Stack Exchange
log in

Luaan

 Discussion on answer by Allure: Why i…

Imported from a comment discussion on physics.stackexchange.co...
Luaan
Mar 3, 2024 17:13
@AgniusVasiliauskas I'm not sure what you're disagreeing with here; you're saying the same thing Allure is.
 

 Discussion on answer by beichst: Is r…

Imported from a comment discussion on scifi.stackexchange.com/...
Luaan
Jan 25, 2024 11:25
@MarkMorganLloyd True, but in-universe, there's a distinction between the transporters and the replicators. They're clearly related technology, but replicators are unable to produce copies of the same quality as the transporters, and in particular with food, it's often said that many people prefer non-replicated food (or food cooked from replicated raw materials). That said, it's hard to see how you would have ethical problems with using replicated meat and at the same time have no ethical problems with using transporters to move people/animals (of course, in-universe, some do ).
 

 Discussion on answer by Justme: Why d…

Imported from a comment discussion on retrocomputing.stackexch...
Luaan
Sep 1, 2023 10:09
@Therac Modern 60 Hz LCD panels still can't truly catch up to a 60 Hz CRT. No matter which LCD technology you used, you sacrificed something compared to a CRT. It's hard to believe if you don't have a CRT to compare to. The recent move to 120 and 144 Hz doesn't have much to do with human perception and a lot to do with the simple fact that even the most modern 60 Hz LCDs can't actually change the whole image 60 times a second. The 60 Hz figure only comes from the rate of the signal coming on the VGA cable. Not a big deal for office applications, which is what LCDs were made for :)
 

 Discussion on answer by JBH: Could a …

Imported from a comment discussion on worldbuilding.stackexcha...
Luaan
Jul 19, 2023 02:10
Or, if you want to keep things realistic... forget about digital computers made out of semiconductors and just have them study real , biological neural networks instead. High-performance computing like we have today relies on absurd levels of industry that likely wouldn't be available... but that just means we'd have more incentive to use other approaches, like biotech. We know biological neural networks can do the thinking humans do :) It also gives plenty of opportunities to make that world quite distinct from ours without breaking suspension of disbelief.
 

 Discussion on question by Pcp115: The…

Imported from a comment discussion on electronics.stackexchang...
Luaan
Jun 28, 2023 11:37
Are you sure you want to experiment with Li-ion batteries when you're clearly just starting out with electronics? While the model you're using has protective circuitry, lithium batteries fail really spectacularly.
 

 Discussion on answer by Laurel: Does …

Imported from a comment discussion on skeptics.stackexchange.c...
Luaan
Feb 5, 2023 01:59
It should be noted that "dinner" doesn't mean "evening meal", though. It already means "the most important meal of the day", the Oarsman quote is kind of tautological. Hence the "whether taken in the middle of the day or late in the afternoon" (i.e. "dinner can be lunch or supper"). When people say "dinner" today, they usually mean "supper"; a lunch was very often the dinner.
 

 Discussion on answer by Robert Rapple…

Imported from a comment discussion on worldbuilding.stackexcha...
Luaan
Dec 2, 2022 04:18
@DanielSchepler Actually, humans do produce vitamin C, just like all the other mammals. Or, to be more exact, it is produced by bacteria in our intestines. The problem is that it happens too late, and doesn't get absorbed through the intestinal walls. So the solution is actually pretty simple (if disgusting and dangerous, of course), and a lot of mammals indeed do use it (including guinea pigs). Definitely a last resort kind of thing, though :D
 

 Discussion on answer by phyrfox: Do t…

Imported from a comment discussion on law.stackexchange.com/qu...
Luaan
Sep 12, 2022 14:59
Jaywalking has a bit of a history itself; it was essentially a derogatory term ("idiot-walking") addressing people who walked in a street. Which of course was pushed by the emerging automobile lobby (rich and influential people; cars were luxury items of course) who tried to get everyone else out of the streets, so they could go faster. Before that, streets were freely used by everyone - people, carts, horses etc.
 

 Discussion on answer by JBH: Under wh…

Imported from a comment discussion on worldbuilding.stackexcha...
Luaan
Sep 6, 2022 09:51
@ZizyArcher The main problem is that for hard science-based, you don't have magical shields, thermally superconductive hull plating or whatever. That means that centralised power supply for your lasers probably isn't a good idea - there will always be weapons that go straight through any defences you might have. It's not just the lens being a weak point. It's hard to imagine a realistic laser that could be more dangerous to a spaceship than a kinetic round - kinetic rounds are really good at concentrating the impact. Lasers need to be focused and kept on target.
Luaan
Sep 6, 2022 09:51
It's funny that even in softer sci-fi like Star Wars, they're not using lasers . Even though they have absurdly powerful power generation compared to what's even theoretically possible in our own universe, they actually use (unspecified) particle beams. We can even see in episode 3 that they do in fact use some kind of massive projectile, just somehow "imbued" with energy. Heck, even in Star Trek, the phasers clearly aren't lasers. It just seems that a lot of sci-fi likes to use the name laser, while describing something that isn't a laser (presumably the meaning of the word changed).
Luaan
Sep 6, 2022 09:51
One very important thing you're missing is missing . It's highly unlikely you'd see anything about the ships exchanging fire... until they start missing. And then those mass driver projectiles might impact your atmosphere and hit your cities . That's going to be noticeable :D Hopefully, any nuclear missiles they use are set not to detonate upon hitting a planet.
 

 Discussion on answer by Dale M: In wh…

Imported from a comment discussion on law.stackexchange.com/qu...
Luaan
Aug 2, 2022 22:36
Heck, many people fled Britain not to escape persecution, but pretty much the opposite - because they saw the then-new laws around religious freedom to restrict their ability to impose their views on others and restrict their religious freedom. That's a very different kind of freedom built around someone's freedom being inherently more important than someone else's (and the list of all those "approved" targets was anything but short).
 

 Discussion on answer by Ben I.: If a …

Imported from a comment discussion on cseducators.stackexchang...
Luaan
May 17, 2022 14:15
@Džuris No, it's not. We're not talking about some automated gate that checks outputs of given inputs and grades based on that. The grading is on the source code. The source code is perfectly readable even if it doesn't compile. For some compilation errors, I wouldn't even consider them a problem. It's kind of like doing a math assignment, and having all of the understanding and a good process... except that at that one point, you made a small arithmetic error. Are you seriously trying to suggest that should result in a zero score, as if you did absolutely nothing?
 

 Discussion on answer by codingCat: If…

Imported from a comment discussion on cseducators.stackexchang...
Luaan
May 15, 2022 14:52
@DikranMarsupial I agree, and that's exactly the difference between pointless scaremongering and actually helpful behaviour. You can't force anyone to learn; but you absolutely are there to provide opportunities. Just like the point of teaching someone to swim is that the end result is either failing or being able to swim; but there's better ways to teach than throwing the poor lad in the water and calling them a failure if they don't perform :D
Luaan
May 15, 2022 14:52
@DikranMarsupial Remember how the teachers always used to repeat "Now you're in grade school, but wait until you get to high school, nobody will hold your hand there!"... and then of course, the same thing in high school, and then in college... :D Ultimately, a teacher's job is to teach students, as annoying as that may be. They're not there to decide who is worthy.
 

 Discussion on question by Cyrus Drake…

Imported from a comment discussion on worldbuilding.stackexcha...
Luaan
Apr 23, 2022 03:38
@StarfishPrime They're still making it, they just rebranded it to get the Hitachi name off it. It's still called a massager, of course - that's what it does very well, either way ;)
 

 Discussion on answer by Valorum: How …

Imported from a comment discussion on scifi.stackexchange.com/...
Luaan
Jan 25, 2022 09:17
@AmiralPatate Presumably, a kind of "standard atmosphere", like we have now. The differences even on Earth are considerable. And we can probably expect human-habitable planets will not have too different atmospheres.
 

 Discussion on answer by Keith Morriso…

Imported from a comment discussion on history.stackexchange.co...
Luaan
Nov 24, 2021 23:18
The advantage for trade in particular seems like it aligns brilliantly with the development of sedentary cultures, which are intrinsically linked with extensive trade. Beautiful answer ;)
 

 Discussion on answer by gnasher729: W…

Imported from a comment discussion on philosophy.stackexchange...
Luaan
Nov 11, 2021 17:18
@J... Not to mention assuming that he is a true intelligence, and that his intelligence comes from something other than the neurons of his brain (and whatever other physical and chemical processes are happening in his body). It's something philosophers have been debating to death for as long as philosophers have existed, and it clearly shows the biggest flaw of how philosophers work - they can never resolve any argument, ever. It's telling that while a lot of good has come from philosophy historically, it always started with dropping philosophical approaches and doing something.
 

 Discussion on answer by Peteris: Why …

Imported from a comment discussion on ai.stackexchange.com/que...
Luaan
Nov 4, 2021 14:27
@forest The whole point of Asimov's robot stories was that the rules don't work (and more generally, that no set of rules works). The only safe AI is one that understands your values. You might be able to shackle a human-level AI, but any kind of superintelligence (even mere "human with 1000x processing speed) is inherently unsafe unless it has the same values you do. "It's quite easy to prevent an AI harming humans by setting a hard limit" is a very dangerous illusion.
 

 Discussion on answer by niels nielsen…

Imported from a comment discussion on physics.stackexchange.co...
Luaan
Oct 28, 2021 01:37
Of course, resistive heaters are much cheaper to build and maintain. A good chunk of new houses being built where I'm from do use heat pumps, but they weren't particularly cost-effective (the underground kind), despite their very high efficiency. This changed rather dramatically with the massive energy price increases recently, and it's unlikely that trend will change anytime soon. In any case, heat pumps are pretty ingenious :)
 

 Discussion on answer by Nihar Karve: …

Imported from a comment discussion on physics.stackexchange.co...
Luaan
May 17, 2021 13:47
@RBarryYoung I think one thing that helps understand this is that the "new" fields are just something different than what the "old" fields were (and this affects their quanta as well, obviously). Either the energy is higher than X, and you get the old fields and old quanta, or it's lower, and you get "our" fields and quanta. This isn't the only point in the standard model this happens either - three of the "fundamental" interactions are now considered to result from subsequent spontaneous symmetry breakings in the "more fundamental" interactions.
Luaan
May 17, 2021 13:47
@RBarryYoung It's a subtle misinterpretation. Nihar Karve is saying the point where the fields change (allowing e.g. electrons, and their having mass) is discrete - it's not a continuous effect that changes as energy drops even lower. You're reading it as "all the mass in the universe was created at this point", while he's trying to say "first it was massless, then it was massive - at a discrete point, not as a continuous process that increases mass as energy drops or something". And of course, it's not the process that gives mass to e.g. protons anyway!
 

 Discussion on answer by Ash: Is it mo…

Imported from a comment discussion on worldbuilding.stackexcha...
Luaan
Dec 3, 2020 17:03
@John That's not true in general. Rather, there's an optimal size for everything with given constraints. This is one of the big mistakes we've thoroughly explored after WW2 and the subsequent rebuilding of Europe - bigger is not always cheaper, more efficient, better. There's definitely a ship size where doubling the size means less than the doubling of maneuvering thrusters - there's limits on how small you can build efficient systems. But the same is true in reverse - there is a ship size where halving the size gives you less than half the cost, even ignoring risk management.
 

 Discussion on question by Yashveer Si…

Imported from a comment discussion on superuser.com/questions/...
Luaan
Nov 28, 2020 15:12
@YashveerSingh It's more that SSDs try to avoid overwriting one block over and over, and HDDs don't. This is basically because each SSD block has a limit of how many times it can be erased, so you want to spread the modifications all over the drive if possible. HDDs simply don't care.
Luaan
Nov 27, 2020 09:04
"Cache" is a very general term basically meaning a temporary storage space that allows you to bypass an expensive operation. Browser cache means you don't have to download that 1 MiB background image on a website over and over (unless it changed). CPU cache does the same with RAM - on CPU time scales, RAM access is slow. How long does a cache last? That depends on the cache policy. For example, a browser cache usually has a size limit; but in anonymous mode, it is also not persisted on disk, and deleted when you close the browser (or sometimes even just the tab).
 

 Discussion on answer by Mokubai: Is w…

Imported from a comment discussion on superuser.com/questions/...
Luaan
Nov 27, 2020 16:40
@YashveerSingh If your computer and internet access is secure, persistent storage is your only problem. There's not that much persistent storage in a typical PC - usually you can ignore anything other than the hard drive. But if your PC is not secure, there could be a monitoring application that sends information about your browsing. If your internet access is not secure, people can see what you browse as you browse. If you care about your internet privacy, you need to cover those two things first and foremost - and also either encrypt your disks or use anonymous mode in your browser.
 

 Discussion on question by Boolean: Wh…

Imported from a comment discussion on worldbuilding.stackexcha...
Luaan
Nov 6, 2020 22:53
The only thing that would be annoying is the minimum airspeed of modern fighters, but that's very unlikely to lead to any real issues.
 

 Discussion on answer by Nosajimiki: W…

Imported from a comment discussion on worldbuilding.stackexcha...
Luaan
Nov 6, 2020 15:17
@DaveSherohman The question says 1940, so nope. But even if they knew jet planes existed, the ME-262 is quite a different beast to modern fighters, and they probably wouldn't have any training or experience shooting down even ME-262s anyway.
 

 Discussion on answer by Philip Kendal…

Imported from a comment discussion on workplace.stackexchange....
Luaan
Oct 26, 2020 14:28
@Mark Sure, but don't forget that you might also be making an extremely common and crucial mistake - assuming the requirement is actually what the customer wants. This is very rarely the case, and you'll probably quickly find that what the customer actually needs is a much weaker form of what you assumed; maybe they're fine with adding limitations to their system, or just having a timeout for long operations or even just having a way to cancel a calculation that is taking too long. It's fine to say "that's impossible", but it shouldn't be the end - "let's make things simpler" should follow.
 

 Discussion on answer by Eddy: Does th…

Imported from a comment discussion on physics.stackexchange.co...
Luaan
Oct 23, 2020 14:15
@LawnmowerMan Come on, you both know you're both right. On the timescales where we care about global warming, essentially every device converts almost all of its input into heat. For that context, it's useful to consider all electricity generated as heat added into the system. Even those water potential energy storage plants do, efficient as they are. We're not talking about billions of years here, just dozens of cycles. Are you trying to dispute that the vast majority of the electricity generated today will dissipate into the atmosphere as heat within, say, a decade?
 

 Discussion on answer by Helena: How t…

Imported from a comment discussion on workplace.stackexchange....
Luaan
Aug 20, 2020 13:59
@JohnHunt I think a little prudence is required here. You should be able to pull a simple, obvious solution to a problem out of your sleeve - it's hard to see how you could do much programming without that. But that's it - simple and obvious solutions. As soon as you notice the problem has performance implications, or high complexity, it's hard to get correct results... search for a good ready solution instead, if possible. It's exactly as with the calculator - no reason to not use a calculator for a square root of 384, but for 2 + 2? You're just wasting time and more importantly, focus.
 

 Discussion on answer by Chris: Can a …

Imported from a comment discussion on physics.stackexchange.co...
Luaan
Aug 19, 2020 05:02
@TomášZato-ReinstateMonica It would make for an interesting alternate universe for exploring the theoretical possibilities of our physical models. Might work out to be quite a few interesting articles. But as an answer on SE? Nah. It's surprisingly hard for people to really internalise the conservation laws, and stop trying to find loop holes all the time :D
 

 Discussion on answer by Praxis: What …

Imported from a comment discussion on scifi.stackexchange.com/...
Luaan
Aug 9, 2020 19:53
@MichaelEdenfield Well, the "human cultures" were considered aliens. In some cases, the other people weren't even considered human (because of course, how could a human not be a christian, right?). This makes it quite analogous to the use in especially Star Trek, where the different aliens seem to be just different races, not even species (especially from TNG on - TOS still worked with Spock's hybrid question as something assisted by technology; it has grown into pretty much free breeding between the aliens over time).
 

 Discussion on answer by Flater: Why p…

Imported from a comment discussion on movies.stackexchange.com...
Luaan
Aug 5, 2020 10:08
@Barmar Fur is much simpler, because there's barely any complex interaction between the individual hairs; when you look carefully at the CGI, you can see it really moves in "groups", rather than having to simulate each individual strand. The same approach doesn't work for hair at all - if you did the same thing, the hair would look unnaturally sticky and tough. This is especially horrible in a micro-gravity setting (or underwater). Mind, even fur gives you serious costs to CGI, and in general, modern high-end CGI is ridiculously computationally expensive.
 

 Discussion on answer by elemtilas: Wh…

Imported from a comment discussion on worldbuilding.stackexcha...
Luaan
Jul 20, 2020 19:10
@njzk2 You don't seriously think people couldn't read back then, do you? Few people got to read books, certainly, but they would be literate by today's standards. There were definitely places where that wasn't true (e.g. the Slavs, who probably only got their script from Cyril and Methodius as the 9th century was coming to a close), but in Western Europe, literacy never disappeared. People still kept records, they still wrote and read signs and all that. It's just the books that were relatively rare and expensive - and most importantly, almost all written in Latin.
Luaan
Jul 20, 2020 19:10
@DKNguyen I thought it's obvious enough; John doesn't go to the past with the intention to make money - he's going there for entertainment, just like visiting another country. It's when he's already there that he notices those people don't use X, which would give them a huge benefit (just like people did while visiting other countries).
 

 Discussion on answer by Nelson: Is fi…

Imported from a comment discussion on workplace.stackexchange....
Luaan
Jun 25, 2020 12:02
@Nelson HTML is not that much about user friendliness; it was designed to allow web sites to render before the whole document reaches your computer. Of course, today I'm working on a web application that takes 30 MiB (!!!) as initial download, and doesn't show anything until all of that is downloaded. It's funny how ridiculous things can get - ten years ago, when MS presented .NET running in Javascript in a browser, everyone was like "But it's like 10 MiB of Javascript for something that doesn't really do anything, what a waste!" :)
 

 Discussion on answer by Machavity: Wh…

Imported from a comment discussion on scifi.stackexchange.com/...
Luaan
Jun 22, 2020 15:18
@O.R.Mapper Just like walkie-talkies and unlike cell phones, which was my point :) The thing that makes a cell phone a cell phone is in the name - a network organised into cells, with each phone connected wireless to a cell tower, and the individual cells connected into each other, relaying the communications. Cell phones do not talk directly to each other (Bluetooth and such are separate technologies).
Luaan
Jun 22, 2020 15:18
It can probably be said that Star Trek popularized many edge ideas that existed long before. But predicted? Not so much. Inspired? Well, you could claim that some cell-phone designs were influenced by the communicators, maybe. Transparent aluminum? Come on, synthetic rubies were first produced in the 19th century! Today, the same stuff is marketed as "sapphire glass".
Luaan
Jun 22, 2020 15:18
Both communicators and PADDs work through the central computer; they're walkie-talkies, not cell phones/Wi-fi. The internet has very little to do with asking another computer for data - that was done way before Star Trek, much less TNG. Star Trek didn't have shuttlecraft until TNG, which is newer than the Space Shuttle; and in any case, the idea comes from naval shuttles (and earlier, simple rowboats), which were routinely used to transport personnel between ships or landings. Video conferencing is also way older than Star Trek, not to mention TNG. Biometrics, ditto.
 

 Discussion on question by Nzall: Was …

Imported from a comment discussion on space.stackexchange.com/...
Luaan
Apr 3, 2020 19:33
What would be the point? It's not like they planned to launch another rocket at great expense or something. In what way would cutting contact and letting them deal with it be beneficial to anyone involved? The die was already cast, all the material invested, and it's not like you'd get anything from telling the mission control crew to just pack it up and wait for the next mission.
 

 Discussion on question by TheGodlyBea…

Imported from a comment discussion on physics.stackexchange.co...
Luaan
Mar 10, 2020 16:43
Keep in mind electrons aren't particles, they're quanta. A quantum leap doesn't mean that an electron at [x0, y0, z0] suddenly jumps to [x1, y1, z1]. Quantum leap isn't a leap in position, it's a leap in energy levels. Think about it more as a standing wave on a guitar string - when you press on the string, the "note" suddenly "leaps" to a different energy level; but it still doesn't really have a position (of course, on a guitar string, the "leap" still involves emitting "junk" sound waves; an electron does not produce intermediate photons in its leap).
 

 Discussion on question by Miles Means…

Imported from a comment discussion on worldbuilding.stackexcha...
Luaan
Mar 7, 2020 17:09
Do you have some purpose in mind? Is a planet-spanning government desirable, much less an interstellar one? What are you trying to achieve in your world? And what counts as a "unified government"? Something like the UN? NATO? What kind of autonomy do you expect of the elements, what kind of centralization? There's probably little point in relying on violence to govern people if those responsible for an uprising are long dead by the time your punitive expedition arrives (especially if you only "hear" about it when a shipment fails to materialize).
 

 Discussion on question by Swaroop Jos…

Imported from a comment discussion on physics.stackexchange.co...
Luaan
Mar 6, 2020 10:11
@SwaroopJoshi "Observable" is a very specific technical term in quantum physics. It doesn't mean "measurable with the instruments we have". There's plenty of observables we can't measure.
Luaan
Mar 6, 2020 10:11
@user13267 I was writing an answer that explains this, but it got way too complicated way too quickly. If you want to play around with it, think about the basic problem: a wave is a pattern that endlessly repeats itself (e.g. f(x) = sin(x)). How do you compose multiple waves to produce a "wave packet" (the same pattern repeating in finite time/space)? This is what happens every time you strum a guitar, for example. What's the frequency and length of the tone you play? What's the frequency if you mute the string almost immediately after?
Luaan
Mar 6, 2020 10:11
@SwaroopJoshi A simpler way to look at the problem is that our intuition that the world is made out of particles is just wrong, full stop (assuming QFT etc. is correct enough). Don't try too hard trying to fit reality to your intuitions - we're machines built by evolution. Trying to find particles in reality is just confusing yourself - there's only quantum waves in quantum fields, and those follow some pretty specific rules. Sometimes, it is convenient to think of particular configurations as "individual particles", but as with all models, you must not take it too far.
Luaan
Mar 6, 2020 10:11
@SwaroopJoshi That's one way to look at it, as long as you understand that the actual values of position and momentum in the quantum field are not observable even in principle. All we can observe are the probability distributions. Sometimes those probability distributions are approximately factorizable, and it makes sense to talk about "individual particles"; much more often, you have a superposition that cannot be factorized, and you can only talk about things like "two electrons interacting" or "probability distribution flow". What's the position/momentum of a C note I play on a keyboard?
Luaan
Mar 6, 2020 10:11
Look at an animation like this: upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3e/Wavepacket1.gif This is analogous to how quanta work. What is the position and momentum of the wave packet?
Luaan
Mar 6, 2020 10:11
Measurements aren't involved at all. It's about the waves. The same problem was well known in classical waves - we might as well call it Fourier's Uncertainty Principle. The critical point is that indeed, matter is made of waves. If it was made from particles (the corpuscle theories), the effect would only exist as an artifact of measurement, and better measurement would give you less uncertainty. But for a wave packet, the (lowest possible) uncertainty is simply there - it has nothing to do with measurement. Musicians have to deal with it every day when e.g. tuning their instruments :)