isaacg
Joined 11 years ago
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362
Submissions
65
Member since
Jun 10
Recent submissions
Comment · 3 years ago
Comment · 3 years ago
In particular, copper smithing predates glassmaking, 10000 years ago versus 4000 years ago
Comment · 3 years ago
Same here - the games just randomly end, sometimes my clock gets set to 0 out of nowhere, sometimes the opponent's. Fun game though!
Comment · 3 years ago
I met Ellsberg when I attended a live recording of the podcast Philosophy Talk in 2019. It was called "The Doomsday Doctrine", it was about the policy of mutually assured distruction. I remember he talked about the difference between "their bomb is in the air, so we're launching" and "their bomb has exploded, we're launching". Politicians vacillate between the two, when history shows us that they are very, very different. Airplanes and bombers encourage the latter, while missile silos encourage the former. This makes missile silos a severe liability, as they encourage first-steike launches.
I remember talking to him briefly after the talk. It impressed me how decisive, opinionated, and well-thought-out he was, at his age.
He liked my T-shirt, which said "Statistics means never having to say you're certain."
I'm glad I got a chance to meet such an important and positive figure in US history.
Comment · 3 years ago
My bet continues to be optical phenomena - that's why the orbs and other phenomena resemble simple geometric forms, rather than anything with complex structure, service irregularities, etc. Happy to be proven wrong, as this is the most boring explanation, but that's my current hypothesis.
Comment · 3 years ago
By the way, the word is "beeline", not "b-line". It originally was a reference to bees traveling back to their hive. Sorry to be pedantic.
Comment · 3 years ago
Real qubits have flaws, and you could experiment to see under what conditions they work better or worse, like by applying magnetic fields. Simulated qubits are presumably flawless, and so you can't experiment with them.
Comment · 3 years ago
They seem to be marketed for educational purposes. You could simulate them in software easily. They could be useful for research, but they're not directly useful for computing, except as a novelty.
Comment · 3 years ago
The cubit/kubit/qubit typo does not inspire confidence in this article. Here's the items for sale, in Japanese: https://www.switch-science.com/search?type=article%2Cpage%2C...*
Comment · 3 years ago
That pattern looks periodic, but it's super cool! I think the periodic unit is a flower shape consisting of 8 tiles: 2 in the middle making a hexagon, and then 6 more around the hexagon, like the petals of a flower.
Comment · 3 years ago
Your reaction should be "astronomy fun fact, that will have no direct effects on anyone's life." This black hole is so dim and distant that it required a super powerful telescope to even notice it exists. It will have no effect on life on earth, except by adding to scientific understanding of the cosmos.
Moreover, black holes aren't death machines or anything. This black hole puts out much less light and energy than an equivalent-mass star. It's quite safe.
Comment · 3 years ago
This object is rated as a 1 on the Torino scale, which combines probability of impact with size to get an overall danger level.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torino_scale
The last time an asteroid reached a 1 on the Torino scale was late January. That asteroid is 2023 AJ1. It was downgraded to 0 on the scale in early February, after further observations decreased the estimated chance it will hit the earth.
Overall, objects reach a 1 on the Torino scale 3-4 times a year. No objects have reached level 2 or above since 2006.
Comment · 3 years ago
Most cases of Polio are actually caused by vaccines - it's not a case of confusing cause and effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polio#Epidemiology
This is only the case because the vaccine has been so effective that the disease is close to being infected, and a vaccine-caused case is much less severe than a wild case, but they're still looking into a different vaccine type that will lower the risk of vaccine-caused infections.
Comment · 3 years ago
Comment · 3 years ago
This is a story about documenting multiple kinds of history at once: documenting the dinosaurs, and documenting the expeditions that dug up the fossils. Prior to modern technology, it was either-or: Open the containers, or preserve them. Now, we can have it all.
Those galaxies are magnified to the point where they are visible by another, much closer galaxy cluster, which is only 3.5 billion light years away.