SyzygyRhythm

6 ms·

31.
by SyzygyRhythm 7mo ago
> that's why they were the color they were That doesn't seem right to me. Sodium (and mercury) vapor lamps are the color they are due to physics, and were chosen because they're very efficient (and long lasting). Low-press
32.
by SyzygyRhythm 7mo ago
If running twice is good, then is running N times even better? I wonder if you could even loop until some kind of convergence, say hitting a fixed point (input equals output). I wonder if there's even a sort of bifurcation property whe
33.
by SyzygyRhythm 8mo ago
Is it two, or is it infinite? The quaternions have three imaginary units, i, j, and k. They're distinct, and yet each of them could be used for the complex numbers and they'd work the same way. How would I know that "my"
34.
by SyzygyRhythm 9mo ago
Getting an EKG seems very prudent. I had one done for a non-heart related procedure, and afterwards was basically asked: - Ever have any heart events? Heart racing, palpitations, that kind of thing? - Yes, a few times a year I've notic
35.
by SyzygyRhythm 10mo ago
If you do both (use flipped parentheses around the operators), it makes even more sense, and makes the parsing trivial to boot: just surround the entire expression with parentheses and parse normally. For instance: 1 + 2 ) ( 3 Becomes (1 +
36.
by SyzygyRhythm 10mo ago
Many people think of driving in time rather than distance. I'd say it's actually more common to say a city is 3 hours away rather than 200 miles. What makes kW less useful is really just that most EVs don't advertise their ca
37.
by SyzygyRhythm 10mo ago
We know the upper bound for most of those numbers. SpaceX already achieves internal marginal launch costs of ~$1000/kg, for instance. We know their rough costs per satellite. In contrast, we know little to nothing about the inputs to t
38.
by SyzygyRhythm 10mo ago
I wouldn't downplay the opportunity cost of that much human capital. It really is quite a lot, given the obvious talents of the physicists. I'm not saying I fully agree with the position, but one way of looking at it is that thous
39.
by SyzygyRhythm 10mo ago
I'd suppose the fashion goes somewhat with the price of copper, though I haven't tracked it. The heatsinks themselves have gotten far larger as CPUs and GPUs have gotten more power hungry, not to mention RAM and SSDs. A material t
40.
by SyzygyRhythm 10mo ago
Indeed. Aluminum is actually a (far) superior conductor to copper per unit mass. It would be used on transmission lines even if it was the same price as copper, because the towers can be cheaper and farther apart. It's in increasing us
41.
by SyzygyRhythm 11mo ago
I've found that quite a lot of cheap keyboards cannot register a T when shift-R are being pressed. If I always used the standard QWERTY finger positioning, this wouldn't be a problem, because my index finger could not be on both R
42.
by SyzygyRhythm 1y ago
This is important. The mechanism doesn't really work the way you want most of the time. I occasionally see a claim that you can power a carousel with this method, but it doesn't work. You would have to have the cable go out and ar
43.
by SyzygyRhythm 1y ago
Even with the visualization, I found the minimal solution hard to visualize. I came up with this instead: Suppose you start with two separated intervals. The left one starts sliding rightward. At what point do they contact? That's easy
44.
by SyzygyRhythm 1y ago
The article mentions that some flights produce a net cooling effect. I wonder if it could be cost effective to divert flights toward contrail formation when it's predicted that they'll produce cooling (I also wonder what the act
45.
by SyzygyRhythm 1y ago
I went to Space Camp in Huntsville in '89 or so. One of the perks was a daily showing at their Omnimax theater. Felt absolutely incredible at the time. The most memorable moment was a scene where they filmed the Space Shuttle tower esc
46.
by SyzygyRhythm 1y ago
You can prove it easily by induction. If Wm(n) is a mustard watch containing n micrograms of mustard, then it suffices to show that Wm(0) exists, and that if Wm(n) exists then Wm(n+1) must exist. Obviously a single additional microgram of m
47.
by SyzygyRhythm 1y ago
We don't know all the things they did to the Booster, but among them were deliberately not igniting some engines as well as taking a more aggressive angle-of-attack on descent (the rocket is a fairly effective lifting body, as it tur
48.
by SyzygyRhythm 1y ago
It's the original definition of "pushing the envelope." You start with a known flight envelope, then push a little past that. Sometimes you learn that the real envelope is bigger than you thought. Other times you find that th
49.
by SyzygyRhythm 1y ago
I disagree with the article's claim that the geometric mean lacks physical meaning. Say you have two benchmarks with different units, frames/second and instructions/second. You can't take the arithmetic mean of these unl
50.
by SyzygyRhythm 2y ago
The article says that the crystals don't affect the taste or scent. The crystals are a signal that you have a good cheese, but not the cause of a good cheese. Adding them to a bad cheese won't make it a good cheese, so in that sen
51.
by SyzygyRhythm 2y ago
Drilling the well is the expensive part. It heats at a relatively constant rate depending on the geometry. You could size the plant to be exactly matched to the well output--but the generators and such are relatively cheap. So instead you m
52.
by SyzygyRhythm 2y ago
I would say instead that math is a game. A universal game with no predefined rules at all and only one guideline: if the rules you make up lead to a contradiction, then the rules are probably boring. If your rules say that 1+1=3, then you
53.
by SyzygyRhythm 2y ago
Infinitesimal calculus is the old-fashioned calculus! It was what Newton and Leibniz invented. Limits only came into play later when mathematicians wanted a more robust foundation. But then Robinson proved that infinitesimals were perfect
54.
by SyzygyRhythm 2y ago
Tim Walz claimed there is "no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech, and especially around our democracy." That's false--the First Amendment has no such carveouts for those things. So it's concernin
55.
by SyzygyRhythm 2y ago
For that to happen, you would have to be very unlucky: all of your measurements would have to be 2e, 4e, 6e, etc. If a 3e or 5e sneaked in there, you'd realize that the charge was e, not 2e. With enough measurements, you can be confi