xkcd

ijuin

I have a vague memory of asking my Mom if the runner-up (1960) in the election became the Veep, but am not sure about that one. According to Hamilton , that's how it used to work (although that "convention" was changed after two elections). Maybe it's an idea y'all should bring back? Give...

ijuin

My Google maps app is sufficiently accurate to portray what part of my house I am in—it is just BARELY unable to determine which room I am most likely in when I am in the room’s center.

ijuin

Your lunar cycle will also need to deal with the dreaded moon dust . It's much grittier than earth dust, since it hasn't been eroded by processes that polish off the pointy bits. It contains very fine particles, so it gets everywhere, and due to the lack of water it's chemically harsher than typica...

ijuin

Assume that it is a non-legal-tender coin.

ijuin

USB connectors other than type C are deliberately made asymmetrical in order to prevent this. Even if you could get the plug into the socket, the wires would be on the wrong face to connect. If you could connect a USB cable with the wires in reverse order, then the power leads would be where the dat...

ijuin

Tyres should also be silicone instead of rubber, since vulcanized rubber does not handle vacuum or temperature extremes sufficiently well for the lunar environment.

ijuin

And then you can reverse the other speaker for twice the improvement!

ijuin

Pretty much anything that uses a magnetic/electromagnetic field to move something or exert a mechanical force is going to pull/move in the opposite direction with reversed polarity. On the other hand, anything using electronic logic circuits is going to fail outright because most such circuits use d...

ijuin

Falcon Heavy only lifts 64 tonnes to LEO. A crewed lunar landing would require a full launch for the Artemis lander, one for the trans-lunar injection stage, plus a launch for the Orion or lunar-capable Crew Dragon with extra Service Module fuel.

ijuin

And for those here who don’t know who Grace is, suffice it to say that she is an intelligent, if naive girl who never got any formal education before high school, and thus had never heard about WWII (or any other major wars), or the horrors thereof, until her Junior year history class. The mere conc...

ijuin

Yes, likely in part because removing them alive seems non-viable.

ijuin

Yeah, in the US we have had only one sitting President resign, ever, and there is no such thing as a “vote of no confidence”—a President can only be impeached for malfeasance such as “high crimes and misdemeanors”. Otherwise, we are stuck with him until the end of his term. Even if a President does ...

ijuin

That’s an aspect of having a government system in which power can shift on short notice instead of only at fixed election dates.

ijuin

The Intelligensia are always declared to be enemies of The New Philosophy, and must be forcibly Re-educated for The Greater Good.

ijuin

Many non-American cars are sufficiently small to make that a distinct possibility.

ijuin

That’s fine for work done by hand, but if you want functional GPS, then you need part-per-trillion accuracy. (one part per trillion is 86.4 nanoseconds per day, a time span in which radio signals will be off by 26 meters)

ijuin

That must have been interesting from an emotional perspective, given how we still culturally think of the heart as the seat of the soul despite knowing that it’s in the brain...

ijuin

If the rate of false positives is too high, then it would/should not be admissible as court evidence the way that fingerprints or DNA are. If the accuracy rate is below eighty percent or so (one false positive for every five or six true positives), then it should not even be used as justification fo...

ijuin

The first question is, how unique and consistent are individual people’s heartbeat patterns? Is it like retina or fingerprints where a person’s pattern remains stable over their lifespan? Second, do the patterns vary in a predictable way for a given individual when the person is under various stress...

ijuin

The question is, did the pregnant woman act in a manner which reasonably justified the use of lethal force against her? If the shooter was clearly overreacting, then it is definitely the shooter’s fault.

ijuin

And then we have the problem that many homeowners’ associations or local ordinances mandate that houses have lawns instead of native vegetation. My mother tried to do the meadow thing with her front yard, and the municipal government demanded that she return it to being a cookie-cutter lawn or face ...

ijuin

Well, was she liable for the shooting, and not just in a “she was scary, so OF COURSE I assumed she was going to kill me, so I shot her” sense? The person who bears the responsibility for the shooting should presumably bear the responsibility for the outcome of the shooting.

ijuin

Given that it was a long-term mission that was going where no man had gone before, and that it would be a decade before they could send anybody else, then the loss of crew functionality would more or less be synonymous with failure of the mission.

ijuin

Perhaps we should distinguish between “artificial intelligence” and “ artificial sapience”. An artificial sapient would have the whole “free will, capable of contemplating disobedience, acting as its own agent” thing, whereas an artificial intelligence would not. As such, an AI would be capable of n...

ijuin

That works for delivering to a neighborhood location where you can easily walk to it. What I had been referring to was the kind of setup where the branch post office holds your mail on-site as with a typical US PO BOX, which would thus require nearly all postal customers to come to the post office i...

ijuin

Consider just the first law: an AI shall not harm a human. What constitutes harm? Physical injury is straightforward, but defining that as the only form of harm would lead to AIs locking us all up for our own safety and denying us access to anything more dangerous than a ballpoint pen. Meanwhile, de...

ijuin

Hmm, well, for one thing, at such low temperatures, spontaneous quantum tunneling over macroscopic distances would become common. Even with current ultracold experiments, tunneling occurs over distances of millimeters. Sufficiently cold environments would allow tunneling over kilometers or more.

ijuin

Eliminating direct-to-door delivery and making customers come to pick up their mail will create massive traffic congestion problems, because it replaces a couple hundred thousand delivery drivers with three hundred MILLION people trying to get to the post office several times per week. Most post off...

ijuin

Does that also imply that drivers of mail trucks and similarly un-plated vehicles are exempt from moving violations as well, even while driving recklessly?

ijuin

gmalivuk wrote:Do you think anything like the First Law would ever make it into a military robot?

I would expect that a combat AI would have the relative priority of the First and Second laws reversed.

ijuin

I suspect that the Administration will argue that, as illegal entrants, they have no rights, much as how the George W. Bush Administration claimed that captured terrorists were “unlawful combatants” and therefore not entitled to any rights.

ijuin

CorruptUser wrote:Alright, my opinion has somewhat changed on the matter. Fuck putting them in detention centers, and fuck making the detention centers worse than prisons.

Any treatment that is too poor to justify giving to convicted murderers is too poor to justify giving to anybody.

ijuin

The notion of a minimum temperature is not off the table though. 0 K is a lower bound (excluding negative temperatures), but it might not be the greatest lower bound, and it's definitely not a minimum, since it is unattainable. There might be a physically attainable positive temperature which is lo...

ijuin

The attorney for the Administration argued that Sleep, Toilets, Toothbrushes were Not enumerated by the court order, so those things are not required. What makes that statement doubly stupid is that denying the detainees sleep generally requires deliberate effort toward that end by those overseeing...

ijuin

This issue of energy still being greater than zero yet still unable to decrease is what is called the zero point energy. When matter cools to absolute zero, there is still energy left that can not be extracted because there are no more permissible transitions to lower-energy states.

ijuin

They’re also being denied any form of toilet or latrine at times, apparently with the intent of making them soil themselves.

ijuin

The only reason the current definitions of the second, kilogram and metre are "arbitrary" numbers of oscillations of caesium and whatnot is so that the values match the old definitions so no-one needs to remember a whole new set of constants and buy new scientific calculators. :)I suppose...

ijuin

24 oz is a trivial amount of mass compared to life supply requirements anyway—any astronaut consumers quadruple that in water and food per day. I would think that conversely, astronauts would be willing to forgo the equivalent of a single bottle of water in exchange for an extra pound of personal al...

ijuin

The figures I used were meant to represent how much money the employer gets from the work, NOT the employee. My entire point was that the amount paid to the employee does NOT reflect how valuable the work is to the boss, but rather only reflects how difficult it is for the boss to get another qualif...

ijuin

Given that all of my grandparents died before I was born, my initial reaction to hearing about people having an adult grandchild is “how have you not died of old age yet?”

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