81–90 of 176 posts
Are we sure this is the most expensive? I would guess the number which represents the bit pattern of a Windows 10 iso cost Microsoft more than $1.5 billion to find. I am sure you can find other examples of numbers that were expensive to find.
Is your username a play on charcuterie?
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Aren't all the major bridges in New York built with ridiculous safety factors? It's why these century old bridges built for carriages and small trucks in a city of a million, can deal with 2021? It's fascinating to me, and I feel like over-spec'ing certain chokepoints in infrastructure makes sense like this.
The funny thing is a safety factor is a factor after all. Just one needs to be small enough, and the whole construction (pun intended) may collapse in the worst imaginable manner. This happened recently in Italy: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-57219737 . "Engineers" didn't consider the safety brake essential (i mean, why do you even need it?), and Murphy took his chance.
It seems like they’ve decided that the support cable was functioning after the main cable broke.
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/blame-italy-cable-car-dea...
Grossly increasing the factor of safety is a subtle way that science fiction stories connote a feeling of very advanced technology. For example in the JJ Abrams movie Star Trek Into Darkness we see the Enterprise operating at depth in an ocean, then dramatically zooming away into space. Then later another ship falls from orbital height and plows through San Francisco without losing its hull shape. In Star Wars the Mi…
The real number engineers should be considering is not the factor of safety, but the probability of failure. The probably of failure should be calculated considering material defects, forces larger than predicted, simulation errors, and all other causes the factor of safety is designed to protect against. Then the engineering process can allocate those probabilities in the most efficient way. For example, in a rocket…
I'm guessing most engineers' grasp of proper statistics math is worse than their understanding of factors of safety.
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Seems disingenuous to lump a science fiction movie where the focus is future technologies to an action movie with exaggerated physics and lack of real damage. In action movies, bad guys die with one bullet while the hero finds his way to safety (and survives!) despite having 10 or more lethal bullet wounds. For the record, Star Wars is not science fiction nor has it ever been portrayed as such. It's very much an acti…
> For the record, Star Wars is not science fiction nor has it ever been portrayed as such. FWIW this is literally the first time I’ve encountered someone claiming that it isn’t science fiction. ( Soft SciFi, to be sure, but still: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MohsScaleOfScien... )
All of this stuff has inspiration from classical fantasy. That doesn't change whether or not something is SciFi or not.
There is an intersection of SciFi and Fantasy for sure, and the line gets blurred. Artificial human stories can be cyborgs, androids, clones, golems, or chimera, or even explicit fantasy races like minotaurs.
If it's an android, then it's SciFi. But if it was a clay golem made with magic (but otherwise the same story) it's fantasy.
See golem stories for instance. They explore a lot of sci Fi themes but are basically a fantasy theme. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golem
So, reducing the padding from 5x to 1.5x was already most of the benefit. If you were at 1.2, there are probably better ways to shave costs than reducing your unexpected force multipliers. It’s definitely attractive to lower cost / increase speed / whatever if you truly think it’s “free”, but the benefits are diminishing.
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About the Abrams movie: Too bad the same factor of safety wasn't applied to the buildings, where that should have been even cheaper. Your point is good though. Just like we're now starting to put wi-fi chips into absolutely anything just in case, why wouldn't an advanced civilization simply use their super strength nanoparticles for everything? Why go out of your way to use worse materials?
We use super-strength thousand year plastic for one time uses. It's a big problem.
Also if the bio diversity dropped, and people are used to living in closed ecosystems to limit damages from such harmful chemicals, over long enough period everyone will forget what was there before , further making bad things will not impact their quality of life anyway.
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> For the record, Star Wars is not science fiction nor has it ever been portrayed as such. FWIW this is literally the first time I’ve encountered someone claiming that it isn’t science fiction. ( Soft SciFi, to be sure, but still: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MohsScaleOfScien... )
And Vulcan are space elves, Klingon are space orcs and Borg are space undead. All of this stuff has inspiration from classical fantasy. That doesn't change whether or not something is SciFi or not. There is an intersection of SciFi and Fantasy for sure, and the line gets blurred. Artificial human stories can be cyborgs, androids, clones, golems, or chimera, or even explicit fantasy races like minotaurs. If it's an an…
I regard the superhero genre as a modern version of the old divine pantheons — heroes and villains, supposedly far beyond human, yet oddly well-balanced against each other (Hawkeye should not be in the same battleground as Thor in the same way and for the same reason that Choi Mi-sun should not be in a battle featuring an attack helicopter).
Sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic and all that.
Grossly increasing the factor of safety is a subtle way that science fiction stories connote a feeling of very advanced technology. For example in the JJ Abrams movie Star Trek Into Darkness we see the Enterprise operating at depth in an ocean, then dramatically zooming away into space. Then later another ship falls from orbital height and plows through San Francisco without losing its hull shape. In Star Wars the Mi…
It's an automated radio that is supposed to operate unattended for millions of years. You want a strong case for that.