Viewing profile — martincmartin

How does this interact with the No Cloning Theorem? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-cloning_theorem If you can rebuild the cQbit from just the bath, then there's no information in…

OP here. Yes, that's what I meant. Using the rocket equation, truncated Taylor series approximation, truncating even more to make things solvable, then iterating to improve the sol…

OP here. Cool! I was born in 1969, less than a month before Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, and was only a few months old when this game was written. I too learned BASIC, then s…

Yeah, I think we're agreeing. :) So it turns out, before discovering the bug, I actually wrote code to find the optimal sequence when your choices are restricted to integers. I tho…

I thought it was a little odd that he mentioned "impressive for a high school senior in 1969" multiple times throughout -- honestly I would imagine that growing up in the Space Age…

The nature of the bug is that it has trouble finding when the lander has touched the surface. You need to have an altitude of less than zero for around 0.05 seconds for the game to…

OP here. True, I oversimplified. What I meant was, there are two parts to the dynamics, the rocket equation and gravity. They add linearly, so any extra velocity that comes from gr…

True. + also has higher precedence than -, so that a - b + c means a - (b + c).

Thanks. Fixed!

OP here. One interesting thing about FOCAL is that * has higher precedence than /. So in Lunar Lander, M*G/Z*K is what mathematicians and other languages would write M*G/(Z*K). I d…

OP here (of this blog post, not the original game). The naive way is what I expected too, and described as the Euler method in the post. In terms of physical accuracy, especially w…

$82,098 in 1955, adjusted for inflation, was worth $727,502.05[1]. So homes were actually much more expensive back then. [1] https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=82098&yea…

The Economist had an article about this last week: https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2024/05/17/... (Accompanying editorial: https://www.economist.com/leaders/2024/0…

If you click on their username, it takes you to their profile. https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=simonsarris which says: I make GoJS, a powerful canvas-based diagramming library…

Isn't actually collecting judgements hard? I thought I read, in some article about how Alex Jones hasn't paid any of his judgement, that it's not uncommon to take decades before se…

True. It turns out, it also applies for the two body problem, as long as one body is much more massive than the other. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_period#Small_body_orbi.…

In a uniform gravitational field, it isn't. On the earth's surface, acceleration due to gravity is 9.8 m/s^2, independent of the mass of the falling object. See Galileo's Leaning T…

What examples would you suggest?

Used to be - 90% of replies were from normal people. Nowadays, it is just 90% bots in all replies. This reminds me of the saying that 90% of statistics are completely made up.

An economist literally won a Nobel prize for answering that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons When you buy a used car, even one that's less than a year old, you …

But observations need powerful domestic telescopes. If you're NASA, you own and have access to them.