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Messages - i2amroy

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61
General Discussion / Re: I like anime, do you like anime?
« on: December 08, 2016, 03:15:40 pm »
Watching A Certain Magical Index, got super hyped when I got to Accelerator's first appearance, he's kinda the reason I learned about this show, and he didn't disappoint. Get to the climactic arc fight against Touma, and HE KEEPS GETTING IN MELEE RANGE LIKE AN IDIOT. WHY. WHY WOULD YOU OPEN YOURSELF UP TO A BEING WHO YOU KNOW CAN TOUCH YOU, HAS A HELL OF A RIGHT CROSS AND THE GUTS TO TAKE YOU CHARGING HEAD ON.

He practically gift-wrapped his defeat.
To be fair while it's not as noticeable in the anime the books highlight a bit more strongly the fact that if Accelerator touched Touma even once anywhere else he was basically dead, as well as highlighting all the effort Touma was doing to close the gap (i.e. it wasn't just Accelerator running at him like an idiot). That said there was also a fair bit of stupidity brought on by the fact that he's never really had to learn to fight, his own conceit at not taking Touma seriously, and then the shock of finally encountering something that can actually get to him. Lastly keep in mind that after he did take a hit or two he wanted to do something really gruesome to Touma, and he can't control vectors unless he's touching them (the whole plasma thing was more the realization that he was already "touching" all the air on the planet instead of any sort of level up, [though I guess the whole "all powers are really just mind-based small-scale reality warping means that a realization like that actually is a level up :P]).

62
General Discussion / Re: Space Thread
« on: December 08, 2016, 02:51:36 pm »
My position is that any planet in the solar system, or in the universe for that fact, has the possibility of holding an EM Field around it. Such as the sun, any number of the planets in our solar system;however weak or strong they may be.

This, in turn, leads to langrange points-One's that Elon Musk is planning on using for the interplanetary transport system.
I'm not quite sure that you understand what a Lagrange point is, because it has absolutely nothing to do with electromagnetism and everything to do with gravity (which, as of this writing, we still have no real conclusively proved way to connect the two yet). To understand Lagrange points the first thing that you have to understand is that normally the speed an object in orbit is directly linked to it's orbital distance. This is because (and I'm going to steal some graphics from xkcd right now), space is not like this:
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
but instead is like this:
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
(To get a grasp of how fast we have to move even in a low orbit in space, if you stood at the edge of a football field and fired a rifle bullet towards the other end zone at the same time the ISS passed right over you it would have crossed the whole field before the bullet even made it 10 yards). Because of this you can't ever be in the same orbit as something unless you have the same speed, and any attempts to "catch up" to something would just result in your altitude moving you into a higher orbit, which actually slows you down due to some weirdness which is the second thing that you need to know; that when you are in orbit a "lower" altitude rotates you around the object you are orbiting faster than a "higher" one (think back to if you ever spun around in a chair as a kid and pulled your arms/legs in to speed up and then stretched them out to slow down; same physical concept applies here [if you haven't done it before then get yourself a spinny chair and do it now, I won't judge you]). As such in space if you want to "catch up" to something in the same orbit as you the actual process involves first slowing down (thus dropping to a lower orbit that lets you move "faster" around the planet than the target does) and then burning to speed up (thus moving you back to your original altitude to intercept). It's backwards seeming and weird, but that's the way it works.

Now what Lagrange points are are special exceptions that happen when you complicate the problem a little bit from our original assumption. Previously everything I've been saying just assumes you are orbiting around one single body, but in the real world you're actually largely affected by two; the planet you are orbiting directly (say Earth), and the bigger orbit around the Sun. Now let's say I want to build a space station somewhere between the Earth and the Sun so I can fill up my rocket ships there. Obviously i can't keep the station perfectly still without it moving through space, without some speed to give it an orbit around the sun it'll get sucked in! But that's not all, we have a second problem as well. Remember that objects in "lower" orbits move around the object they are orbiting faster than objects in higher orbits? If I just build my spaceport at a lower orbit around the Sun than Earth is at it will therefore quickly "pass" us in orbit around the sun and take off on it's own, rendering it fairly useless if I want to be able to reliably fill up my spaceships there. If I put the spaceport at one of the 5 "Lagrange points" though, then something nice happens; the gravitational forces from the bigger object (the sun) and those from the smaller object (the earth), work against (or with) each other a little bit to change the effective altitude of my orbit, thus causing a change in the "speed" of the orbit at that point to perfectly match that of the smaller object. In other words, if I put my spaceport at any of the Sun-Earth Lagrange points, then it ends up having an orbital time around the sun of 1 year, which is exactly the same as the earth's! This means that we can always be sure that our spaceport is only a short distance away from the earth where we need it to be so we can refuel our spaceships, without it wandering off on it's own due to taking a different amount of time to rotate around the sun than the earth does.

As you can see, this doesn't have anything at all to do with the electromagnetic force at all (barring some sort unified field theory that we haven't gotten around to showing good evidence for yet that unifies them at a low level), and is wholly confined to the forces of gravity, velocity, and momentum.

63
General Discussion / Re: Space Thread
« on: December 08, 2016, 12:06:12 pm »
While there are signs that a larger planet a long distance away might exist (based on the movement of certain Kuiper Belt objects such as the dwarf planet Sedna there could be a mars-sized object out around 53 AU or a neptune-sized one out around 1500 AU), the effects of such a planet on us are extremely, extremely tiny, to the point of being basically unnoticeable. No blaming climate change or anything even close to being similar in scale on any distant planet.

(As a further note, analysis of mid-infrared observations with the WISE telescope have ruled out the possibility of a Saturn-sized object (95 Earth masses) out to 10,000 AU, and a Jupiter-sized or larger object out to 26,000 AU. If there is something out there then it's either small, meaning no oldsters, or very far away).

64
So on slings v. arrows, I've been doing some digging and what it looks like is that slings fire with less force than arrows, but are more aerodynamic (no stabilizing feathers) and have more of their force transmitted with a non-head on strike than an arrow would (due to their mass being more of a flat shape than a line). The result is that at close range and with a good hit an arrow does more damage to you, but as you start to put some more distance between you and the target the slings maintain their lethality range a bit better than arrows do due to them maintaining their force more and doing more damage on a glancing strike. Note that this would be against the standard combination of plate mail with padding beneath it (i.e. the plate itself deals more with the initial strike, be it from the arrow or the stone, with the padding dealing with the blunt trauma created).

TL;DR:
1) Arrows are better than slings at close range head on strikes
2) Arrows taper off faster than slings do with range
3) Arrows taper off faster than slings do with glancing blows

65
General Discussion / Re: Railgun and Spirituality Discussion
« on: December 06, 2016, 02:09:12 pm »
Still seems right dickish to stick Jesus in a place where people in the americas wouldn't hear about him for over 1000 years, and then after enough time that christians had decided that killing non believers was super cool.

The Roman Empire is probably about the best possible place to put someone in that period, wouldn't you say?
Maybe a good place to reach many people, but not good enough. I'd expect better from God.
Yeah, Jesus should have simultaneously appeared before every single person to interact with them, right? :P

Per the belief vs. rules thing, it's also something that helped to set NT Christianity apart from other religions of the time. Most religions of the time (and many still today) are much more ritualistic focused, i.e. follow these steps, make these sacrifices, do this pilgrimage, etc. and you will be saved. NT Christianity's promise that all you had to do was "believe", something you could supposedly do right now, and didn't require you taking on a life of piety or sacrificing half of your income or anything else (not that they would be opposed if you decided to as a further sign of devotion), is quite an attractive one compared to things that require daily religious text reading, sacrificing your fattest cows on the altar and such forth.

And yeah, many versions of NT Christianity have some sort of rule that says that people who don't have the chance to convert and believe due to circumstances (which captures people who died before the NT, people who never heard the word, and babies that died too young) often get dumped into purgatory or something similar as opposed to straight into hell (or there is a tool like in Mormonism that lets you "save" your past dead ancestors through one process or another to bring them out of hell/purgatory).

66
General Discussion / Re: I like anime, do you like anime?
« on: December 06, 2016, 01:53:53 pm »
Well there's nothing saying that the reference might be there, but was created in the opposite order. (No I'm not saying the Phantom of the Opera is referencing Steins;Gate through time travel shenanigans, fitting though that might be. I'm saying that maybe the name was created first due to the aforementioned reason, and then as a result the reference became possible, i.e. the name creates the reference, as opposed to the reference creating the name).

67
General Discussion / Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« on: December 06, 2016, 01:41:28 pm »
... I have had a song, or at least part of it,* stuck in my head for like the past... week. Fucking incessantly. It doesn't go away. It's actually been causing headaches. The wall has been driven up and we are now in ceiling donut land. Is the worst case of this I've ever had, and I wish I knew what was causing it besides a freakishly effective earworm.

*Background music from the first real town in voidspire tactics. Can hear it kinda low here, starting around 14:48 if the link doesn't take properly. Probably a better example somewhere on youtube but effort.
Maybe check out unhearit.com. Of course, that gets catchy songs out of your head by replacing them with other catchy songs, but it does usually work if you spend a bit of time on it. :P

68
General Discussion / Re: I like anime, do you like anime?
« on: December 06, 2016, 01:34:53 pm »
I have now almost finished Steins;Gate, and good grief the whole 'Christina' thing was an elaborate Phantom of the Opera reference. Wow.
Wait what? According to the Steins;Gate wiki the likely origin was that the pronunciation of "Kurisu" matches that of the western name "Chris", which then gets given a western feminization to get to "Christina". (Basically it's just "Kurisu"+"tina"; pronounce it kinda engrishy and you will see the connection)

69
General Discussion / Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« on: December 01, 2016, 04:38:16 pm »
Computers can make a picture if they don't have a card because many CPUs and some mother boards come with an integrated graphics card.  Every computer needs some kind of graphics something, or you just aren't going to see anything on the screen (excepting BIOS IIRC).
To be truthful it's not exactly that your computers need a graphics card, it's just that if you wanted to see anything graphical other than basic DOS text-stuff you need to program some sort of graphics into the computer. That graphics program is usually built into the drivers of the graphics card that you install (and the average computer is set up to work that way), though there are a few cases (such as working with really small embedded systems) that you might end up programming one of your own directly onto the chip itself.

70
General Discussion / Re: I like anime, do you like anime?
« on: November 30, 2016, 01:46:28 am »
Finished Puella Magi Madoka Magica. Christ, that was a trip. Even though I couldn't keep myself from compulsively checking Tvtropes after every episode, I was able to avoid the biggest spoilers, and all the little spoilers really didn't dilute the fun, feels and awe.

Fuck that demon cat bastard, I'll never be able to see that emoticon again without gritting my teeth.
Have you watched the films? Because while the first two are just recap stuff with some small changes (and therefore aren't really that important) the third one keeps the ride going full force in an especially mind-twisty (and rather fan-polarizing) way.

71
General Discussion / Re: I like anime, do you like anime?
« on: November 28, 2016, 09:41:07 pm »
IIRC the camera angles in that last scene also seem to go out of there way to avoid showing whether she is talking to someone or just talking to herself, as if they were trying to hide something, which was another hint.


72
General Discussion / Re: I like anime, do you like anime?
« on: November 28, 2016, 01:00:57 pm »
Hah! Knew he
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
Called it! Called it sooooooo hard! They tried to tell me that it was so, but I didn't listen! Now who's laughing? :D

73
If you want you could look on it as the breaking of the rhyme on purpose. After all, part of the poem itself speaks about how no hand or eye can frame the tiger well, so the fact that it doesn't rhyme could be a meta level of following its own topic (i.e., not even the author here can accurately capture the fearfulness of the tiger, thus the broken rhyme).

74
General Discussion / Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« on: November 13, 2016, 12:48:58 pm »
Aren't parents supposed to encourage kids to think for themselves and develop their intellect, not do the exact opposite and act as thought police?
No. Religion begets religion, so their job as Christians is to make their children believe "because god".
They must think they went wrong with you so don't be surprised if they take that out on your sister. Isn't life grand.
To be fair that's a bit of a generalization. While religion does in fact encourage religion, there are plenty of Christians out there that take the "acceptance" part of their religion to be more important than the "get others to believe the same as you" part.

Of course if you're dealing with some of the less tolerant ones that believe in forcing blind faith on others, than stay strong, you and those in danger will pull through eventually, I know it. :)

75
General Discussion / Re: What with the title under?
« on: November 13, 2016, 12:45:26 pm »
There's also a few people with special titles for special reasons, IIRC they are: Toady One - "The Great" (as DF coder extraordinaire obviously), ThreeToe - "The Natural" (Toady's brother), and Baughn - "The Haruhiist", because he helped Toady with getting the multithreaded graphics rendering code that you use when in print mode STANDARD or higher up and running.

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