91–100 of 782 posts
I'm going to go a bit random...get a styptic pencil! Nobody I've met even knows what they are. I came across them years ago in the shaving section, and was blown away by their utility. They are solid pieces of some saltlike material that are super effective at stopping bleeding. We don't even have bandaids in our house anymore, the pencils are way more useful.
Take a positive integer. If it's odd, multiply it by 3 and add 1. If it's even, divide it by 2. Example: 7-22-11-34-17-52-26-13-40-20-10-5-16-8-4-2-1-4-2-1-4-2-1... Any positive integer you take, you end up in a 1-4-2-1 loop. It's not proved yet but there's no number found yet that satisfies otherwise. That's the Collatz Conjecture or the 3n+1 problem. Probably the easiest conjecture to explain to someone. Good day/n…
Very interesting. whats the use case of this?
The Boltzmann brain hypothesis suggests that it would be more likely for a single brain to spontaneously and briefly form in a void (complete with a memory of having existed in our universe) rather than for the universe to come about in the manner cosmologists think it actually did. In this physics thought experiment, a Boltzmann brain is a fully formed brain, complete with memories of a full human life in our univer…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But… we do live in the most important time. We’re alive, and everyone else is dead. We can do things; they can’t. I don’t know what’s more important than that.
Your parent covers that under, (paraphrasing) 'if we are, everyone always is'.
Either it’s the most important or unimportant.
Almost everything around you has been designed by another person, or teams of people.
sin(0) = sqrt(0)/2. sin(30) = sqrt(1)/2. sin(45) = sqrt(2)/2. sin(60) = sqrt(3)/2. sin(90) = sqrt(4)/2. You probably knew all of those, but may not have seen it set out in this fashion before.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We used them in the Navy!
Curious...for what purpose? I'd read the Army used to pack wounds with basically a crushed version of the same thing.
Quantitative easing (sometimes mistaking called "money printing") isn't directly inflationary. Because when central banks buy bonds, they do not pay with normal money. Instead, they pay with a special type of money that can never enter the real economy (as to not create inflation). This special type of money are called "bank reserves". And bank reserves can only be used to 1) settle interbank transfers and 2) buy mor…
https://www.hrw.org/reports/2001/prison/report.html
Caution: that’s hard, explicit, distressing reading.
I've described this on HN before; forgive me if you've already seen it. I have chronic migraine. It sounds worse than it is; I rarely suffer attacks anymore, and when I do, they're usually mostly harmless, as in the case I'll describe below. Contrary to popular belief, migraine is not a headache. It's something a little more like an epileptic seizure. Intense headaches are one common symptom, but there are a lot of o…