Viewing profile — avz

Phones can easily be oriented either way, unlike most laptop and workstation screens. Majority of views certainly come from people whose eyes are horizontally next to each other an…

The US has extended the protection of the law to the law-abiding Irish, Italians, Germans, Russians, Jews, East Asians, Indians, and Latinos freeing them up to flourish and build h…

Well, the may have understood the concept of "running out of stuff" and yet not realize it naturally belongs with numbers (of which they would have known other examples like one an…

The perspective of modern computer science (with its zero-based indexing etc) or modern algebra (with its need for neutral element for addition) certainly makes it clear that zero …

The OP said "There's more time between the last Stegosaurus and the first T-Rex" which computes to 145-72 = 73 and "then (sic) there is between the last T-Rex and us right now." wh…

Agreed. Perhaps the most prominent example of this shameful behavior is this one: curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh Source: https://www.rust-lang.org/t…

Technical detail: Having crossed all meridians is generally not considered the proper criterion for circumnavigation since this is trivially done near the poles. The definition I h…

Looks good to me as a rough back-of-the-envelope calculation to get the orders of magnitude right (the speed will go down as the object is climbing out of Sun's gravity well). Howe…

It seems to me that "the universe" is not an appropriate term for our close planetary neighborhood. There is a difference between an interstellar object passing within 85 times the…

> Whoever has more weapons get the land. Aliens might not actually be land-based creatures like us. Those who evolved on planets entirely covered by liquid (water or otherwise) mig…

What does "habitable" mean in the context that includes multiple alien species that evolved independently on different planets? After all, alien fishalikes that might have evolved …

Single planetary system isn't much more of a protection than a single planet against some of the possible extinction events, e.g. ones associated with the activity of the Sun or in…

I think the situation with interstellar travel is well summed up in this conversation between TARS and Cooper as they attempt to dock at Endurance (intentional pun hiding in movie …

I agree with your conclusion, but I always find that these discussions miss the role of medical science. The key parameters governing feasibility of human interstellar travel are t…

Side note: Sorry to spoil the apparently impeccable record, but for completeness: A half-century ago, civilians could experience supersonic flight. Well, it has since become imposs…

This made me think of Elephant in Cairo [1] and Pachydermic Personnel Prediction [2]. Specifically, it reminded me of what the classification says about the job of a politician: > …

> Why has no human stepped foot on the moon for 50+ years? Technically, this is not true. Unfortunately, it will be true in a few weeks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_17

This is not unscientific. Since we don't have a single unified and consistent theory of everything, it is very reasonable to suspect that not all laws of physics are known to us no…

> give much more flavor and diversity to the world than what rational thought will ever produce. I don't know. The religious and mythological concepts such as punishment, judgment,…

No, it still isn't infinite. Under reasonable assumptions the series is actually bounded from above by a geometric series [1] which is famous for having a finite sum when ratio is …

> The Fed has held interest rates at 0 (negative, real terms) which makes all cash flows effectively infinite net present value. No, it doesn't. Net present value (NPV) of future c…

The only one I can think of right now that releases energy when burnt in oxidizing atmosphere is H2, though there almost certainly are others.

Interestingly, if we go in the opposite direction we also loose something: Real numbers (1-dimensional): No more algebraic closure [1] though as you suggest we do gain a nice order…