@Green so I get home, and the wife is halfway through the pilot of AHS... Just kinda weird...

Last night dream involves a strange conversation:

Guy: Is it possible to try again when you fail at a game?

Me: The issue is that this game only exists in the dream world, thus you have to be very lucky to revisit the same dream world in order to play the game again. But if you are referring to games normally, then why not, you can always pick up the game and retry, it will not suddenly disappears

Time for a new question about airships

@AndyD273 AHAHAHHAHA!!!! The weirdness is spreading!

Yeah, it was a strange coincidence

There is a new sci-fi series on the YouTube premium originals channel called Origin. It's kind of a space horror/suspense type thing, but WB kind of messed it up for me... It takes place on a space ship with rotating rings for gravity, except that they keep showing the people standing on the wrong surface when the show external shots...

They do get it right other times, showing the people walking down long halls that curve up in both directions, like you'd expect, but whoever did their CGI decided that artistic license trumps physics. :)

That being said, the first episode was pretty good.

Is that a still shot or part of the movie?

screen capture from the trailer, but it's also in the show

@AndyD273 Groan. All they needed to do is rotate the frame so the hub is at the top of the frame.

And if this is a horror/suspense show then having someone upside down would be really helpful to make the audience uncomfortable.

its from a long pan out, where they show his face up close, and then zoom out till you can see all of the ship, with a bunch of different rings and solar sail and stuff

Yeah. Probably most people won't really think of it, and might have thought it looked weird to be looking out the window up at the rest of the ship, instead of down at the rest of the ship...

There were a few other continuity errors that were put in for dramatic license, and the ship layout doesn't make a lot of sense if you look at the external views and try to make them fit the internal sets, but after you beat the logical center into quiescence it was pretty enjoyable.

@AndyD273 Ain't that always the way? Logic makes things hard.

Similar to logic: I'm trying to find a comic I saw once where a normie is sitting on a park bench. A guy in a hat sits down next time and asks if he has any friends. The guy replies that he does. The hat guy replies "Need help with that?" and holds out a book titled simply "Philosophy".

I was reading a book about the history of quantum physics and related topics, and it was interesting how much of it came out of someone making a philosophical argument about how the universe should work, with a lot of them having little maths background, but then later on a mathematician comes along and figures out the math to make the philosophy work (or not, in some cases).

It's very similar to how Star Trek has moulded a lot of science and technology. Some writer and set designer though that something was cool, and then later on scientists try to make it reality

The cycle of Cambrian explosions in new fields fascinates me. If you're a JS developer, the number of libraries and frameworks is absolutely exploding. Lots of little (or large) experiments are being run. Many will fail or fall into irrelevance so that a few established players remain with "The Right Way" to do things.

The primary reason I am interested in scifi is because it so resembles reality that one day it can be realised and thus the ideas directly explored physically

@AndyD273 Heh. Someone says "The world works thus!" Someone else says "Yeah, let's test it." then we learn something new.

To me, my holy grail of worldbuilding is to worldbuild a Verse so similar to reality and at the same time, so distinct such that it confuses the hell out of real life itself, thus making the laws of physics unable to distinguish between reality and fiction, and thus allowing my imagined entities to coexist and be accessible by other people

@Secret I kinda think it works the other way around. Scifi shows a version of reality, and if it gets popular enough reality tries to shift toward that vision.

that is true. Collective belief exerts its influence not via supernatural law of attraction stuff, but because of how it motivates humanity as a whole towards a certain goal, thus shifting reality into that vision

@Secret What is reality anyways? Nietzche is quoted as saying, "Reality is those illusions that we have forgotten are illusions."

(extreme delusion mode) It does not matter what reality is, what it matters is I will force it to coexist with my worldbuild world by 2020

@CortAmmon Actually, philosophically speaking...

does reality knew whether it is real

Depends on your illusions =)

Hmm, that might make an interesting story. Reality, itself, knows that it isn't real, like a lucid dream, and it is the humans in the story which force reality to stay asleep because they aren't ready to face the illusions yet.

@Secret you have to get a majority of belief before that can happen, meaning that you have to get a majority to believe that it is possible. Star Trek did it, but it took a couple decades to get tablets and personal communicators... You are going to have to work fast to get it all by 2020

Acutally, I marked that as extreme delusion for a reason: It is highly unlikely to be possible. for starters my Verse include the following things:

There is so far no evidence of 1 and theory said it is highly unstable (thought we have mimics in condensed matter physics)

Backward time travel is highly unlikely to be feasible, and even if so, evidence suggest we are operating in type 1, not type 3

Extra macroscopic spatial dimensions were ruled out by a paper this year

arxiv.org/abs/1801.08160

@Secret Is that the one about how gravity doesn't appear to be weakened because it has propagated across other dimensions, as tested by observations of two neutron stars merging and the gravity waves measured?

yup

IIRC, it doesn't actually say that they are impossible, just that gravity doesn't work that way across them. It wasn't so much ruling them out, as it was saying that they are not the reason why gravity is so weak.

It also doesn't mean they are possible either, of course

hmm I see

The theory was "Hey, maybe gravity is weak because it is bleeding across other dimensions on the m-brane. Lets measure it. Hmm, nope, that's not it..."

If they had seen evidence that it was doing that then we would have had direct proof of other dimensions, which would be cool. But as is "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence", or "you can't falsify a negative", or something like that...

Personally, I kind of wonder if it is weak because it is stretched out like a string. The longer it is, the more it is stretched, and the weaker it is. And gravity waves are just vibrations down the string... The strings could be philosophical strings, or string theory strings...

Science is full of negatives. Only rarely does a really interesting positive come around. As stated in Schlock Mercenary, "Many people think scientific discovery sounds like 'Eureka!' followed by jumping out of your bathtub and streaking through the town. Real scientific discovery does not sound that way. Real scientific discovery sounds like, 'Hmm, that's kind of funny.'"

What's shakin wubbers?

@AndyD273 Can you unfalsify non-negatives, though?

(Sorry, had a discussion about double-negatives in the context of programming earlier.)

@James I don't know but I'm'bout to drop some sick wubb-a-licious bass beats in da house!

Guess who's still not done

@dot_Sp0T would it be .fleck?

@Green Don't insult our client's machinery!

@Hosch250 dotFeckless sounds like garbage machinery.

@Green No, John Deere...

@Hosch250 Oh! Well, Case tractors are worse! They choke on a tiny bit of corn husk dust. Psshaw, they ain't nothing!

LOL.

For real, though, all that machinery is ****ing awesome.

@Hosch250 I can be equally racist against all farm equipment.

@Hosch250 No kidding. Both the people that work with/on them and the machines themselves.

Is it racist if I just hate everyone equally?

@AndyD273 Only if everyone is from the same racial group.

I'm time-ist. Modern people just don't hold candles to the ancients.

Oh, I don't discriminate based on race. That would be racist.

I don't think modern construction is worse than Roman construction.

But catch modern people doing that level of construction with that same equipment...

@Green Just no.

lol

@James WUB WUB BUZZZZ BUZZZZZZ WUB WUB BBUUUUZZZ BASS BUZZZ to rock dah house!

@Green You sound like malfunctioning hard drive.

@James FALSE. I am robot super genius!

@James I'm a robot with machine learning trained on a sample of all of Spotify. No human can out beat me.

@Green There is so much wrong with that statement bahahahaha.

@James Snow!

@James You're welcome :)

@HDE226868 Snow rocks.

@James I think it's funny to hear people complain about snow....because I don't have to shovel it, drive in it, or walk in it for any long distance. I can walk in the snow if I want to.

Snow is great!

I have to drive and shove and walk a bit in it and couldn't care less. I shovel the entire driveway into a pile and we make a snow cave :D

I don't like driving in it.

It makes me take 2 hours instead of 1 hour to get to work.

Most of that is freeway, bumper to bumper. It's better driving home, because it either gets cleared, or it's less traffic, or both.

I don't mind it otherwise.

The cold is bad sometimes. I park outside, and tumbling from a warm bed to -10F or colder within 30 minutes is brutal.

Usually a week or few each winter, with mostly 0-10F temps the rest of the time.

@HDE226868 oh boy, university

Oh man, that's nice.

I thought it was a screenshot of a winter scene in front of a "castle" in a movie.

Nope, very much real. And very much not a castle.

@HDE226868 Ow, crick in the neck

@HDE226868 Very pretty!

@Hosch250 That kind of cold only bothers me for a few days then it's normal again.

I generally don't mind snow, I just wish they hadn't decided to skip fall this year. It went summer, quasi-spring with lots of cold rain, and then winter.

I went to school in a place that would see day time highs of -5F for a week at a time (-20F at night. Not too far away, they would see -40F).

@Green That was us last year :)

@Green I was in Minneapolis. Yeah winter was brutal.

@Green That sounds like . . . fun. Ish. Not really.

@Hosch250 As long as you've got days long snow storms, I'm happy. The east coast gets 12 to 18 hour blasts then sunshine.

I like the week long snow storms.

I very rarely landed on the correct side of the "Stay in warm bed" vs. "Get up and go to class" debate

@HDE226868 You get so where you can tell how cold it is based on how stiff your boogers freeze up.

@James You went to school in Minneapolis or just lived there for a while?

@Green School

@Green Nope.

Maybe night-long.

@James St Paul here.

@Hosch250 Ok technically I was in St Paul too.

East shore of White Bear Lake.

But more people are familiar with the non-bastard child in that "twin" relationship.

@James Did you get Bachelors in Nerdom?

@Green Close. Philosophy.

@James Fair. Philosophy does tend to narrow the people who can be your friends....just like an engineering degree would.

Also drinking and video games...though those weren't really formal "classes"

the first ever xkcd I saw was a CS Major buddy of mind sending me the race car on a train strip.

@James I went to a dry school where alcohol in any form and concentration was a very dirty word. Sex was a dirty word too.

@Green Dude. My school was Catholic. All the dorms were gender specific and technically the campus was dry...reality was a little different.

@James All my dorms were gender specific and the campus was actually dry. If you got caught drinking or intoxicated, you got expelled. I don't ever recall seeing a liquor store in that town of 15K (30K with students).

@Green Wow...

thats...ewww

@James Thankfully, I now enjoy a good hard cider.

@Green When and if I ever get to the east coast we are going to practice drinking good whiskey

@James Not Jameson.

@Green Nice.

@Green Jameson is gross.

I don't think anyone actually likes it...they just pretend to like it because other people pretend to like it.

From a different chatroom:

@James So, what's a good whiskey?

@Green I prefer Rye's personally. My regular, in the cabinet, is Templeton.

It totally tastes like Creme Brulee

@James really?!

You just have to get past the first few drinks where whiskey burns.

@Green Yup.

Quite delicious

@James those kinds of flavor profiles fascinate me because there is zero creme in the whiskey but it sure tastes like it does.

I don't really mix anymore but once upon a time I would on occasion drink a whiskey mixxed with cream soda.

My alcohol pallette is very under-developed. I'm starting with hard ciders because that's familiar and I think I might be passed that period of life where one acquires the taste for beer.

@Green You aren't.

My grandpa played next to a brewery in his childhood. He wasn't able to develop a taste for beer for a couple decades.

@Green Nah. You just need proper guidance, which for the record, is far less painful than drinking crappy stuff until you just appreciate good stuff.

templetonrye.com/the-good-stuff

When I was in college, I was a big fan of the sweet drinks. I was told by a frat brother, "over time, you will learn to appreciate the dry drinks." He was right.

I've got a standard theory about the dry drinks, and non alcoholic bitter drinks.

@CortAmmon I wasn't a greek but yeah that generally holds true

Our sense of bitter is perfect for helping children not eat poisonous things.

@CortAmmon This should be good :)

@CortAmmon I've heard something similar.

It's got literally thousands of flavors that it responds to. And our initial response to them is to get away from the source.

@CortAmmon Does that mean that kale is actually poisonous?

technically speaking alcohol is poison...

@Green To a certain level.

Too much of it screws with your thyroid.

I've not gotten to eat kale or cabbage for years because of that.

Kale isn't poisonous to us, but it and some related species are poisonous to other animals.

Because I've only been financially independent for about a year, and my parents wouldn't get it.

I love kale.

@Hosch250 On the list of things I'd be willing to be allergic to...those are pretty high.

And I still live here, and eat their food (complex negotiations involving chores and bills).

@James I love them :(

Kale is also very alkaline in its raw form, and there are alkaline plants which are very dangerous

@Hosch250 Weirdo.

@James Thanks for the confirmation.

I only eat it because my wife makes it and if I don't I can't make my kids do it...

Everyone calls me weird. My family, my acquaintances on the internet....

I guess I really must be.

If it helps...we're all weird.

So if you were trying to intelligently design a species, you'd have to make the children avoid alkaline foods. But some, like Kale, are nutrient rich. So as adults you want to be able to learn how to selectively override this bitter taste

@CortAmmon Acid foods are equally dangerous in the right forms and/or quantities.

I have a thing for shows with singing. Right now I am listening to songs from Glee via Amazon music...because...reasons.

Like meats. My dad gets acid-induced migrains if he doesn't eat his vegetables.

@Hosch250 Yep. And I have the cellphone videos of my daughter trying to eat a lemon to show that the theory holds for those too: you try to avoid them as a kid =p

(See acidosis.)

@CortAmmon I like those too, but not like kale.

@Hosch250 I'm okay with greens and veggies in general but they're not really helpful.

@Hosch250 But at least on WB, you're in really good company with a lot of other people who are also called weird.

Thank you.

@Hosch250 Of course! :)

@CortAmmon I'd never considered the reason behind why kids don't like bitter foods though your explanation totally makes sense.

@Green Evolution is freaking insane.

@James I've been thinking about it a lot recently in the context of IT projects.

question is up, and I'm out - cheers

keep up the chatter!

I have someone in upper management who doesn't appreciate (or doesn't seem to appreciate) that things should work at all points in time. Instead, they favor big bang deployments....which boggles my mind!

@Green Older people tend to like what they are familiar with and for decades they were used to giant installations that impact everything.

@Green They're just different ways of doing it. The big bang deployment does offer liberties that the agile approaches do not.

Most of the mentality being based on old mainframe systems

@CortAmmon That's fair. I guess my disagreement is with risk management styles or my perception of their sensitivity to risk.

@james (and anyone else) what's your general opinion of status meetings?

@Green they definitely yield very different sensitivities to various things.

@Green Status meetings are great for everything except updating status. That's a total waste of time. But all the interpersonal interactions and alignments are tremendosuly valuable.

@Green I like them if it is teammates talking to each other about active work. Sometimes the "tell your boss what is going on" kind are also necessary if annoying from a management perspective

@CortAmmon Like, I lost a lot of trust in this one exec when I realized that my failure conditions where encompassed in his success conditions.

They are very important if you are shifting styles, such as trying to do SCRUM development on a larger program managed by the more draconian big-bang tools

@Green Yeah, that kind of.... alignment =p

@James I don't mind that kind of meeting either. The "update status to management" meeting seems to be something you can workout in an email. "We're working on this thing. It's almost done. We have these blockers...." That's an email.

@CortAmmon Yeah, exactly.

@Green I try to walk around and ask people about it.

@James I like that kind of 'meeting'. It's fast and effective.