puzzledobserver

8 ms·

31.
by puzzledobserver 2y ago
I suspect that it isn't the unpredictability, rather it is the acceptable margin of error. Say you have a 1500 kg car with a 100 hp engine, which starts from a standstill and runs for 5 seconds. How fast will the car be moving at the e
32.
by puzzledobserver 2y ago
While we hear a lot about isotopes (nuclei with same proton count but different neutron count), we don't hear as much about nuclear isomers (nuclei with the same proton count and same neutron count, but somehow having different configu
33.
by puzzledobserver 2y ago
How does the PyPy JIT compare to the JIT in the upcoming CPython 3.13?
34.
by puzzledobserver 2y ago
What does it mean for a corporation to plead guilty? Does it mean that there is evidence to establish a crime beyond reasonable doubt, but there is insufficient evidence to implicate any employees in particular?
35.
by puzzledobserver 2y ago
The 2008 Ignobel Prize in Medicine was awarded for a paper that showed that higher-priced placebos are more effective than lower-priced placebos [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ig_Nobel_Prize_winners...
36.
by puzzledobserver 2y ago
The US House and Senate have parliamentarians, who have some power about what bills can be voted on. This was in the news some years ago, when they (if memory serves) blocked some bills from being voted on. I am unsure of the limits of this
37.
by puzzledobserver 2y ago
I just installed Baba is You. It reminds me of Sokoban. I and my friend spent several hours playing Sokoban in college. It was frustratingly difficult.
38.
Biden Administration Tightens Mileage Standards to Buoy EVs(nytimes.com)
2 points by puzzledobserver 2y ago|2 comments
39.
by puzzledobserver 2y ago
Are there any gas / hybrid vehicles on the market which achieve 65 mpg? Even the 2024 Prius seems to only achieve 57 mpg.
40.
by puzzledobserver 2y ago
Might having correlated random variables (in this case, rand and the address of main) unintentionally cause vulnerabilities like the Debian OpenSSL incident [0]? [0] https://lists.debian.org/debian-security-announce/200
41.
by puzzledobserver 2y ago
My last physics class was on electromagnetism. We used Griffiths' textbook. Some 17 years ago. I briefly glanced at page 2 of this book, where the author describes the qualitative mechanism by which Maxwell's equations give rise t
42.
by puzzledobserver 2y ago
Understanding the effect of humidity on popcorn making sounds like a fascinating research project. Also one that I can honestly imagine a high school student undertaking. I would like to know how you controlled humidity, what your popcorn m
43.
by puzzledobserver 2y ago
I am not a linguist, but I don't think that many linguists would agree with your assessment that dialects, leet speak, short form writing, slang, creoles, or vernaculars are necessarily ungrammatical. From what I understand, the modern
44.
by puzzledobserver 2y ago
I was watching some Youtube videos to wind down last night, when it decided to play a creepy unskippable ad for a horror movie, forcing me to turn down the volume and temporarily switch to another browser tab. As an immigrant myself, I am c
45.
by puzzledobserver 2y ago
The Practical Engineering Youtube channel has a very interesting video on black starts of an electrical grid [0]. Are there any additional challenges in turning a grid off? [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOSnQM1Zu4w
46.
by puzzledobserver 3y ago
Curious: Why might data centers need earthquake warnings, and how might they prepare if given a few minutes or seconds of heads up?
47.
by puzzledobserver 3y ago
This sounds conceptually difficult: Wouldn't the presence of one-way streets or airport security checkpoints, for example, mean that the travel time from A to B might not be the same as the travel time from B to A? How can a map then b
48.
by puzzledobserver 3y ago
From a cursory glance at the article, they appear to use the word bullshit in the same sense as Frankfurt's essay on bullshit. Frankfurt's essay goes into a lot of detail about what is and isn't bullshit. If I remember correc
49.
by puzzledobserver 3y ago
What would a hypothetical dark energy engine look like?
50.
by puzzledobserver 3y ago
I don't use shopping carts because my groceries typically fit in a shopping basket. What I find frustrating about my local grocery store is when they inexplicably rearrange items. One week, bread is stocked in one aisle. Suddenly, on m
51.
by puzzledobserver 3y ago
> "In 2013, Vennells hired forensic accounting firm Second Sight, headed up by Ron Warmington, to investigate the Horizon software losses. Warmington discovered the system was flawed and faulty, but Vennells was unhappy with Warming
52.
by puzzledobserver 3y ago
The Wikipedia article on Paula Vennells tells me that the Post Office prosecuted 700 subpostmasters between 1999 and 2015 [0]. That works out to about one prosecution every 8 days. I do not know the baseline rate at which postmasters commit
53.
by puzzledobserver 3y ago
If I understand correctly, only one of Einstein's papers was ever subjected to peer review. He didn't like it. [0] There are some situations where peer review has led to groupthink. The one that comes to mind is the amyloid hypoth
54.
by puzzledobserver 3y ago
Wouldn't a better first question be _why_ we're teaching students C? One answer might be that although students might spend most of their later professional lives in higher-level languages, they should have some experience in a lo
55.
by puzzledobserver 3y ago
I tend to agree. I am comfortable with writing functional programs, but I have tried and failed multiple times to grok the Nix documentation. The complexity is not because "functional programming is hard", but because the document
56.
by puzzledobserver 3y ago
I didn't know that the speed of sound in the interstellar medium is 100 km/s. That seems surprisingly high, given that there's more atmospheric material here on the surface of Earth, and the speed of sound is only about 330 m
57.
by puzzledobserver 3y ago
All papers that it has accepted have been unimpeachable. All papers that it has accepted have been guilty of academic fraud. Is this the world's most credible journal, or the most notorious one?
58.
by puzzledobserver 3y ago
Is ranking by brand necessarily the most useful ranking? How does the Toyota Prius (with 19 potential trouble areas, per the article) compare with a non-hybrid (say a Mazda 3)? The first graph indicates that Toyotas are, on the whole, more
59.
by puzzledobserver 3y ago
I get the impression that large animal species (whales, elephants, humans, other apes) on the whole live longer than smaller animal species (rabbits, dogs, cats, etc.). I also get the impression that within each species, large individuals s
60.
by puzzledobserver 3y ago
Might it be possible to see an image of the Milky Way itself, diverted back on to us with sufficiently strong gravitational lensing?

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