Recent submissions

Comment · 4 months ago
And yet it did work, with positive results shown over a year, right? It seems that the reasons why this "could never work" like cracks, dust, and vibrations might have perfectly reasonable solutions. Solar panels have gotten so cheap that it might not be as important to install them in perfect conditions, and other factors like real estate, ease of maintenance, access to the grid come into play in interesting ways. I suppose long term results are yet to be seen, but it doesn't seem ridiculous to me.
Comment · 8 months ago
https://www.astrologercat.com/

Because everyone loves astrology and cute cats. (A toy project just for kicks)

Current features:

- AI Chat with Petunia the cat Astrologer

- Daily personalized astrology email

Coming soon:

- Ephemeris calculations

- Stories of historic events from past dates which share today's astrological conditions

- Whatever else Petunia dweams up from her sweepy nap on the bookshewf

Comment · 2 years ago
"Molecular biologists tend to focus on characteristics like metabolism, growth and development, response to stimuli, reproduction, and the ability to process information or evolve."

Even if you stretch the others real hard, I don't see how you'd argue that the Earth "reproduces." Especially not the more rigorous definition of reproduces fertile copies of itself which can evolve.

Comment · 2 years ago
Comment · 2 years ago
Thinking about this more... and just thinking out loud here. So this pattern essentially happens when: In whatever base you're in a number x^n gives an end of "0" plus a remainder of the number x. So a number would be automorphic if ((x^n - 1) * n) always ends in "0" (to whatever length that matches the number).

E.g. ((6^n - 1) * 6) or ((376^n - 1) * 376) Cool

Comment · 2 years ago
It just occurred to me that it was weird how 6^n always ends in 6. And that it never occured to me before that that was weird. 5s of course do that too. And I wondered what numbers do it in other bases and why. And I found this nice blog post talking about it. And was surprised to find that very large numbers also have this property.
Comment · 2 years ago
Terrament is working on a modular gravity storage solution that uses deep mine shafts to gain 20x more height than stacking blocks above ground. So you don’t need water or mountains. And since gravity storage uses ballast that is really just dumb weight, it could even be economical to make that ballast a secondary storage like thermal storage.
Comment · 2 years ago
With climate weirding accelerating, I'm getting concerned that it's only a matter of time before this road continues to collapse in new sections and it will no longer be feasible to keep repairing it as we are now. I'm also worried that sections on both sides of big sur could collapse leaving thousands stranded.

Anyone have knowledge about any studies on these scenarios?

Comment · 2 years ago
Or, the media is gaslighting people to think violent crime is up even if it’s not. Which is a rational possibility since reporting crime has political motivations.
Comment · 2 years ago
From stories I’ve read, I think people generally, and including Feynman, concluded that the sprinkler would not rotate. Because conservation of angular momentum. Which is almost true. So what’s fun is that this experiment shows it’s not entirely true, if you have a sensitive enough experiment that takes into account more nuance of the fluid dynamics.
Comment · 2 years ago
Yes that is the experiment. I think when you do that it doesn’t move at all because the effect is tiny so will normally be nullified by friction? And I think the research used very low friction so they could observe the small effect.
Comment · 2 years ago
I'll add that this could become particularly important in the 4d case once the sprinkler starts moving. Cause when it's still, the pressure gradient will create a partial-torus like shape around opening, but once it starts rotating, the outer side (rotating around the sprinkler's axis) of the 4D version of this shape has a larger diameter than the inside. So the inner side will be more affected by the environmental water's momentum state than the outside which has more water mass in it's scope rotating around the sprinkler axis.

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