The Factory Floor

5:33 AM

@Green First off, they're a minute that has 61 seconds, so you have to account for that. But the bigger issue is that they aren't predictable. They occur when and where needed to keep UTC squared to the rotation of the earth.

So that means the only way to know when they have occured is to have a table containing all of them. And there's no way to predict ahead when they will occur in the future.

So every time one happens, some poor IT sap has to go configure the computer to do a one-shot correction.

Contrast that with leap years, which we can predict hundreds of years into the future.

dot_Sp0T

9:19 AM

Sooo, I am back and ready regarding the ordering stuff in the US/Austria @James @Hosch250

Hosch250

1:08 PM

I'm here.

Kind of.

John Locke

1:39 PM

That was a really stupid pun, I'm sorry

Hosch250

1:52 PM

I missed it :(

Please send it again.

James

@JohnLocke You're fine bad-puns is one of the tags for this room.

Hosch250

James won't let us add limerick, though :(

James

Seriously...its right over there ---> and up...

limericks are the devil's poetry.

2

Hosch250

Even after I made a custom one that he starred in.

James

@Hosch250 I had to dip my monitor in the holy waters of the Lethe after that so I could remove the demonic taint.

Hosch250

2:11 PM

LOL. Didn't it get wrecked?

John Locke

@James And now it's on the star board too

AndyD273

@Hosch250 Thankfully lethe water is ultrapure, so no conductance.

Hosch250

Oh.

AndyD273

Is Everything Waterproof in Pure De-ionized Water? Charging Phone in Pure Water Test

►

John Locke

@Hosch250 I said the birds aren't real campaign is a hoot. It wasn't a good enough pun to qualify as a bad pun.

James

2:19 PM

Lethe

In Greek mythology, Lethe (Greek: Λήθη, Lḗthē; Ancient Greek: [lɛ́:tʰɛː], Modern Greek: [ˈliθi]) was one of the five rivers of the underworld of Hades. Also known as the Ameles potamos (river of unmindfulness), the Lethe flowed around the cave of Hypnos and through the Underworld, where all those who drank from it experienced complete forgetfulness. Lethe was also the name of the Greek spirit of forgetfulness and oblivion, with whom the river was often identified. In Classical Greek, the word lethe (λήθη) literally means "oblivion", "forgetfulness", or "concealment". It is related to the Greek...

Hosch250

That's as good as the Flat Earth Society.

John Locke

@AndyD273 I was hoping he would throw a handful of salt in the bowl at the end just to see what would happen.

AndyD273

@JohnLocke Replication is at the heart of the scientific method. I approve of your volunteering to verify the results of his experiment, and please be sure to record the additional experimental results of adding salt at the end.

John Locke

@AndyD273 Here's a question: If you dump a huge amount of salt in a small amount of water, will the salt absorb the water before it ruins the phone?

AndyD273

2:35 PM

@JohnLocke Checks out. Definitely a question. It has that little squiggle at the end.

James

@AndyD273 lol

Green

@CortAmmon I read once in the laments of a developer who spent way too much time dealing with timezones and such that there was a time database that could be queried to catch leap seconds like that.

Hosch250

I want to see a computerized analog clock deal with a 61 second minute when the hardware only supports 60 ticks per minute.

John Locke

2:53 PM

@Hosch250 NASA illustration

dot_Sp0T

4:06 PM

I am return

Hosch250

4:27 PM

@dot_Sp0T I am Groot.

BTW, @AndyD273, got any ideas for the story go round?

James

@Green @AndyD273 I think I figured out my preferred political party

In no particular order
1. Will overturn citizens united, and require all donations be by individuals and disclosed
2. Make change incrementally based on actual data
3. 4 term limit for reps, 2 term limit for senators, 1 (12 - 16 year) term for SCOTUS
4. Supports a bipartisan organization to manage redistricting
5. Financially moderate, debt is ok in some situations but shouldn't be the norm
6. Prioritizes policies that provide opportunity, social policies (race religion etc) would be limited to leveling the field as well

Those are both policy things and government restructuring things.

Hmm...actually this is less a party and more what I want government to look like...

Mithrandir24601

@James For the point about debt, I've been told (and I believe they could be right) by various people that a country being in debt is a good thing - on an inter-country scale, money isn't really the same thing as what we use

James

4:42 PM

@Mithrandir24601 True. And despite all the calls for "government to be run like a business" ...government is in fact not a business, it is not intended to be profitable by definition. It manages a bunch of stuff that business doesn't want to deal with/isn't profitable.

Hosch250

@James There have been good discussions about 10 on politics.

James

@Hosch250 Seems like such a no brainer to me. The only reason not to support it is you don't want people to go vote.

Hosch250

13 Meh... So much science has been flawed in the past...

@James Nope.

People still have to work on national holidays in many fields.

And those days are the busiest of all for many fields (fast food for one).

James

@Hosch250 Agreed, but what do we have to go on that is better than science?

Hosch250

What we do now?

Nothing?

And then we get cases where "science" is split by party too.

James

4:44 PM

@Hosch250 Science is better, if still imperfect, than nothing.

Hosch250

I don't know...

James

@Hosch250 That actual science isn't split...people just twist it.

Hosch250

Yes, interpretation of science.

Which is what the politicians would use, instead of actual science.

James

@Hosch250 True, but this wouldn't be christmas/etc. The whole point of the day is to vote.

@Hosch250 The idea is that this party would listen to what the scientists say instead of their understanding/interpretation of science.

Hosch250

Voting takes 10 minutes. The rest of the day, people would party/go on trips.

Even scientists interpret data.

James

4:46 PM

Again...its not perfect but nothing will be.

Humans are messy.

@Hosch250 Seems like a good deal all around then.

Hosch250

@James The partying/going on trips is what generates the busyness for other fields.

"Ooops, can't get gas, the gas station is closed".

"Ooops, out of beer; what'll we do?!"

James

@Hosch250 That's just bad planning those people deserve it!

Hosch250

"What the scientists say" is open to A) the scientist's interpretation, B) the organization the scientist works for, and C) the government in some cases (e.g. nuclear weapons).

You can't trust a scientist any farther than anyone else.

James

@Hosch250 These are fair points and I don't see obvious solutions but I still feel it is better than today.

Hosch250

Yeah, I'm not saying it's perfect. I'm just saying that making these changes suddenly violates rule #2 :)

Especially all at once.

James

4:50 PM

True. But this would be the platform for the party, it doesn't have to all happen at the same time.

Hosch250

Yep.

8, yeah, take care of the environment, but remember--the environment is a heck of a lot more stable than we think, and counter-correcting things can do just as much harm as the initial problem.

It's best to prevent damage than to try to repair it, but better to just cause damage (for a period) than cause damage and try to repair it.

For example, wind farms really screw with weather patterns, which is NOT a good thing. It might be better than CO2 at the end of the day, but we'd better check it fast before we ban gas.

AndyD273

@James Fairly decent list. Some of them might need a bit of definition, and I'd like to add something along the lines of the "Read the bills act" and the "one subject at a time act", just to make sure that really stupid things like not allowing congress to vote on bills that they aren't allowed/don't have time to read, and make sure that people don't try to hide stupid things inside.

Mithrandir24601

5:18 PM

@Hosch250 It depends on the scientist really - there are scientists that you shouldn't trust anymore than anyone else (annoyingly, these can be the people making the big claims about things) but your average scientist is pretty trustworthy when it comes to their own field, in my experience. e.g. you'll often hear things like 'quantum computing is 10 years away'. It's not - we'll hopefully have something functional if tiny and really still very bad in about 30-40 years

Hosch250

@Mithrandir24601 LOL.

Enough time for me to finish my career before they come :)

Yeah, the reason we have computers everywhere today is because early computers didn't require that much skill once we knew how.

Mithrandir24601

@Hosch250 Probably :P Unless you work in comms (or some other specific applications) - it (quantum comms) is considerably more advanced and field trials are already in existence. Commercial systems are available, if about an order of magnitude too expensive yet

Hosch250

Anyone with a basic background in math could develop some seriously awesome techniques.

James

6:02 PM

@AndyD273 I really like the one subject at a time act. I should have included that.

Or what about, the individual pieces of legislation can only be 20 pages long act

AndyD273

6:28 PM

@James Eh, I dunno about that exactly... 20 pages might not be enough for some things. But if you do the Read the bills act, requiring that they HAVE to read it, out loud, before in a full voting session, and combine that with only allowing one subject, then you'll likely end up with much shorter bills by default. Who wants to sit there and listen to some politician drone on for 2000 pages of tightly packed legalize?

@Hosch250 I kinda don't. I sort of want to change what the last challenge is, as "herb challenge" is annoyingly broad and vague. Like, I think if the last challenge was "use all the knowledge to get into the academy" then we could everything worked out and bring it to a conclusion. Right now I've been waiting for inspiration to strike.

Hosch250

Yeah. I was thinking they finish this challenge, go home, then come back and get picked up.

AndyD273

Granted, that could still be the real final test

Hosch250

Because I couldn't figure out how to close it out otherwise.

AndyD273

I have an idea of how I'd like to see it close, namely, they have to use the knowledge they gained with shadows and the like to gain entrance to a place that is inaccessible otherwise.

This is also where they have their final showdown with the thugs. Basically the thugs have used threats of violence to make it through, and so haven't mastered the shadow stuff. SO they get to the end, and can't get in. The group shows up, one of the thugs tries to force them to open the door, the other either has a flash of conscience at last (good ending), or the group and maybe the new shadows subdue them both (less good ending) before opening the final door and getting into the academy.

Hosch250

@AndyD273 That's what I figured the overhanging cliff could be.

It could be the same type as that tunnel they had to cross.

But yeah, that's not something they could help these guys with much.

Feel free to change whatever you want.

James

6:49 PM

@AndyD273 legal-eze

AndyD273

7:03 PM

@James You could have just edited mine...

Alucard

what would a civilization look like if intelligence was equally distributed amongst all citizens?

Hosch250

Same as ours.

The differences are pretty much statistically insignificant, I'd guess, and would balance out anyway.

AndyD273

@Mithrandir24601 There is is a point where it stops being true. Take the Maldives. They accepted Chinese investment, and now their debt to GDP ratio is right around 100%. Meaning that they owe China roughly as much as their entire economy makes in a year. And so China is like, "hey, you know, you don't really need to worry about that. We'll just take this chunk of land to put up a military base! Don't worry, you'll hardly notice that we're here..."

John Locke

@Alucard Including common sense?

AndyD273

@Alucard So instead of a bell curve, it would be a line?

Hosch250

7:12 PM

You'd have no Newtons or Einsteins--but normal people would be able to draw the connection sooner or later anyway, and we don't have much commonly-useful tech that uses that knowledge.

And you'd have nobody with serious cognitive problems either.

Alucard

@AndyD273 ah no, i mean it like Hosch interprets it. everyone has iq=100

(if IQ is even a meaningful measurement)

AndyD273

@Alucard So no curve, just a flat line

Hosch250

@AndyD273 Not a line, a point.

AndyD273

ok

John Locke

@Hosch250 I would think it would be quite different. As a society our science would advance linearly instead of in large bursts.

Hosch250

7:15 PM

@JohnLocke No, it would still advance in bursts.

Someone, after long work, happens to see the problem come together.

Then, once the problem is solved, then everything easier can build on it.

How many times have you said "it could happen, if X worked"? It's the same thing. Once X works, A, B, C, D, etc. can all suddenly happen.

It's just that X has to be solved by a lot of work first.

AndyD273

I've heard different things about IQ being a meaningful measurement. I do believe there is a lower limit that the Army will reject an applicant for, the logic being that below a certain threshold it gets hard to teach new skills or something like that. That doesn't mean that people with lower IQs are less valuable, just that they might not be suited for all jobs.

Hosch250

For example, computers had to be build before we could have a single application.

But once we had a computer, then we got Word, Excel, C#, Java, etc, all pretty quickly, TBH.

An airplane had to be built before we could fly. But within 100 years, we had solved the problem of supersonic flight.

We just need a base to build on, but the base takes a long time.

Alucard

weren't there bases for flightmachines in the middleage?

on paper i mean

Hosch250

On paper.

But it took years and years before the practicality could be worked out.

AndyD273

None of them worked, but they had solid ideas. Some of them might have worked if they had a few other things, like gas motors

Hosch250

7:22 PM

The idea is there first, then we build the solid knowledge base, then all the applications for the knowledge base explode into being.

@AndyD273 Worked enough for them to figure it out from there, anyway :)

AndyD273

I wonder if it is some kind of gateway thing... You need someone to have that flash of insight to show that it is possible at all, and then suddenly it gets really easy.

Hosch250

@AndyD273 It gets easy because they document the behavior of the medium.

Etc.

For example, airplanes needed a basic knowledge of aerodynamics before it worked.

Alucard

also there are deventions, like Internet Explorer :D

James

@AndyD273 ...oh yeah. I sometimes forget the power I wield.

John Locke

@Hosch250 I see your point.

Hosch250

7:26 PM

For example, I still don't think a lot of those "geniuses" were that much more brilliant than a lot of other people.

AndyD273

Leonardo da Vinci was a real genius. If he had a couple extra bits of information, like how lift worked, they could have had airplanes, or at least gliders, a few hundred years earlier.

Hosch250

They were just hard-working, and had the right pieces in the right place.

AndyD273

@Hosch250 Maybe... I think there may be a bit more than that, even if it is just some ability to not see the world as they think it is, but how it really is, and how it could be. How many people throughout history have been hit on the head by fruit? It tooks someone really thinking about it, and figuring out "why" on a deep level.

Hosch250

Yep.

OTOH, we don't know how many people figured it out and never wrote it down, or it was lost because they were just "peasants".

AndyD273

Or it was an extra heavy piece of fruit?

James

7:32 PM

@AndyD273 Must have been a dragon fruit. Those things are dense.

AndyD273

"Pat McCray came very close to discovering the theory of gravity. But for one small fact he would have asked the important question of 'why did the watermelon fall DOWN to hit me?"

Hosch250

@AndyD273 You mean "UP"?

Watermelons grow on the ground :P

And again, I rather doubt a watermelon would do much unless it fell off an airplane. They burst pretty easily.

James

@Hosch250 <-- Winner.

@AndyD273 <-- Loser.

AndyD273

No, gravity makes things fall down. This is an important thing to realize. He just happened to be under the bridge on market day.

Hosch250

Well, OK.

In that case, though, I think he got a free watermelon.

Now, if it was a coconut...

AndyD273

7:35 PM

@Hosch250 Well, no one else wanted it. Brains kinda spoiled it...

James

Anyone else ever try a booze melon?

@Hosch250 Really as far as deadly fruit projectiles go your best bet is pineapple.

Alucard

@James two good things in one? what could possibly could wrong?

Hosch250

Brazil nuts: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_nut

Massive trees, massive nuts...

AndyD273

@James Because the enzymes will dissolve your body after it kills you?

James

@AndyD273 Its dense = bludgeoning damage + pokey = Piercing damage + sharp (leaves) = slashing damage.

but cleaning up after itself is a nice touch

AndyD273

7:41 PM

@James Pineapple, the fruit that eats you while you eat it.

John Locke

Can moderators on one site grant write privelages to users on another site's chat that don't have 20 rep yet?

Hosch250

Yes, all mods are chat mods.

Although, it might be different across the different servers (SO chat and SE chat are on different systems).

James

@AndyD273 giantitp.com/comics/oots0514.html

John Locke

Can a moderator here add The_Lava_Weilder to this room chat.stackoverflow.com/rooms/182163/…

I am trying to answer a question about App Inventor on SO but the comments are getting too long.

James

Also read the comic that directly follows.

If you created it you should be able to add him...I think

John Locke

7:55 PM

Not without being a mod. Unfortunately, I don't know any of the SO mods and can't find the main SO chatroom.

James

@JohnLocke I checked but I don't see any way to change his access

John Locke

It's in the room info. I can see it, maybe because I'm the room admin, but if I add them with write privelages it says they need 20 rep. A meta search told me that only mods can add them, but didn't specify if it had to be from that site.

AndyD273

@JohnLocke Do you see that option?

John Locke

Yes

I tried that

AndyD273

ah

well, I tried

John Locke

8:04 PM

Thanks anyway

I can try asking @HDE226868

*Summons a moderator*

Journeyman Geek

apparitions

AndyD273

FYI, Todays Audible book deal, Steelheart, is a pretty good story, if anyone's interested.

audible.com/pd/Steelheart-Audiobook/B00ECDZ08I

John Locke

I have done it! I have summoned a spirit from the depths of the 2017 Moderator Elections WB meta page! Infinite power will now be mine! Bwahaha

Journeyman Geek

@JohnLocke actually no.

John Locke

Oh, sorry, the 2017 Moderator Elections Super User meta page! Now I can get all the cheat codes!

Alucard

10:16 PM

Would we die if modern technology were suddenly absent, like electricity

Shalvenay

@Alucard ...you'd have to break so much physics to do that that we probably would be insta-toast

Green

@Alucard Yes, absolutely.

John Locke

10:35 PM

@Shalvenay Solar flare anyone?

@Alucard The main problem would be food and water. Without mechanized agriculture, food will be in very short supply and the supply chain will break down. If you reduce the population size first, people will be hit hard, but they won't die off.

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