merc
@merc@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on Iron 2 days ago:
Way too brittle if it was the weight of a typical sword, and way too heavy otherwise.
On the other hand, the cutting edge of that sword would be pretty amazing while it lasted.
- Comment on Voyager 1 1 week ago:
what we typically do is build in redundancy into the memory cells
Do you know how long that has been going on? Because Voyager is pretty old hardware.
- Comment on Voyager 1 1 week ago:
To me, the physics of the situation makes this all the more impressive.
Voyager has a 23 watt radio. That’s about 10x as much power as a cell phone’s radio, but it’s still small. Voyager is so far away it takes 22.5 hours for the signal to get to earth traveling at light speed. This is a radio beam, not a laser, but it’s extraordinarily tight beam for a radio, with the focus only 0.5 degrees wide, but that means it’s still 1000x wider than the earth when it arrives. It’s being received by some of the biggest antennas ever made, but they’re still only 70m wide, so each one only receives a tiny fraction of the power the power transmitted. So, they’re decoding a signal that’s 10^-18 watts.
So, not only are you debugging a system created half a century ago without being able to see or touch it, you’re doing it with a 2-day delay to see what your changes do, and using the most absurdly powerful radios just to send signals.
The computer side of things is also even more impressive than this makes it sound. A memory chip failed. On Earth, you’d probably try to figure that out by physically looking at the hardware, and then probing it with a multimeter or an oscilloscope or something. They couldn’t do that. They had to debug it by watching the program as it ran and as it tried to use this faulty memory chip and failed in interesting ways. They could interact with it, but only on a 2 day delay. They also had to know that any wrong move and the little control they had over it could fail and it would be fully dead.
So, a malfunctioning computer that you can only interact with at 40 bits per second, that takes 2 full days between every send and receive, that has flaky hardware and was designed more than 50 years ago.
- Comment on fossil fuels 3 weeks ago:
the specific argument you put forward is rather weak
I wasn’t claiming to pick the most environmentally destructive thing that people do. I was just picking a random, easy-to-understand thing that seems innocuous but still contributes to climate change. People know that driving cars is bad for the environment, but often don’t stop to consider that eating a banana could also be bad because of the shipping.
the problem cannot be solved from the consumer’s position
Not completely, but consumers can change their habits and make a significant dent in the problem. For example, “people sitting in tons of steel making short trips”. If people stopped driving, or at least significantly reduced it, that would have a real effect.
I’d argue that the problem can’t currently be solved by voting either. Yes, government regulation eventually has to be the answer, but right now there are too many people who would vote against that kind of a change, or who at least wouldn’t make it a priority. And, with all the fossil-fuel special interest money flowing into politics, even if it is a priority for a voter, there will often be elections where both major party candidates are in the pocket of the oil industry.
If people change their own personal habits (i.e. stop driving) that makes a small dent in the problem. But, it also motivates them to try to campaign, run for office and vote for other people who will make that kind of a change. If you stop driving you realize how much cities are geared around driving. How many hidden subsidies drivers get, etc. If you keep driving but just vote for candidates who talk a good game about carbon taxes, when they back down on those promises you sigh but you aren’t highly motivated to keep pushing.
- Comment on fossil fuels 3 weeks ago:
they imagined a solution would pop up where they themselves would not be required to make sacrifices
Exactly what’s happening in Canada with the carbon tax. If you emit more CO2 than the average you pay a tax. If you emit less you get a rebate. But, now people who emit more than the average think that their case is special and they shouldn’t have to make a sacrifice because they’re not the real problem.
they imply that corporations emit greenhouse gases totally decoupled from the people’s consumption
Yes! Or, they think that corporations are maliciously burning fossil fuels for the hell of it. While corporations might not care about the environment, they do care about profits. They will burn oil to make profits, but if they can find a way to burn less oil and use that to make more profits, they’ll do that too. Now, sure they’ll also burn more oil if they can make a business case to do it. But, unless you’re talking entertainment companies like Las Vegas casinos, corporations are generally not burning oil just for the hell of it.
- Comment on fossil fuels 3 weeks ago:
And, how likely do you think that any laws are going to actually get passed?
People’s consumption is the only real thing they have agency over. They can vote, but if voting is more a placebo than an actual way to change things.
- Comment on fossil fuels 3 weeks ago:
Let me just buy some locally grown bananas, in the north…
That’s my point. You can’t. If you want to not be responsible for those CO2 emissions you have to eat something else.
It is totally up to the governments to regulate emissions, with regulations.
Sure, but you also have personal agency. You can choose to eat beets instead of bananas. You can choose to pay to have an old monitor fixed by a local repair shop instead of buying a new one. Instead, people use the lack of government rules as an excuse to continue to live the way they want to live. They choose to blame corporations for polluting instead of their own choices as consumers.
If I want a banana, I’ll get a banana. I will have no idea or information whether it’s shipped with the shittiest fuel burning ship, or an electric locomotive.
Yes, because you don’t want to know. You will never do that research. Admittedly, the research is hard to do. It’s hard to do a complete calculation of all the CO2 costs of the entire chain of events that results in a banana on sale at a local supermarket vs. a locally grown beet.
People could choose to try to do that research, but they don’t. It’s hard, and it’s depressing. Instead they’ll feel good about recycling an aluminum can, and never think about the environmental impact of driving around the city in a car.
And will people vote for stricter emissions laws and/or carbon taxes? Some people will, many people will vote against it. Many of the supporters will also not make it a priority. And, if the party that promised carbon taxes and/or stricter emissions wins but then gets lobbied and doesn’t enact those new laws, very few people are going to go out and protest.
The government’s lack of action and the idea that corporations are really to blame for CO2 emissions is a convenient way for people to continue to live their massive energy footprint lives, while shifting the blame to someone else.
- Comment on fossil fuels 3 weeks ago:
why aren’t these companies having to pay for the damage they cause?
Because it’s too difficult to measure, and it affects the entire world in a diffuse way, instead of affecting a small group of people in a really concentrated way.
If a factory’s process resulted in extremely loud noise for their neighbors, the neighbors would try to get the factory shut down. They’d get involved in local politics. They’d show up to town meetings, etc.
If a factory’s process resulted in a river getting polluted, affecting hundreds of thousands of people, but in a way that is hard to measure and tough to notice, they might get away with it. It would be hard to figure out exactly what damage is being done. Maybe cancer rates in the area are slightly higher than usual, but it takes scientists and doctors to notice that. Maybe that gets people outraged enough that some of them try to get the place shut down, but other people are going to be out there saying the factory is a source of jobs, and that maybe it wasn’t actually pollution that caused the cancers.
With CO2 emissions, the effect is global, and any one factory’s emissions are extremely tough to nail down. The affected people mostly aren’t local, they’re around the entire world. Even if they want a factory to be shut down, they have no leverage because they might not even be in the same country as the factory. And, since every factory does it, you can’t easily narrow the focus down on one individual factory. Plus, that factory employs people, and if you shut it down they lose their jobs.
So, that’s the problem with trying to focus on a form of pollution that is diffuse and worldwide.
The other issue is how would you determine the “true price”. The price of something being sold is based on the cost of the goods needed to produce it, any fees, fines or taxes the company needs to pay, what they think people will spend, etc. So, maybe you think the price should be higher. How do you arrange that? You could increase the price of the items the company is buying. But, that just shifts the problem to a different company. You could add fees or fines, but a lot of people hate the idea of carbon taxes, and when governments threaten them, companies threaten to move somewhere else where those taxes don’t exist.
It seems like you haven’t really thought this through.
- Comment on fossil fuels 3 weeks ago:
Exactly. If you eat bananas that arrive in a port on a ship, that ship spewed out a lot of CO2. If everybody changed their habits and ate something locally grown instead, those emissions would not happen (but other emissions might happen instead). Every CO2 emission by a profit-driven company is going to be the result of a person buying one of their products.
We live in a society, and the amount of difference one person can make is pretty small. Often all of the options available to us are bad. But, this meme is worse.
The ridiculous aspect of this meme is that it shifts the blame onto companies, and allows people to pretend that their lifestyles and choices deserve none of the blame, and instead it’s just some evil companies that are ruining the world. The unfortunate fact is that in this modern society, if you’re living like a typical European or North American, even if you think of yourself as an environmentalist, your lifestyle probably results in a ton of CO2 emissions.
- Comment on Anon buys an air fryer 1 month ago:
You definitely can do high heat cooking in a pot. Most of them are stainless steel or cast iron after all, the material doesn’t care.
Sure, but most of the time when you’re doing high-heat cooking you’re not using a lot of liquid so a pan with its shallow sides makes it easier to get a spatula or tongs in to move things around. The high sides are only useful when you want to heat a large volume of stuff. Typically that means you’re using a water-based liquid (even something like a tomato sauce is mostly water based), so the heat will be at most 100C.
I suspect the British version of “pan” including what I’d call a pot must be from after North American English and British English diverged. The etymology of pan says that it has referred to a shallow thing since even before ancient Greek:
This is supposed to be from Latin patina “shallow pan, dish, stew-pan,” from Greek patane “plate, dish,” from PIE *pet-ano-, from root *pete- “to spread.”
I guess the North American English dialects kept this meaning of a shallow thing, whereas British English focused on whether or not it goes on a burner (which apparently you call a hob).
- Comment on Anon buys an air fryer 1 month ago:
I live in Canada, where a pan is shallow and has 1 long handle and a pot is deep and typically has 2 small handles. A pot isn’t a pan, although you can get crossovers like a saucepan which is typically deep like a pot but has a single long handle like a pan. If it’s not shallow it isn’t a pan. Pans can include frying pans, skillets, saute pans, even a wok would be considered a pan. Pans are for cooking at high heat. Pots are for boiling things or for preparing something that’s mostly liquid: soups, stews, sauces, etc. You can also have roasting pans or cake pans for use in the oven, but once again, the key thing is they have shallow sides compared to the bottom.
To me, a pot being a subtype of pan is like saying a knife is just a subtype of spoon. They’re completely different things.
- Comment on Handy temperature conversion scale. 1 month ago:
See, at the end? What you’re describing is timezones with a different name, and more fine grained so we have more of them. This makes it harder.
No, timezones are intended for people who live in them to be in a time that’s roughly coordinated with other people living in the same area. I’m saying that’s unnecessary. There’s no reason that 12:00PM should be close to the time that the sun is at its peak. That already isn’t true for people in the west of China. For them it’s normal to think that 3PM is when the sun is at its peak. What I’m suggesting is that that be applied worldwide.
If, for some reason, you want to know where the sun is relative to someone else on the planet, there are plenty of ways of doing that. I suggested some. That doesn’t mean that you need time zones.
Business hours are correlated to where the sun is
There’s a correlation, sure. But that isn’t enough information to know if a business is open, especially if it’s a business in another country which has different cultural ideas about when things should be open. Business hours are no reason to stick with clunky time zones.
People communicate with people in parts of the planet where everyone would say it’s a different time because the sun is in a different part of the sky.
No, they say that because it’s what they’re used to. If they were used to using UTC they’d say it’s the same time. They already do that for some things, because time is understood to be related to causality. As in, “Did that happen before or after the bridge collapsed?” People in different time zones will agree that in that sense, time is the same for everyone, even if they’re using a different time zone for historical reasons.
Again, we already have UTC. People use it where it makes sense.
And don’t use it where it would also make sense for historic reasons. People also use US customary units not because “they make sense”, but because of historic reasons.
- Comment on Handy temperature conversion scale. 1 month ago:
Like I said, people who use Celsius know when to wear a coat.
So do people who use Fahrenheit.
But if we’re maintaining that 0 and 100 are special numbers, then Fahrenheit maps hazardous conditions more neatly to those numbers.
I completely disagree. 0 Fahrenheit is very cold, but there’s nothing special about that temperature. You need to start dressing for cold conditions long before it gets that cold, and if you dress for cold conditions you can easily handle temperatures well below 0F. 100F is also nothing useful. Yes, it’s very hot, but you start needing to take precautions for heat long before it hits 100F.
Basically the Fahrenheit scale has nothing particularly useful at 0 or 100F. The Celsius scale has useful things at 0C and 100C. 100C is not useful for weather, but 0C is very useful for weather because it tells you whether it’s likely to be icy out.
- Comment on I notice Indians speaking English tend to speak very fast. Are the Indian languages simply spoken faster? 1 month ago:
Take “Hi”, 2 letters, which means exactly the same as “How are you doing?”, 14 letters.
It’s similar, but not exactly the same by any stretch. But, yeah, it’s not a perfect method. But, there probably isn’t a perfect method. How would you decide what “1 unit of information” is?
- Comment on Handy temperature conversion scale. 1 month ago:
Crude is approximately the same as water, about 0.8 to 0.9 g/mL. But, even if it were significantly less dense, like gasoline (0.74 g/mL) it’s still good for an order-of-magnitude calculation. Knowing that 1L has a mass of 1kg is especially useful since many of the liquids we commonly encounter are water-based.
- Comment on Handy temperature conversion scale. 1 month ago:
I’m imagining a tank wearing a fez.
- Comment on Anon buys an air fryer 1 month ago:
I’ve fried already-cooked rice in a pan, but when I cook rice it’s in a pot. Have you cooked rice in a pan?
- Comment on Handy temperature conversion scale. 1 month ago:
Below zero is when air temperature starts to get hazardous
Hazardous in what sense? If you’re not wearing proper clothing, lower than 10C can be hazardous. Many hikers who get lost get hypothermia even if it’s above zero because they were dressed for an energetic hike, not sitting around waiting for a rescue.
If you are properly dressed, -10C is no big deal. Many people do outdoor sports for hours when the temperature is well in the negatives.
IMO, if you’re within 10C of ideal room temperature, you may be uncomfortable but you’re probably not in danger. But, if the temperature is above 30C or below 10C you need to take precautions: shade and water in the case of hot weather, warm clothing in the case of cold weather. I don’t think there’s anything special about 0C for humans, except for the fact it’s when water turns to ice, rain turns to snow, etc. If you have the right gear, 5C, 0C, -10C and -20C are all survivable, possibly even comfortable. You just need more and more specialized gear as the temperature gets lower.
- Comment on Handy temperature conversion scale. 1 month ago:
I gotta ask, do you use a thermometer to boil water?
No, but I use a thermometer (built into the electric kettle) to prepare tea. Greens want to be brewed at 75-80C. Whites are often about 70C. Oolongs are about 95C.
The numeric value associated with boiling water has no impact on cooking, because the boiling water doesn’t care.
But the human who is doing the cooking might care.
- Comment on Handy temperature conversion scale. 1 month ago:
Tineszones exist because we have two uses for time
Not really. Time zones exist for 1 reason: it was too difficult for each town to have its own time, especially when it came to train schedules. So, they were organized into zones so that 6pm in Baltimore and 6pm in Philadelphia were the same. But, people were still used to having 12 pm being the time when the sun was at its peak, so NYC was put in a different zone from Los Angeles.
To communicate across wide stretches of the earth, you need a way to know where the sun is wherever the person you’re talking to is
You normally don’t need to know where the sun is, you need to know if it is normal business hours. Or, if it’s a friend, what their schedule is like and if this is a convenient time for them. You can search for the time in that other place and guess that maybe their business hours are 9 AM to 5 PM, but that isn’t always true across companies and especially across cultures. What you really need to know is something like “what are Dimitri’s business hours” which is easier if everyone uses UTC. If you ask “What are Dimitri’s business hours” and you get the answer 8h - 16h EET, now you need to figure out what “EET” means. But, if you get 6h - 14h UTC and you’re also using UTC, there’s no conversion needed.
is the man in Madrid likely asleep if I’m eating lunch?
If that’s what you need to know, what you really need are the current UTC offsets used to describe time zones. Just store those as “sun offsets” relative to cities and nuke the time zone aspect.
- Comment on What firing your PR team does to a motherfucker 1 month ago:
Nah, Loki at least has a plan. He’s more like Pierce Hawthorne from Community. A guy who can’t seem to get along with anybody, who desperately wants to be cool, failing constantly, but who uses his money to make up for that.
- Comment on Anon buys an air fryer 1 month ago:
Yes, it’s good to cook rice in a, [checks notes], pan.
- Comment on Anon buys an air fryer 1 month ago:
Good for heating up frozen snacks but usually too small to cope with large families
What would you recommend for cooking your whole large family?
- Comment on Handy temperature conversion scale. 1 month ago:
In Canada the scale goes higher and lower.
- -5 to -10: a warm day in the winter, a break from the misery
- -10 to -20: Ugh, again?
- -20 to -40: Wow, it’s actually really cold out!
- -40 and below: Wow, even with all my winter gear, this is going to suck.
Then sometimes in summer:
- 35-40: WTF, we’re hotter than the Sahara again!
- Comment on Handy temperature conversion scale. 1 month ago:
Fahrenheit does coincidentally line up nicely for subjective weather scales
In what sense?
- Comment on Handy temperature conversion scale. 1 month ago:
People can spend hours outside at below 0C temperatures as long as they’re wearing the right gear. Some people even like doing sports outside when it’s -20C.
But, you’re right that most of the time people only care to the 5 degree range. It’s a bit different when it’s close to the ideal room temperature. If you personally like it at 22C and the room is set to 20C you will probably feel cold after a while. If it’s 24C you’ll probably feel overly warm. But, except for something like measuring a fever, people almost never care about fractional degrees.
- Comment on Handy temperature conversion scale. 1 month ago:
But, with Fahrenheit you also need brain cells to remember that 90F is super hot outside.
- Comment on Handy temperature conversion scale. 1 month ago:
And water boiling at 100C is useful too because boiling water is used so often in cooking.
- Comment on Handy temperature conversion scale. 1 month ago:
Nobody even uses exact degrees when using Fahrenheit and talking about the weather. You can’t feel the difference between 71 and 72. Most people just round off to the nearest 5 degrees or so when talking about the weather. With Celsius you might be slightly more likely to use a non-rounded value, say 22 degrees instead of 20 or 25. But, you’re almost never going to use fractional degrees.
- Comment on Handy temperature conversion scale. 1 month ago:
During the French Revolution they tried to create metric time units, but it didn’t stick.
The one thing I think is possible within our lifetimes is getting rid of time zones. Instead of a business being open from 9:00 EDT to 17:00 EDT it could just be 13:00 UTC to 21:00 UTC. Then it’s much easier to schedule things with people in other parts of the world. China is already kind-of doing that, the entire country is on China Standard Time, even though it’s a huge country. That means that the sun is directly overhead at approx 3PM CST in the far west, and at the equinox the sun will rise at about 9am and set at about 9pm.