Jump to content

pzkpfw

Senior Members
  • Posts

    748
  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    4

Everything posted by pzkpfw

  1. What do you think?
  2. Spam everlasting.
  3. I know the OP is gone, but came across a counterpoint to his "Dylan will have to change his lyrics" babble. The Band (Canadian/American) "Up on cripple creek" Given who's pushed that silly name change, and who the OP voted for, I found this amusing. YMMV.
  4. It rained after his visit to CA, and people are crediting him for it. This cult of personality is getting (even more) scary.
  5. On ๐œ itself: 1. It seems the value depends on the number of significant figures you wish to work with. That would mean both of these would "work": 10 / 3 = 3.3 + ๐œ 10 / 3 = 3.33333 + ๐œ So ๐œ has inconsistent values, and couldn't be used in self consistent math. How's that help? (Even worse, what if you we're mixing fractions with different dividends in one formula?) 2. You are inconsistent, showing both: 10 / 3 = 3.3 + ๐œ 100 / 16 = 6.66 + 4๐œ Why not 3๐œ in the first? 3. This is weird: 100 / 3 = 33.(3 recurring) + 33.(3 recurring) + [33.(3 recurring) + ๐œ] You divide by 3, and don't get three things the same size, "if we divide it by 3 it will have 2 equal side and 1 tiny bit bigger". What problem does that solve? And wasn't ๐œ so you didn't have to write "recurring"? 4. Have you thought about other kinds of repeating? 22/7 = 3.142857
  6. You're not the first to miss what an infinity of decimal places is doing here. Search for discussions on 0.999... = 1 Math says 'yes', a few individuals argue 'no'. I'm not going to get into it further here, just to note that reinventing math itself is not a good way to introduce a new symbol.
  7. 9.999... does equal 10. 0.0...1 is meaningless (except maybe in the esoteric infinitesimals) as you cannot stick a 1 after infinite zeroes. (I'm using "..." as the more common way to represent your "(n recurring)".)
  8. That's because you fell for the trick. Single issue parties exist all over. In my country we have "legalise cannabis" and "animals first" for example. In the U.S., the republicans have made an art of cobbling together a bunch * of single issues that each are enough to push a block of voters to vote for them, looking the other way on other issues. Each of those issues held up by lies. The Democrats were never going to come take all the guns away from everyone. Meanwhile, surveys show a larger % of Americans support sensible gun laws than the % (of voters that voted) that voted for Trump. (* edit to add - perhaps slightly joined by a common thread of "oh no! change!")
  9. Are you thinking about somehow reaping the energy and then sending it to some craft (e.g. laser to a light sail), or are you thinking you'd bring the black hole along with you? The first could maybe somehow work, maybe, somehow, but the second would need reaction mass, and has a snowball in heck chance of working. Either way, there's so little detail in your post "could this work in theory?" cannot really be answered.
  10. There was a king, then there was the American War of Independence. There was slavery, then there wasn't. There was prohibition, then there wasn't - even the constitution changes. (People who bang on about this or that amendment, what do they think "amendment" means?) There was segregation, then there was, well, less. Any American crying about change may as well go yell at a cloud, for not looking like a bunny as it did five minutes ago. At what date and time do they want to freeze the World? We've had the issue of "Eskimo" come up in N.Z.: https://www.nzherald.co.nz/lifestyle/pascall-eskimos-lollies-changes-name-to-kiwi-inspired-explorers-after-racist-undertones/3XLNFY67TTIA3574BRT35TN5SA Took a while, but I'm all for it. Removing a name that offended people doesn't affect the taste of the lolly. People offended by the change ... gosh there are some genuine issues in the World they could spend their time on.
  11. e.g. Photon Sphere? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photon_sphere (I'd think if anything as small as Earth could have an effect like this, it'd be very obvious. I doubt we'd be seeing the stars at night, just a smear of light.)
  12. I was working at a bank at the time, and had recently built (VB 6.0!) a part of the inter-bank money transfer, so was one of those required to stay home and sober that night, in case I was called in. Got a $1,500 bonus for it. Lots of it all was pure hype. People in the newspaper writing your microwave might stop working. Really? it might have a clock, but did you ever set the date on a microwave in 1999? Maybe you'd have trouble with the timer in your VCR, but there'd be workarounds for that if it happened. For banks, given they commonly offer 30 year mortgages, the year 2000 was a thing by 1970, so even with byte saving 2 digit years I don't think every bank system was guaranteed to have been neglected. But given how far and wide automation was by then, it made sense to be careful. It was entirely possible some forgotten bit of code in a local water supply pump station made the thing turn off, that extra emergency water was good to have ... there are other kinds of emergency too.
  13. My WAG is that the cost of building, maintaining, and running interstellar trade would be more than the cost of just producing the goods locally. If wine from Zebulon 7 is $1,000,000 per glass but a bottle of local plonk is $10, what's the point? And I'd bet that technology for exact replication of Zebulon 7 wine would be developed before interstellar trade anyway. You'd need to postulate some (vital, not just luxury) commodity that just can't be sourced locally, for this trade to make sense. (Given the limits of lower than light speed travel and communication, I think human expansion (if any) beyond the solar system will largely be one-way.)
  14. This is largely based on the myth that observation requires consciousness. Observation more just means interaction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observer_effect_(physics)
  15. Trump liked to play on the "migrant crime" thing, and in many speeches during this campaign (and before) pretty much claimed every single migrant came from a prison or asylum. But the stats show migrants as a group commit fewer crimes than born Americans. (Various reasons.) So if he actually did follow through with mass deportations, I'd suspect crime rates will go up. (Slightly tongue in cheek of course, I just find it astounding Trump could make people think he'll make them "safe" and thus accept his fascist leanings. Meanwhile, kids will continue to be shot at school - and the the coming VP will just say that's a "fact of life".)
  16. If the GOP (as a whole) are not racist and sexist (regardless of more or less), why accept him as their figurehead?
  17. gamer87 often had similar concerns, and also had this machine. Maybe they have advice for you? https://www.scienceforums.net/topic/124822-question-uv-plastic-and-rubber
  18. This stuff is googleable: https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/what-are-tariffs#chapter-title-0-2
  19. Tariffs are applied as a kind of tax on the goods, not as a separate bill to the Government of the source nation. (The fantasy is that the seller has to lower profits to keep the final cost the same *, making local industries competitive again. The reality is that prices go up and the consumers pay more.) ((* or maybe even leave the market altogether, which while it might leave local manufacturers standing, it decreases their competition and still raises costs for consumers.))
  20. What is yours? ... and what's your definition of a prime number?
  21. Are they all greengrocers too?
  22. The current AIs are LLMs, large language models. Very summarised, they just soak up data such as text and mathematically record patterns that can be echoed back out. They know nothing about "truth" or "reality". Recent cases you could search-up: somebody asks how to keep the cheese on their pizza and are told by an AI to add glue to the sauce. Another asks if it's good to eat rocks and is told by AI that a small rock a day is good. The first was traced to a joke reddit post, the second to an article on The Onion; both on the internet and soaked up in the LLM training. What this means is any crank can put something out there, that an AI "reads" it and can repeat; it means nothing. (Edit: was typing this when Mordreds' post arrived, not meaning to detract from that post.)
  23. Yep. Watched a Sabine Hossenfelder youtube last week where she claimed this is why AGI is not going to be near what some people say it will.
  24. Turning off all Bitcoin related systems would have more effect than halting fusion research. ... and be much better for us all.
×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

We have placed cookies on your device to help make this website better. You can adjust your cookie settings, otherwise we'll assume you're okay to continue.