Pharmakon
Joined 8 years ago
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Recent submissions
Comment · 7 years ago
Comment · 7 years ago
Better build quality for one. The experience of actually driving a Tesla is undeniably sweet, but the panel gaps, the feeling of cheap half-assedness about details is not (especially at the Tesla price). More broadly price and range need to improve for those of us not willing to spend a premium just because it’s Tesla, and who don’t make only small commutes in a place full of superchargers. For me as well, OTA updates and the willingness of the CEO to go public blaming the driver for an accident is a no-go as well as all-touchscreen controls.
Comment · 7 years ago
The manifold is well-behaved and continuous at r=1, and mass is one of the few characteristics a black hole has other than spin and charge. Gravitons from within the event horizon won’t escape, but the event horizon itself can be thought of as the entire black hole (for everything outside of the black hole).
This discussion might help where my ability to answer your excellent question is failing: https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/937/how-does-gra...
Comment · 7 years ago
Have you ever read the Financial Times? More broadly, in addition to FT I try to get a multitude of perspectives without straying too far into extremes (so no Fox News, no CNN) and I try to rely on single-topic sites. FT, NYT, Jerusalem Post, AlJazeera, Aviation Week, BBC, SkyNews, a handful of science and tech journals, HN, and some others. You can get a fairly balanced (not perfect) perspective without the kind of moral panicking and clickbait you’d often find. BBC and Sky being exceptions, but that’s my local news.
Comment · 7 years ago
It’s important to realize that Brexit is a bit more complicated than the rhetoric would have you believe. First it began with a combination of simple populism/nationalism/jingoism in the form of UKIP and at the same time a section of the political class in the Tory and Labour parties. For the Tories (at least the ones who became ERG members) it’s pure self-interest. They are filthy rich and like many filthy rich businessmen they think they’d thrive in a more lenient regulatory environment. They can create that environment for themselves if the EU is out of the picture and they keep power. Labour is more Remain, but Corbin and his fellow hardliners want a Brexit because they want the UK to be Socialist/Marxist. They know that’s just not going to happen in the context of the EU.
So you had Farrah’s and others playing the usual “Hey struggling masses, all of your problems are those immigrant’s fault” game. Over time the political success of UKIP and internal strife within the Tories led David “The Chinless Pudding” Cameron to promise that he would hold a referendum on the issue of re-elected. At the time he assumed that he would win by the same narrow margin he had previously and once again would enter into a “power-sharing” deal with the Liberal Democrats. He could then blame the LibDems for blocking the referendum, defuse the Tory civil war, and shut Farage up for another election cycle.
Then he won, decisively, and the LibDems tanked. So Cameron had no excuse to not have the referendum. He assumed that people who had been openly pro-remain such as Boris Johnson would put aside their personal ambitions and support Remain, but of course that didn’t happen. So what you had was a group of highly motivated people such as Boris who used this as a means to get power, people like Farrage being populist demagogues, and the ERG playing ideologue while just looking to get even richer. Cameron quit and literally walked away humming a little tune, and the Tories went to war with themselves. In the end everyone “died” and out of the ashes rose the silent one, Theresa May, who had switched from staunch pro-Remain to equally staunch Brexiteer mode overnight.
The rest is history. In a sense at the highest levels where Brexit isn’t about gaining short-term power and settling grudges, it’s about the long-term goal of being able to capture UK regulatory bodies. “People” like Jacob Rees-Mogg see how the business class can rob the state in the US, and they want a slice of that. The EU would prevent much of it, so they want out of the EU. The details of why individual people (who bothered to vote at all) voted to Leave is a lot less interesting and has less to do with Brexit than the political reality.
Comment · 7 years ago
It’s not that interesting unfortunately, although I liked your approach. A graviton would be just another boson like a photon, and like a photon would be unable to escape. All of the worldlines of a graviton within the event horizon would lead to a collision with th singularity. It’s just another aspect of “No Hair” on the hole.
Remember that this applies everything where r≤1. As far as “flat” worldlines I think you might be thinking of a geodesic approaching r=1 in terms of a null geodesic, which isn’t necessarily true unless we’re dealing with a photon or graviton. Regions I,II of the Classic Kruskal-Szekeres extension illustrates this pretty clearly.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kruskal–Szekeres_coordinates...
The total mass of the black hole (and all other information possible about it) can be described in terms of the boundary at r=1, so there’s no problem with mergers or accretion. To answer Wallace’s original question, we see no information escaping the black hole. What we’re seeing is sort of like shining a light on an absence of information, and observing the shadow cast. That’s not quite right, but it’s close.
Comment · 7 years ago
My wife got her start as an attorney in the U.S. and her first criminal cases as defense counsel were for drunk divers. It ended up driving (no pun) her away from defense work, because these guys were inveterate offenders and never got more than a slap on the wrist. The penalties on the books for DUI and the penalties actually administered are often miles apart. That may have changed in the last decade though, I can’t say.
Comment · 7 years ago
Taleb calling someone else an entertainer is a bit rich, sort of like a clown telling someone to have dignity. I have no opinion on Silver whatsoever, but Taleb is a bloviating ass who has gone from popular milquetoast observations, to climbing fully up his own backpassage. That this all began with the likes of Dinesh D’Souza doesn’t help.
I realize that Black Swan is popular here, but it was horrendous. A single essential premise which, instead of support, rested for chapter after chapter on assertions. That’s not evidence, it wasn’t an argument, it was the sound of someone having one good idea and then realizing they lacked the capacity to support it.
Comment · 7 years ago
Maybe they work as an app or web dev?
Comment · 7 years ago
We should have sympathy for victims, without letting them be in charge of policy decisions. That pain leads to the opposite of rationality. It’s up there with “think of the children” arguments in terms of harm that can be done.
So yes, it seems at least some of them can.