Nuke

i think this may very well be the ugliest rocket ever sent to space.

was it just me or did it seem like one of the srbs was offset. every time i watch the launch it seems off. i know ive made that mistake a couple times in ksp, usually with explosive results.

people like to think of the universe as a plane. but its really kind of a big ball of wibbly wobbly spacey timey stuff.

no gateways to hell unfortunately.

i had to fight vikings for a dozen krispy kreams. idk how you can wear fur in this heat.

i once had a neighbor who did this, played crappy rap music. my solution was to pick up the complete works of richard wagner.

the graph seems dated, there are no 737 maxes. it says its from 2016. also according to the graph boeing are a bunch of liars.

according to that graph the only way to die on a 767 is to intentionally fly it into a structure.

"wrote my own game engine" may have not been the correct phrase. more like "attempted to write my own game engine and never officially gave up". its been a long running project. i was playing orbiter at the time, and coming off my freespace modding stint. i liked space flight sims but orbiter is kind of boring. my initial goal was to prove that a newtonian game could be fun. of course then ksp came out and rendered the whole project moot. also i was more interested in the guts of the game than the game itself, and using a 3rd party engine doesnt give me that. the book covers all the math you need for game dev. i only skimmed it, but it has some good stuff in there. it was posted on hack a day and i figured some of the up and coming game devs here could use it.

this was linked on one of my feeds. free online book that covers a lot of video game maths. useful for anyone going into game dev. wish i had this thing handy when i wrote my game engine. https://gamemath.com/

believe me, im 40 and i still have a hard time figuring out whats what. when the have tos affect the kitties, they will make sure they make your life miserable until they get what they want. even as i write this i got one's paw on my hand demanding scritches.

just do the have tos before the want tos and you will be fine. then the most you can waste is your spare time. if you don't have any spare time you are working too hard.

as far as great plagues go, this one was kind of meh. think of all the changes that happened because of the spanish flu (i cant think of any). thats about what we will get out of this pandemic. the only thing different this time was we had biotech to roll out a vaccine in less than 2 years. just goes to show there is not a virus on the planet that cant be nuked from orbit provided you want to spend the 2 years and the millions of dollars it took to develop the vaccine. that really doesn't save us from future pandemics, unless we can make the lead time shorter.

there is that stupid (but in a good way) hybrid airship to orbit design. but thats a kilometer long flying wing filled with hydrogen, covered with thin film solar panels, powered by plasma engines and also using some kind of ion based drag reduction technology.

problem is always power. the list of super engines we have on the drawing board and the manufacturing capability to build is rather long. but they all want for a power system that could feed it. it seems to be the limiting factor in all plasma/ion engines and what keeps them from really scaling up. if we had unlimited free power yea you could to at atmo plasmacraft. i mean its kind of been done before. and yes the most interesting thing about that plane is its power supply.

to answer the final query of the comic. its because learning sports you are training a neural network. its amazing how the human brain (or any critter's brain) can for example do real time inverse kinematics and predict the trajectories of thrown objects, things significantly non trivial to compute with math. but then you give it a basic floating point multiply and it struggles to find the answer. in both cases you train the same neural network. in sports you do the thing in a very natural way, and some kind of background process you are not aware of does the heavy lifting. in math class what you are really drilling into your head is a cumbersome procedure for doing math. you are actually programming an emulator that can do procedural computer style instructions yet it runs in your own wetware. it does not take advantage of the full compute capability of the brain.

these scientists must be the kind of people who find mimes amusing.

on mothers day i threw a couple rib steaks on the grill. now our grill is terrible, its one of those little camping grills that takes a coleman propane canister, less than 2 square feet of grill space and absolutely zero thermal control. i keep wanting to get a better one. had my eye on this beautiful hybrid grill that can do propane, charcoal or wood based on what you are cooking at the time (cedar grilled salmon is to die for). i could drop bank on that thing right now and it would show up in four to fourteen days. but mom keeps talking about moving up further up north. wanderlust was always a problem with that one. its why i was never able to cultivate meaningful relationships growing up and why to this day i still live out of cardboard boxes, im always 5 minutes with a tape gun from being packed and ready to go. being her care giver in her senior years has given me some sway and i really like how easy this small town is with everything being in walking distance. mom does have a valid point about being closer to medical care, being an hour from anchorage by road is a lot better than being 4 hours by plane. and we would move near where my sister lives so she can sometimes see some of the grandchildren. but i still hate moving because it means throwing away half my stuff now that i have a desk i like and work benches and some large power tools. not to mention our own washer and dryer (i hate doing laundromat runs and everyone seeing my underpants). not to mention knocking me back 10 years in accumulated projects. wait i was talking about meat... beautiful meat, it almost cooks itself. but i did my usual light seasoning with onion powder, pepper and the slightest dash of garlic powder. now these steaks were gargantuan, but i found a way to get both of them on the grill at the same time. mom likes hers well done. i mean my opinions on the matter are as follows: but we make exceptions for family. so i made sure to start hers several minutes before i put mine on (rare of course). serve with a baked potato and grillin beans. i usually prefer ranch beans with steak as the grillin beans tend to be too sweet, but mom wanted them and thats all that matters. still i got to eat a ginormous perfectly marbled and delicious rib steak so i guess it works out for everyone involved.

when you say you hate math. what you are really saying is you hate doing math. that comes from math class when you get handed a page of boring difficult problems to solve before the class ends while the math teacher plays games on his phone (they didnt have smartphones when i was a kid, so our math teacher did crossword puzzles all day). this is why math class is so boring, in that you dont actually learn anything. the idea when this was done was to drill students into doing math quickly so that they could use it effectively in the workplace. what they dont realize is that is cheaper for an employer to supply their workers with calculators than waste man hours doing math the way taught in schools. and this started well before the digital age, with mechanical calculators (slide rules) and the "flight computers" that pilots once use (and still do as a backup to their electronics). then the pocket calculators of the '70s, and eventually spreadsheets. as a scientist you probibly arent going to be doing a lot of manual number crunching unless you are going into some kind of theoretical physics (and people who do that usually love math). you are going to be managing data sets. you might have to use some formula for your spreadsheets, but the computer crunches the numbers for you. there is no reason young minds who have just figured out how to multiply should have to perform the same multiplication problems for 2 weeks straight. seems like our math class spent a lot of time reviewing fractions, especially when i was simultaneously using liner algebra and calculus in my electronics class (the ac unit sucked). i think schools need to expose students to a much wider variety of mathematics and less on drilling. because what it really should be doing is introducing you to stuff so you can make an educated decision about what field you want to go into when you get into college. i just realized this thread is almost a decade old and i already responded to it.

the reason puns are bad is that they usually take no effort to create, and therefor are the lowest form of comedy. you could instead use the more disgusting, yet significantly more classy, toilet humor instead. that's always worth a few laughs.

you can now get an altair 8800 kit (a real kit mind you, no emulation) that fits in an altoids tin. im thinking about getting one, its only $80-ish. i always wanted a blinkinlight computer, and not one of those gaudy led clad monstrosities that gamers build. i know we shouldnt talk about politics, but i should have a right to bear nukes. i should also have the right to nuke bears. and yes nothing good will come of this. Crawly McCrawlerson for president!

its not a assumption of need but an assumption of cost combined with a change in the way the technology is used. rather than owning the expensive hardware, and you can if you want to throw a lot of money at it (think datacenter hardware). but most people are not going to do that. instead you use it remotely in the form of cloud services. you can rent time on super computers, dedicated neural networks, and quantum computers if you have a need for those kind of computations. the computers you own might even go down in performance, and you have already seen this with smartphones. they don't exactly have the fp64 performance of an x86 rig, but you can always phone it out, so to speak. the biggest issue is the cooling solution which has gone from an afterthought to a critical and expensive share of a pc building budget in the last 10 years. water cooling has gone from a nice to have to almost being a hard requirement for high performance home computing. quantum computing requires cryogenic cooling, and unless you are in the upper crust of society, you aren't owning one of those as a pc. the cost of silicon, which is close to its minimum possible process node, is proportional to the area of your silicon and so there is a hard limit to how much power you can reasonably afford. most people are content to tap away on their screens and let others worry about keeping the hardware it depends on running. for me its more important that my computer not take up so much desk space than it is that it be fast, and its plenty fast. i have more cores than i can simultaneously use, i got more ram than i need, and i got enough gpu resources that i can turn a profit on them when im not playing games.

im still maintaining that its going to be biotech. computers, at least the kind that normal people use in their day to day lives, are about at their peak. there is some headroom in enthusiast, datacenter and supercomputing and of course quantum computing left to explore, but those are not the kinds of systems everyone will be using. you can of course make them available for cloud computing. when we get to the point where you can have a beast of a gaming rig (pc gamer standards) in your pocket, it will probibly just be a terminal for cloud infrastructure that far exceeds what you are capable of owning. but thats not where the future lies. seems there are those who want to usher in the posthuman era, and biotech will play a huge role in that. we have seen first hand how rapid manufacture of vaccines can be achieved on the order of a couple years. that will only get shorter. we already have the technology for rapid deployment of genetic engineering which will be used as soon as it clears the ethics hurdle (or those get shifted to new norms). there is also life extension which seems looming on the horizon. and there will be a desire to unify human conciousness with technology. another tangent might be towards space if elon and his ilk prove successful. biotech might solve the issues with long term space habitation and the creation of new human derived species that are capable of living and thriving on mars, in space, in the greater jovian moonscape, etc. even making a species that can survive the rigors of interstellar travel. fusion power is also on the horizon but thats not really going to have a major impact on society at large. as far as most people are concerned its just another way to charge your phone or your car, or your personal vtol aircraft.

the universe in sepia.

mom needed another medical "vacation", this time more routine stuff. because she doesnt have any friends and i am the only one who tolerates her crap, i get the not so fun job of being escort. most people like the excitement of traveling, especially for free, but i really hate travel. to the point where i wont go see the out-of-town cardiologist that my doctor keeps trying to send me to. its just too stressful on me and my cats. anyway after setting up everything the medical center in seattle canceled on her literally in the final hours. after spending the last week or so stressing out and psyching myself up for the inevitable hell trip (and poor mom was 3 days into her rather strict pre-test diet), its now been bucked down the line. i just wanted it out of the way yet its still looming on the horizon. i keep hoping uncle vlad makes good on his nuclear threats so i dont have to go anywhere.