xkcd

Xanthir

Yes, that's basically what Soupspoon said.

Xanthir

I need to play it some more, as I've really enjoyed it as well. I think I've only done 2 trips? It's so great just gliding thru it and seeing what happens, when suddenly you're successfully executing a mutiny and shaving a ton of time off your trip by sending the ship straight to where you want it.

Xanthir

Javascript's Date, in particular, is a near-exact copy of Java's Date, with all the terrible mistakes that implies. Side-effect of its initial design being done in 10 days and needing a date object from the very beginning.

Xanthir

I'll disagree with you there - a million simulation trials, conducted naively, only takes a second or so, and is really easy to code. Figuring out the algebra can be a lot more difficult, and depending on how the math turns out and how naively it's coded, might end up doing silly things like generat...

Xanthir

I mean, in the sense that everything *can* be modeled as a logical system, sure. You're not, like, actually *doing* axiomatic math in those cases, tho. Birds certainly aren't.

Xanthir

Well, you've got the intuitive mathematics that people and many animals can do on their own. It's basically just small-number addition plus some statistics that only works for relatively large probabilities and short timescales.

Xanthir

It sounds like there's a third "no change" outcome to the test? Otherwise the answer to the third question is trivial; 100% chance they're alive if N is less than X, 0% chance if N is greater than or equal to X. Are D and S out of the same interval, or separate? That is, is the math that (...

Xanthir

Also the conversation topic is literally about quantum effects (the virtual-particle sea comes from quantum mechanics), so trying to use a pre-quantum understanding of EM to intuit behavior has a good chance of leading you wrong. (Note: I don't actually understand EM at that level either, but I have...

Xanthir

How is the magnetic field not photons? What does photon mean to you? For me, a photon is a little shortcut for talking about the particle-ish behavior in QED, but not so important. Light and magnetism are both just shades of QED. If you want to split out the radiative term in a propogating field as...

Xanthir

I agree in general (both circles are valid), but if I draw a circle around myself on the ground and ask you where its center is, you're naturally going to point to my feet, not gesture vaguely to the opposite side of the world. The fact that some use-cases have different notions of "natural&quo...

Xanthir

A great circle is no different than any other circle - a given circumference divides the sphere into two circles, with centers on opposite sides of the sphere. The only distinction is that a great circle doesn't have as many ways to define a "natural" circle to associate with the circumfer...

Xanthir

Yeah, precisely that. A single photon acts wave-like if you poke it the right way. An EM wave acts like a single "particle" of energy if you poke it the right way. Both are just interpretations of EM field excitations that can be useful for thinking about energy in different situations, bu...

Xanthir

Yeah, I've been quite happy with the new tracker. I won't usually run out of my way to catch something, but sometimes I do!

Xanthir

Light is literally an EM wave. Magnetism is transmitted by photons. If photons are very slightly slowed down from c by virtual particles, then "magnetic force" is too, because it's literally photons.

Xanthir

For #3, they're saying that the ratio changed, but the actual number of men with fertility problems in p2 didn't change; it's exactly the same as p1. So the question is, what # of women with fertility problems in p2 do you need so that you get the right right ratio but have the same # of men? Then, ...

Xanthir

Agree with lorb, a chi-squared should do you right.

Xanthir

Two sweet recent projects I backed:

The Game Anywhere Table - sweet fold-up gaming table, with all the separator/etc bits magnetic so they stay in place.

JazzNESs: A Nintendo Classic Jazz Tribute - Jazz versions of a bunch of classic NES songs (finally, a Music project for my pie-chart!)

Xanthir

Chargen is also the time when you are *actively looking at tables*, so just looking up the bonus is barely noticeable in all the other table-lookups you're performing. One of the issues D&D faces is one of power-creep - 20 years ago, when I started playing (2nd Edition AD&D), character gener...

Xanthir

No one actually gets proficiency in strength checks by default do they? Strength saves yes, but the actual checks I presume you'd need a feat or special class ability (if it even exists) to get. No, when we're talking about "strength proficiency" or what have you, we mean proficiency in s...

Xanthir

I don't get why they stuck with the clunky ability score bonus formula, though. (Ability Score - 10) / 2 -- rounded down? Why not just half your Ability Score, rounded down? No more negative ability bonuses; on top of that, it's much easier to calculate ability bonuses on the fly. Sure, it means ad...

Xanthir

*in areas where the latin alphabet is the default. Π often loses its curves after the person gets familiar with one dash + two legs, whereas τ must keep its curved leg to tell it apart from T. That's not relevant for it's use in mathematics, where we always use the lowercase letters. Lowercase τ do...

Xanthir

I'm still having v easy time with conquests, on King difficulty. Combat AI is apparently still too hard.

Xanthir

doogly wrote:Double false! The claims in the paper were not so legit, but we aren't likely to head for a rip even with the currently understood acceleration.

IIRC, we're currently theorized to be headed for the Big Freeze (infinite expansion, but not at an infinitely accelerating rate), right?

Xanthir

I'll leave it to you to look up the details, but Cryptonomicon describes a pretty decent encryption algorithm implemented with modular addition and a pack of cards. It does require some form of coordination to allow the sender and receiver to agree on the deck setup before starting; in the book, it'...

Xanthir

Yeah, I've definitely accidentally skipped attacking sieging units with the city defenses before, because it doesn't show up in the "next thing to do" rotation. And the loss of an "Alert" action is keenly felt at times for similar reasons.

Xanthir

Since my first Prince game was super easy (accidental culture victory in 1910?!?), I turned off culture victory and went up to King for this game. WOOF, that's a noticeable difficulty curve. I'm holding my own as a middling power, but my neighbors on my continent are all better than me. I finally go...

Xanthir

Already described in the OP: print a robot body, run the character's mind on it, feeding them input from the robot's sensors.

Xanthir

Why, that's hardly a circle at all then.

Xanthir

This is also why, the *moment* I start getting confused, I print something to verify that execution is actually running thru the code I'm writing. This instinct has saved me hours of debugging time. I often do it even before I start getting confused, just to make sure I'm looking at the right code i...

Xanthir

The magic of "luxuries get automatically spread out to your cities as needed" and the non-obvious sources of amenities still have me a little hinky. I get around it by just putting in some entertainment districts, but still don't really know how things work there. (In general, there's seve...

Xanthir

No, capitalism guilt-washes the items as long as all the people-you-know in the ownership chain tracing back from you weren't aware of the stolen nature of the goods.

Xanthir

Yeah, each one decreases the number of candidates to check by 1/n, where n is the prime you're adding - adding 5 reduces by 1/5th, adding 7 reduces by 1/7th, etc. I used the 2*3*5 wheel back when I was working with primes for Project Euler, but I didn't do any real tests to see if a larger wheel wou...

Xanthir

For a big example, there was the changeover from a reducing atmosphere to an oxygen atmosphere, caused by the rise of blue-green algae, which caused the extinction of most other life on earth at the time. There's probably several other examples of "species A changes the environment in some sign...

Xanthir

None of that made a lick of sense. I'll repeat myself from before: "Prime" isn't a natural quality that we can just recognize in the universe, it's a definition we created to label a particular subset of the integers that have some useful properties. And it so happens that, for most purpos...

Xanthir

And then also take the Sega route of developing for the other consoles; then we'll get Splatoon VR on the PlayStation. <3 On that note, I spent last night playing Splatoon, first time in a while. Still such a great game, and my skills are pretty decent now (I'm almost always the top-performer on my ...

Xanthir

gmalivuk wrote:If you put it in one place, the damage will be extreme but localized.

And not even *that* extreme. Assuming p1t1o's math was correct, 10kg of antimatter, fully annihilating, will only deliver 430MT. Larger than any bomb ever detonated, but still just a city-flattener.

Xanthir

So you played Civ 2 two decades ago and aren't familiar with the mechanics and improvements of 3, 4, 5, or the upcoming 6, don't understand the level of abstraction/metaphor that Civ employs, and prefer games with an actual battle-simulation focus. Cool, but none of that has anything to do with Civ ...

Xanthir

Prefers Civilization 5's diplomacy over 4's. Revolved heavily around religion in 4. Defined relationships more than anything. Acknowledges 5's warmongering penalty issues. (Hates you for every city you capture. Applies even in wars you did not start. Becomes a pariah after completely conquering one...

Xanthir

Minimum ten miles to a side? That's "at least all of modern Leeds" to a map square. London's 30 miles wide now , sure. If you zoom in on Leeds , you can see towns that pre-date the city. Anywhere ending in "ley" is named for a waterside pasture. Zoom far enough in and yo...

Xanthir

I would have thought siege towers and battering rams were the less stackable units. Archers can huddle pretty close together to get through a canyon or something, and swap places back and forth to increase the rate of shooting from the same length of wall, but a ram has a pretty fixed footprint. A ...

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