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 Discussion on answer by John Doty: Wh…

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hobbs
Dec 30, 2024 18:51
@uhoh the geoid really is the thing you want (or at least the long-term average of the thing you want, smoothing out tidal variations). Remember the relativity part of relativity. If I put you inside a closed box, then a conventional experiment (like Cavendish's) has to give the same answer for "am I on the geoid?" as running your atomic clock for a month inside the box and seeing how much time it gained or lost.
 

 Discussion on answer by Jen: Can some…

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hobbs
Jul 2, 2024 14:28
@Barmar the Supreme Court doesn't answer a question it wasn't asked. It can only be asked after the question came up materially in a lower court. And the question "what is an official act?" only becomes material after it's established that "official acts" enjoy some sort of privilege.
 

 Discussion on answer by Mindwin Remem…

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hobbs
Mar 27, 2024 21:16
@MindwinRememberMonica what "holding company"?
 

 Discussion on answer by Nobody: Why a…

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hobbs
Dec 19, 2023 09:10
GDP is more than just a number: it's just a number denominated in dollars. Inflation makes all numbers denominated in dollars go up sooner or later, except my bank balance. It doesn't do the same to numbers denominated in tons, barrels, or bushels.
 

 Discussion on answer by Dale M: Can a…

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hobbs
Nov 22, 2023 03:47
@JHR well let's boil it down to something simpler: this answer proposes that a restriction like "you may not rent the property out during X time" is enforceable whereas one like "you must use it as your primary residence" is probably not. If the problem is that speculators are prepared to buy and hold without making the property available on the rental market in the short term, then they wouldn't be strongly deterred by a "may not rent" clause; it's only a small decrease in flexibility.
 

 Discussion on question by Scott Rowe:…

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hobbs
Jul 25, 2023 09:10
@StevanV.Saban for a visual example of artificial hallucinations, check out DeepDream. For the textual kind... yeah, it definitely happens. You can't even call it deliberate, it just "knows" that it's been prompted to cite, it knows what a citation looks like, and it puts in something statisitcally likely. Only problem is that the referenced material either doesn't exist or doesn't support the claim. But it doesn't know anything about that!
 

 Discussion on question by Ed_Gravy: W…

Imported from a comment discussion on astronomy.stackexchange....
hobbs
Jul 18, 2023 18:27
@Ed_Gravy it doesn't, that simple.
hobbs
Jul 18, 2023 18:27
Does this answer your question? Why speed of light is considered to be the fastest?
 

 Discussion on answer by L.Dutch: What…

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hobbs
Apr 20, 2023 14:51
@MarkRansom the builtin Mail app on the phone. There are other problems, but that's not one of them.
 

 Discussion on question by AvengingEar…

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hobbs
Apr 18, 2023 17:07
Related: worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/54484/…
hobbs
Apr 18, 2023 17:07
@XanderHenderson that's far from true. Civilian GPS receivers for "normal people" (boaters, hikers, the first in-car GPS navigation) came on the market in 1990-1991.
 

 Discussion on question by phd_cyber_c…

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hobbs
Jan 13, 2023 16:47
Why would they spend time and money to hold and attend your defense if it wasn't possible to fail?
 

 Discussion on question by dtech: Does…

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hobbs
Dec 26, 2022 21:56
Yes, open source stands for the exact opposite of everything you believe, and that is a very good thing.
 

 Discussion on question by Kyndel: Why…

Imported from a comment discussion on retrocomputing.stackexch...
hobbs
Nov 29, 2022 17:31
The channel bandwidth is the same regardless of whether or not there's an antenna involved.
 

 Discussion on question by dshin: What…

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hobbs
Apr 22, 2022 21:49
This isn't a fake browser, just a malicious browser.
 

 Discussion on answer by Justin Thyme …

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hobbs
Apr 8, 2022 02:57
"If the exact same physical thing is no longer functional as a living brain" that's where your error is. It's not the brain that's broken, it's just in an environment in which it can no longer operate.
 

 Discussion on answer by ohwilleke: Ca…

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hobbs
Mar 31, 2022 16:03
@slebetman "really weird" is a synonym for "unfamiliar", not "wrong". When one puts honest thought into it, it ceases to be weird.
 

 Discussion on answer by pinegulf: Did…

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hobbs
Feb 11, 2022 15:03
This was in line with CDC guidance up to that point, which was that recommending mask use to the general public (rather than medical workers and high-risk individuals) was a waste of good masks due to the low effectiveness of masks when worn by untrained personnel, and the risk of depleting the supply of masks for people who really needed them. But that was before we turned 97% of the world economy to mask production.
 

 Discussion on answer by DrMcCleod: Ho…

Imported from a comment discussion on workplace.stackexchange....
hobbs
Dec 29, 2021 19:53
@computercarguy the purpose of a downvote is to move the content down the page and signal to readers that it's wrong or not useful. You're making a mistaken assumption that there is something to be "fixed" when, in general, there is not. The fix is for someone else to supply a good answer (which often, as now, is already done).
hobbs
Dec 29, 2021 19:53
@computercarguy same thing. Votes are anonymous for a reason. Asking voters to out themselves is monumentally stupid and evil.
hobbs
Dec 29, 2021 19:53
Okay, fine. Downvoted because it's a deliberate refusal to answer the question. (And FWIW complaining about downvotes should be a bannable offense).
 

 Discussion on answer by Vallahga: Why…

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hobbs
Dec 6, 2021 16:45
@Adamant Valorum's answer is fine. I'm discussing this answer, in light of what the question is actually asking. OP says that regional variations are to be expected, while major diversity within a single city is weird. This answer says "no, because it was all mixed together in the past of the setting, and genetics would keep it that way". But realistic genetics does not keep it that way after 100 generations of reduced mobility (I know people aren't trees, but history provides plenty of corroboration).
hobbs
Dec 6, 2021 16:45
@Adamant to learn more see bit-player.org/2020/questions-about-trees particularly the bits about how "neutral drift" can still result in plenty of homogeneous clumps.
hobbs
Dec 6, 2021 16:45
@Adamant there would be plenty of variation... between different places. Substantially less in a given place. Some places with as many blondes as Minnesota, some with as many blondes as China.
hobbs
Dec 6, 2021 16:45
@Adamant mostly it does. Bear in mind, almost everything we arbitrarily file as an "ethnic group" today is an admixture of two or more distinct groups that existed as recently as a few thousand years back in our history. Not many places are that isolated and stable.
 

 Discussion on question by 4d4143: Are…

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hobbs
Nov 18, 2021 17:48
Many, many, many.
 

 Discussion on answer by user112486: I…

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hobbs
Oct 21, 2021 10:03
@RedSonja the US used to have systems based on the same principle in the early 20th century, before someone came along and "fixed" it. It's been an endless series of "improvements" ever since.
 

 Discussion between DKNguyen and Dave …

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hobbs
Oct 11, 2021 16:40
gladly
hobbs
Oct 11, 2021 16:35
and yes, circular arrays are the nice way to do the direction finding thing (it's like a discrete version of a spinning radar) but the two antenna version is very cute and actually useful for understanding
hobbs
Oct 11, 2021 16:34
@DKNguyen yes, I think you've got it
hobbs
Oct 11, 2021 16:31
moving the signal in space causes a phase jump, and a continuous series of phase jumps looks like a frequency shift (plus some mess that we disregard)
hobbs
Oct 11, 2021 16:29
anyhow it's a thing and "pseudo-Doppler" is a well-known name for it
hobbs
Oct 11, 2021 16:29
same principle works on transmit, not that I've done it :)
hobbs
Oct 11, 2021 16:28
when it comes in end-on, then it reaches the two antennas with different phase, and switching between them creates a sideband
hobbs
Oct 11, 2021 16:28
when the signal is broadside to the two antennas, it reaches them with equal phase and switching between them has theoretically no effect
hobbs
Oct 11, 2021 16:27
but to elaborate on what @DaveTweed was saying, there's a famous little handheld direction finder that just needs two vertical antennas a short distance apart and the ability to switch between them using a signal generated by a 555
hobbs
Oct 11, 2021 16:26
um, kind of, I'm not sure if I follow
hobbs
Oct 11, 2021 16:23
and PM and FM are roughly equivalent
hobbs
Oct 11, 2021 16:23
when you change the phase over time, you have PM (even if it's a funny discrete version using antenna switches)
hobbs
Oct 11, 2021 16:23
You're assuming time invariance when you say "summing a sinusoid with a phase shifted version of itself gives a sinusoid of the same frequency"
 

 Discussion on answer by Ramhound: Int…

Imported from a comment discussion on superuser.com/questions/...
hobbs
Sep 23, 2021 17:18
"without an OS that takes advantage" they'll still get used (at least, I believe they show up in the ACPI tables in the usual place and get booted), just not intelligently (they will get tasks scheduled on them without regard for what is most power-efficient or user-satisfying).
 

 Discussion on answer by Will Hartung:…

Imported from a comment discussion on retrocomputing.stackexch...
hobbs
Jul 1, 2021 17:25
@adrasthea there is a standard for communicating information about file types. It's called MIME. It doesn't have anything to say about arbitrary thingies on the end of filenames offset by dots... um I mean "extensions".
 

 Discussion on question by Franck Dern…

Imported from a comment discussion on english.stackexchange.co...
hobbs
May 9, 2021 02:07
@nnnnnn "slide deck" is an old phrase; using "deck" on its own to mean a slide presentation is post-2010 (in my estimation) business jargon.
 

 Discussion on answer by Caleth: Why d…

Imported from a comment discussion on politics.stackexchange.c...
hobbs
Apr 23, 2021 08:17
@r13 I would gladly vote for a candidate who swore never to use Twitter or similar. If it doesn't merit a press conference, it's beneath the dignity of the office.
 

 Discussion on answer by Joe Bloggs: C…

Imported from a comment discussion on worldbuilding.stackexcha...
hobbs
Jan 18, 2021 10:10
@SZCZERZOKŁY telling the difference between "some" and "none" is a different process from telling the difference between "some" and "some more". There's a reason why it took millennia for western mathematicians to agree that zero was a number (and some of them were unsure whether one was a number either) — they felt that number pertained to counting sets of items, and 0 or 1 items wasn't a countable set!
 

 Ham Shack

General discussion for ham.stackexchange.com
hobbs
Aug 5, 2020 01:22
three different groups in a week is a nice sign :)
 

 Discussion on answer by CDJB: How cou…

Imported from a comment discussion on politics.stackexchange.c...
hobbs
Jun 12, 2020 13:46
@TsahiAsher turns out that clarity is inversely proportional to exposure to facts.
 

 Discussion on question by user6760: I…

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hobbs
Jan 19, 2020 19:14
I don't think "heliosphere" means what you think it means.
 

 Discussion on answer by Greendrake: I…

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hobbs
Sep 30, 2019 00:43
(This is also, as I understand it, why a store can refuse inconvenient forms of payment such as a wheelbarrow full of pennies. If they were obligated to sell you the item, then legal tender laws would obligate them to take cash in settlement of the debt. But since they're not obligated to sell on demand, they can decline an offer of a wheelbarrow full of pennies, and no debt is created.)
 

 Discussion on answer by L.Dutch: What…

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hobbs
Sep 12, 2019 14:17
Yeah, Apollo astronauts didn't decompress, only prebreathe. (Well, they decompressed, but it was on top of a rocket ascending through the stratosphere). The rapid drop in pressure was apparently non-problematic as long as nitrogen was thoroughly purged from the blood and tissues beforehand.