Viewing profile — ravi-delia

Propellant is still used for rotation control. Reaction wheels can "saturate" if they compensate for rotation more in one direction than the other on net, so propellant is needed t…

I mean I guess you could say they have different semantics. They're just different types, int and Int64 aren't any more different from each other than Int64 and Int32. You can trea…

Ok, running this by you one more time. There is a type called "int" in the language. This is a 63-bit signed integer on 64-bit machines, and a 31-bit integer on 32-bit machines. It…

So the "one bit" you refer to is what makes the standard int 63 bits rather than 64. If you could do things with it it would indeed break the runtime- that's what tells it that you…

The usual int type is 63 bits. You can get a full 64 bit int, it just isn't the default.

This is why we never should have invented the phonograph. People who want to listen to music can just buy a record, making it literally impossible for them to perform an activity h…

The question wasn't "why do protons have +1 charge", it was "why do protons have +1 charge, *considering electrons have -1 charge". The fact that possible charges are restricted to…

Not so much for takeoff! Most rocket designs better than chemical rockets trade off thrust for specific impulse. That's an improvement in orbit, since delta-v is delta-v. But imagi…

You know what, that's a sufficiently cursed workflow that it wraps back around to adding nerd cred

It isn't

It actually bottoms out pretty low though. The apparent fractal dimension changes over scales, but is sufficient that ruler length really does make a huge distance in coastline len…

I think what you're referring to is the false proof suggesting that pi=4. That is not what squaring the circle is, and does not in fact become smoother and smoother but rougher and…

Sure, but if you're gonna have a space heater (and people do) there won't be any difference in efficiency between any possibility, including computers

Large carnivores are kind of the pricey boondoggles of evolution. They work, they are successful, but they're balanced on a knifes edge. Every step a large carnivore takes consumes…

I mean this is a crazy thing to know about 37. And we know it!

In analytic number theory we usually only care about growth rates in a very coarse sense- up to scaling by some constant, and asymptotically. Because the log of any base is precise…

Population counting isn't an exact science, there were estimates suggesting we hit 8 billion about a year ago. But the 90s are right out- last big milestone was 7 billion in 2011.

So you can of course multiply some vectors- the real numbers are a vectorspace, and they have a perfectly nice product. Even R^2 can have a nice multiplication- (a,b)(c,d) = (ac - …

> "Definition" - "Theorem" - "Corollary" structure looks like a silver bullet, it fits very well in a linear format of a book. Unfortunately, this format is totally inadequate when…

Hmm, I do see where you're coming from. To me, saying math is the study of formal systems is a statement of acceptance and neutrality- we can welcome ultrafinitists and non-standar…

> I think in 50 years we will look back on the way pure math was written today as a great tragedy of this age that is thankfully lost to time. That could very well be true. I mean …

I think that "when you proceed to applications" is the issue there. Applications where? For applications in field theory, the spatial metaphor is exactly incorrect! For application…

I absolutely see what you're saying with that. I think I'm definitely the target audience of the abstracted definition, but I've long held that every new object should be introduce…

> To me, each column represents a different dimension of the basis vector space, so the notion that X, Y, and Z might form independent "column spaces" of their own is unintuitive a…

Axler serves as an adequate first introduction to linear algebra (though it is intended to be a second, more formal, pass through. Think analysis vs calculus), but it isn't intende…