The Factory Floor - 2015-08-25

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3:15 AM

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Q: Can we have an SE blog for this site?

Stack Exchange put per-site blogs on hold a while back because, among other things, WordPress was causing too many problems for them. (They also had concerns about usage.) Now that SE has migrated its own blog off of WordPress, can we reopen the question of per-site blogs? Specifically, may we...

feature-request blog

9 hours later…

12:27 PM

@James, top of the morning to ya!

3 hours later…

3:20 PM

@Green That's the first time I've ever heard someone say that using the full "of", not just "o'".

@HDE226868 Makes sense though. I'm not Irish. :)

So, last night I asked a question, but then deleted it because I wouldn't be available to respond to any comments or answers. I decided to re-ask it today, but a message popped up saying that I would be asking a duplicate of the previous question. I didn't want to undelete because the question would be lost in the mix of new questions. I was forced to post a semi-different (crappy) question and then quickly edit it to what I wanted it to be.

Seven minutes of annoyance.

Ooh, an upvote and five views, though!

@Green Wow. You hit the rep cap already?

@HDE226868 Yep. It's been a really good weekend for me. Today is the fifth day in a row.

I've only done it ten times (yesterday, thanks to a bounty), although I've been doing well recently.

Sorry, eleven.

@HDE226868 I like that question.

3:33 PM

@Green Thank you. My three "practical" questions have all gotten good receptions.

I especially enjoyed that underground map question. Making that map was tons of fun.

My final map is probably going to combine your technique with Samuel's, although I'm still working on it.

I hope we get the blog going because I'd really like to see that map when you're done with it.

It will probably take a while. I've decided to work on other aspects first, primarily the language. I'm still trying to think of questions about that, though.

3:47 PM

@HDE226868 That question is so good. I didn't realize how close Faraday, Maxwell, Edison and Tesla were together. Man, that was such a cool period for physics!

@Green It was really cool.

1 hour later…

5:06 PM

I appear to have asked 4/7 of the current unanswered questions.

You might want to reflect on that.

@Samuel I have/still am.

I'm borderline deleting one of the old ones.

Is it a science is hard one?

@HDE226868 Oh, average for the world or average for a first world country?

@Samuel Good point. First-world (I edited that in).

@HDE226868 I'm feeling some recognition with this question. Was there a similar one asked before by someone else?

5:15 PM

@Samuel Could it be this or this?

My name is Joe.

@HDE226868, thanks for asking that question for me. I appreciate it. :)

@Green Your name is Green.

@HDE226868 It wasn't either of those. I'm probably imagining it. Or maybe it was closed/deleted for being too open ended.

Or asking what one person should do.

I'm not sure how my question falls there. I'm directly asking, "Is it possible?", and secondarily asking, "How could he do it?" The plausibility is the main issue, hence reality-check.

Perhaps that's just semantics.

5:40 PM

> Among the things he learned while researching his new book, “The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry”: the incidence of psychopathy among CEOs is about 4 percent, four times what it is in the population at large.

@Green Thank you for scaring me.

How did he diagnose psychopathy?

:)! You're welcome.

You did describe a psychopath though....someone who doesn't have empathy.

The article didn't say.

Perhaps Joe is merely a high-functioning sociopath.

There are some nuances between psychopathy and sociopathy but I can't remember them off-hand. I think that psychopathy is a genetic thing while sociopathy is an environment/upbringing thing.

HAHAHHAHAH!!! I thought of the same clip!

. . . with your number.

Or this clip: youtube.com/watch?v=lS4yQrYz-04

Psycho/socio-paths aren't always evil but they are always always always scary.

5:46 PM

I'm willing to bet that 8% of Worldbuilding users are psychopaths.

I'm not sure how I'd confirm that stat, but I stand by it.

Well, coming up with interesting ways to most efficiently kill people isn't something a normal person usually contemplates. How to destroy the world from orbit isn't something they think about either.

I don't know about the percentage you offered but I'd say it's a non-trivial percentage of WB-ers are.

Does Worldbuilding make sociopaths or do sociopaths make Worldbuilding?

. . . That is the question.

Found another source for psychopaths in the C-suite.

forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2011/06/14/…

6:03 PM

Ohhhh, my.

> There was his reputation that he was a man who seemed to enjoy firing people, not to mention the stories from his first marriage — telling his first wife he wanted to know what human flesh tastes like, not going to his parents’ funerals.

Do you not want to know what it tastes like?

@Samuel Well, the answer is obviously chicken.

> A really interesting question is whether psychopathy can be a positive thing.

I hear it's closer to pork.

@HDE226868 Psychopathy can be viewed as a tool. Useful in certain circumstances. It's like UV light. Harmful to your skin but very very helpful in sterilizing particulate free water.

Excellent example.

6:08 PM

@Green Good point.

> Some psychologists would say yes, that there are certain attributes like coolness under pressure, which is sort of a fundamental positive.

But like a tool it must be controlled. The difficulty with controlling psychopaths is that they have the same kinds of rights and privileges as other less-"broken" humans.

@Green Ah, the psychopath rights movement is certainly a problem.

Ah, I almost forgot to give my current plan for Joe's world domination. It should be proof that I'm not Joe, because I could never be a hacker.

Computer-savvy I am not.

A hack of the magnitude of Ashley-Madison would certainly give you a great deal of leverage though that might also have a detrimental effect on your life expectancy. You are a "terrorist" in that sense.

Good call.

I've made a good life decision.

6:39 PM

Did you know that you can ship human remains on normal airline flights?

Think about that... the next time you fly across the country, there could be corpse flying with you.

Crap! and I'm flying tomorrow!

@Green Do corpses get frequent flyer miles, I wonder?

That would be an interesting question to ask on Travel.

LIkely not. That would be a fun question to ask though. I think corpses would qualify as freight, not passengers.

"Hi, is this American Airlines? Yes, I'd like to know if my dead relative can fly first-class."

Exactly!

. . . and the rest is silence.

6:42 PM

dial tone

I wonder if that would get me put on some sort of list.

Call from a burner phone and don't worry about it. ;)

6:54 PM

@Green One of these? I haven't heard that term before.

Yep! And pay cash for it.

...if you can.

Or just buy a pre-paid debit card with cash and use that. I've heard some requirements that you have to pay with a debit or credit card to get a pre-paid phone. Not sure about that though.

@Green That's untraceable?

Not sure. I've never had to test it. I'm just inferring what I know about the traceability of cash vs the traceability of credit cards.

...which is why I like WB so much. The entire site is inference of how something would work based on what I know.

Right. It lets the psychopaths channel their psychopathy without actually hurting anyone. :-)

1 hour later…

8:03 PM

@Green which is why it is prohibited in some countries. I know that in Japan, it used to be quite simple to buy a pre-paid phone at the airport, but last I tried to rent a phone in Japan, it was claimed on some notice that due to legal reasons this is not possible any more. And if my memory does not fail me, Lonely Planet claimed that it was due to misuse of anonymous lines.

@bilbo_pingouin Yeah, I figured it was something along those lines. Keeping contact between two parties without being able to associate a person with either end makes the three letter agencies nervous.

yup

...and it's easy to harrass people when you don't have to worry about them calling you back.

indeed

about anonymous phones, one of the funniest thing I heard was that CIA have/had a special OS on their smartphones... and due to that the Italian intelligence were able to track them... ;-)

8:30 PM

@bilbo_pingouin That's as basic a "hack" as looking for new agent strings from new versions of iOS. That's super duper basic.

it just proves that anonymous and secure aren't always compatible things

true that.

8:52 PM

Random Inspired Question: How big could a mass of cotton candy get before it collapsed into a solid and/or became a planet? — Frostfyre 29 mins ago

Also, can someone explain the low answer votes today on Worldbuilding? I count 3 answer votes on my question (2 up, 1 down) on eight answers and 9 question votes. That's somewhat disproportionate.

I noticed that too. Tons of views but no votes. That's very unusual.

Mine started yesterday, I had 4 answers and not a single vote.

in either direction

I did delete one because it really wasn't that good... but still

@HDE226868, your average joe taking over the world question has ~700 views but a paltry 2 upvotes for all answers to that question. Weird.

I can't tell if I'm getting any upvotes or not since I hit the limit earlier today.

@Green There's a third, a -1 on Cort Ammon's answer.

I don't mind missing upvotes if I'm over the limit but missing reputation if I'm under the limit is super annoying.

@HDE226868 True, but that's a downvote. ;)

9:12 PM

I'm maxed out on votes since ten hours ago, so I'm helping with the recent vote-drought, but not by choice.

I'm going to go back to something that I never quite finished: going over old questions. If anyone gets any random upvotes, that's most likely me.

Does anyone know of a query that will let us compare how many upvotes there were today compared to votes/day for the last week?

But I maxed really early today so I haven't been seeing votes anyway.

Deleted answer, but wtf?

worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/19341/627

Wow, that's so delusional. I guess all those eye witness accounts from Hiroshima and Nagasaki don't count as proof.

9:20 PM

@Green This query is close - data.stackexchange.com/worldbuilding/query/349015/…

@Green Oh here it is - data.stackexchange.com/worldbuilding/query/1718/…

Is there really enough need for the modern-in-medieval tag?

I mean, there are ten questions, but still. . . I guess it's kind of cool.

@Green Or no... Not quite

Need to limit by creation date from the other query.

@Samuel My brain is fried or I would make the modification.

I'll try it out. I don't even know what language these things are in though.

JS?

I like C and assembly better.

Those queries? That's straight SQL. If I had to guess it would be against MySQL but if you go with generic SQL then you should be okay.

9:26 PM

Yeah, no idea. But I know six others so I can probably kludge it together.

Ah, good. They have the DB schema. very excited eyes I can do a lot of stuff with that.

@HDE226868 I'd rather kill that tag. It'd be better to have a tag capturing the time-shifting in general and a tag for the specific period. I mean, I don't want to see modern-in-ancient-Greece, modern-in-renaissance-europe, modern-in-inca, etc...

@MonicaCellio Agreed when you put it that way.

Should there be a Meta WB post about retiring that tag?

@Green @Samuel @HDE226868 voting is actually up for the last several weeks, after taking a dip earlier in the summer (vacations and the like, I presume).

@Green maybe. Some volunteer (cough) should look at those ten questions. If it's obvious what to do, just do it; if it's not obvious or you just want more input, post on meta. Sound good?

Sounds good to me. I'm busy for the rest of the evening but I'll see what I can do.

9:31 PM

@Green T-SQL, I'm pretty sure, not that I've seen cases where that mattered. But I am not an expert. Anything you know about plain old SQL is probably true for SEDE.

@Green thanks! Or if somebody else jumps in first, that's fine (please speak up if so).

Oh hey... anybody with 2k rep (I think?) should be able to see these analytics: worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/site-analytics

@MonicaCellio Nope

@MonicaCellio That's everyone who's spoken in the last 24 hours, I think.

(Mods have slightly better analytics, which is what I based my previous statement about voting on.)

404 for me

Not showing for me, though.

9:35 PM

Huh, that's weird -- let me find the MSE post about this.

@Green I can write up the post, if you want.

Just let me know.

Oh I see -- it's a "coming attraction" for "high-rep users" (not sure what exactly that'll end up meaning) and only works for mods right now. Sorry!

48

Q: Proposed micro-privilege: site analytics

Remember when I asked a few months ago: Help us identify micro-privileges for top users? The idea was to be able to start rolling these out quickly and not take too much developer and designer time. In particular, the idea I suggested in the question, site analytics, should have been a quick turn...

feature-request moderator-tools privileges analytics

"5k on undergraduate sites"

Guess we're in college.

Ok, this reports average votes on answers and questions each day for the last week - data.stackexchange.com/worldbuilding/query/354822/…

Ah, yes -- just found that.

9:39 PM

I modified the original so its limited to the last week.

Interesting. It picked up just after I got back from vacation.

@HDE226868 there's been a focus of late on some of the terminology. With long-running betas that never "graduate" ('cause they're just not active enough), does "graduation" say to those sites "you didn't make it"? Robert Cartaino wants to get rid of the term entirely, and also drop "beta" after a few months IIRC.

@MonicaCellio I remember the slew of meta posts on that. I was jesting.

@HDE226868 hmm. :-)

@Green Here, now it's also sorted by day to start with - data.stackexchange.com/worldbuilding/query/354824/…

9:42 PM

We're not downvoting enough, are we?

We do on Mondays, apparently.

I mean, I've focused on downvoting poor answers to hard-science questions, but I'm not seeing a lot of downvoting there or on many other posts.

I usually comment on those ones first. It's kind of a special case and people get testy if downvotes are first.

As we have seen :)

Ah, yes. I did get a bit testy when I was downvoted on Friday because I thought it was a certain user being a bit . . . spiteful. There were, of course, valid reasons for downvoting my answer, as parts were not that good, so I decided to shut up about it after that.

When I get downvoted, though, the other guy is right 90% of the time, though.

I don't even get a comment that often.

9:49 PM

I generally comment if the person shows good intentions, unless someone else has already brought the issue up.

Wow, this thing can actually move (image out of context but related to a question):

user image

Bagger 288 (Excavator 288), built by the German company Krupp for the energy and mining firm Rheinbraun, is a bucket-wheel excavator or mobile strip mining machine. When its construction was completed in 1978, Bagger 288 superseded Big Muskie as the heaviest land vehicle in the world, at 13,500 tons. In 1995, it was itself superseded by the slightly heavier Bagger 293. NASA's Crawler-Transporter still remains the largest self-powered land vehicle in the world, since bucket-wheel excavators are powered by an external power source, and the Overburden Conveyor Bridge F60s hold the title of largest...

10:37 PM

@HDE226868 I'd like to see that thing in a Mad Max or zombie survival situation.

@Samuel Yes!

user image

Overburden Conveyor Bridge F60

F60 is the series designation of five overburden conveyor bridges used in brown coal (lignite) opencast mining in the Lusatian coalfields in Germany. They were built by the former Volkseigener Betrieb TAKRAF in Lauchhammer and are the largest movable technical industrial machines in the world. As overburden conveyor bridges, they transport the overburden which lies over the coal seam. The cutting height is 60 m, hence the name F60. With a length of 502 m, it is described as the lying Eiffel tower. In total, the F60 is up to 80 m high and 240 m wide. In operating condition, it weighs 13,600 metric...

Some fun engineering there.

I wonder what the insurance is on that thing.

I wonder if there is an easy way to see how much reputation I've lost due to the daily cap.

I suppose just (question upvotes *5 + answer upvotes *10 + answer accepts * 15 + question accepts * 2 + bounty) - (given bounty + downvotes *2) = reputation lost due to cap

But that's not an easy way.

10:55 PM

@Samuel You'd probably have to comb through it manually, but I remember reading something about it on Meta.

Oh, there is a query.

I've lost 4,256 due to cap.

. . . Wow.

I guess I didn;t want to know that.

What query is it?

data.stackexchange.com/worldbuilding/query/340568/…

Gives rep without cap

So, that minus your current rep.

data.stackexchange.com/worldbuilding/query/338054/…

That ones is even more painful.

I had two days where over 300 was lost.

370 on the worst day..

11:03 PM

I've lost 230, apparently. Not bad.

The last time that happened was December 3rd.

The most I've lost is 140.

Basically 37 of these votes - worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/21913/3202

Oh well.

I've seen that happen a lot. You answer early in the day, the question hits the HNQ, and you proceed to lose quite a lot.

Painful.

The dirtscrapers question hit the HNQ. We now have 7 questions there.

I see the point in a rep cap for sure. But maybe awarding one point instead of zero would hurt less and let us see that things are still getting votes.

Seems like it would serve the same purpose.

People would still game the system, though, just en masse.

@Green has a higher hit rate than I do :) data.stackexchange.com/worldbuilding/query/276817/…

11:10 PM

Hey, I'm 9th!

You're close to the Epic badge, then.

data.stackexchange.com/worldbuilding/query/223913/…

That's a good one too

Wait, I've lost 668 reputation? That can't be right. . .

It calculates a slightly different value.

I'm not sure if one or the other is taking into account bounties.

Or downvotes.

Oh, this one does. That other one didn't.

Weird. This guy's at -355 with that.

Yeah, something is not being accounted for. Probably bounty given away.

And something else... Maybe downvotes, because bounties aren't in increments of 5 points.

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