234000+ entries in 0.056s
mircea_popescu: anyway, asimov ends it with an intelligent design thing ? /me is disappoint.
mircea_popescu: sometimes i wonder how thinking people manage to put up with this indignity. it's really worse than any government bullshit. to not have a dictionary ?! barbarous.
mircea_popescu: fucking incredible how bad the "definitions" peddled by online sites are.
mircea_popescu: except this is just your perception of a fundamental law.
mircea_popescu: a lot of human history can be readily understood by sieving it through the universe-cosmos duality
mircea_popescu: pointedly opposed to the concept of cosmos (the lot of related parts)
mircea_popescu: nah, it's defined alright. "universe" = "the lot that obeys the same laws"
mircea_popescu: which is probably what the universe is in the first place : the big bang was... well... one such event, tiny in its proper scale.
mircea_popescu: through a process roughly similar to pair generation (which is how we even know black stars exist : spontaneously generated pairs which sum to zero but which are separated by the event horizon result in direct radiation of the black body), it is reasonable to expect even a thermically dead universe to display localised disturbances, permanently.
mircea_popescu: asimov's idea of thermic end is kinda bizarre. it doesn't go to 0, it goes to "soup"
mircea_popescu: whenever the great ovary tears off the packaging off a pre-prepared condom-equivalent.
mircea_popescu: " It took mankind a million years to fill one small world and then only fifteen thousand years to fill the rest of the Galaxy."
mircea_popescu: we're fighting the bad ideas of the 1100s by being too stupid to have them yet!
mircea_popescu: "i have an idea, let's separate church and state. the 'community' is made out of idiots who aren't actually intellectually prepared to have any sort of church yet anyway."
mircea_popescu:
http://log.bitcoin-assets.com/?date=31-03-2015#1080512 << everytrhing even moderately costly is in severe permanent shortage in the soviet america. the only thing they have in ample supply is "technologies", a la facebook. exactly mirroring the situation of the previous soviets, eating pravda on bread, except "real" pravda on imaginary bread.
☝︎ mircea_popescu: aerial cables, bad idea. trees and cable, horrible idea. etc.
mircea_popescu: yea, until your tile splits in the middle and the halves slam into each other.
mircea_popescu: i suspect this is not akin the myth that 1900s ocean liners had solved a problem since idem.
mircea_popescu: and i suspect not enough to move economy to your model.
mircea_popescu: there's a reason the first coin in the world was a bar of copper.
mircea_popescu: people who casually do not realise the importance of peak copper in limiting human history are invited to read up on ww2 economic history
mircea_popescu: whereas peak copper allows only this much capacity ever being deployed.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform peak oil vs peak copper. except peak oil allows an infinity of capacity to be deployed as long as the sum consumption is under X
mircea_popescu: but then we're back to rockets, and sure, "tile of rockets", consider the mechanical problem that got brushed asiude above
mircea_popescu: decimation tiny turboprop or jet works better than tiny engine yea
mircea_popescu: what if the only reason electric seems cheap now is that we don't use it.
mircea_popescu: or maybe the only reason you think so atm is because you're looking at the dynamic equilibrium of proces as if it were static
mircea_popescu: and even this 2 cc combustion engine will beat the shit out of your electrical 10 watt engine
mircea_popescu: making a 2 cc combustion engine is more expensive than 1/50 of making a 1000 cc one.
mircea_popescu: look, a combustion engine works from about half liter to about five. that's what it does.
mircea_popescu: if you look at the relative size of a plane when it moves from two to four it's abundantly clear what the sweetspot is like
mircea_popescu: decimation yes but there's a reason they have bipropellers and quad propellers, rather than thousandprops
mircea_popescu: some very simple math : cheapo chinese copter toy = $100. cessna, $100k. cessna powerplant = 100kW. chinese copter toy = 10W
mircea_popescu: what was to recognise/promote ? guy was iirc a military officer with interests in mechanics.
mircea_popescu: decimation he was born either just before or jsut after revolution
mircea_popescu: the golden standard (carnot cycle) is too big generally, rather than too small.
mircea_popescu: the problem is tho : the electric machines suck specifically for being electric. this isn't fixed by assembling more of them.
mircea_popescu: seems exactly the sort of thing to get freak compounding nonsense in.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform a simple exercise : given each element applies a force F on a random vector, calculate the shear force - probability function for a string of 100 such.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform it's also much harder than it sounds, because of all sorts of scale effwects
mircea_popescu: three hours with the fucking ram because apparently no fucking blacksmith existed anymore.
mircea_popescu: at the time, the united states was like, a world leader.
mircea_popescu: !v assbot:mircea_popescu.rate.brendafdez.-1:99c85240d655d8874bfc63e85c4d96eab4222b144bd7b518ea6a0ffbd3a9fac7