comicjk (u/comicjk) - Readit News

comicjk commented on Webb telescope helps refine Hubble constant phys.org/news/2025-05-web... · Posted by u/pseudolus

ghastmaster · 3 months ago

There are alternatives to taxation. With enough attention and disposable income, citizens can privately fund amazing things. Like the polio vaccine was.

Alternatives: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_non-profit_space_age...

comicjk · 3 months ago

Regardless of what funding mechanism you would prefer in its place, turning off the existing system with no transition plan is a huge mistake.

comicjk commented on Why America's economy is soaring ahead of its rivals ft.com/content/1201f834-6... · Posted by u/kvee

narski · 9 months ago

>Looking at the numbers

I'm reminded of this excerpt from 1984:

But actually, he thought as he re-adjusted the Ministry of Plenty's figures, it was not even forgery. It was merely the substitution of one piece of nonsense for another. Most of the material that you were dealing with had no connexion with anything in the real world, not even the kind of connexion that is contained in a direct lie. Statistics were just as much a fantasy in their original version as in their rectified version. A great deal of the time you were expected to make them up out of your head. For example, the Ministry of Plenty's forecast had estimated the output of boots for the quarter at 145 million pairs. The actual output was given as sixty-two millions. Winston, however, in rewriting the forecast, marked the figure down to fifty-seven millions, so as to allow for the usual claim that the quota had been overfulfilled. In any case, sixty-two millions was no nearer the truth than fifty-seven millions, or than 145 millions. Very likely no boots had been produced at all. Likelier still, nobody knew how many had been produced, much less cared. All one knew was that every quarter astronomical numbers of boots were produced on paper, while perhaps half the population of Oceania went barefoot. And so it was with every class of recorded fact, great or small. Everything faded away into a shadow-world in which, finally, even the date of the year had become uncertain.

---

Of course, I'm sure none of that would ever apply to our numbers, only to those of our opponents.

comicjk · 9 months ago

What are the actual numbers you think are fantasy? Most of the time when I see someone claiming economic statistics are fake, it's a misunderstanding or lack of context. For instance, people will say the US unemployment rate is fake because it doesn't include people who have given up on looking for work... but the U-4 unemployment metric, published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics alongside the main U-3 metric, does include these people.

comicjk commented on Kudzu, the vine that never ate the South (2015) smithsonianmag.com/scienc... · Posted by u/NoRagrets

christophilus · 10 months ago

Trains might be an option, though.

comicjk · 10 months ago

Growing and sequestering enough biomass to slow down climate change means effectively running the fossil fuel industry at the same scale but in reverse. In that spirit, I'll point out that most efficient way of moving carbon-bearing solids per ton-mile is the bulk carrier ships we use for shipping coal.

comicjk commented on Is running a more efficient way to travel than walking? joehxblog.com/is-running-... · Posted by u/freediver

akira2501 · a year ago

Is your name Fabian, by chance?

comicjk · a year ago

Another apt ancient example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Sphacteria

Lightly-armed Athenians trapped heavily-armed Spartans in hilly terrain, and instead of fighting them in a phalanx, wore them down with a long day of hit-and-run. Hundreds of exhausted Spartans were taken alive, which was a massive scandal for the Spartan reputation at the time.

comicjk commented on The First Animal Ever Found That Doesn't Need Oxygen to Survive sciencealert.com/this-is-... · Posted by u/georgecmu

SAI_Peregrinus · a year ago

Not to mention plants (oxygen is a waste product for them), some fungi, etc. They're multicellular, but not animals.

comicjk · a year ago

Plants still perform respiration using oxygen. Photosynthesis lets them create their own sugars, but their process for using those sugars in the mitochondria is similar to how we do it. Plants release more oxygen than they consume because they grow: in order to grow they must pull CO2 from the air, use the C as building material (instead of respiration fuel), and dump the O2.

https://www.pthorticulture.com/en-us/training-center/basics-...

comicjk commented on Kobold letters: HTML emails are a risk lutrasecurity.com/en/arti... · Posted by u/chillax

bambax · a year ago

> I just mean the people that fall for phishing don't need this sophisticated of an attack to fall for

Yes. It's more of the opposite. It's a well documented fact that the most obvious/ridiculous scams work the best, because they help select the most gullible potential victims.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/why-do-...

comicjk · a year ago

That analysis is from the perspective of the scammer. The scammer has limited time to write to each victim once the responses come back from the initial mass-email, so the scammer is better off if only the most gullible people reply. From the perspective of the person being attacked, the counterintuitive result based on selection bias goes away, and a more convincing scheme is more of a risk to you personally. (The assumption that scammers have limited time to write to each victim may itself become less true because of LLMs.)

comicjk commented on The Texas Triangle: A rising megaregion unlike all others (2021) kinder.rice.edu/urbanedge... · Posted by u/sorenKaram

spxneo · a year ago

Megaregions is nothing new but lately seem to be a testing the waters for an independent Texas state.

I feel like articles like this is mentally preparing the American public for a potential secession states forming post-election.

comicjk · a year ago

Texas is not going to secede. In the 2020 election, the vote was 52:46 between Trump and Biden, meaning almost half the state supported the overall national winner. Compare this to the actual secession crisis election in 1860, where the vote was 75:24 against the pro-Union candidate, with Lincoln not even on the ballot in the state.

comicjk commented on A rudimentary simulation of the three-body problem github.com/achristmascarl... · Posted by u/achristmascarl

PeterisP · a year ago

Would it make sense to explicitly implement conservation of energy?

I.e. do a simple method but calculate the total energy at the beginning, and at each step adjust the speeds (e.g. proportionally) so that the total energy matches the initial value - you'll still always get some difference due to numerical accuracy issues, but that difference won't be growing over time.

comicjk · a year ago

The method you describe would be an example of what is called a "thermostat" in molecular dynamics (because the speed of molecules forms what we call temperature). Such adjustments to the speed can definitely paper over issues with your energy conservation, but you still have to be careful: if you rescale the speeds naively you get the "flying ice cube" effect where all internal motions of the system cease and it maintains its original energy simply by zooming away at high speed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_ice_cube

comicjk commented on A Camel Through the Eye of a Needle, and Other Wild Tales of Translation (2018) stantlitore.com/2018/06/0... · Posted by u/EndXA

timbit42 · a year ago

How much time is there between the oldest source and when it was originally written?

comicjk · a year ago

Both the original writing, and the surviving manuscripts, have uncertainty bounds of decades in their dates. The oldest physical pages we still have come from the years 100-200 or so. And assuming that a description of an event can't be written before the event happened (a touchy subject in this case), then the original writing of the Gospels must have been after the start of the First Jewish-Roman War in the year 66. So the gap between the writing and our extant sources could be pretty short, or could be over a century.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_manuscript#Earliest_e...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel#Composition

comicjk commented on A Camel Through the Eye of a Needle, and Other Wild Tales of Translation (2018) stantlitore.com/2018/06/0... · Posted by u/EndXA

comicjk · a year ago

The "camel means rope" story, while cute and not implausible, is basically a guess. All the earliest available sources say "camel" - there is no actual evidence of this mistake beyond speculation (though it is admittedly an ancient speculation, as early as Cyril of Alexandria). The Wikipedia page has a much more balanced summary than this page. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_of_a_needle