Viewing profile — comicjk

Historically, this is the norm. The British Navy in WWI was a behemoth, but still couldn't force safe passage through the mines and cannons of the Dardanelles Strait against what w…

I have bad news about reading the internet...

It's worth remembering that "fusion = abundant power" is a guess about technology that hasn't been finished yet. Fusion power might turn out like solar panels (easier to build than…

A Fire Upon The Deep is a fantastic novel for programmers to read, and I think the prequel A Deepness In The Sky is even better. There are some amazing old-school coding jokes in t…

People always need to be reminded, though. It seems to be in human nature to fear bad publicity, and the people who fear it less end up with disproportionate power as a result.

Not everything on Wikipedia is true, but the parts Elon Musk hates most are probably true.

This context is very important. "Little by little, over-inflated results and breathless breakthroughs betray trust. They throwing dimes in a wishing well which people rapidly start…

The climate shock from stopping aerosols would be a crisis for the planet, but we would have more than weeks to stop it. First it would take months for the aerosols to leave the up…

I gave my engineering students a CO2 removal design problem once, and at the end, asked why the theoretical efficiency had increased in the time since the textbook was written. The…

It is tough to beat classical computers. They work really well, and a huge amount of time (including some of mine) has gone into developing fast algorithms for them to do things th…

Yes, in fact they might be useful for chemistry simulation long before they are useful for cryptography. Simulations of quantum systems inherently scale better on quantum hardware.…

Regardless of what funding mechanism you would prefer in its place, turning off the existing system with no transition plan is a huge mistake.

What are the actual numbers you think are fantasy? Most of the time when I see someone claiming economic statistics are fake, it's a misunderstanding or lack of context. For instan…

Growing and sequestering enough biomass to slow down climate change means effectively running the fossil fuel industry at the same scale but in reverse. In that spirit, I'll point …

Another apt ancient example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Sphacteria Lightly-armed Athenians trapped heavily-armed Spartans in hilly terrain, and instead of fighting the…

Plants still perform respiration using oxygen. Photosynthesis lets them create their own sugars, but their process for using those sugars in the mitochondria is similar to how we d…

That analysis is from the perspective of the scammer . The scammer has limited time to write to each victim once the responses come back from the initial mass-email, so the scammer…

Texas is not going to secede. In the 2020 election, the vote was 52:46 between Trump and Biden, meaning almost half the state supported the overall national winner. Compare this to…

The method you describe would be an example of what is called a "thermostat" in molecular dynamics (because the speed of molecules forms what we call temperature). Such adjustments…

Both the original writing, and the surviving manuscripts, have uncertainty bounds of decades in their dates. The oldest physical pages we still have come from the years 100-200 or …

The "camel means rope" story, while cute and not implausible, is basically a guess. All the earliest available sources say "camel" - there is no actual evidence of this mistake bey…

We're talking about negative externalities, of which pollution is a perfect example: the effects of pollution are spread across everyone, no matter who emits it, so no one has an i…

Probably a symplectic Verlet method instead of Euler or Runge-Kutta, since you want energy and momentum to be conserved in this simulation.

You would end up with the "religious week" and the "standard week" moving relative to one another over the years, in a classic case of trying to fix messy details and thereby addin…

I agree. The author's description of what is "reasonable" sounds like a blueprint for many of my late nights struggling with Windows: "apps that assume that printing works will sti…