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Right, any interstellar travel transport attributable to people will be AI/digital people, or some kind of tiny automated biological 3d printer or incubator that will grow people after arrival and establishing infrastructure.

Meh. Shorter is always better than longer unless there's some intrinsic value in the transit duration. That remains true even if you're talking about something that will live until protons evaporate. Time spent doing anything has an opportunity cost. Post-salt edit: There's nothing wrong with...

"Assume a spherical cow..."

Possibly a good psych move by Waterson. Force JJ to suffer and possibly fail a tough cut, then change her mind at the last minute and fight a drained opponent. Big difference between "The numbers don't work so fuck it, I'm having a burger and a good night's pre-fight sleep" and "I was in the...

No pre-pubescent human has any idea what sexuality is really about. They may know some labelling words and facts about physiology, but the hormone drive is an unexplainable paradigm shift. It's like saying, "My nine-year old understands what it's like to be old."

At nine they should be thinking somewhat independently, sure. Below that, less so, and it varies wildly on an individual basis. My kids have cousins in the 6-8 range who are actively proselytizing evangelicals. That's pure indoctrination. On some issues my seven year old is quite mature. On...

Young kids aren't equipped to evaluate complex topics this way. There are too many layers of knowledge and abstraction that they have no practice navigating. One of a parent's primary jobs is to shield their kids from malignant misinformation until they've developed good critical thinking skills.

Get that man some PEDs so he can rebuild his body.

So I've got bad knees and hips from twenty years of martial arts - eight surgeries in total. Due to my knees I can't run, jump, or ride a bike, never mind lift useful amounts of weight. I've been struggling the last couple years to stay in shape. Fat has been creeping up, lean mass creeping...

Even stray hydrogen atoms can cause problems, and there are a whole lot of them. A "modest" 0.5c means the interstellar medium is coming towards you at 150 million m/s. Whatever shielding you've got evaporates over enough time (though perhaps not fatally so for "short" trips)...

The frustrating thing is you're right, and it's really not out of reach. The only reason we're not on Mars and other bodies now is because we collectively don't want to. I get really sad thinking about where we could be as a species if we'd spent the years since Apollo focused on exploration...

As long as we're slinging out as many semi-technical words as possible, we may as well be careful and precise. Exponential growth functions are not sigmoidal. (Your linked paper's results are exponential.) A typical sigmoid function used in growth modeling would be logistic.

That is some absolutely pornographic craftsmanship. Anyone who likes that should check out his clockmaking and reproduction of the Antikytheria Mechanism. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCworsKCR-Sx6R6-BnIjS2MA

Been around since the Noows days. This is the most bizzare cross-section of humanity I've ever been part of.

In the far future, the universe looks pretty boring. The expansion of space will eventually cause molecules, atoms, and even protons to evaporate, which basically leaves lots of black holes floating around in a pitch-black near-absolute zero void. The universe will only support life for a tiny...

Nitpicking, but this is observably untrue. Life is littered with organisms taking actions that result in sub-maximal survival. Obviously there's a selection bias towards the outcomes that increase species survival, but that's not the same thing and mostly only applies to pre-reproductive...

Not what I said. What I'm suggesting is some combination of the following: a) Physics/engineering currently unknown to us influences advanced civilizational development in a way that conforms to our current observations. b) Given sufficient knowledge/development, advanced civilizations cease...

Because this exercise is set up as a binary choice between "dead" and "filled the visible universe in a way noticeable to current humans" where the only justification is "entropy eventually wins", and that is a false dichotomy. The lack of a middle ground seems a failure of imagination. You keep...

No, I'm suggesting that perhaps we're misinterpreting how those laws influence civilizational development on a large scale. I have a degree from MIT and work in simulation myself. I know those kind of people, how those models are built, and which parts of them should be taken with a healthy...

Not really. I'm saying that what we assume about advanced civilization may not be correct, which is why we're confused by our current observations. They're out there, but not in the way we expect. From that video: "It's very likely that this is a universal principle for civilizations, no...

Perhaps we're working on different definitions of "expand". Yes, you'd need to move to avoid locally catastrophic cosmic events. Yes, you'd need replace losses due to entropy. This does not expansion in the sense of perpetual exponential growth of the physical scale of the civilization. As you...

That's not the scenario I had in mind, although in retrospect I stated it poorly and your read is fair. IMO, many of these arguments that we should see solar system-level construction projects everywhere conflate possibility with desirability. I'm not arguing an alien race would be unable to...

But surely there are competing drivers, like "space is fucking huge and it's a pain in the ass to get to the next star" and "dyson spheres are goddamn hard to build". I don't find it implausible that at a certain point an intelligence could decide that physical expansion isn't worth it and...

My personal theory is that intelligent species pretty quickly figure out that space is really fucking big, physical travel is hard, slow, and low-reward, and sacks of meat are resource-intensive and unreliable substrates for long-lived intelligence. They evolve/invent/transfer themselves onto...

There's a fair case for that. It's really interesting how he uses his arm outside the choke to trap his opponent's hand so they can't release the guillotine and escape.

If that's real mass reduction and not food bulk and water, that's a super-fast weight loss rate. I know bigger people can lose more weight faster, but eventually you'll want to approach something more like 1-2 lbs/week on managed caloric intake. Slowing down a bit can help a lot with making your...

Also one of the world's great pragmatists, and the progenitor of such gems as (paraphrasing), "Always show up late for a duel, because your opponent will be fustrated and make mistakes," and/or "Ambush them on the way to a duel. If they object, they should have been ready." You don't get to win...

Honestly? Kirkland. Basic jeans, fit fine, $30. Wear them out, repeat.

It's not like there aren't dudes in spandex shorts out there for 90% of the event. Let's get some gender equality, shall we? Give the girls more time.

Are we talking about the same thing? Who gets tested for cold sores? This is not "I have HIV and need to tell everyone on the first date" territory. I guarantee a high fraction of everyone you know or have ever kissed has it. HSV-1 is not "herpes" in the sense that most people mean it. Hell. I...

50%+ of adults in the US carry HSV-1. You should just assume everyone has it. You probably do.

Khabib is the modern version of the 1990's Gracies. If you have superior grappling and you can impose it without exposing less-developed parts of your game, that is a categorically dominant approach to fighting. There is no response to being physically restrained by your opponent.

Brb, I'm going to build a giant trebuchet for the first private moon landing.

Just think of it as homeopathy, only effective.

This isn't a thing for wood unless you put it in a pressurized/submerged environment for extended periods. You can take a planer or chisel to wood with any kind of surface treatment you like and see that it goes in 1-2mm at best.

I'm not hopeful given how he's acting and the rate at which he's collecting additional CTE.

My cousin works on aerodynamic simulation for SpaceX. The physics behind a simple-looking hover and landing like this are truly horrendous. It's a massive accomplishment that they're starting to make this look routine.

It means "We're going to charge you a premium as a band-aid over the fact that you have drainage/grade problems." I've had leaky basements and the problems invariably trace back to bad bad gutter placement, bad technique around the foundation and/or not properly accounting for water flow on the...

I initially read this title as "Supergiant Games" (Bastion, Transistor, Hades), thinking to myself "Man, this is a big departure from their typical art direction.

And he's the one I quoted who admits that, while the returns were indeed some unquantified amount higher, “It’s not very big in the long-only space" . He may have raised a billion dollars using this strategy, but the market went gangbusters during this period so of course he did well. I read...