efrique @ efrique @lemm.ee

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2 yr. ago

"one fifth the mass" is not the same thing as "five times lighter"

Consider something that weighs half as much. It's 50% lighter ... 0.5 times lighter. Something that weighs 0.2 times as much has 20% of the weight, and is 80% lighter. If it weighed 1% as much, it would be 99% lighter (0.99 times lighter). If it was 100% lighter ... it would weigh nothing. Five times lighter would be -4 times the original mass.

We already have accurate and precise ways to describe less mass (albeit leaving aside for the moment the distinction between mass and weight). It's no harder to say "one fifth" than "five times", but only one is correctly describing what is going on.

I expect a lot more authors will go this (crowdfunding) route; if Kelsey Dionne can get over $1.3 million for a fairly niche TTRPG product (albeit that it was a very well done example of its particular niche), publishing straight up fiction books via crowdfunding has to look pretty damn attractive.

(edit: added a missing word)

Yeah. Not a certainty, even with everything, but sure -- an increasingly solid chance of it.

And if it's the first time you've seen that xkcd link, congratulations, you are one of today's meta-10000

What, too soon?

heard that one earlier today ...

Because of the Norman invasion. 1066 and all that. (edit: specifically, after a time the peasants spoke English and looked after the animals, the nobility spoke french and named the food, so we got the English words for the animals and the French words for most of the farm animals were used for the food made from them)

I'm not completely off reddit yet (reduced interaction but still disentangling from it, it'll probably take a little while yet to be completely gone), but I made the account I have there now in August 2008, just shy of 15 years ago. I lurked for a good while before making that account though. (edit: > 150K comment karma, most participation on low volume subs)

https://xkcd.com/927/

That's a bit like asking "twitter or reddit"; different tools, different purposes. A single person may prefer one or the other, or use both in approximately equal measure.

global warming is definitely something it makes sense to worry about and which there's still some chance to mitigate the worst effects of.

The sun expanding - or even the much earlier effects before that happens, as the sun gets hotter - will happen on such long time scales that there simply won't be any humans at all; most species only last about a million years or so, vastly less time than we're talking about.

We might well make the planet nigh uninhabitable in considerably less than one-millionth of the sun-being-a-major-problem time. It's like worrying about the bridge maybe rusting dangerously a few decades from now, while not paying attention to the truck that has just veered onto your side of the road and will surely hit you in the next few seconds. You need to take evasive maneuvers, not worry about the bridge.

basically will just die a boring death after swallowing all the planets in the solar system

Not all the planets, no. Mercury and Venus, sure. The earth's orbit will move somewhat further out when the sun expands, and probably won't be swallowed but it will at least be well baked.

Who says you have to have an AL adventure? I've played in stores a ton but never used one that I recall. Nothing against them, some of them are pretty decent adventures, and they'd be a fine choice, but they'd only be necessary if someone insists that you use one.

Even a little button wear would be enough to pick between those three, so in a lot of cases you'd just need to try one of them.