ISS has an end-to-end width of about a football field orbits at 1.2M feet hight, 20 times further away than this balloon. Yet anyone can take a photo of it from their own back yard.

Yes, there is a speed of motion and the front end of an object will start to move before the back end does.

So let's look at your thought experiment. Imagine an extremely long metal rod in space. We know metal is highly resistant to compression and not very elastic. If you apply too much force at the front, the rod will deform. If you apply a force that is sufficiently low such that it avoids permanent deformation and that force is applied over a long enough time, and the rod is sufficiently long enough, yes, you will achieve your 10cm of compression in motion where the front of the rod will have moved 10cm before the back of it will experience any motion.

The length of the rod to achieve this effect would largely depend on the bulk modulus (resistance to compression), strength of the material (you don't want to deform it), and the speed of sound in the material (which is really the speed of movement).

Here is a great video where an experiment is created to answer this exact question. I highly recommend a watch all of the way through.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqhXsEgLMJ0

The invariance of the speed of light with respect to frame of reference is a special property. If something is faster than the thing observed to be invariant, which happens to be light, the geometry of special relativity breaks down, predicting spacial and temporal inversions. This isn't just limited to breaking relativity. Other areas of physics would break too. For example, this would also be a violation of the second law of thermodynamics. It doesn't stop there. Much of accepted physics would have be be rolled back.

This is a pretty decent description of what Big Tech already does.

Consider the cost of developing and maintaining software that companies like Google and Meta provide to people at no cost. Consider the cost of producing entertainment products like professional sports that are provided by networks at no cost because dollar value is found in advertising.

Economics and forward thinking companies have already learned that fundamental unit of value isn't promise of labor or goods, but choice. This was understood when advanced economies transitioned from producing goods to services. UBI is just another way of allowing low friction choice. UBI is not just entirely compatible with capitalism but is the end state of capitalism.

The barrier isn't propaganda or capitalism. The barrier is that people and by proxy, elected government, don't understand this.

It’s fine to call it axiomatic. You can get into that Hilbert style formalism all you want. That’s all just backwards justification of math.

There is a reason nobody picked it up and continued that work when he abandoned it.

Math, like every logic system, must have axioms. These are statements that are true only because they are stated to be true, not because they can be shown to be true.

The imaginary unit is axiomatic. There is nothing special about axioms. I think people are just thrown off by the unrelated associations people have with the term "imaginary" and how/when it is taught in school.

In this case, imaginary numbers don't just lead to interesting structures and algebras, they are exceedingly useful in physics and might even be required.

The Expanse was originally a SyFy network show. Netflix just paid for streaming rights. After season 2, SyFy cancelled the show. Amazon picked it up and produced the later seasons. Netflix never "cancelled" the Expanse as they didn't produce the show.

It's fair to assume that Amazon had absolutely no interest in letting Netflix acquire streaming rights for seasons 3, 4 and 5 and Netflix had no interest in putting up only the first 2 seasons when everyone who gets into the show would have to move over to Prime Video to continue watching it.

When a show is cancelled early, rights holders shop it around. It's possible Netflix and others had interest in acquiring the show. If they did, they were outbid by Amazon.

People who have subscribed to Netflix for years will only cancel their Netflix accounts when they think Netflix will not have enough good content in the future.

"Never cancelled a successful show" a fair thing to say when subscriber counts are growing. It's incorrect when subscriber counts fall. A successful show isn't one that gets a lot of viewers. A show is successful when it is the reason people don't cancel their subscription.

I cancelled my Netflix account. If I thought they would continue to put out and support stuff like The OA and Altered Carbon, I would still have a subscription. Instead they decided to acquire a bunch of what would have been considered straight-to-video content in the days of Blockbuster.

From the Cowboy perspective:

In the under 35 crowd, no animosity towards the Niners, just their fanbase for being obnoxious in general.

For the under 35 Cowboys crowd, the main rivalry is definitely with the Cowboys. Sorry, the Cowpies. (Yes, Dez caught it and Romo doesn't deserve the slander.)

I take issue with this. The biggest commercial and scientific benefit to quantum computing is listed as #2 in this list. Quantum computers can simulate quantum interactions more efficiently than silicon computers.

One of the uses would be the ability to predict properties of materials like metal alloys. A world where cheaper and superior materials are available for commercial use is beneficial to everyone, even if IP laws restrict who can produce these materials.

Another use would be to predict how molecules interact with the body. Sure, this will be a huge boon to Pharma, but again, the entire world wins.

On the whole, quantum advantage is projecting to be one of those "a rising tide lifts all boats" things, but that doesn't get clicks and comments.

There are a bunch of relevant numbers. Below the dead pool threshold power stops generating. Above the flood pool threshold water has to be diverted.

Percent capacity can be a bit hard to interpret because what’s fine for one dam may not be fine for another. These ranges will also change for the same dam over seasons. Without more context it’s not possible to know if the percent capacity is ideal, too high or too low.

Historical average for the time period is probably another good line.

This shouldn't be downvoted. Intellectual property constraints are the reason this effort has yielded nothing over the last several (maybe 10?) years.

It's also why no other company outside of Huawei (who don't have the same legal hurdles) would even consider doing this.

Read my other post in this thread. Qualcomm and Broadcom have monopolies in their respective domains. Breaking a monopoly is hard.

Nobody else has the budget, patience, legal power and scale needed for this to be a sane thing to try to do. For everyone else but Apple and Huawei, just paying the price Qualcomm demands is the right choice.

It is kind of crazy.

There's good reason there isn't an all-radio chip on the market. They are hard to make and even harder to make without patent infringement and opening yourself up to billions in liability. If your all-in-one chip isn't good at the "all" part then it's worthless.

Radio is hard. Apple wasted a ton of money into building a cellular chip only to continue to buy from Qualcomm. Oh, and they also lost big in court too! Apple had originally planned on using their own cellular chips half a decade ago. I wouldn't venture to guess how much money they've already pissed away on this venture with nothing to show for it yet.

It only makes sense to even attempt this if you have an unlimited development budget, have a legal team that can tiptoe around the field of IP landmines, can wait years on end before going to market and even then only if you are confident you can sell a billion of these.

It's pretty much something that doesn't make sense for anyone on the planet but Apple or Huawei to attempt.

It's not going to let Apple make better gadgets. It's that Apple is at a scale where they find themselves tired of paying tens of billions of dollars for Qualcomm and Broadcom stuff. For other companies, a risky multi-billion dollar bet and a bunch of high profile IP lawsuits just to make a single component that isn't related to your core competency for one of your products instead of just buying it from a vendor is a terrible idea.

Is there a mechanism where a failed nuclear warhead can effectively become a dirty bomb? From what I've read, dirty bombs and ICBM warheads are wholly unrelated.

There isn't enough arable land to feed 8 billion people without fertilizer.

In the late 1800s scientists were modeling that after around 2 billion people population growth would have to stop because there wouldn't be any way to feed everyone. In the early 20th century a bunch of methods to mass produce fertilizer appeared. It was one of the biggest events in human history.

Today you can do the math and determine exactly how many calories a shortage of X tons of fertilizer will cause to global food production.

I went down this rabbit hole recently. There isn't much radioactive material in a nuclear bomb. Almost all of the ionizing radiation is created during the explosion. This radiation is extremely dangerous but it decays quickly. Radiation in nuclear test sites isn't even detectible today.

There are models that show how ionizing radiation can have disastrous downstream effects but these are all effects that follow the seconds and hours after an explosion.

There hasn't been any detectible radiation in Hiroshima or Nagasaki for many decades.

The image I had in my head of a lifeless wasteland that is uninhabitable for thousands of years after a nuclear holocaust just isn't real. The only material that is radioactive for thousands of years is spent nuclear fuel, or HLW. Everything else decays quickly.

For scale, a nuclear power plant will use 24,000 kilograms of nuclear fuel per year. An advanced nuclear bomb will have about 4 kilograms before detonation.

The radiation and even the long distance radioactive fallout following a nuclear explosion is most definitely not worse than the explosion itself.

The scope of the diabetes epidemic in the US is far worse than people seem to realize. It's truly frightening. 38% of Americans over 18 are pre-diabetic. Almost all of them will develop type 2 diabetes.

On one hand, the extreme prevalence of diabetes in the next 10, 20 and 20 years alone will ensure availability of insulin and other medications. On the other, without steps to prevent type 2 diabetes with diet and exercise, diabetes will become a leading cause of death.

Leaf shutters solved rolling shutter for still images a long time ago, but they cannot be used for video.

Film video cameras use rotary shutters while digital video cameras do not use any mechanical shutter at all. The rolling shutter effect in digital video is a consequence of not being able to do a readout of charge on all photosites at the same time, or more technically, fast enough that it doesn't matter.

"Global shutter" in this sense is not a mechanical shutter. It's technology on the image sensor. Maybe a better term is global electronic shutter. Unless it's a fundamentally different tech, this would work the same as any image sensor, just faster. A good image sensor these days will complete a readout in under 20ms, so if they are calling this much better than what they already sell to the point they brand it as a 'global shutter', I would guess it's in the range of 1ms or so.

Charter schools are private schools with a public enrollment program. Instead of collecting tuition from parents, students who enroll are funded at a government-determined rate paid for by the government. It is intended to be a private alternative to public schools.

The concept is that charter schools provide competition to public schools which results in higher quality education for everyone. When a charter school is run better than neighboring public schools, enrollment will be high, the private venture will be profitable and public schools will improve by by adopting the standards and practices of the successful charter school.

The best case scenario does happen. There are some high performing charter schools and sometimes that does pressure neighboring public schools to perform better.

In practice, what generally happens is that the charter schools spend tuition on gimmicks that attract parents and students and they academically underperform. Since public schools are also funded by the number of enrolled students, when they experience a decrease in enrollment they get a decrease in funds. Poor performing schools with even fewer funds perform even worse.

Sometimes this results in a type of segregation where most of the good students attend the charter and bad students attend the public schools. The poor performing public school, having fewer quality students and less money will, surprise, get even worse.

More often charter schools underperform. In many states charter schools are typically founded by religion organizations that push secular requirements to and beyond legal limits.

They do vary wildly in quality. There are good charter schools, great charter schools, bad charter schools and straight up scam charter schools. They work well in some areas. On the whole they don't work well and cause considerable harm to neighboring public schools, but a good argument could be made that this is mostly due to poor oversight.

Another good argument could be made that they are doing exactly what they are designed to do by providing the kind of education that the community wants, even if it's substandard from the perspective of colleges and universities. The drawback of that argument is that it always comes as the cost of taking away funding for public schools harming children and parents who don't want religious organizations teaching their kids.

TL;DR: The charter school system is a chaotic shit show. Which is exactly what many people who wish for higher quality publicly funded education want and many people who wish to subvert and destroy the publicly funded education system want.

Humans are a prosocial species. Cognitive and behavioral adaptations with social benefits, such as empathy, are strongly selected for. The ability to positively regulate the mood of others and the ability to have your mood positively regulated by others is a powerful one for a social species. Dopamine buttons like smiling and touching are powerful tools for a prosocial species. A brain that releases a massive amount of dopamine in response to music is exactly that ability.

The ability to understand music evolved due to the pressures that selected for speech and language. Blissful enjoyment of music is itself a social ability that was selected for by the same pressures that favored enjoyment of touch and laughter.

Give that podcast a listen if you are interested. Speculation wasn't the right word to use. Behavioral and cognitive evolution is very real, but also very fuzzy.

The strong relationship between language and music in the human brain has been long established in neuroscience through a number of experiments.

What I found to be uniquely interesting about this theory is that where we already knew that our ability to understand music is deeply related to our ability to understand language there is now a theory that explains how this relationship evolved and why that relationship has to be so.

The dopamine response to song provides a clear evolutionary benefit. For birds that benefit seems to be limited to mating. Humans are a eusocial or prosocial species. Both the ability to positively regulate the mood of other members of a society and the ability to have your mood positively regulated by others is an extremely beneficial adaptation. Extreme isn't a strong enough word. These abilities are likely hard requirements for intelligent prosocial species. Selection pressure for cooperative and affinitive behavior would have been immense. Humans have developed prosocial abilities in many ways. Ability to enjoy music is an example of one of those abilities

Understanding music would then be something that just comes with the ability to learn vocalizations, speech and language. As we evolved speech and language abilities, the ability to understand music just came with it. Enjoying music as opposed to just comprehending it is an exceptionally beneficial adaptation for a member of a prosocial species.

Brainwaves are not timed fetch/execute cycles like computers but that doesn't mean there's not anything to this comparison.

Computers are built from the ground up on timing. Perfect sequentialling is required for computers to function. One thing happening out of order will shut the entire system down (some exceptions). Neural networks (even when simulated in software) don't have that strict ordering requirement.

Timing of networks in the brain allows for more efficient messaging with other networks. This results in faster computation and lower energy consumption.

See my recent post. There's some incredible new neuroscience on this topic. I don't think you can say "we don't know" anymore.

I recently listened to a podcast that covered this exact topic. There is much more known about this than the other posters are aware of.

TLDR but the whole podcast is highly recommended:

All species that can learn vocalizations, such as birds and humans, will dance and respond positively to music. Songbirds learn songs by making vocalizations that it determines to be pleasing. In this case "pleasing" means when the processing of the musical sound triggers a release of dopamine in a way that other sounds don't. When a songbird learns a song it likes, it will sing it to attract a mate whose brain will also release dopamine in response to hearing it.

The answer to why humans like music has been researched and is understood. Just as it does with birds, music triggers a release of dopamine and dopamine makes you feel good. This phenomenon can be used for social benefit as a tool to cause the release of dopamine in other humans.

There is a compelling theory on the harder question of why human (and bird) brains can understand music in ways other animal brains cannot. The same networks in your brain that can learn speech, or generically, networks in any brain that has ability to learn vocalizations, are speculated to be necessarily receptive to music. This is because the brain must learn melody, rhythm and creative expression to control the muscles that move vocal cords in ways that intentionally shape sound to produce creative speech and song.