Brainsploosh

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Brainsploosh,

There are standards for such ratings, and several countries have mandated minimums, which lead to longer and healthier lives.

Brainsploosh,

The posters might have exaggerated the fun part

Brainsploosh,

If they are to take it, they need to take it before winter.

Taking it before winter means they can consolidate in the area over the winter, prepare a defensive position that will similarily bog down Ukraine in spring, and have an uncontested springboard for bombing and other civilian harassment all winter.

If Ukraine holds it, they will reinforce it for spring, and use it to harass the much worse Russian positions supporting the front.

Brainsploosh,

Perhaps, but the weather change is recent, and perhaps the reports haven’t convinced enough of the leadership that the weather is bad enough that stacking bodies won’t overcome it.

But then again, a lot of the Russian big pushes have been of questionable war importance. There seems to be at least two more games being played in parallel (army & other internal politicking, but also non-military interest groups), probably even more.

Regardless of why, it seems clear Russia is playing for something different than Ukrainian annexation and genocide, but I’ve heard little credible analysis as to what it could be.

The most credible guess seems to be dreams of reinstating USSR/Russian Empire as a legacy after Putin, but this has so many holes and contradictions to previous actions that Putin’s deathbed is one of the only plausible explanations. And the costs by now surely must have exceeded any indulgence of a dying leader?

Anyone wanting to succeed him must weigh the already decade long repercussions against his lifespan. And we’re not very far off having enough deaths and ruined relations that it will define another Russian generation regardless of if they win the war or not.

Brainsploosh,

US politics?

Brainsploosh,

Check your watch, time travelling seems to have messed you up a bit.

Any news of the lottery numbers perchance?

Brainsploosh,

Ah, but they gave him back story and motivation.

Spoiler warning: He wasn’t purely evil for evil"s sake, he just tried to rebuild society for the scions of humanity, and had already discarded the normies (can’t remember the term they used) as primitive, albeit barbaric, creatures.

The genius of Bester is that he was so self assured and uncontested, making him almost cartoonishly evil, but also that he was so essentially human. Driving home the major themes of the series: the dangers of unchecked power, the human drive to self determination, and that wielding power over others perpetuates a cycle of violence.

Brainsploosh,

It is for me

Brainsploosh,

Begun, the drone wars have.

This is btw very similar to how we first got fighter planes, started with pistols and dropping rocks on each other.

Brainsploosh,

Would such a thing be possible? Maybe I’m cynical, but wouldn’t any process of getting input to the politician be vulnerable to professionalised influence, and any insular politician isolated from their constituents?

Brainsploosh,

Wasn’t the whole point of the beachhead to threaten the Russian logistics to the choke points?

It can’t be more than a week ago I read about this

Brainsploosh,

You should probably widen your media diet, there’s active information warfare going on from both sides and their allies, a lot of misinformation and propaganda abound.

Besides, Ukraine not long ago did promise to remove their nukes in exchange for not guarantees of not being invaded by Russia.

Promises made by the same sitting head of state.

Makes it hard to trust any deal that isn’t surrendering the country.

Brainsploosh,

Question, if one wants to learn of effective means to organise resistance, how could this be done?

I’m currently not in an occupied country, but Russia has been threatening many of its neighbours.

Brainsploosh,

I’ve tried, but I’ve found no usefully complete source, and as important as it may be, I’m hesitant to trawl through thousands of memoirs and op-eds written in a foreign language and foreign culture to distill five useful tips.

Brainsploosh,

Have a secretly sentient AI manage all communications for you?

Solid advice :p

Brainsploosh,

A lot of the energy comes from orbital speeds.

The Hypervelocity Rod Bundles project proposed 6,1x0,3 m tungsten rods, weighing about 8200 kg, impacting at about 3000 m/s, meaning about 42 GJ of energy per projectile [wikipedia].

The weakest recorded nuke, the Davy Crocket Tactical Nuclear Weapon, is estimated at about twice that (84 GJ), and the largest, Tsar Bomba, at about 3 000 000x the yield (210 PJ).

Brainsploosh, (edited )

Oh, I apologise, I suffered some curse of knowledge there, the answer is time.

A blast is a release of energy over a short time, the whole point of building weapons is to store and handle energy in safe amounts over time.

Global electric energy consumption is about 200 PJ a day, approximately the same as the Tsar Bomba, but there’s no risk for a huge explosion neither when you incinerate trash or turn off the AC.

Because time.

Although we could explode a nuke and propel things ballistically, it turns out it’s a lot easier to use rockets. A rocket, although carrying frightening amounts of fuel and exploding spectacularly when it fires wrong, has several safeguards to not expend all that fuel at once. And also gives the opportunity to correct course along the way.

Now imagine that the same amount of energy has been expended many many many times over the course of the space era, and almost any mass in orbit has serious potential for damage.

For example, the MIR was 130 tons, orbiting at about 7,8 km/s, for a kinetic energy of 4 TJ, and another 235 GJ of potential energy. Totalling about a tenth of Little Boy that levelled Hiroshima.

Edit: Specifying and correcting the global energy consumption.

Brainsploosh,

Daily electricity is right, I’ll edit

Brainsploosh,

It’s funny, because tracking big rocks months/years in advance is what we currently do really well, and iirc we update all trajectories of all known objects orbiting earth at least every 11 days, and the main problem is figuring out which is which when they are maneuverable, not where they are going.

There’s currently about 750 000 things being tracked in earth orbit. The total number of asteroids is about twice that, so without upgrades we can still refresh each object every month, and with active space flight I’d guess that would be done much much more often.

Although, doing the math, enough Epstein drives (guesstimating tens) on a smaller asteroid could yield up to 1 m/s² acceleration, meaning an asteroid could traverse the distance from asteroid belt to earth in about a week.

Brainsploosh,

Agreed. On all points.

Moreover, the Tungsten rods are quite dense and thus small, and thus very hard to spot on radar or hit with countermeasures.

Brainsploosh,

This is fascinating, could you perhaps link to some reading on the topic?

Brainsploosh,

Thank you!

Brainsploosh,

I came to say precisely this.

The standard hp for a regular human, which for the setting is probably in better shape than the office honed bodies of today, to be incapacitated for combat and eventually die is about 4 (depending on edition).

There is maybe one way a trained human could perform a combat biting attack that would render someone unable to fight back, which is a bite to crush the wind pipe, and with all anatomical protection in place, it seems unfeasible even if they would have the jaw strength for it.

Brainsploosh,

Due to information operations leading to low morale/desertion in Russian troops.

Brainsploosh,

Weird how an export economy is faring worse when clients’ buying power is diminished.

Industrialists are whinier than I imagined…

Brainsploosh,

Fruit yoghurt is nice, soda is nice.

Mixing them is abomination.

Brainsploosh,

By that standard the only countries not monstrous are those too feeble to ally with.

Plenty of countries on all continents have sided with oppressive regimes, and conveniently ignored atrocities as long as they’re aimed at someone else. In anything from the Korea or Pakistani wars, to genocides in Central America, to slave trading within the African continent.

The West is due some criticism, but this approach is useless.

Brainsploosh,

Obviously. The pun was his attempt at humor and if one is tired, the other follows.

You managed to not only say nothing useful in a derogatory manner, but to do it in a stupid way.

Brainsploosh,

But you could also do a mean time analysis on specific tasks and have it cut off at a standard deviation or two (90-98% of task times covered), and have a checkbox or something for when the user expects longer times.

You could probably even make this adaptive, with a cutoff at 2x the standard time, and updating the median estimate after each run.

Brainsploosh,

Several teams actually

Do cosmologists know for sure that the Big Bang is propelling all matter away?

Is it at all possible that instead of being pushed away, we are instead getting pulled toward something huuuuuge via gravity? As if we are falling into something way greater than ourselves? I thought this was a wild idea but after I Googled it I found out that there is such a thing as a “Great Attractor”. Something 150...

Brainsploosh,

You are right that things would still look like we’re accelerating away from us, even if we were actually contracting.

Interesting hypothesis! How do we investigate?

What could we expect from a large central gravitational point? We should have other signs of the gravity well:

We would expect a point that we contract towards (and that seems ill fitting, as we see the expansion moves as the observer (including earth) moves), we would expect some kind of mass or similar effect, which would also have a size to fit it in (we know that gravity works different when you’re inside the mass, and we would be able to see it, much like black holes or dark matter), we would expect things to orbit the gravity well (which we know that at least our galaxy doesn’t orbit us).

You might want to actually check on these things to make sure they apply and are true, but at least at first glance it seems the expansion is better explained without a central gravity.

Brainsploosh,

No, that’s not at all what redshift is.

And neither redshift nor dopplershift would have that much effect on light at the speeds we’re talking about.

Besides the sun’s color on earth it’s not a shift of wavelengths, it’s a subtraction of wavelengths, as you easily can see in a spectrogram.

Brainsploosh,

A common problem (before learning it is impossible/fraught with danger) is categorisation, like sorting of strings.

Say you have a text, and need to count words of different lengths.

One intuitive approach is to pass through it once and add each word to a list for the corresponding length, as well as making lists as needed. No 7 letter words, no 7-letter-word-list, even though there are longer words.

As humans we’re good at sorting things into an unknown number of categories, and we have to unlearn that for programming

Brainsploosh,

A programmer might, as trained/conditioned by the limits of programming languages.

A human would intuitively not, these are meaningless and/or convoluted concepts to the untrained human.

Brainsploosh,

Maybe the last bit is disgusting, much like certain earth beverages, and the cup is to protect you from the dregs?

Brainsploosh,

Why? Bob has higher costs and longer preparation time for work.

In economic theory, the job is worth less to Bob, and he should be compensated more for taking it.

Is it fair that Bob should subsidise the company’s labor costs?

Bob’s labor also incurs greater costs on the communal infrastructure (roads, pollution, gas, etc), why should the company not also have a higher burden (higher tax) to compensate the commons for that?

Brainsploosh,

But the question is not what is simplest for the company. Arguably it would be even simpler for the company not to pay Bob, or anyone for that matter, they could also simplify a lot with not bothering with doing anything beside extracting money from people, slavery and robbery are very simple.

If we change the viewpoint from people living to serve companies, we might arrive at different conclusions, and maybe even a society better suited for humans, rather than companies.

Brainsploosh,

Serious question: What do you do to keep a steady supply of cat grass?

I have two cats and they will destroy a full planter like in the picture in about 3 days. I really can’t go to the petstore to buy a new disposable package of grass twice a week, neither time, income or the environment will bear that.

I’ve tried planting oats, rye and barley myself, but a) don’t get it as dense, b) it’s surprisingly hard to get seeds in the 1 kg range, and c) my beasties will murder any fledgling grass even as the fresh, healthy, fully grown planters watch in horror.

What do you all do?

Brainsploosh,

Wow, mine will happily graze it down all the way.

Brainsploosh, (edited )

I’ll have a go at that, thank you!

Edit with update: A fistful of outside grass seems to have been appreciated, but they are grazing less than usual, might be because it’s harder than the oats they usually get, or just because they haven’t gotten used to it yet. It seems to have done enough for them though, thanks for the tip!

Brainsploosh,

Wheatgrass doesn’t seem to be a thing here yet, only powder form that I can find.

I did find a pet store that buys whole oat seed in bulk and sells by the kilo, next time I’m gonna bring a container to fill, but for now I have a bag with enough seed for another month or two ;)

Brainsploosh,

A lot of the niche subs died over time as well, it’s rare to see activity in any of the subs you googled to find

Brainsploosh,

Believe it or not, he made his name as a wry liberalist, antagonising established conservatives (and Democrats).

I’ve only watched some Real Time, in the early days it was kind of interesting, but it quickly becomes clear he holds conservative ideals. Nowadays he’s mostly a talking puppet for the conservatives. He strikes me as one or two rungs below Sean Hannity.

Brainsploosh,

Don’t know about interesting, I’m guessing he got paid and thought “fuck you, I got mine” as conservatives are wont to do.

I haven’t watched in many years, but back then he geared himself towards “intellectuals”, but as the politics have become more polarised and the messaging dumbed down, maybe “middle class conservative” is more his brand.

Don’t know about actual viewership though, only his presentation.

Brainsploosh,

The square-cube law is also why we don’t have giant spiders, so it’s not all bad.

(a cow sized spider would have legs as thick as matchsticks, and as intuition would suggest, collapse hilariously on itself.)

deleted_by_author

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    Brainsploosh,

    This is bunk, there’s plenty of science to back up that having a safe space as well as unsupervised time is highly beneficial to healthy development in adolescents.

    In several countries, the parent’s behaviour is illegal and abusive, and would engender state child protections.

    The weird notion that a child can’t stop the abuser is somehow making it not abuse is sycophantic and, if acted upon, abusive in itself.

    Brainsploosh,

    But in several countries it is legally abuse to withhold emotional safety from a dependant, including withholding the right to privacy.

    I know, as I teach this to youth organisations who have a reporting duty against that law.

    As for the health benefits, I’d urge you to read a basic textbook on child developmental psychology. The keywords used in most models are autonomy, privacy and keeping secrets, as important parts of social (and cognitive) development from about the second year, and only get more important with age.

    Brainsploosh,

    Sorry for the late reply, but I’ve now watched the two seasons of Strange New Worlds and just can’t agree with you.

    Strange New Worlds works at establishing plot lines, in the first season telling you a central character plot point and a few episodes later doing an episode around it. Until the J’Gal character plot there aren’t even any twists.

    What I mean with plot weaving would be something like the Vulcan Archeological Medicine fellowships being a secret Romulan plot (established through the multiple glimpses into what they’re studying), or having reconstructed Pike after his premonition so that he can escape it.

    And this totally makes sense, Strange New Worlds is a TOS tribute, and those are notorious for being very episodal, with almost no links between episodes outside the main characters.

    Either we have different interpretations of plot weaving, or it’s extremely subtle that I cant detect it after a rewatch.

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