DavidSJ

18 ms·

241.
by DavidSJ 5y ago
The concept of "cosmic neighborhood" is deliberately left a bit vague in my description, but it definitely doesn't mean the stars that were near the sun when the sun was born. Rather, it refers to those stars which are within
242.
by DavidSJ 5y ago
No, for two reasons: 1) The idea is that we will do it, not that we have done it already. (How does something we will do in the future affect what we see today? It doesn't, at least not causally. It's just that some civilizati
243.
by DavidSJ 5y ago
I'm only suggesting a possibility, not a certainty. That said, it only takes a tiny fraction of their civilization to do it, for it to happen.
244.
by DavidSJ 5y ago
There's also the possibility that the existence of one civilization in a cosmic neighborhood tends to preclude the emergence of other civilizations in that same neighborhood, due to the tendency of civilizations to rapidly expand and t
245.
by DavidSJ 5y ago
But California ≠ a house in California, which was my point. How does the universe know it’s supposed to consider the positions on the entire circumference of a galaxy, and not just the “left” edge, or the left edge plus the center, or the r
246.
by DavidSJ 5y ago
This seems sort of like saying a house in California should be more entropic than a house in Rhode Island because California's bigger than Rhode Island. But the laws of physics don't care where we've drawn arbitrary lines on
247.
by DavidSJ 5y ago
I found Fluent Forever's minimal pair Anki training decks to be extremely helpful for my German listening and pronunciation. I'm native to American English, and I've been told by multiple native German speakers that my accent
248.
by DavidSJ 5y ago
I was asked to implement something like this at a web startup years ago (since folded): I was supposed to juice the number of active users in the last month by a large random number in the range of 50,000-100,000 or so. I refused saying I d
249.
by DavidSJ 5y ago
This is language dependent. In English: It's only five minutes to the bus stop. In German: Es sind nur fünf Minuten zur Bushaltestelle. (It are only five minutes to the bus stop.) I think it's a question of whether the verb is sup
250.
by DavidSJ 5y ago
This reminds me of my sci-fi dystopia idea: An intergalactic network of wormholes enables rapid travel and communication between worlds, but the collective energy output of the universe's stars is devoted entirely to bitcoin mining, ul
251.
by DavidSJ 5y ago
Thanks! It requires some planning. It's been ~7-8 years, but I guess I probably figured out what trans-Munar injection velocity I needed and roughly what phase angle I wanted the Mun at (these are some basic astrodynamical calculations
252.
by DavidSJ 5y ago
I've done this for fun to see if I could get to the Mun only looking out the window in the crew cabin. (I succeeded!)
253.
by DavidSJ 6y ago
This is basically just linear algebra. For an abstract perspective, try Sheldon Axler's Linear Algebra Done Right . For a more concrete perspective, Gilbert Strang's lectures: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list
254.
by DavidSJ 6y ago
Same. I heard it once completely unexpectedly and it scared the shit out of me. I was 13.
255.
by DavidSJ 6y ago
I'm not 100% sure I'm interpreting your comment correctly, but higher orbits will always decay more slowly, all other things being equal. There's just far less atmosphere to bleed off the energy. Edit: I think I now understan
256.
by DavidSJ 6y ago
What do you call a walled garden which you can't escape from because it keeps expanding to wherever you go?
257.
New physics from µ magnetic moment? Maybe not, per new theoretical calculation(theconversation.com)
1 points by DavidSJ 6y ago|0 comments
258.
by DavidSJ 6y ago
A few problems with this: 1) Much (most?) of the time, participants don't get to verify their safety numbers, and in those cases you are at least trusting the server to deliver your messages to the right client. There's a potentia
259.
by DavidSJ 6y ago
The problem is these orbital periods are generally not rational multiples of each other, so their GCD is undefined (or 0, in a sense). Some exceptions to this exist due to orbital resonance: Pluto and Neptune are in 2:3 resonance, and in th
260.
by DavidSJ 6y ago
Teaching a foreigner one's native language is one of those situations where completely arbitrary conventions (including, by the way, how to segment and classify phonemes!) can misleadingly seem like "obvious" facts, and like
261.
by DavidSJ 6y ago
What is the theoretical treatment of relativity of simultaneity for kingons in Minkowski spacetime? Or worse, what if spacetime is curved?
262.
by DavidSJ 6y ago
I consider “occurred coincidentally”, “is a coincidence”, and “occurred by chance” interchangeable. They are all equivalent to the null hypothesis. If my dice are loaded then the two 6’s weren’t a coincidence. They were guaranteed. So to
263.
by DavidSJ 6y ago
The original wording is: "there is roughly a one in 1,000 chance that the measurement is a statistical coincidence". By definition, "the measurement is a statistical coincidence" means the same thing as "the null hy
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by DavidSJ 6y ago
Thank you, good point. My statistics is better than my linguistics. ;) I'll correct it in my comment (you're replying to someone quoting me).
265.
by DavidSJ 6y ago
Fair enough; what I meant is "multiple testing" in the context of a single overarching experiment, which is I believe what the comment I was replying to was getting at as well.
266.
by DavidSJ 6y ago
There's been a misunderstanding between us. To clarify, I'm not saying we know some data exists (that's of course true, since an experiment was done). I'm saying we know this data exists. Grammatically, they've
267.
by DavidSJ 6y ago
If I say: "there's a 25% chance that Pat is from North Dakota", I'm taking as a given that there is a person named Pat, and I'm talking about the chance that Pat, whom we know to exist, is from North Dakota. In this
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by DavidSJ 6y ago
My brain does too, but I fear the average layperson won't know to do this and will come away from the article thinking there's been a real discovery here.
269.
by DavidSJ 6y ago
Look, that may be so, but if it is, then they should either omit such a line entirely so as not to mislead their readers, select better language so that we don't collapse concepts which are fundamentally, completely, different from eac
270.
by DavidSJ 6y ago
"There is a one in 1,000 chance that the measurement is a statistical coincidence", grammatically, presumes the measurement which did in fact occur and says something about the chance that a statistical coincidence did, in fact,

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