How did I manage to get 201 points for the day just ended? The Rep panel just shows the last upvote with +1 after a long string of blanks since I had already reached the limit of 200.
I have noticed that the capping system is annoyingly dumb: after truncating incoming upvotes, if I “spend” poin...
@JDługosz The reason I completely neglected (so far) your laser setup is that I'm not at all convinced you can create a beam with a small enough divergence that will deliver the necessary power with the necessary accuracy from three light-years away. I'm going to look into how that would affect the spacecraft, but I'm still trying to convince myself that that's plausible.
Well, Robert L Forward used the device thinking it could really work. In Rocheworld he had an issue where the larger lens didn’t get funded in time and they end up halfing the frequency instead. That was to Barnard’s star. IAC I would be more interested in knowing what it takes to get convergence than to learn about a thousand-year flight that is not relavent to my story.
After I edited Does the probable heat of nanotech universal constructors make it infeasible in home environments? I noticed that the editor had altered 10^12 to 1012. While trying to fix this the editor told me I needed to change at least 6 characters before I could save the edit. In this case I ...
Is there a way to add more options to the review stuff. A lot of the times the problem with the answer is that it needs to be expounded on, rather than any of the current options given, or perhaps a way to mark something as a Low Quality answer and possibly allow the answerer to mark it that way ...
who, I just found some really weird code. There's a class with a static field of the same class. You call a static method which returns that field, or instantiates it if it doesn't exist
I can't tell if it's brilliant, or commonplace and I'm just stupid
@James I use portable recorders (Zoom and Tascam) that provide phantom power over XLR. A USB box can do the same—external box is much better than a sound card because of the heavy rf interferance in the PC chassis.
You can get a $100 Zoom recorder with builttin mike that is great for interviews and voiceover. Next size up (h4n is what I have) takes xlr inputs.
@james I suggest shopping at a brick&morter store like Gutar Center. Get the cheapest thing in pro audio, with help from the salesguy. Like what I did: USB box for $150 quite a few years ago, low end but still pro quality microphone, intstore deals for stand and cables. The people at the pro audio counter are geeks for this and can really help.
But now, you can also find all in one USB units that are sold as podcasting microphones! If you don’t plan on doing anything else (output to home theater or pro headphones, accept different kinds of inputs,etc) that might be easy.
but there are advantages to the self-contained recorder like the Zoom! It will work even if you are using the PC for other things and the recording app clashes with the chatting app, etc.
Well, as a nontpro who bought stuff to use with computers for hobby use, I might have more specific advice than the pro who uses it for pro work. So let me know if you have any more thoughts. I really suggest in-person shopping at Gutar Center.
@JDługosz wow, I really have to say it again. ’tis now my hightest scoring answer!
@NexTerren well, I saw you mention XLR, which is higher end. I would be afraid that a cheap podcasting mike would be a prop that looks like a pro mike but is terrible. I found a <$30 lav mike at radio shack a couple years ago that’s better than I expected.
How to tell without trying? Take a laptop and headphones so you can record something in the store?
Or just budget $100. It will outlast generations of PCs so the amortisation is better than you are used to for computer stuff.
@JDługosz I dunno. I've heard $40 gaming headsets (complete with the speaker bits, mind) that sound perfectly fine for what I'd expect of an amature podcast.
@NexTerren well, someone the other day had one that did not. I've bought one and they must have spent more on the packaging than parts—a real turd when I tried it, irregardless of the boasts on the box. How do you tell beforehand?
I was thinking of bold letter, not arrow on top. I want to make the illistration I'm drawing use the same notation and appearance, and crazy manual adjustment of items in Illustrator is to be avoided if I can use bold a d subscriot with regular text. So what should it look like for this meaning, in this style? Is the p italic as well as bold? Is the subscript the same or plain letter or what?
I can never remember how to format units in math formatting, and people show different ways to do it anyway! So I thought it would be a good idea to hqve a permanent note listing things to do and not-do with peer-approved examples to copy from.
Units
Scientific notation with units on the end:
...
https://medium.com/universe-factory/the-sisters-war-part-2-6f954aef1cba?source=rss----6b76dbf2e0eb---4 Universe Factory - Medium The Sisters’ War: Part 2 Monica Cellio 1473367683
Let us say that, in the future, some scientists have created satellites capable of something that seems science fiction for now — punching the walls of the universe to study an alternate reality. By that scenario, some hundreds of “alternate Earths” from hundreds of alternate universes would alre...
I feel like a very high percentage of the questions asked here concern plausibility, which is something that's hard to avoid where any kind of fiction is concerned. Some questions purport to be related to "reality", even if they try to "hedge their bets", but in the context of fiction are really ...