phscguy

5 ms·

1.
by phscguy 5y ago
The lack of standard scaling of amount of activity breaks this chart. Rock climbing is given as roughly the same death rate as heroin addiction: 0.0145% vs 0.016% per year. But the chart counts 100 years of heroin addiction versus only one
2.
by phscguy 5y ago
I am well aware of von Neumann's works and achievements and mentioned just computing because that is what the HN crowd mostly knows him for. But really, do we want to look for ethical advice from a guy who worked on explosives for the
3.
by phscguy 5y ago
He advocated for a first strike attack (bombing Moscow). Though this was before the Soviets had a strong nuclear arsenal and so likely would not have started a war. So yeah you are right, saying he was pushing for a war is stretching it. He
4.
by phscguy 5y ago
> not the sort of puerile irrationality that privileges Gene Roddenberry's ideas over those of John von Neumann. Ah yes, the von Neumann that helped developed both the fission bomb and the hydrogen bomb and aggressively promoted t
5.
by phscguy 5y ago
Yeah. It's these low probability events that scare people away from fission. Fossil fuel pollution kills millions of people per year. Like more than 5 million. How many has nuclear power killed in 60 years? Probably less than 100,000
6.
by phscguy 5y ago
The amount of long lived radioactive material produced by fusion reactors is many orders of magnitude less than fission. Iirc it's about the same amount of the radioactivity released as burning coal in a coal plant of the same power ou
7.
by phscguy 5y ago
Sadly no. While I think that it would work and probably be cheaper and easier than fusion, fission has an absolutely abysmal public image. People are terrified of radiation, even if the danger is very low. This means it becomes prohibitivel
8.
by phscguy 5y ago
I can understand that from an enginneering perspective ITER is terrible, but fusion in general? There are all sorts of approaches to fusion, and things such as type 2 superconductors were undiscovered 30 ago and uneconomic/unpractical
9.
by phscguy 5y ago
Yeah, any positive news on fusion progress and there always seems to be the same set of comments appear that are overwhelmingly critical of fusion development. Fusion is not well funded and imo has been let down by mismanagement of ITER, an
10.
by phscguy 5y ago
I think they meant that sometimes you don't need secure and optimized code and hence you don't need an expert.
11.
by phscguy 5y ago
It doesn't solve it. The action at a distance is not a problem with quantum theory. This is because it both is predicted by quantum theory and also observed in experiment. It is a fact of nature and must be accepted. Entanglement does
12.
by phscguy 5y ago
As others here have already noted, this analogy is wrong. But I think people here haven't given a convincing example of a system that behaves differently due to entanglement than it would if the behaviour were simply conditionally rand
13.
by phscguy 5y ago
The parent comment was using Rockefeller's peak net worth as compared to FAANG CEO's net worths to show that FAANG is smaller than Standard Oil was. I mainly wanted to point out that if you instead compare company valuations, each
14.
by phscguy 5y ago
Well actually, Standard Oil peak market cap was about $1 trillion. Rockefeller owned about 25% of this. The rest of Rockefeller's wealth came from the rise in share values post-split. Standard Oil at it's peak actually had lower