I've been 'designing' websites since about 1994, and I remember being very excited when the major browser(s) started supporting background images, so that my webpages didn't have to have the same flat-grey background that every other webpage in the world had at the time. I also made one of the first 'starfield' backgrounds, and was simultaneously thrilled and annoyed to see other people start using it on their webpages.
Readit NewsSJSque commented on I'm So Old: Web Edition davidwalsh.name/im-so-old... · Posted by u/ingve
Would have liked to see more detail on why projects are so expensive in the UK - there was some detail in the road section (changes from objections leading to more expensive features to placate these complaints), but can't see that for underground projects, for instance...
I know when the Olympics was in Weymouth and Portland, someone knew a contractor who was doing it, and they were able to charge 3x their normal rate as long as it was guaranteed to be on time. They made a fortune. In addition, a local road building project near me (which is on the road between London and Weymouth) was pushed through to provide a better route - despite it being massively expensive and making a terrible long-term mess of what was a bad junction that needed a flyover, not the awful hamburger junction solution that the local area is now saddled with that is always on the traffic reports.
> not the awful hamburger junction solution that the local area is now saddled with...
Do you mean the Canford Bottom Roundabout [1] by any chance? :)
SJSque commented on Ask HN: How to navigate the world as a brain-damaged 17 year old? · Posted by u/AdviceAlt
For what it's worth: you still write very well.
SJSque commented on I'm already nostalgic for AI-generated Seinfeld johnsillings.com/2023/02/... · Posted by u/johnsillings
"This channel is temporarily unavailable due to a violation of Twitch's Community Guidelines or Terms of Service."
That's disappointing :(. I guess it was a blatant copyright violation, though.
Ah, no. This appears to be the offending content: https://twitter.com/watmay1/status/1622518097067511811
SJSque commented on Earth now weighs six ronnagrams: New metric prefixes voted in phys.org/news/2022-11-ear... · Posted by u/leephillips
Nitpick: 1/10⁷, not 1/10⁶. They picked the power of ten that gave a reasonably-sized unit of length.
They also made things complex by then picking a unit of mass that’s inconsistent with that: a gram isn’t the mass of 1m³ of water, but of 1/10⁶ m³ of water (a cubic meter is 10³ liters, and a liter of water weighs 10³ grams)
Centimeter-gram-second (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centimetre–gram–second_system_...) really is superior in that sense (but of course, that’s relative to the arbitrary choice of using water to convert between mass and volume, and from that, length)
10E6 = 10×10⁶ = 10⁷, so you can unpick that nit!
The 2-minute brute-force explanation of Fourier transforms in a recent Veritasium video was my "aha!" moment.
I can also highly recommend 3Blue1Brown's treatment of the topic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spUNpyF58BY
(...which I see now is cited in the video that you link to!)
SJSque commented on Our moon has been slowly drifting away from Earth over the past 2.5B yrs phys.org/news/2022-10-moo... · Posted by u/wglb
> wish they explained why the moon being that much closer would have such a dramatic effect on the day length. Can someone explain this? Seems off to me, but I'm very physics-naive
Earth-Moon momentum is conserved.
Think of a pregnant woman (the Earth) spinning on a seivel chair. The woman gives birth to her child (the Moon) and she takes the child in her arms and extends it at arm's length.
Their rotation slows down, just like an iceskater slows down when spinning and extending their arms.
The Earth does not have phisical arms holding the Moon, but it has gravity and the Moon also has gravity that affects the ocean tides -- the tidal effects are like tiny tiny arms that both the Earth and the Moon use to push eachother away (and lose a lot of energy in the process also).
The Earth is losing rotational momentum at the expense of the Moon, which is gaining momentum and increasing speed in traveling around the Earth which increases the centrifugal force which means the Moon goes to a higher and higher orbit and further and further away from Earth.
> Think of a pregnant woman (the Earth) spinning on a seivel chair. The woman gives birth to her child (the Moon) and she takes the child in her arms and extends it at arm's length.
Just in case any of you were thinking of patenting this idea, I'm afraid that someone beat you to it: https://patents.google.com/patent/US3216423A/en
SJSque commented on Our moon has been slowly drifting away from Earth over the past 2.5B yrs phys.org/news/2022-10-moo... · Posted by u/wglb
Its relative velocity with respect to a Cartesian frame of reference fixed on the surface of the Earth may be dropping, but that's not particularly meaningful.
Think of the moon being in free fall, without any external forces acting on it. It would be moving at a constant velocity in a straight line, except the space and time it is in is curved due to gravity. Because of that curved spacetime, the moon appears to accelerate relative to the Earth. It's not actually accelerating, though; it is moving in a straight line at a constant velocity, the straight line just happens to be curved completely around the Earth.
The tidal forces are literal forces, and forces cause acceleration. So, the moon isn't quite moving at constant velocity. The change in velocity means the moon isn't quite travelling in a straight line through spacetime. The orbit changes, and in this case gets higher and slower relative to the Earth.
Another way to think about it. If you're in a space ship at a point X1 in an orbit, you can steer the nose of the ship in the direction you're moving relative to the Earth, and fire your rocket engine. You're now going faster. The opposite end of your orbit, point Y1, will now be higher in altitude than it would have otherwise been. Your relative speed at Y1 will indeed be slower than where you would have been had you not fired your engine, but when you circle back to X1 again your speed will still be higher. When you get to Y1 again, you could fire your engine a second time and increase your speed even more. You'll no longer end up back at X1, but a new point X2 at a higher altitude than X1 was. Your relative velocity at X2 will be lower than it was at X1.
In space, "speed" isn't really velocity, but acceleration. Big rocket engines make you go fast! In The Martian, the main character makes a comment to that effect when he talks about NASA convincing him to strap himself into a hodge podge death rocket, by claiming he'll be the "fastest" astronaut in history.
In a future where humans practically travel to a distant star, a "fast enough" space ship would be one that can maintain constant non-trivial acceleration for many decades. You would accelerate to the halfway point, then turn around and decelerate the rest of the way. Assuming you got fast enough relative to the destination, weird relativistic effects would become obviously apparent and the travellers would perceive space and time compressing.
Just a comment on your second and third paragraphs: it's a bit odd that you invoke general relativity ("curved spacetime") for the Moon's basic orbit, and then discuss classical mechanics ("tidal forces are literal forces") for the second-order effects. Tidal forces are of course also gravitational effects, just differential (i.e., the result of the fact that we are not talking about point masses, but rather extended objects).
SJSque commented on How Sweden became the Silicon Valley of Europe reuters.com/business/fina... · Posted by u/levmiseri
I thought Eindhoven, the Netherlands was the Silicon Valley of Europe. After all, ASML is based there.
Well, technically ASML is based (as in, headquartered) in Veldhoven, but that's part of the same conurbation really.
Meanwhile, check out the 235 (at last count) technology companies located on the High Tech Campus in Eindhoven (where NXP is headquartered): https://hightechcampus.com/companies
SJSque commented on Aerobics instructor appears to capture Myanmar coup in dance video timesnownews.com/the-buzz... · Posted by u/darshanime
I think this is also the road featured in Top Gear a while back.
I know nothing about Myanman politics so I won't wax poetic about anything
The video appears to be taken from this spot, facing roughly due west:
https://www.google.com/maps/place/19%C2%B046'33.0%22N+96%C2%...
After the vehicles pass through the roadblock, they can be seen to turn left, heading towards the Presidential Palace.