theothermkn

17 ms·

91.
by theothermkn 8y ago
"...the fact that is triggered and constantly maintained by gravitational collapse." What you have written is not a fact. Forces only do work when they act through a distance. Gravitational potential energy only comes into play du
92.
by theothermkn 8y ago
Stars simply do not "work by converting gravitational potential energy into light/heat through fusion." The "light/heat," or energy, that stars produce comes from the mass defect of the fused atoms. Basically,
93.
by theothermkn 8y ago
> Aren't watches anachronistic, though? This is perhaps the best pun ever to appear on HN. I hope it was intentional!
94.
by theothermkn 8y ago
> And if the employees placed thier [sic] values over profits, why are they still there? There is probably more than one kind of profit. I think that if you've got a mortgage on a SV condo or house, and made plans for your financial
95.
by theothermkn 8y ago
In the extreme, two successive trades, where the first gains 110% and the second loses 100%, “average” out to a 5% return. However, you don’t want to make that pair of trades.
96.
by theothermkn 8y ago
The Froude number appears to be a dimensionless parameter. Dimensionless parameters and the Buckingham Pi Theorem are fundamental to physics, and especially fluid flow. It boils (ha!) down to the ideas that 1) A fundamental law of physics
97.
by theothermkn 8y ago
What is presented without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. But this statement can be dismissed twice: Not only is it not established that brevity gives life meaning, it isn’t established that life even has or needs meaning!
98.
by theothermkn 8y ago
While the article title is sensational, it’s encouraging to see SENS getting wider traction in the public imagination. A lot of the other proposed therapies seem to involve genetic engineering, and this one seems more somatic, more at the s
99.
by theothermkn 8y ago
> //sarcasm is not even enough to describe this lunacy that's eating the world// The author’s “accidental racism” phrasing is a little awkward, but the idea is there. The point isn’t that “whitelist” and “blackli
100.
by theothermkn 8y ago
A quick Google image search reveals that the airfoils on the Disco do not have rear-facing steps. These steps are the defining feature of the KF foil family.
101.
by theothermkn 8y ago
One thing I like about this idea is that there doesn't seem to be the impact that, for example, a hydroelectric plant would have. In other words, because the streams are intermittent, and because most of the flow seems to be restored b
102.
by theothermkn 8y ago
> If you have a cable capable of holding a space station and counterweight, no satellite is going to stop it. A satellite impacting the tether will definitely "stop" it, in that it will, at the very least, melt an impact crater
103.
by theothermkn 8y ago
The center of mass of the cable-counterweight system orbits at geosynchronous height. Also, the gradient of gravity will Stabilize the attitude in the desired orientation. None of this should be construed as an endorsement of space elevator
104.
by theothermkn 8y ago
The whole project smells of YouTube woodworking culture. That's not a bad thing! It's just that the device itself reads like a CNC Pantorouter ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wZ1v4PIsYI ). They show a table-top w
105.
by theothermkn 8y ago
At the typical velocities for this kind of impact, probably not. At these speeds, computer analyses ignore the solid properties of the colliding objects, modeling them as liquids, instead. (The shear resistances is just not relevant, and ev
106.
by theothermkn 8y ago
The converse of this is that the first bit of velocity you save pays off handsomely. Every multiple of the exhaust velocity that you save nets you a factor of e savings in mass ratio. Additionally, getting out of the soup of the lower atmos
107.
by theothermkn 8y ago
> I prefer the failure modes of an aircraft to those of a rocket. Then you would hate a launch loop. A flexible steel rod traveling at above orbital velocity and magnetically suspended inches away from an enclosing sheath is basically
108.
by theothermkn 8y ago
I was raised on the inverted pyramid, too, and like it. However, the benefit of easy scanning was secondary to its main design driver, manual (and literal) cut and past. They needed to guarantee that they could cut a story basically anywher
109.
by theothermkn 8y ago
I’m not sure how much more circumspect I could have been.
110.
by theothermkn 8y ago
> So, there are a lot of factors in play. I forget where I read this, or even the exact figure, but bowel movements for some subset of indigenous tribes was something like 4 pounds. I remember thinking they must be getting ridiculous amo
111.
by theothermkn 8y ago
To me, this is akin to finding out what happens to airplanes when their pilots die. If we're wondering about this because they have been dying of asphyxiation at altitude, we'd still learn something if we ran the experiment of sho
112.
by theothermkn 8y ago
Yup. I'm hopeful about the work associated with Aubrey de Grey and the SENS foundation. Again, this is from a layperson's perspective. My mind was kind of blown by the YouTube videos of the Undoing Aging 2018 conference, especiall
113.
by theothermkn 8y ago
My main problem with the [A-Za-z0-9] notation is that it looks great at first glance. I mean, it looks really, really great. Of course [A-Z] means all capital letters. And then you think about it, and you start to suspect something like t
114.
by theothermkn 8y ago
I could not disagree more. As the article states, and this meshes with my layperson's understanding, mitochondrial malfunction is a key facet of aging. While we strongly suspected the role of mitochondria, being able to turn them on an
115.
by theothermkn 8y ago
He's said it a number of times. Googling "zizek easier" yielded a ton of autocompletes, and then a ton of hits. :)
116.
by theothermkn 8y ago
There's another way to frame that: What if it's a coincidence that the rent of labor has afforded a tolerable lifestyle for the masses and lavish lifestyles for capital owners for nearly 200 years? And, what if this coincidence th
117.
by theothermkn 8y ago
At a practical level, your initial instinct was right. In space, nobody can feel you convect. Essentially all of the waste heat has to be disposed of via radiation, and this is orders of magnitude less effective than convection at the tempe
118.
by theothermkn 8y ago
Interestingly, while the Carnot Limit is derived using heat engines, it applies to any "device" that extracts energy from a temperature difference. If it were not so, then one could place, for example, a thermoelectric device betw
119.
by theothermkn 8y ago
The Carnot efficiency of a heat engine is 1 - T_low/T_high. When operating between 305K and 300K (room temperature(ish)), for example, this is 1 - 300/305, or about 1.6%. In other words, the absolute most amount of energy a device
120.
by theothermkn 8y ago
> For example, why is rape wrong? Easily answered with God: because he said so. This is exactly the non sequitur that I pointed out. Not even a God’s say-so could change “objective” morality, if it existed. He can change the sea to red,

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