Viewing profile — bodhiandphysics

more like wolves of the sea, since they hunt in packs and often attack prey larger than them.

you can just put a quartz watch in a faraday cage. That'll be more accurate than any mechanical timepiece. Mechanical clocks have a nasty habit of breaking.

The rest of the world only thinks the US is dumb because they rely upon us to make the kind of decisions that they don't want to have to make. It's easy to criticize without real s…

It's a little more complicated than that. There are two international treaties at play here (that the US has ratified)... the Outer Space Treaty requires that countries regulate th…

no... you can do fibonacci as O(log n)... you cannot represent (1 + sqrt(5))/2 on a computer.

no... if she's losing a steady 5% of $1000 bucks, she's paying 50 dollars to the casino. That's not enough for the casinos... her room costs more. The casinos want her to spending …

The security council defines terrorism as "…criminal acts, including against civilians, committed with the intent to cause death or serious bodily injury, or taking of hostages, wi…

you still need to agree on some things... For instance even if you're passing data through text, you have to agree on the actual encoding (Unix uses ascii, but there are lots of di…

This seems like a great idea! It was in fact a major focus on effort by basically everyone from about 1988 until 2004... This was the idea behind Microsoft's COM, IBMs SOM, smallta…

Try animating a photogrammetric model! How about one that changes its shape? You get awful geometry from photogrammetry… In practice the answer to will this be useful is yes! Subdi…

Boeing "recalls" aircraft all the time. That's what it means when the FAA grounds an aircraft type. Any problems will be identified, and then fixed, either by Boeing or the carrier…

Ammonia has the mild issue that it's not just flammable, but toxic and flammable!

Just to point out... the whole point of Terraform Industries is to solve the problems that are raised in that sobering view! That doesn't mean they will succeed, but saying "this i…

Even the biggest artists still need promoters (Taylor Swift has a promoter... it's Massina Touring Group, Beyonce is with Live Nation). The reason is obvious... star's can't afford…

No... first hebrew is basically just a dialect of Phoenician, and phoenecian isn't an indo european language! It's semitic, like arabic and Akkadian. Also the name Casesarea is of …

Modern hebrew gets the name from the Mishnaic hebrew name for the city. It's also spelled with a unvoiced glottal in arabic. Note that Israel was in the hellenistic part of the emp…

it can be probably polynomial time... that's ZPP! (ZPP is the complexity class of languages that are accepted by a randomized turing machine in expected polynomial time. However, i…

If you can make pseudorandom numbers well enough deterministically in polynomial time, you can simulate any algorithm in BPP in polynomial time on a deterministic turing machine, s…

It's a little funny for me to say this (my shtick in my lab is that I used randomized algorithms for everything), but whether this is true is actually a major open problem in compl…

Astronauts also need to be able to survive 1) high g reentrues (apollo reached 7 gs on reentry) and abort modes, which can be very high acceleration indeed

not if you already have one! In general, a second bachelors in the US and Canada requires 60 credits, or two years of studies. Schools generally don't require you to redo gen ed re…

Again this is not about people but about businesses... in this case startups which are somewhat unusual businesses since they have tons of cash an no income, and often don't spend …

While it’s easy to say to administration… it’s more complicated than that. Salary for professors didn’t increase much, but benefits increased massively (because of the increased co…

Me neither.. but cmake is infectious. You end up using it because you need libraries that use it

I disagree… cmake is very clear about what problem it’s trying to solve… build portability. If you need something to build on windows Mac and a variety of unixen cmake works much b…