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S_Daedalus

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I think it's also just useful to learn for the way it makes you stop and examine the world around you, your own decisions, in a new and more analytical light. Besides, if you're into physics, it's the only way; you can't visualize a 10-sphere.

I thought I was unable to learn math, until I learned it outside of a school. One book like Prime Obsession was worth more to me than every moment of high school math. It's unbelievable to me that anyone can learn something devoid of context. I think there's a similar problem in how second languages are taught in schools as well.

No Mario's Sky 10 years ago

There is a strange, hardcore of people who love No Man's Sky. I don't mean people who like it, I mean people who (literally) brag about buying multiple copies and playing hundreds of hours. Those people do not like the reception the game has gotten, and have failed to integrate the reasons for that reception well with their own extreme enjoyment.

Why would embracing one destroy the other? I think a combination of gestural interface, subvocalization voice recognition, and AR could be the big winner in our lifetimes. The text won't be bound to a screen, you don't give anything up, you just gain.

When you need to get into serious writing or bulk data entry, maybe it would be a keyboard.

I think it just means you have a bit of empathy, and awareness of how other people might view you. Many, if not most people seem to lack those qualities in general, never mind in relation to their phones.

On the topic, something which reads your subvocalizations is really needed, and could even increase the speed!

No Mario's Sky 10 years ago

I can't imagine charging people $60 for a game that wasn't finished, that goes just as much for the makers of NMS as any other game.

As for beauty, very much eye of the beholder I guess.

That's a fantasy which we are about to run headlong into, as a species, in part thanks to people who won't face the grim reality and be responsible. This, "Tech will save us!" attitude among the a vast number of people who remain utterly ignorant of the reality of how that might happen, is literally going to kill us all if we're not careful.

I think that might be one of those seemingly straightforward questions that's actually very nuanced, because I suspect that the combined masses of the two stars will have a lot to say about the outcome. For a couple of Solar mass stars, I would expect... a big explosion. I can't imagine it really happening though, except in a one-in-a-<insert -illion of choice> "head-on" collision. In that case, whether it blew apart and re-settled into a star, or a nebula, or... just blew apart, would be a function of mass and momentum.

In the case of slowly decaying orbits, one star usually ends up stripping most of the atmosphere from its partner, before the core eventually passes its Roche limit, breaks apart, and is accreted. In that case you get a series of Novas (not to be confused with supernovas), and a somewhat larger star when all is finally said and done. Lots of debris, occasionally very bright.

It's hard to imagine a situation in which two stars "merge" without a slow process of cannibalization. Compact collapsed bodies like white dwarves, neutron stars and the rest definitely do merge, but they're so much denser than a "living" star.

I can't imagine that the concentration of matter ejected, which diffuses impressively, would have been so concentrated so far away. Supernovae shockwaves are thought to be a candidate for touching of the process of dust cloud collapse and stellar formation, but an old star is usually a really dense core and a very wispy atmosphere, relatively speaking.

Maybe a shockwave could set off a nova event, or the addition of matter could trigger a collapse, but I'm not sure how it could jumpstart nuclear fusion again.