The Factory Floor - 2018-01-22

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Ferret Civilization

12:00 AM

Feeling paranoid though have something like this, intermezzo.typepad.com/.a/… best second egress way of doing things

1 hour later…

1:15 AM

@kingledion Congrats on getting Legendary!

hey there @Gryphon and @HDE226868

2:12 AM

sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/01/180110131506.htm

World building idea: Magic packets

Imagine being able to contain magic with different aspects into small droplets, and then use physical or magical means to cause these to mold, transform and combine. This will put alchemy to a whole new level

In particular, you can have droplets with various infusions thus represent a compound magic effect contained in a small droplet, and control its reactivity with a droplet with different customisation

(NB not sure how true magic will fit into such framework, thus that is omitted from the above idea for now)

@HDE226868 Thank you! I was going to brag about it in chat tomorrow, so don't steal my thunder :)

hey there @kingledion

@Secret potions-by-the-drop xD

Hey @Shalvenay

@kingledion how're things going? been thinking about how nonsensical the "catgirl as playtoy" trope is to me, over here.

Uhhh, that seems kind of porn-y.

In pornotopia, anything can be realistic, as long as it ends in sex

@Shalvenay Where do you live that you are always online at night (from my East Coast US perspective)

2:24 AM

@kingledion one time zone west of you, I'm just a bit of a night owl :p

@kingledion my understanding is its kind of an anime thing (not necessarily fanservice, but leaning towards that)

(and also don't really have a life to speak of right now, in a bit of a lull between classes re: getting school finished first)

Well, I don't watch so much anime, so I don't really know about that

Nope, never seen that in porn of any kind, not at all

@kingledion yeah, my understanding of it is all third-hand, as all my catgirl exposure is of the discount-Khajiit variety, who come with all the equipment necessary to put you on the ground with a hole in your throat

Ferret Civilization

2:45 AM

Discount-Khajiit... What I think of before finishing that sentence, "The Lusty Khajiit Maid"

@FerretCivilization harharhar xD

I wouldn't argue with her xD angry Khajiit is more trouble than I want to have in my life

Ferret Civilization

But as long as you have coin Khajiit has wares...

@FerretCivilization hahaha, true xD

I definitely wouldn't want to stiff her, though!

Ferret Civilization

Would she just angrily tell me to go... *Put on shades* Elsweyr.
YEAH!!!

2 hours later…

4:43 AM

sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/01/180121221627.htm

A future where it might be possible to use acoustic tractor beams to levitate humans

8 hours later…

12:47 PM

Could someone reject this edit suggestion? Someone's trying to circumvent the character limit with HTML comments.

@Secespitus done

@Shalvenay Thanks.

How's it going?

Future Historian

1:08 PM

@FerretCivilization? New Visitor biology coming through.

They have four muscular legs, an exoskeleton, two arms with 3 fingers (including opposable thumbs), skin change based on humidity, mostly infrared eyesight with visible light mixed in (albeit colourblind), weak sense of echolocation compared to humans, contain spore sacs at the bottom, a tail that contains a spore release mechanism and has the capacity to extend itself, and has a heightened sense of hearing (therefore making sounds that humans would have trouble perceiving).

Once those spores are released, their life cycle is similar to that of jellyfish with a larva attaching itself to something, then becoming a polyp-like thing that the adults usually take care of as it reproduces asexually in there. Once a young normal-looking Visitor emerges, it ends up growing up for a while until it becomes an adult at ~13 Earth years of age (they can live up to 20 - 30 years on average in their pre-industrial times).

In their 21st Century equivalent, they could extend their lifespans to a maximum of 80 - 100 without radical life extension. Once that kicked in, they could live for centuries or millennia without dying, which depends on the technological capabilities that their political entities and cultures have available at any given point in time or in interstellar space.

@FerretCivilization? Is Kepler 442b being 2.9 billion years old a bad sign for a technological civilisation, even though it is a K-class star?

No wait.

He is not here.

@Shalvenay? Is this a better description of the Visitor biology than my original one?

1:52 PM

@Secespitus Do you know how to link a badge in a question, the way you can link a tag?

@HDE226868 Maybe if you are on you know how?

2:02 PM

@kingledion Have you tried [badge: example]? I don't know if that works but it would be the most obvious solution.

Though there is nothing about badges in the formatting page.

@Bellerophon It didn't seem to work

space

[badge:deputy]

[badge:populist]

Nope

No, it didn't. I'm trying to remember if I have ever seen it done.

Not working

We could ask on Meta SE.

Worldbuilding Meta

2:04 PM

1

Q: Know Your Site Monday: Which answers are most underappreciated?

Welcome to 'Know Your Site' a (hopefully) every Monday Worldbuilding trivia feature where I use the Stack Exchange Data Explorer and maybe some python parsing to find out interesting things about the site. I will post a question on Monday, and people have until Thursday at noon to guess the answ...

discussion trivia

@Gryphon I should search meta first, actually, let me do that

@kingledion If there isn't anything, might as well ask.

@kingledion I tried searching meta. Came up with nothing.

@WorldbuildingMeta Seems to much like maths to me.

Hmmm, my school internet blocks links direct to answers. Weird.

144

Q: Add badges to Markdown?

I always found it odd that although I could compose questions and answers with tags in markdown, I can't do the same for a Great Question, Great Answer, or any other badge. I assume that this is because, outside of Meta Stack Overflow, there is no real need to reference badges? Be that as it may,...

feature-request status-declined badges markdown

Not going to be implemented, as of October 2016

Yep, I just found that as well. Too bad.

2:10 PM

@kingledion You can't

Yeah we just found that out

One of the answers to your newest trivia should be on my highest voted question, let me search that...

2:23 PM

@Secespitus You can post the answers one at a time as you find them

I've got four already (and the one with 98 difference)

Thats good. I didn't know how easy those would be able to find

I might have to make them harder still :)

2:36 PM

I am missing one

I'll find it

(Sorry for solving that stuff so fast, I just love this sort of trivia :D)

@kingledion Found it (I was sure I already had it in my list and overlooked it...)

@Secespitus I wonder if I should post another one for today?

Nah, I'll wait until next week, but it will be really hard

Or maybe two questions, one fore @Secespitus, one for not-Secespitus

@kingledion Yeah, I am too awesome for normal questions :D

2

3:00 PM

@dot_Sp0T I can't access that video right now, but I'll check it out later.

Future Historian

@kingledion? Did you see the revised Visitor biology?

Sorry if I interrupted, but I wanted to know.

@Secespitus ah it's just one of my terrible mini-jokes - linked to the Think Different apple commercial

Future Historian

Hmmmmmmmm.

@dot_Sp0T Ah, not bad :D

Future Historian

I wonder if it is possible for the kind of skin change based on humidity to occur by natural evolution.

3:03 PM

@kingledion the plural form would be Secespiti, the negation thus non-Secespiti

3

Future Historian

sighs

I will take that as a "no".

Not the skin change, but.....the people seeing that revised biology.

@kingledion did I already mention that I slightly messed up on answering your chat questions about nuclear shelters in Switzerland? They are technically nuclear shelters in that most of them are below at least 1-2m of soil/concrete and in that they can be sealed air-tight and all of them are required to have air-filters to keep out chemical/nuclear contaminations

Future Historian

What about nuclear shelters?

@FutureHistorian it's pretty much all in the post above yours

Future Historian

Oh.

Well, what about the revised Visitor biology?

No comments?

Because I think I may need to ask about specific aspects of it (such as the fact that they can adapt their skin to the humidity of an environment, say a forest, savanna or desert, for example, and their jellyfish-like reproductive cycle, mixed with the initial stages like a fungus).

@dot_Sp0T? Question: if Kepler 442b is 2.3 Earth masses and 1.34 Earth radii, how strong is the magnetic field?

NOTE: The gravity on that planet is 1.28 Earth gees.

3:24 PM

@FutureHistorian honestly I don't see myself ever being able to derive the math necessary to answer that question. I already started a sweat when calculating the magnetic fields between two unipolar magnets...

Future Historian

@dot_Sp0T? Well, what is the equation for calculating Earth's magnetic field strength?

I will see if I can find out myself.

@FutureHistorian I just told you that I do have no bloody idea

Future Historian

Oh.

:(

Well, does anyone have that formula?

Or not really?

Why not try the internet ?

@dot_Sp0T I don't trust that thing

2

Future Historian

3:30 PM

I am trying that as we speak.

>:(

@FutureHistorian that's the spirit

Future Historian

So far, Earth's magnetic field is 25 to 65 microteslas.

I need to find out the strength of Kepler 442b's magnetic field.

In computer programming jargon, a heisenbug is a software bug that seems to disappear or alter its behavior when one attempts to study it. The term is a pun on the name of Werner Heisenberg, the physicist who first asserted the observer effect of quantum mechanics, which states that the act of observing a system inevitably alters its state. In electronics the traditional term is probe effect, where attaching a test probe to a device changes its behavior. Similar terms, such as bohrbug, mandelbug, hindenbug, and schrödinbug (see the section on related terms) have been occasionally proposed for other...

The many faces of glitches

Never heard of that term

3:46 PM

acutally another nature of magic question one can ponder is the following: What is the difference between programming and spells

this is also related to how to phrase information technology in purely descriptiv, emotive, artistic etc. language

@Secret Magic is more reliable than programming.

Well, that I kinda agree. Just a few hours ago, my optimisation program decided to spawn 3 hydrogens overlapping 3 other hydrogens, result it to crash any program that tries to load the molecule

and, being a heisenbug, I so far failed to reproduce it

Glitches and bugs in magical language, probably will be described as unknowns that creates specific or describable phenoemenon

They are in a sense, "localised packets of unknowns"

@Secret did you write the program yourself? By overlapping do you mean as in when you draw a visual representation of the data generated by it with another program, or is all in the same program? If the latter it's likely a floating point bug innit?

@Secret This is something I wonder about when thinking about magic systems... What is executing the spell? Is it the wizards own mind altering the universe? Is it some behind the scenes mechanism of the universe that is being triggered, like a compiler? I kind of like the universal compiler idea myself, over the wizard level compiler

@dot_Sp0T Well, the main program is a well establish one used in computational chemistry, however I wrote some scripts for job submission and batch processing of my PhD data. By overlapping, I mean the data is basically xyz coords of atoms, and I have 6 hydrogen atoms such that 3 pairs of them share the same xyz coords

4:01 PM

@AndyD273 I always thought the wizards were using some high-level language that is interpreted on the fly by the universe, which can lead to interesting results if you happen to mis-remember some instructions.

Future Historian

@AndyD273? Sorry to interrupt, but.....I have a problem.

@AndyD273 and Secespitus: Another possibility are supernatural agents like angels and demons pulling the strings in the background after reeiving the commands. You may as well say they are the compliers

@Secret Then you may have a problem when a different angel than usually receives your instructions.

@Secret So the Siri model of magic, the most annoying kind.

Which might make magic interesting again.

(and by the way @Secret: you can use multiple "@" in each chat message)

Future Historian

4:03 PM

If you saw the revised Visitor biology, you probably noticed that they have a weaker sense of echolocation.

I know, but I treat pings as a precious commodity, thus I seldom use it if the conversation is obvious

Future Historian

Unfortunately, I want to know: if Kepler 442b is 2.3 Earth masses and 1.34 Earth radii, how powerful is its magnetic field relative to ours?

@FutureHistorian 0.9

some time later, I might need to put deeper thoughts on this direction, this programming perspective might help put some of the descriptions of magic in some perspective that will allow easier comprehension and hence contribute to the answer of the nature of magic, but for now, it's 3:04, I am dashing to sleep, I have been rather f****** by the heisenbugs in my PhD coding

Future Historian

@AndyD273? Relative to Earth....?

How di-?

4:06 PM

@FutureHistorian Mass and magnetic field are not related. Set it to whatever you want for your story

Future Historian

is confused and lost

:(

Oh.

Well, it does relate to density, which, in turn, should give away its composition.

No, it doesn't relate to density, it relates to the core

Future Historian

Oh.

And what it's made of

Future Historian

:(

4:07 PM

and how its spinning

and a lot of other things that we wont know until we get there someday

Future Historian

Or they get to us.....if any intelligent life is there advanced enough.

Get it?

drums play in the background

Mars doesn't have a magnetic field, but that's not because it's mass, it's because it's core froze up and stopped spinning.

Our moon really helps us, because it keeps the Earths insides moving around

Future Historian

Well, this planet has 3 moons (1 is big and the other two are captured asteroids).

:P

So it probably has a magnetic field. So decide how weak or strong you want it, and set it to that.

Future Historian

Hmmmm. Fair enough.

Problem? This planet is bigger than Earth, yet it is 2.9 billion years old.

:/

3.8504 g/cm^3 is how dense this moon is.

4:12 PM

If you get it wrong, you can wait for the Keplers to complain.

Future Historian

84% silicate rock, 14% iron and 2% water ice is Kepler 442b m I's composition.

Also, what does echolocation have to do with magnetism anyway? Those are not the same thing at all

I just want to say, if you tell people what the moon is made out of in your story, it will only make the story weaker.

It's fine if you want to note that stuff for your development phase, to keep things consistent, but it won't add anything to your story at all.

Hi @RoryAlsop

@AndyD273 afternoon

Future Historian

Hmmmmmmm.

@AndyD273? Because echolocation is dependent on a magnetic field to function?

I really need to do some research.

Also, I found the hill sphere of this planet.

0.006 AU relative to the planet.

Or more specifically...........

952,685.7724303737 km.

@Secret I never really liked the supernatural agents method... It seems like it would degrade into a massive legalize problem, like giving instructions to a djinn, unless you were on really good terms with your compiler.

Animal echolocation

Echolocation, also called bio sonar, is the biological sonar used by several kinds of animals. Echolocating animals emit calls out to the environment and listen to the echoes of those calls that return from various objects near them. They use these echoes to locate and identify the objects. Echolocation is used for navigation and for foraging (or hunting) in various environments. Echolocating animals include some mammals and a few birds; most notably microchiropteran bats and odontocetes (toothed whales and dolphins), but also in simpler form in other groups such as shrews, one genus of meg...

Future Historian

4:25 PM

Oops.

So.........it is like sonar but for....... facepalms

I meant the ones seen in sharks.

Maybe this?

Magnetoreception

Magnetoreception (also magnetoception) is a sense which allows an organism to detect a magnetic field to perceive direction, altitude or location. This sensory modality is used by a range of animals for orientation and navigation, and as a method for animals to develop regional maps. For the purpose of navigation, magnetoreception deals with the detection of the Earth's magnetic field. Magnetoreception is present in bacteria, arthropods, molluscs and members of all major taxonomic groups of vertebrates. Humans are not thought to have a magnetic sense, but there is a protein (a cryptochrome) in...

or this?

Electroreception

Electroreception is the biological ability to perceive natural electrical stimuli. It has been observed almost exclusively in aquatic or amphibious animals, since salt-water is a much better conductor than air; the currently known exceptions being the monotremes (echidnas and platypuses), cockroaches and bees. Electroreception is used in electrolocation (detecting objects) and for electrocommunication. == Overview == Until recently, electroreception was known only in vertebrates. Recent research has shown that bees can detect the presence and pattern of a static charge on flowers. Electroreception...

Future Historian

The latter.

Oops.

Well, oops.

Sorry about that.

I mixed up the wrong terms.

Yeah, they're similar enough to be confusing but really mean very different things

echolocation is bats and dolphins etc - they make clicks/etc and listen for the echo

7 hours later…

11:07 PM

hey there @Mithrandir24601

11:20 PM

hey there @Green

Mithrandir24601

@Shalvenay ni hao! How're things?

@Mithrandir24601 alright here, wondering what Euron would think of coming across a droneship in the middle of the ocean :P

Mithrandir24601

@Shalvenay "What the **** is that! Archers at the ready!"

@Mithrandir24601 they loose a volley of arrows, only to have the droneship's rugged construction shrug at the pelting

Mithrandir24601

@Shalvenay Then they'd probably try to board it :P

11:30 PM

@Mithrandir24601 heheheh. what would their response be to finding nobody aboard?

Mithrandir24601

@Shalvenay try to figure out how to sail it?

@Mithrandir24601 LOL. they'd probably look all over and not be able to figure that out

Mithrandir24601

@Shalvenay exactly

I wonder if the thing has a P.A. though...

if it did, that could be cause for much consternation :D

Mithrandir24601

@Shalvenay "Where's that noise coming from? There's no-one here!" (probably with lots of angry tones and swearing)

11:36 PM

@Mithrandir24601 xD siren noises blare "Mission Control to unknown boarders: Leave the ship at once!"

Mithrandir24601

@Shalvenay "Not a ******* chance!"

"This is my ship now! Ain't that right boys?"

@Mithrandir24601 "This is your last warning!" a couple minutes later, a loud roaring noise can be heard from the sky as a streak of light heads for the ship....

Mithrandir24601

@Shalvenay Panic ensues

@Mithrandir24601 the roaring abruptly gets louder as the object comes into view -- a tall cylinder spouting flames from its base

Mithrandir24601

yeah, definitely panic :P

11:41 PM

remark from Mission Control: "talk about morons...snuck in in a skiff under the radar, then thought boarding the droneship at T+0:30 was wise. Guess they'll learn real fast how hot RP-1 burns..."

hrm...would the boarders finally abandon ship at this point?

Mithrandir24601

@Shalvenay Dive into the water?

@Mithrandir24601 yeah, I hope they would dive in before they find out how hot rocket exhaust is

cues shot of Euron running off the deck and jumping in the water as the rocket lands, with his everything on fire

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Jan '1822

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