TauZero @ TauZero @mander.xyz

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7

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297

Joined

2 yr. ago

Magic Carpet was incredibly fascinating. A whole planet that you could explore and influence and even modify terrain on? Every kid's dream, even given proof by Minecraft's popularity 20 years later. Could never get past the first several levels though.

Finished the game recently after giving it another go, no wonder only the beginning is kid-friendly. The later levels are devilish puzzles in difficulty. If you do not figure out the exact sequence of actions necessary to solve them, you die! Their open-world nature is only a masquerade to trick you into complacency.

The Expanse is not a realistic show. I like hard sci-fi, keep hearing the Expanse is ultra-realistic (no ftl, no anti-grav), so I open up a random clip to check it out and what's the very first thing I see? A guy in a spacesuit standing on a catwalk outside a spaceship under main engine power. Ok, constant 1G acceleration from a magic engine, so far so good... That's what sci-fi is supposed to be: change one magic thing and one thing only and show the consequences! But then the guy starts space-welding something, and the torch is creating puffs of smoke that effortlessly FLOAT UPWARDS. Whaaat? Ok, I'd understand if the show has to stay within a reasonable budget and can't afford to film inside a vacuum chamber, but the fucking puffs are already CGI! The lazy no-physics-education artist has failed to seize the one opportunity to show something exotic about living in space: to animate the puffs spreading outward without impedance while falling to the ground.

I'm glad I didn't watch the show. If I had seen this clip of the guy zooming along from moon to moon in seconds while leaning into the gravity-assist turns, I would have had an aneurysm.

That photo looks like the 26-lane wide Katy Freeway in Houston! I use the rule of thumb of 2000 pphpd (passengers per hour in peak direction) for a fully-loaded freeway lane from this much better-looking graphic we saw last time we discussed this question on lemmy. (Apparently this graphic is now the headliner on the pphpd wiki page!)

2000 pphpd per lane matches my own attempts to verify this value. I couldn't find traffic stats for Katy Freeway, but here are the stats for Manhattan river crossings: https://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/downloads/pdf/manhattan-river-crossings-2016.pdf Specifically, the George Washington Bridge is a very busy bridge with 7 lanes in each direction and highly-optimized traffic density - constant traffic flow with no spacing in between - a good example of peak highway lane capacity IMO. It moves 290k vehicles per day, but more importantly 11k incoming vehicles during peak morning rush hour (page 10), which is 1600 vehicles per lane. The average occupancy is 1.74 (page 24, though not sure how that treats buses), so that's 2800 ppphd per lane.

GWB does have a lot of truck traffic though. The Holland Tunnel has 2 lanes in each direction, no trucks, constant traffic flow with no spacing, 2700 inbound vehicles during peak morning rush hour (page 10), and 1.22 occupancy (page 24), resulting in 1600 pphpd per lane.

So that's 2739*1.22 + 4860*1.41 + 11474*1.74 = 30k people crossing from New Jersey into Manhattan during the morning rush hour using the 2+4+7=12 lanes of the Holland+Lincoln tunnels and GWB or 2500 pphpd per lane. I believe that sufficiently approximates 13 lanes of Katy Freeway, which has no trucks and no buses.

Compare that to the 22k people transported from New Jersey into Manhattan during morning peak rush hour by PATH trains in two incoming tubes (https://www.panynj.gov/content/dam/path/about/statistics/2023-PATH-Hourly-Ridership-Report.pdf page 14, only shows turnstyle entries but almost everyone entering is travelling to Manhattan). And PATH trains look outright empty compared to crowd crush on NYC trains. Lexington Avenue Subway is like 32k pphpd for a single express track (https://new.mta.info/document/22126 page 5B-4, 25*1296 in 2002 and has gone higher since).

In conclusion, the numbers in this meme photo do not reflect full capacity, thus leading to questions and confusion, but the overall comparison is still valid: one half of a 26 lane highway has about the same capacity of ~30k pphpd for peak hour travel as one half of a 2-track railway.

That's what I used to think as a kid - westerns standoffs are an outgrowth of Old World duels, a formalized custom performed by traditionalists, even the baddest bandit secretly being a gentleman at heart. The showerthought here is that the order of events is also perfectly explained by taking legal considerations of justified self-defense into account.

So what does this mean for Western gunslingers? Is it always better to draw second? Well, not quite. Welchman also found that the 21 millisecond benefit of reacting quickly was totally overwhelmed by the 200 milliseconds it took to react in the first place.

I was just pointing out the absurdity of describing seeing something on TV in a plane, recorded with a camera on the plane, as seeing it with your own eyes, without even realizing it 😄.

Is it different to see a launch live on TV in a plane vs. seeing a launch live on TV at home?

The random user switching had been happening occasionally until some update a month ago, something to do with stale websockets. Never heard of anyone successfully exploiting it, like making posts or seeing PMs. All you get is to see someone else's username. OP, if it happens to you again, try to make a post quickly before the session throws you out to prove whether it is a security risk!

Totally agree! That kinesin walking animation has dealt untold damage onto the collective psyche 😂. It just looks sooo cool strutting along on its stroll, with purpose and determination! But the reality is more like the molecular dynamics simulation videos you posted - wacky waving inflatable arm flailing tube men all the way down.

Warning shots killing the target was also a running gag on Generation Kill (2008) show.

I feel like companies are "double dipping" by selling these carbon credits. Getting to "net zero" by itself is good. Sourcing CO2 "from an ethanol refinery in neighboring Oregon and, later, from pulp and paper facilities in Washington" means it's coming from biomass, which is almost as good as using any hypothetical direct capture air scrubbers (do we have any functional examples of those yet or are they entirely fiction so far?). Sourcing electricity from hydro is good. (Sourcing from "fossil gas and a small amount of coal" is not.) We do need jet fuel. All continental routes should be replaced with high-speed trains, but we still have transoceanic travel. We can either give that up entirely or find a carbon-neutral way to make jet fuel.

But when you make this almost-zero carbon jet fuel, but THEN ALSO sell carbon credits, who actually gets to brag about being carbon-neutral? Is it the airlines who use the alternative fuel, or the GHG-emitting industries who bought the credits? "We paid someone to make alternative jet fuel which saved 1000 tons of oil from being pumped out of the ground, so we get to burn 1000 tons of coal at our factory guilt-free." No! That doesn't count if the airline ALSO gets to burn those 1000 tons of fuel.

At the very least the airline should lose the right to brag about using carbon-neutral fuel and be forced to go buy its own carbon credits elsewhere.

Your comment hasn't been peer reviewed, so I'm gonna take your advice and not believe you.

The year is 2025. A massive geomagnetic storm has fried all forms of technology, wiping out hard drives and solid-state drives alike, and scrambled all backup tapes. Coincidentally, a new plastic-eating bacterium has munched on all the compact discs without anyone noticing.

Humanity will rebuild...

The computer chip manufacturing pipeline has been restored, but there is no software to run them. In a dusty office previously owned by a lawyer from a long-defunct dotcom, a treasure trove is discovered. Five metal cabinets filled with paper: the printed Linux kernel source code, in 5-pt comic sans font. One brave soul will enter to transcribe. Mistakes are not an option. We all thank you for your sacrifice.

I tried to post a meme in JPEG-XL on lemmy, and my browser wouldn't show it :(

Many of us have already overcome it! All of them are holding us back though.

That's... not how science journals work.

Menstrual cups are the bidet of hygiene products. Practically eliminate the need for one-time-use consumables, a great sustainable solution to add to our world in great need of them. Highly recommend everyone get one. To know that they are also even healthier and more hygienic is just the cherry on top.

You won't survive even 24 hours in a 100°F hot tub 🤣.

I don’t see why actors should be treated different to any other worker really.

Yup! And every worker should receive profit share 😎.