chaosCruiser

Using seconds as the base unit of time would work in various situations, but not all. For example, kiloseconds (ks) would be handy for measuring the runtime of a movie or the length of a workday. In that regard, it’s just a matter of getting used to it. However the length of a solar day is about 86.4 ks and a year is about 31.54 Ms, which would be annoying numbers to memorize. Then again, remembering numbers like 60, 24, 52, 365 is about as annoying too, so that’s a problem for another day.

Also known as a sidereal day. Check the animation. It’s pretty cool.

This topic also touches upon the concept of reference frames. When people say that the earth takes 24 h to make a full revolution, it’s in relation to the sun. From a universal perspective, the heliocentric reference frame moves and rotates. From the heliocentric perspective, the usual earth based reference frame also moves and rotates. Nothing is truly stationary, and measuring revolutions is impossible unless you define your frame of reference.

If you say a full revolution takes 24 h, it’s not wrong, but it’s only true in one reference frame.

Ethiopians are clearly very smart people. Take that white supremacists!

Ancient Romans just loved convoluted systems, which were later inherited by the rest of Europe. The French revolution fixed most of that mess by simplifying it and getting rid of the quirky designs. They also tried to fix time units and the calendar, but that just didn’t stick for some reason. Meanwhile, Ethiopians were already using a sensible calendar that has a good way to mitigate the messy properties of Earth.

I approve of this system. It should make calendars nice and simple for the most part. For example, salaries would be pretty simple since the period wouldn’t fluctuate wildly.

It’s just that not all things respect global holidays, so calculating energy production, water consumption and other things like that would still have to deal with weird inconsistencies. Regardless, this would still be far superior to our current train wreck of a calendar.

Now that’s the kind of thinking we need more of! Mathematical precision is the way we run things around here. Screw whatever nature had intended for orbits and such. It’s our planet.

Best of all, that funny fraction isn’t even constant. The earth is a bit wonky.

That addresses the calendar problem, which is another pet peeve of mine. Oh, where do I even begin. The calendar system is just the next level of curses and barrels of rotting worms.

At least time units have fixed, but inconvenient conversion multipliers. Months and years involve numbers that aren’t even constants!

Just when you thought it couldn’t possibly get any worse, someone reminds you about time zones. That’s just pure cosmic horror.

It’s a miracle we don’t trigger a nuclear meltdown every week while using a system like this.

Time units are just as cursed as American units.

Conversion between days, hours, minutes and seconds is a total mess. If you never have to do anything with those numbers, you don’t need to worry about it. The moment you need to do calculations or compare devices you run into completely unnecessary problems that would have been easy to avoid. Just think of pumps and fans with units given in l/min or m^3/h.

Just pick the standard time unit and stick with it. Use prefixes to deal with big or small numbers.

The visualizations made be 3blue1brown make so much sense, and they also look cool.

It’s also about motivation. During the first years, you just study all the boring stuff nobody cares about. It takes years to get to the cool stuff, but by that time most students are already completely fed up with maths.

The problems in the books were extra dry, so I prefered to come up with my own problems and solutions. Like, one day I was wondering how long it would take for a super fast train to go from one side of the planet to another. What if you accelerated half the way at 1 g, and then decelerated at -1g. How long would it take? What would be the maximum velocity? I had so many questions, and that’s why I had plenty of motivation to figure it all out. That’s how I learn weird and random stuff.

What if you had a powerful laser that was able to evaporate stone? Let’s say you wanted to use it to drill a hole through stone, but you need to do it with the same rate as with a regular drill? Would you need a nuclear reactor just to power your super laser? My head is full of bizarre questions like this, so learning never stops.

It’s basically just an alternate home feed with the first 2 videos mildly related to what you were looking for. The rest are there to distract you from getting stuff done. The whole point is to boost engagement, watch time and all the other social media cancer terms.

Really depends on how you intend to use Windows. Once upon a time I thought that was a great solution for communicating with an ancient piece of windows specific hardware. Turns out, you really need to keep that old W98 computer around unless you are willing to upgrade to new analysis hardware that costs about as much as a nice car. Home users probably never run into issues like this.

What about those 2% days when you do need windows? Every time you boot to it, you’ll have gigabytes of updates waiting for you, which is seriously annoying. In order to do “just one thing real quick”, you’ll end up wasting an hour each time. I propose you make those days less infuriating, by booting up windows a bit more frequently.

Ideally, you would just uninstall it entirely, and use the disk space for Linux. Unfortunately, many people still have some ties that are difficult to break, so I totally get it why dual booting exists. If that one thing you do in windows doesn’t require much performance, you could also dedicate some old heap of junk laptop for it.

I want to build a Dyson sphere and use the energy to move the entire solar system to a place where our dying star can be replaced.

How’s that for achievable goals?

Cannelloni-Vermicelli Exploration program? You know, to find out what happens if you mix both on the same plate? Will the Italians assassinate you before you can take the first bite? Will the pasta annihilate as soon as they touch? Will it be delicious? Who knows, and now we will never know.

I would argue that being polite also does good to the person writing that line.

Kit cars have been around for ages, and Framework offers DIY laptops. I think we should have kit displays as well. Surely, someone has already made something like that with a raspberry or something.

As long as my 1080p plasma tv works, there’s no need to upgrade. Going 4K would also mean I would have to upgrade my HTPC hardware, because that old APU probably can’t handle resolutions like that.

In the meantime though, I’ll just keep on watching online videos in my living room without ads or interruptions. It’s been great even though all of this hardware is cheap and ancient.

Well what if you need to keep on producing more common metals in the meantime, and REEs are a byproduct. You would need to keep the REE factories running too.

If you end up with 100 tons of terbium and yttrium oxide sitting in bags out in the rain, it’s going to lead to some serious quality issues further down the line. Well, just shove them in a warehouse then?

You’ll need a big warehouse, and you need to keep building more of them every year as the stockpiles grow. Needless to say, there are some serious logistical problems with a total export ban. A partial restriction is more viable, because it gives China some time to figure out how to adapt.

In any case, the rest of the world needs these metals, and they are willing to bend to knee long before China runs out of mitigation strategies. It’s going to be a problem in China as well, but at least they’re not totally screwed.

As opposed to what the headline could make you think, it’s not a complete ban on all REE exports. A total ban wouldn’t make much sense.

The REE business is big, and China can’t keep stockpiling these metals for long. Also, REE production is integrated to the rest of the industry, so you can’t just switch those factories off and expect everything else to keep on chugging along as usual.