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jbperry

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I don't see a way to slow down. So they would be travelling thru that solar system at .2c. At that speed, they wouldn't be in that solar system for long.

Imagine this was Proxima Centauri doing the same mission on our solar system. Assuming that some of the swarm was on target enough to go thru the inner solar system:

Mars is ~13 light minutes from the sun. So double that for the whole diameter of the orbit, 26 light minutes. At .2c that's 130 minutes total transit time (less really unless it passes really close to the sun). So probably less than 2 hours total in the inner solar system. And that's assuming you can hit that small of a target from 4.25 light years away.

Light distance Sun-Saturn is 1.3 hours. 2.6 diameter. 13 hour transit time for most of the solar system.

You don't know where the planets actually are going to be, or were to point a camera or any other instrument, except the sun. And you have probes that weigh grams.

That's a tough problem, without considering the laser.

But I like thinking about it.

I honestly thought that the scrollbar didn't work at all until I read this comment. If I put the site on my right monitor, I can grab the scrollbar by just going to the edge. But on my left monitor, where I typically have the browser, it's almost impossible.

I too find it very annoying, especially for such a long article.

Greg Bear has died 4 years ago

He's the one that really got me obsessed with hard sci-fi in my teens, with Eon.

Followed by The Forge of God and Blood Music. I don't won't to ruin the endings of these two, but who knew you could end books like that?!

Queen of Angels was the weirdest detective book I'd ever encountered, with futuristic CSI way ahead of its time.

The power levels of the conflicts in Moving Mars and Anvil of Stars seemed unimaginable.

Slant, one of my favorites, felt like something like cyberpunk, but something else as well.

I've always thought him as my favorite of the Killer B's (Bear, Brin, Benford). And one of the authors that really changed how I thought about things

I would like to see the same study done with a drastic change in exercise and muscle mass.

I have always struggled with my weight. I find that the solution is always diet. Exercise does make me feel better, but doesn't seem to have much effect on my weight loss, if at all. At least in the short term.

I assume more muscle mass, would mean a higher resting metabolic rate. But how much. Is the effect large or small? Is it like this study, where sure it changes, but not enough to ever be able to eat like a "normal" person?

Wow, nice job. I spent so much time inside the Programmer's Reference Guide as a teenager. My copy was completely wore out with pages falling out.

Writing machine language by hand on the C-64 is the closest I've ever felt to the hardware as a programmer. 3 registers, some flags and interrupts.

I enjoy learning new programming languages. My favorite that I've played around with is Elixir. But I don't see that ever being used at my current job.

The language I reach for the most is C#. LINQ is great and the base libraries are solid. Plus, the industry I'm in (building controls) is largely Windows based, so that obviously influences that choice.

I really enjoy the concepts and syntax of OCaml, but I've repeatedly lost of the battle of making it work on Windows.

The JVM has become much more popular in the building controls industry in the last decade. So I've been thinking of picking up a JVM language this year. Trying to decide between Clojure and Kotlin.

I spent 6 years in the Navy, 4 of those on a fast attack. I would say that it was an exercise in the extremes. There were times of extreme boredom and extreme stress. I leaned a ton of interesting things. The crash course in real world systems and how they work together is something that I'm not sure I could have gotten in any other environment. But on the other hand, I easily cleaned more than I have in the rest of my life.

Another interesting thing, is to see how people react in these situations. Some people can't take the high stress, some the long hours, some the long stretches of boredom. And they deal with it in different ways. And it can bring out the best and worst in people. And everyone comes out of the experience changed.

Learn from Anyone 6 years ago

I had more than one refer to diagrams, but it didn't show the diagrams. Example:

Me: Explain Feynman diagrams Richard Feynman: Ok. Let’s start with the basics. If we have a simple electron traveling from x=0 to x=3 then we could use this diagram: The node circled in blue means that the electron isn’t interacting with anything and is just moving, the node circled in orange means that the electron is interacting with the photon and has an “integrated” or a sum of all possible solutions with differing amounts of spin.

Agreed. The limitations of the C-64 lead me to learn a whole lot more about the internal workings of computers than I think I ever would have learned using something more advanced. Unfortunately(?) that has been the only assembly that I really ever used extensively. Still, it was a great initial foundation.

I keep these 3 printed out, near my desk:

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Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty. - The Coda (Dune Series)

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1. Learn From Everyone. 2. Follow No One. 3. Watch For Patterns. 4. Work Like Hell. - Scott McCloud (Comic Book Artist, TED 2005)

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The old ways are dead. And you need people around you who concur. That means hanging out more with the creative people, the freaks, the real visionaries, than you're already doing. Thinking more about what their needs are, and responding accordingly. Avoid the dullards; avoid the folk who play it safe. They can't help you any more. Their stability model no longer offers that much stability. They are extinct, they are extinction. - Hugh MacLeod - http://changethis.com/manifesto/6.HowToBeCreative/pdf/6.HowT...

New Youtube Layout? 14 years ago

I first thought. Why is everything so small? Barely taking up the left 50% of the screen and the icons for the channels I subscribe to are almost too small to make out anything. Not even 1/4" on a side.

But turns out it scales up well. And it seems to remember your scaling settings between sessions.

Completely. I got that from the description. I just sort of thought we were slowly moving away from that. Maybe I've seen too many commercials with the retailer swiping your credit card with a phone. Or those phone bump commercials. :) I'm sure the static point of sale method will not go away any time soon.

Interesting idea. I think it's biggest downfall is that it's yet another item that you are carrying around. Doesn't seem like it's as convenient or as cheap as printing QR Codes. And NFC could be used for just about any data, where this seems like it's targeted at purchases.

Still gotta give props to the creative thinking.