Nuke

its so absurd that i never figured it out watching the expanse that this was going on. i just assumed it was too nuts an idea for a hard(ish) sci-fi. my brain just automatically filtered out that possibility. i had to read the book to understand that this was the case and that i didnt catch the cues there were in the show.

i finished "reading" leviathan wakes (it was an audiobook). anyway i had seen the show and had been wondering how gravity worked on some of the rocks, not really being high enough to allow for any health benefits or even getting around. i just assumed they used their mag boots on ceres, eros, etc. the show really didnt elaborate very much. but in the book these rocks are spun up so they have backwards gravity from what you would expect (would explain why the airlock was in the floor). but wouldnt spinning up a rock such as ceres just cause it to fly apart? would it be possible re-inforce them so they dont do that?

in before quaternions.

he was always an interesting character. will be missed. ive seen every episode of m*a*s*h at least 7 times. lets try for 8.

you cant even trust third party reviewers anymore. in a capitalist society, advertising is propaganda.

awards shows are usually fixed so i don't normally watch them. unfortunately other people that i live with do.

i like computers that plug into the wall.

i usually just talk to the registers directly at this point. "the arduino way" is nice to get started but eventually you look at the data sheet and figure you can do with 2 cycles what arduino can do in several. and you can scan an entire port at the same cost as checking a single pin. useful if you need high performance code.

what if you build a massive underground sphere, line the walls with lead panels, place a nuke at the center and detonated, how much energy the resulting pool of liquid metal would have. if an hbomb is used, would this be a viable fusion reactor.

the best computer is the one you cant see.

i bought my true love a bag of cat treats.

of the last 3 star wars movies i think i like rougue one the most. it wasnt mired down by a lot of legacy characters and lip service to fans of the originals. i see that in a lot of reboots these days. stop that schtick, just make a good movie first and everything else is ancillary.

having finally seen it yesterday (one screen theater, one movie a week, we don't get everything and its always a month or two behind everyone else), i can say i was not impressed. the movie had some cool moments but it didn't feel like i was watching a star wars movie. it seemed to lack the epicness of the others. later that evening i watched primer, that ultra low budget time travel movie that can really fry your brain of you can follow it at all. now that was good.

well there were people who were inspired by the pain box from dune. had alternating heating and cooling elements that you put your hand on. the heat differential isnt that great nor is it very much heat, but its enough to trick your nervous system into thinking its on fire. full body version and you got an agony booth.

you can get a cheap imu, but the maths are pretty mind boggling. in theory its just integration but theres a lot you need to do to cancel out unwanted components (like gravity and centrifugal force while in turns).

what if you put the factory and the warehouse on a cycler ship? then you solve the logistics and production aspects in one pass. raw materials in (containing waste products that can be used as propellant preferably), production takes place in route and finished goods can be offloaded at the target orbit. several cyclers operating on the same orbit at different phases can make delivery windows more frequent.

an older i7, with 8gb ram. though i did just buy a new 1060 this fall. never seen much point going with more ram. last 4 builds ran 8gigs ram and never had any memory problems.

i didnt know holes were a type of matter. i thought they were just a positive charge caused by a missing electron. i also didnt know it was a new thing, since its what makes transistors work (specifically the interface between a material with holes and a material with free electrons).

its been a very long time since ive seen a game where the graphics impressed me.

its really just a quirk of units conversion.

there is a small problem in that you can only show a theory or how to arrive at a conclusion. if you were to go back in time and hand a paper off to einstein or newton or whatever, they simply wouldn't trust it as science and would probably cast it in the trash because it would look fishy. cited sources that do not exist, experiments that cant be carried out with the technology of the time, or with techniques not yet proven by scientists. especially problematic if there is a chain of work on which the theory was derived. you can just give them the paper on the thing but all the other papers that were cited in that work, and all the papers cited in those as well until you get back to work done by the scientists you are handing your theory over to. every one of those would have to be re-tested and peer reviewed.

now what are the chances of that massive hollow object not collapsing and crushing you into a tiny little sphere of meat paste?

something something acts of arson something. hence the mental institution.

not the end of the world, maybe a new dark age. unless maybe the entity that hacks it happens to be skynet. i dont think there is much the me does about locking down performance, it might run some control loops for cooling devices (it certainly doesn't need unfettered drive and network access to do that job). having control over what it does would be nice. but imagine the botnet you could set up on the computers of people who didnt know to kill the me. i dont like black boxes in my computer.

every bit of silicon has bugs in it. they are designed by people and people sometimes screw up. people were talking about bugs in hardware in the 486 era and no doubt before even then. todays chips are much much much more complex and have more potential to conceal serious flaws.