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scentoni

564 karma · joined July 29, 2014

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scentoni··on Superconductor news: What’s claimed, and how strong the evidence seems to be
It’s not an amalgam (that means a mercury alloy) or any metallic alloy. It’s an oxide (more complicated than that but there’s more oxygen atoms than metal atoms).
scentoni··on Striking SAG actors in disbelief over studios’ dystopian AI proposal
The studio executives are trying to extinguish quality movies because they only want predictable mainstream cliches that can churned out inexpensively in enormous volume from AI on a regular schedule.
scentoni··on Apple Vision Pro: Apple’s first spatial computer
I’d rather reduce the weight on my face by combining the computer with the external battery.
scentoni··on Hash Functions
Those are examples of useful functions. They are not examples of useful hash functions.
scentoni··on A New Formula for the Determinant
A new explicit formula for the determinant that contains superexponentially fewer terms than the usual Leibniz formula
scentoni··on The Incredible Proof Machine (2016)
On iPad, I can’t drag logic blocks out of the corral on the left into the working area.
scentoni··on Algebraic Geometry for Computer Graphics
I think you’re confusing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algebraic_geometry with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometric_algebra which is a type of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifford_algebra and a generalization of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternion
scentoni··on Barry Diller: The movie business as before is finished and will never come back
https://stanfordtheatre.org is a repertory cinema (though currently closed due to covid) that has themed schedules (one month Hitchcock, another month Satyajit Ray, etc).
scentoni··on New phishing attack uses Morse code to hide malicious URLs
I wonder why they would use something so inefficient in this context. Are there phishing scanners that look for more efficient (high-entropy) strings of characters, like base64?
scentoni··on Comic Mono
https://nickgravgaard.com/elastic-tabstops/
scentoni··on A new class of magnet that exhibits novel quantum effects
No, this about signals, not power.
scentoni··on Giant clams manipulate light to assist their symbiotic partner
Changing the wavelength like this is called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluorescence and is the basis of fluorescent lights.
scentoni··on What other coronaviruses tell us about SARS-CoV-2
That is incorrect. The virus particles are mostly identical. The reason the dose matters is because each individual particle doesn't have a 100% chance of infecting an individual. That is partly due to the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innate_immune_system
scentoni··on Particle accelerator fits on the head of a pin
Well, muons are made by getting electrons or other particles up to high speeds and then crashing them into stationary targets or counterrotating beams. But you have to create muon-antimuon pairs, so that requires at least 212 MeV in theory and much more in practice because of energy lost to heat, etc. https://www.fnal.gov/pub/today/SpecialROW032808MERIT.html
scentoni··on Firefox Reality
People have been doing that intentionally since prehistoric times. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_cranial_deformation
scentoni··on I was wrong about spreadsheets (2017)
https://www.xkcd.com/1667/
scentoni··on A Giant Asteroid of Gold Won’t Make Us Richer
Aluminum does have safety issues in household wiring: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminum_building_wiring
scentoni··on NetHack 3.6.2
My current favorite roguelike is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tales_of_Maj%27Eyal due to the rich list of available classes and a mostly useful autoexplore feature.
scentoni··on 5G Is Likely to Put Weather Forecasting at Risk
Laser interferometry will pinpoint the distance to far less than a millimeter.
scentoni··on Super-solid helium state confirmed in beautiful experiment
If you exchange electron A with A', the wave function changes sign (antisymmetric). But if you exchange A with A' and B with B', nothing is changed (symmetric).
scentoni··on Fortran is still a thing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_exclusion_policy_of_NA...
scentoni··on Embracing the Laws of Physics: Three Reversible Models of Computation
for background:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_computing

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fredkin_gate

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toffoli_gate

scentoni··on A faster, cheaper path to fusion energy
To comment on other answers about E=mc^2 and KE=1/2 mv^2, these are just different parts of the relativistic energy

E=mc^2 cosh(eta)

where eta is the velocity parameter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proper_velocity

In terms of the coordinate velocity v,

E=mc^2 cosh(atanh(v/c))=mc^2 / sqrt(1-(v/c)^2) = mc^2 (1 + 1/2 (v/c)^2 + 3/8 (v/c)^4 + ...

So mc^2 is the irreducible energy due to mass and isn't relevant at low speeds because it doesn't change; the first-order approximation of kinetic energy is just 1/2 mv^2 and higher order terms aren't significant at low speeds.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=cosh(atanh(b))

scentoni··on Astronomers Creep Up to the Edge of the Milky Way’s Black Hole
The asterisk has nothing to do with indicating it is a star.

> The name Sgr A* was coined by Brown in a 1982 paper because the radio source was "exciting", and excited states of atoms are denoted with asterisks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagittarius_A*

scentoni··on One Windows Kernel
And VMs that IBM invented on mainframes.

And containers that IBM invented on mainframes.

scentoni··on Ask HN: What's your favorite elegant/beautiful algorithm?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton%27s_method

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CORDIC

scentoni··on A packaging tutorial for Guix
What C and its descendents have instead is numerous repetitions of '\s}\n' to end

if-then-elseif-else switch-case for while until functions methods classes

and good luck figuring out which matches which when there's more than a screen between the beginning and the end of a block

scentoni··on The Wall Street Journal Dartboard Contest (1999)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_fund
scentoni··on Gaia spots stars flying between galaxies
That's no star...
scentoni··on Found hooked up to my router
Epoxy doesn't melt. It burns--at a temperature where your computer case starts melting.
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