

ijuin

I call that one “Digital Dominance Syndrome”—it’s seen a LOT in post-millennials who seem to believe that all worthwhile solutions are digital in nature and any analogue or hardware/physical solutions are inscrutable.

ijuin

In that case, the jet is a Shkadov thruster, forming a major component of the sphere’s propulsion. As far as thermal camouflage goes, anybody advanced enough to be a threat to a Kardashev type 2.0 or higher civilization would be able to detect and track Dyson Spheres by their gravitation rather than...

ijuin

The mass of air superheated by the release of energy will vastly dwarf the mass of any functional nuclear bomb. At sea level, each cubic meter of air affected equals about a kilogram and a half, so six thousand cubic meters or so (i.e. a sphere about ten meters in radius) will outmass any but the la...

ijuin

A nuclear-driven explosion would produce a large number of high-speed neutrons and protons that would collide with the nuclei of the surrounding air/whatever and cause secondary radioactivity. The matter-conversion explosion, by contrast, would have only high-energy photons.

ijuin

That's fine for catching the ball, but how about the pitcher? The pitcher does have to do all of his determination of where the ball will go before it is airborne, so to throw any pitch which he hasn't already practiced under the exact same distance snd weather conditions does require advance predic...

ijuin

The problem, as I understand it, is that maintaining a toroidal shape would require a net outward force that is greater closer to the center than it is farther away. Unfortunately, rotation and gravity do not work that way. The only force that I can imagine holding a stellar mass in such a shape is ...

ijuin

As I said, we don't understand them numerically, but we do have the ability to gauge where a projectile will go, which means that the necessary understanding of acceleration and drag is happening on a subconscious level. Aristotle was not able to explain curved projectile motion in terms of laws and...

ijuin

Newtonian physics is more intuitive to us both because of the simpler equations and because there is survival value in it even with very low technology. What benefit does a caveman get from understanding subatomic particles? On the other hand, being able to predict where a thrown spear will strike? ...

ijuin

If the first generation of these SkySails can save 4% of fuel requirements, then it is quite possible that future bigger and better designs could save 10-20%, which would start to put a dent in overall cargo shipping fuel costs.

ijuin

Since when are hard drives EVER hot-swappable? I was trained that one ALWAYS does a controlled shutdown and power-off before swapping, or else the new drive will be damaged. To expand on what others have said: your training was correct - for older consumer-grade disks - specifically, MFM and ATA (a...

ijuin

Eebster the Great wrote:That's an awfully big turbine for such a small catamaran.

Not really. It looks like the area swept by the turbine blades would be comparable to the combined area of the conventional sails that such a boat would use.

ijuin

Quality of life is improving in absolute terms (wealth, health, safety from violence), but we have a subjectively reduced sense of well-being because a large number of factions (Politicians, Religion, Industry/Finance, etc.) have a vested interest in making you afraid, so that you will buy into thei...

ijuin

Since people are mostly water, and water is mostly incompressible, I'm not sure what would happen when you try to compress water by a factor of 4000. Would degenerate matter form? I think at lower pressures some exotic forms of ice would appear, but I don't think any of those ice types are 4000 tim...

ijuin

LOL! For anything that has only minor blistering or less, just bandage it and keep it clean until it heals, and it will be fine. Antibiotic, antiseptic, or anaglesic creams may be used if you wish. A quick guide: 1st degree burn: Damages only the epidermal layers. Pain and redness but little to no b...

ijuin

ijuin, the server is never pulled from the rack. If the server is running a mirrored RAID configuration, then it never even leaves service. Otherwise the tech has to rebuild the RAID, and then remirror the contents from another server. Servers these days are also smarter, and can self-diagnose and ...

ijuin

Eebster the Great wrote:
ijuin wrote:Luna.

The Moon?

Yes, that Luna.

ijuin

Little bit of a correction for you here As seems usual for this aspect of the denialist position, you seem to have missed the fact that (maybe-)humans being able to survive in a warmer Earth is not remotely the same thing as modern civilization being able to continue uninterrupted through a return ...

ijuin

Oh, and the cost ratio between parts and human work is slightly different for light bulbs and servers. Slightly. Yeah. The technician who can diagnose and replace parts in a server is considerably more expensive. If it takes one man-hour to replace a hard drive, counting from the moment the server ...

ijuin

Brought peace?

ijuin

The problem is that cancer doesn't have a single cause or even a keystone mechanism by which it occurs (e.g. a set of genetic mutations common to all cancers). Cancer can be caused by literally anything that breaks a cell's regulating mechanisms which normally prevent it from dividing out of control...

ijuin

The now-airless glass Earth would receive the same kind of punishment from meteoroids that any airless body would, such as Luna.

ijuin

The wavelength limitation also increases the Eagle's advantage over mammals, since most large predatory birds can see into the UVA band.

ijuin

Since the amount of heat escaping from the Earth's interior (aside from volcanic eruptions) is about 47 terawatts, that corresponds to about half a gram of mass-energy per second.

ijuin

The knee jerk response is often that Evil Oil Companies are preventing it from happening; that they want desperately to prevent anything from replacing oil and other fossil fuels. But that's silly. The reality is, oil companies and energy companies in general are some of the biggest spenders on ren...

ijuin

Glass is not entirely inelastic--optical fibers can bend quite readily without breaking. The thermal expansion and contraction from the day/night cycle and season cycles should be low enough, especially given their relative slowness (it's the extremely rapid cooling that shatters glass when you put ...

ijuin

I think that the gag is supposed to be that Reductionism goes too far in assuming that things are merely the sums of their constituent parts, with no added meaning or function resulting from the way in which they are combined. Here, the "break it into its smallest components" notion is bei...

ijuin

I'd also like to see "block ads over X megabytes in size". The ones that I find the most annoying are the video ads, which not only have audio which drowns out whatever I was listening to, but also hogs my download bandwidth, greatly slowing down the content that I had come to see, sometim...

ijuin

All right, let's assume that we are using some form of silicate-based glass--the relevant physical properties for our scenario don't vary a lot between the common varieties of silicate glass. You can see a table of these properties at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_physical_properties_of_glas...

ijuin

What chemical composition of glass are you speaking of? Soda-lime glass? Aluminosilicate glass? Fused quartz?

ijuin

If you're dealing with the kind of gravity seen on a neutron star, then you are certainly going to need to use the General Relativity equations for gravity, space, and time. Thanks to the intense gravity at the surface of a neutron star, both time and space are going to be compressed by a gamma fact...

ijuin

If it crashed into Earth after falling most of the way down Earth's gravity well, then it would be like the original moon-creating giant impact all over again.

ijuin

You want to give NASA the finger?

ijuin

What bothers me the most is the use of my computing resources, especially the download time and data usage. Let's say that a given set of video ads takes ten megabytes, and my phone plan charges me ten dollars per gigabyte. The ad has thus cost me ten cents that I did NOT intend to spend. Effectivel...

ijuin

No, but there are currently quite a few people still alive who, in their youth, knew people who were born 160-180 years ago. So unless Grandpa is lying about HIS grandpa, we have at least secondhand witnesses.

ijuin

There's more than one hollow Earth theory. One I like: the Earth is hollow; we live on the inside; the stars we see at night are actually the lights of cities on the other side of the Earth. :shock: The "stars are city lights" hypothesis doesn't really explain why the stars haven't change...

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