167500+ entries in 0.048s
mircea_popescu: Devitrifying a glass into crystals is wholly unremarkable. Given the opportunity, solids will descend into their lowest energy state at equilibrium - a crystal. This offers large families of glass-ceramic wonder materials, plus sporadic glassblower loud profanity. That glasses exist at all is also unremarkable. Thermodynamics proposes, kinetics disposes. The problem is scale.
mircea_popescu: "Memory cannot be found because it is not localized, nor does it exist as such. One felicitous memory model is the amorphous glassy metal alloy Ce3Al. Melt-spun alloy passes all local and global tests (HRTEM, ED, XRD, 2D XRD) for random order. Load a diamond anvil cell with a 50x40x15 micron3 sample. At 3,539,000 psi it remains amorphous. At 3,626,000 psi it is a single crystal. Science 332(6036) 1404 (2011), "Long-ran
mircea_popescu: incidentally, you read this bit with the crystals ? behold!
mircea_popescu: "Thermodynamics proposes, kinetics disposes." ahahaha lovely put.
mircea_popescu: goes nicely with the valium for the worthless female subculture of the 80s. sort-of like stoner movies, for a different holstein.
mircea_popescu: the man started in "the raven" and has been doing the same thing ever since : playing the devilishly dangerous lone male in a world of boring, twaddled middle aged women.
mircea_popescu: incidentally, anyone saw "the witches of eastwick" ? yet another of nicholson's signature porn stuff.
mircea_popescu: hardly. lysenko had... passion. these twerps just talk about it.
mircea_popescu: myeah. the "global warming" bullshit is merely the more visible application of an otherwise historical pseudoscientific process
mircea_popescu: "Economists do the economy as psychologists do the mind. A watershed of data is statistically manipulated. Miserably intricate deeply parameterized speculative theory is fit to data, protected from criticism by complexity. Extrapolations are made. Official predictions are absurd versus observed reality. Economists scream "heteroskedasticity!" and demand multi-$trillion Federal bailouts. Psychologists disdain irrelevanc
mircea_popescu: i suppose by "vacuum" one might mean "in the book universe where mass exists in points etc".
mircea_popescu: Do opposite shoes vacuum free fall nonidentically? << they do, actually.
mircea_popescu: make it a few mm squared and you can etch, yes. but...
mircea_popescu: having run some math... i suspect he is actually correct in the absolute. ie, nothing can for physical reasons drill 5 micron holes in half micrometer lens.
mircea_popescu: "this is a that. that is a this. stop mixing this and that idjits!"
mircea_popescu: the other possibly most important intellectual activity is ironically ALSO displayed in the piece : classification
mircea_popescu: half the time when someone talking to me here suddenly gets that sinking feeling in his gut and rug flies out from under feet, what had just happened was precisely an inversion.
mircea_popescu: inversion being possibly the most important intellectual activity.
mircea_popescu: t with aqueous NH4HF2. Engineering diddles things: computers, excimer lasers, and business lunches. It was a Pink solution."
mircea_popescu: "The next first job was creating ophthalmic implants. How is a 5 micron diameter hole drilled through 500 microns of implantable Plexiglas contact lens? It isn't. Nothing can drill such a 100:1 aspect ratio hole. Uncle Al put about 500 7 micron diameter holes through a foot-long Plexiglas rod, the long way, and said "dice it." Holes are a stuff problem, science: vacuum cast glass wool in plastic, dice, then dissolve ou
mircea_popescu: this isn't really real-time. this is "alligned apperture time".
mircea_popescu: "Orthogonal reactivity" to folks in lab coats, "idiot idea" to idiots in suits.) It was his first Personnel file Pink sheet! He wasn't supposed to succeed."
mircea_popescu: "Uncle Al's next first job, four years later, was industrial. Uncle Al was to isolate kerogen (the "not anything like oil") in Colorado oil shale (a calcareous marlstone, not shale). Low rank coal organics are like cured epoxy. They ain't comin' out. The literature was rife with researchers who tortured oil shale then sang like vultures about presumed stuff extracted. Uncle Al dissolved the rock to leave the kerogen. (
mircea_popescu: what's with all these confused broads posing for dating site profile pics WITH THEIR MOTHER.
mircea_popescu: you'll have to decide if you want those salesmen networking or not.
mircea_popescu: "The scientist who receives a percentage of the profits - a percentage of the gross! - generated by his own work has yet to be born, hired, or envisioned (ecept as the punchline of a joke)." << heh, alf's been making 70% of the gross for years now.
☟︎ mircea_popescu: the difference between the kids of today and the kids of back when it was worth meeting new kids... s/lfkdjgkjlewrhgkerhklgj/diaminodihydroxyarsenobenzenemethanesulfonate/
mircea_popescu: "Why Mr. Schwartz, that is brilliant! We have no staff positions open at this time, but we will certainly try your idea."
☟︎ mircea_popescu: "That should not be difficult. Use attrition technology developed for cobalt-cemented tungsten carbide and substitute about 10 mole-% of high molecular weight PVK to adsorb upon the micaceous platelet crystal surfaces. Thus when you add the dispersed phase to a pre-polymer syrup of about 50,000 centistokes viscosity, non-Fickian Type II diffusion will volumetrically plasticize the adsorbate preventing particle agglomer
mircea_popescu: "This is Dr. Frutex. Yes, I heard about you! Tell me, how would you generate a microdispersion of sodium diaminodihydroxyarsenobenzenemethanesulfonate in a linear hydrophobic matrix synthesized below its glass transition temperature?"
mircea_popescu: "Al, you simply must call Althea Frutex at Glanders, Associates. I FAXed her your resume and she practically jumped through the phone with enthusiasm."
mircea_popescu: "I was fired. Sometimes you find it hard just not to cry. (Said employer purged its 20% insubordinate, belligerent, ingenious, and flat-out insane employees. What remained was loyal to a fault, perfect in execution, possessed of fine silk neckties, and unemployed 18 months later when the whole company folded.)"
mircea_popescu: jurov im pretty sure she showed up at least for some of the stuff.
mircea_popescu: and it extends almost twice as far away from the port in the south -west than i nthe north. a town the size of a respectable country.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform incidentally, that wasn't even the outskirts. kinda midtown, the park is two blocks down from chacarrita, the cemetery. she lived nearby. i have a place a good 6 miles further north, right on the province border. the town extends past that, arguably.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform im pretty sure jurov and chet met, i have this memory of hanging out and smoking.
mircea_popescu: not to get facile over here or anything, but let me point out to you from bitter experience that there is generally less time than one'd reasonably have thought.
mircea_popescu: do they have any words for insanity in your language ?
mircea_popescu: so you're spending your youth, or at least every waking hour away from your child and his mother, to do things you wouldn't use on a platform you hate ?
mircea_popescu: but you should both document that lost decade and provide pointers to check what others did against it.
☟︎ mircea_popescu: ;;later tell pete_dushenski that's nice to know. thanks pete.
mircea_popescu: !v assbot:mircea_popescu.rate.chetty.10:e7478a460e183d3fe8a22a4aa41725df6b948a37e9a333aa5c13d44d44e3683a
mircea_popescu: i can readily understand why the ~performance~ issue is a true quagmire.
mircea_popescu: (note that i'm not discussing performance. i'm not going hey, why doesn't lisp-gl push out 2x the fps of directx in 2001. just, it should be abel to do it, at all.)
mircea_popescu: but what's the problem, anyway ? seems like this is an exact match for the argued strengths of lisp.
mircea_popescu: "take your propeller-hat, your paranthesis and your spielhosen away from here and come back when you have a fully native gfx stack."
☟︎ mircea_popescu: and nobody seems to rub the lispers' face in this, either. what, there's some sort of chivalrous convention i don't know about going on ?
☟︎ mircea_popescu: meanwhile... there is an implementation of particularly gnarly in c, but not in lisp.
☟︎ mircea_popescu: yeah well... this logic is broken. so lisp is good because, and i quote, "Because Lisp, as a tool, is to the mind as the lever is to the arm. It amplifies your power and enables you to embark on projects beyond the scope of lesser languages like C. Writing in C is like building a mosaic out of lentils using a tweezer and glue. Lisp is like wielding an air gun with power and precision. It opens out whole kingdoms