I knew that motion sickness is triggered by frequent starts and stops and frequent turns, but even I was not aware of how big a contribution the engine vibration makes until I got to experience a ride without it.

I was apprehensive about EVs but the first time I rode in one I immediately fell in love with it. I get carsick easily, and the super-smooth ride without the chug-chug-chug of an internal combustion engine made the experience surprisingly much more pleasant for me. I do not use a car, but if I had to buy one, I don’t think I could ever stomach an ICE again knowing that this alternative is available.

One example: on May 30, 2020 in Minneapolis, during the protests after George Floyd killing, some police were driving around the streets in an unmarked van, shooting at pedestrians at random without stopping. They later claimed they were shooting rubber bullets to “encourage” people to obey the curfew order. Of course, if you are the one being shot at in a drive by from a mystery van, you have no time to determine what kind of bullets are being fired… One pedestrian shot back! There is a video of it.

The guy was immediately arrested, miraculously without being shot to death in the process, and put on trial, but acquitted due to justifiable self-defense. The police did not drive around shooting randomly any more after that though. I see the guy even won a $1.5M lawsuit against the police now!

This is a great gotcha! I just recently learned that 700C, the “29er”, and (some) “28 inch” are all the same wheel.

To be fair, when I was little I too was guessing that “C” stands for centimeters or something metric. Now I know that “C” in “700C”, the most popular road/hybrid wheel size, stands for the third size in the French “ABCD” notation, where sizes “700A”, “700B”, and “700D” are obsolete and are no longer manufactured.

I’d love to use ISO sizes, but even if I know that I need a 40-622 wheel, there is no way to search for it on the storefront if every single seller made gross mistakes in labeling their product! I have to ignore the specs shown entirely and make educated guesses based on title alone. For example “WHEEL AL 700 FRONT ALEX AP18 QR Silver UCP” in the picture is almost certainly a 700C wheel and NOT an 18-inch wheel. The “18” in the title probably stands for 18mm rim width, which means that this wheel will fit my bike and tire, but is a bit more narrow than ideal 23mm. The sellers must be copying the title verbatim from the manufacturer, and then haphazardly filling out the specifications without knowing or understanding the actual numbers. The ISO size is not mentioned at all.

Given a radiative forcing coefficient of ln(new ppm/old ppm)/ln(2)*3.7 W/m**2 I have previously calculated that for every 1kWh of electricity generated from natural gas, an additional 2.2 kWh of heat is dumped into the atmosphere due to greenhouse effect in every year thereafter (for at least 1000 years that the resulting carbon dioxide remains in the air). So while the initial numbers are similar, you have to remember that the heat you generate is a one-time release (that dissipates into space as infrared radiation), but the greenhouse effect remains around in perpetuity, accumulating from year to year. If you are consuming 1kW of fossil electricity on average, after 100 years you are still only generating 1.67kW of heat (1kW from your devices and .67kW from 60% efficient power plant), but you also get an extra 220kW of heat from accumulated greenhouse gas.

I have wondered this question myself, and it does appear that the heat from the fossil/nuclear power itself is negligible over long term compared to the greenhouse effect. At least until you reach a Kardashev type I civilization level and have so many nuclear/fusion reactors that they noticeably raise the global temperature and necessitate special radiators.

I wanted to go with this, but had to go even bigger. The largest mine truck according to the wiki is BelAZ 75710 (as seen in the picture) which has “59/80R63” tires that are merely 402.7cm big.

But then you have to watch Picard 😢

So I am proposing that the Democratic party is acting irrationally and suboptimally, but you claim that the Democrats are acting most optimally, and it is the fringe left that is acting irrationally instead by refusing to accept a unfair split against all game theory guidance, causing all of us to eat shit (despite them making up only low single digits). Yet if the Democrats are so rational, how come they keep losing? Shouldn’t they have found an optimal strategy to get around the irrational ultimatum of the left? Yet here we are.

the most a third party is going to do is shave off a few percentage points, resulting in the main party losing

If the third party can force the main party to lose, then it holds ultimatum power and game theory rules apply. The main party irrationally keeps rejecting the ultimatum and as a result keeps losing. To execute the threat of the ultimatum even after the unfair split has already been offered is the paradox of game theory. You have to appear credible enough to carry out such a threat, but the only reliable way to appear credible is to actually follow through on such threats every time.

The Democratic party keeps losing and shifting right because it acts irrationally and fails to execute optimal game theory strategy. It could have offered the left a fair split and we could have all had guaranteed single-payer medical care, food, and housing, but instead none of us will have women’s rights, and the immigrants and gays among us will be herded into cages.

more evidence we need Civics back in our schools

Maybe we need more math as well - have you heard of the Ultimatum Game? Sometimes the rational strategy is to reject unfair split offers, even if that makes it a guarantee that you both get nothing.

Brb, gonna wiretap the judge’s house. It’s not a crime as long as I don’t act on the information I hear so there is no injury.

Half the fun of trolley problems is adapting them to puzzles for which they are utterly unsuitable:

I think it’s precisely because there is no governing body for English and all the rules are colloquial, developed through usage, that people do get grumpy! They are the only ones who can create and enforce the rules! Each English speaker feels personally responsible and compelled to correct use they perceive is in violation of the rules the way they want them to be. If they don’t do it right then and there, no one else can.

That’s why Google is pushing hard their Web Environment Integrity. It’s DRM for the browser! They want the TPM chip in your computer to attest that the code running processing the video stream is authentic. Then you can’t slice out the ads because you do not have physical access to the inside of TPM. With HDCP encryption on the HDMI video output, you gonna need to point a literal video camera at the physical screen to DVR the video and slice out the ads later.

They’ve been working hard for decades to lock down the video pipeline with TPM and HDCP and now WEI. They said “don’t worry about it” and we let them. They are really close to snapping the trap shut!

Now please excuse me, my tongue is falling off with all the acronyms…

Echoes of the Eye expansion to Outer Wilds. I managed to avoid all the spoilers, watched some playthroughs but thankfully didn’t study them too closely. Importantly, the streamers never looked “up” during the parts of the gameplay that I’ve seen, so to me it appeared just like another normal environment (well, normal at least by Outer Wilds standards). I already loved the original game, and decided I must play this for myself.

So when I entered through that doorway for the first time I was genuinely stunned. “You fuckers, you really did it this time. You actually went ahead and did it!” I mean…

Yup yup! In a just world, if you have 100,000 workers at a factory, and then they get replaced by robots maintained by 1000 robot technicians, you should have ended up with a Star Trek utopia where 99,000 people now don’t have to work and can pursue culture and passions. In the real world, the factory product price gets halved, the technicians get paid 10x what a worker used to get (20% of total revenue), and the factory owner gets 80% of total. The former workers are now jobless, homeless, and penniless and can’t afford the product they used to make.

They tell us “Replacing jobs is OK! We’ll invent more new kinds of jobs, as old obsolete jobs free up labor. Everyone will be better off!” but the new jobs are mostly “telemarketer”, and “tech support scammer”, and “ornamental hermit” at factory owner’s mansion.

But all that still doesn’t convince me we should be smashing the robots as a job protection scheme. I wish there was a way to keep the automation and have the Star Trek utopia instead!

Warning shots killing the target was also a running gag on Generation Kill (2008) show.