chaosCruiser

Also known as a sidereal day. Check the animation. It’s pretty cool.

This topic also touches upon the concept of reference frames. When people say that the earth takes 24 h to make a full revolution, it’s in relation to the sun. From a universal perspective, the heliocentric reference frame moves and rotates. From the heliocentric perspective, the usual earth based reference frame also moves and rotates. Nothing is truly stationary, and measuring revolutions is impossible unless you define your frame of reference.

If you say a full revolution takes 24 h, it’s not wrong, but it’s only true in one reference frame.

Ethiopians are clearly very smart people. Take that white supremacists!

Ancient Romans just loved convoluted systems, which were later inherited by the rest of Europe. The French revolution fixed most of that mess by simplifying it and getting rid of the quirky designs. They also tried to fix time units and the calendar, but that just didn’t stick for some reason. Meanwhile, Ethiopians were already using a sensible calendar that has a good way to mitigate the messy properties of Earth.

I approve of this system. It should make calendars nice and simple for the most part. For example, salaries would be pretty simple since the period wouldn’t fluctuate wildly.

It’s just that not all things respect global holidays, so calculating energy production, water consumption and other things like that would still have to deal with weird inconsistencies. Regardless, this would still be far superior to our current train wreck of a calendar.

Now that’s the kind of thinking we need more of! Mathematical precision is the way we run things around here. Screw whatever nature had intended for orbits and such. It’s our planet.

Best of all, that funny fraction isn’t even constant. The earth is a bit wonky.

That addresses the calendar problem, which is another pet peeve of mine. Oh, where do I even begin. The calendar system is just the next level of curses and barrels of rotting worms.

At least time units have fixed, but inconvenient conversion multipliers. Months and years involve numbers that aren’t even constants!

Just when you thought it couldn’t possibly get any worse, someone reminds you about time zones. That’s just pure cosmic horror.

It’s a miracle we don’t trigger a nuclear meltdown every week while using a system like this.

Time units are just as cursed as American units.

Conversion between days, hours, minutes and seconds is a total mess. If you never have to do anything with those numbers, you don’t need to worry about it. The moment you need to do calculations or compare devices you run into completely unnecessary problems that would have been easy to avoid. Just think of pumps and fans with units given in l/min or m^3/h.

Just pick the standard time unit and stick with it. Use prefixes to deal with big or small numbers.

The visualizations made be 3blue1brown make so much sense, and they also look cool.

It’s also about motivation. During the first years, you just study all the boring stuff nobody cares about. It takes years to get to the cool stuff, but by that time most students are already completely fed up with maths.

The problems in the books were extra dry, so I prefered to come up with my own problems and solutions. Like, one day I was wondering how long it would take for a super fast train to go from one side of the planet to another. What if you accelerated half the way at 1 g, and then decelerated at -1g. How long would it take? What would be the maximum velocity? I had so many questions, and that’s why I had plenty of motivation to figure it all out. That’s how I learn weird and random stuff.

What if you had a powerful laser that was able to evaporate stone? Let’s say you wanted to use it to drill a hole through stone, but you need to do it with the same rate as with a regular drill? Would you need a nuclear reactor just to power your super laser? My head is full of bizarre questions like this, so learning never stops.

Really depends on how you intend to use Windows. Once upon a time I thought that was a great solution for communicating with an ancient piece of windows specific hardware. Turns out, you really need to keep that old W98 computer around unless you are willing to upgrade to new analysis hardware that costs about as much as a nice car. Home users probably never run into issues like this.

What about those 2% days when you do need windows? Every time you boot to it, you’ll have gigabytes of updates waiting for you, which is seriously annoying. In order to do “just one thing real quick”, you’ll end up wasting an hour each time. I propose you make those days less infuriating, by booting up windows a bit more frequently.

Ideally, you would just uninstall it entirely, and use the disk space for Linux. Unfortunately, many people still have some ties that are difficult to break, so I totally get it why dual booting exists. If that one thing you do in windows doesn’t require much performance, you could also dedicate some old heap of junk laptop for it.

I want to build a Dyson sphere and use the energy to move the entire solar system to a place where our dying star can be replaced.

How’s that for achievable goals?

Oh, that’s a good start. At least one corner stone can be placed easily. The rest of the journey won’t be that easy though.

It’s a good start nonetheless, and I’m happy to see them take this step in the right direction.

I’ve read some stories of someone transmuting Ubuntu into Debian or something like that. It requires lots of knowledge of both systems, plenty of time, and infinite patience. The two distributions should be somewhat closely related in order to make this gargantuan project even remotely feasible. If you’re jumping from Arch to Gentoo, you might as well just do LFS while you’re at it.

Previously it was thought that non-coding sequences were junk, and enormous numbers like 99% were thrown around at the time. Later, we found out that more and more of the non-coding regions actually do various other things, and the scope of junk DNA got narrower as years went by. Nowadays, you don’t really hear that term much, because future scientists have a tendency of discovering new functions for sequences that were previously thought of as non-functional. There’s also debate as to where do we draw the line.

As usual, biochemistry is a fast moving target, and people have gotten cautious about these things. As more and more is discovered, older notions are updated or even thrown away.

Junk DNA.

Convincing someone to abandon their tribe won’t be easy. No matter how logical your explanation is, they’re going to stick to their tribe regardless.

Are you talking to a conspiracy nut? If so, you can forget about reasoning with them. They don’t play this game by the same rules as you do.

No amount of logic, facts or evidence will ever help. They have emotional issues, so you need to use an emotional solution.

Same. I already have two lifetime memberships with other companies, and they work just fine. No regrets.