Rivalarrival
@Rivalarrival@lemmy.today
- Comment on If a mysterious force secretly changed EVERY clock worldwide one minute forward, how long would it take until people notice, and how would people/governments react? 22 hours ago:
The GPS almanac is a table of the exact orbital information of every satellite. Every receiver needs a copy of the almanac to understand where the satellites are supposed to be, so that it can determine where it is in relation to those satellites.
When their clocks all shift one minute simultaneously, the almanac isn’t updated. Every satellite is 60 seconds away from where the almanac says it should be.
If the satellites were geostationary, receivers would still work, they’d just be off by 0.25 degrees of longitude as the entire constellation would be shifted the same amount. But the GPS constellation consists of satellites in a variety of inclined orbits. Nothing is where the almanac thinks it is, and nothing is where it is supposed to be in relation to anything else.
Parent comment is correct: GPS will immediately fail, and remain down until an updated almanac is published and distributed.
- Comment on BlackBerry's iconic keyboard patent has expired 1 day ago:
5 line keyboard!
- Comment on "Reality" is often thought as a paragon of neutrality, being neither good nor bad. So why is a "reality check" ALWAYS felt negatively? 1 day ago:
When I get stuck in a depression-spiral, or experience “imposter syndrome”, a reality check isn’t a negative experience: “Hey, dumbass, this is all in your head. You’re actually doing pretty damn good right now.”
- Comment on Jon Stewart says the media cried wolf with its 'fascist' attacks on Trump 1 day ago:
I don’t think you agree with Jon Stewart.
- Comment on Amazon boss Jeff Bezos could face prison over knife sales to children 2 days ago:
Harsher sentences will also apply to bosses of online stores who let under-18s buy
deadly weaponssilverware in Home Office crackdownFTFY.
- Comment on It's impossible to defend any amount of alcohol consumption without sounding like an alcoholic. 4 days ago:
I’m almost through that case of Christmas Ale I bought in November.
- Comment on Here’s why some people still evade public transport fares – even when they’re 50 cents 5 days ago:
Yeah, I understood your point. I used “free” the same way you did. There was no need to move the goal posts. .
We tend to distrust “free”.
How many "free’ offers do you have in your inbox right now? How many do you think are scams? We assume there are some sort of hidden costs, or that the service is “worth what you paid”. If it is offered “completely free”, it will be broadly avoided.
When charged a token amount, we get the impression of value. A bargain.
The “penalty” for fare evasion should be the cop looking the other way, or handing out “$5” passes and asking them to “pay it forward”.
- Comment on Here’s why some people still evade public transport fares – even when they’re 50 cents 5 days ago:
A more crucial question is: if public transport is nearly free but still generates overhead to manage and enforce fares, why not make it completely free and eliminate the overhead entirely?
- Comment on Here’s why some people still evade public transport fares – even when they’re 50 cents 5 days ago:
The zero price effect: “If something is free, you are the product”.
They seem to be enforcing fares much like Frederick the Great guarded his potato fields.
- Comment on New thermoelectric generator converts vehicle exhaust heat into electricity, boosting fuel efficiency 6 days ago:
even overcoming the parasitic portion of extra energy needed during the compression cycle and the exhaust cycle against the turbocharger impeller?
Let’s assume the contrary. Let’s assume it can’t. Let’s assume the turbocharger is a net drag on the engine, and any gains are only from enabling the engine to burn more fuel. If this is all true, then the turbocharger should not be able to function without the reciprocating engine. Without the “push” from the pistons during the exhaust stroke, the turbo shouldn’t be able to turn.
If we can show that the turbo can not only spin without the piston engine, but that additional energy can be harvested, we will have disproven this assumption.
So, let’s get rid of the pistons. Plumb the intake manifold directly to the exhaust manifold. We have one combined intake/exhaust manifold. We stick a couple spark plugs into that manifold and turn it into a combustion chamber.
Now we have air passing through a compressor turbine, into a combustion chamber and then through an exhaust turbine. Sound familiar?
Engineers discovered that some turbos were capable of producing more power than the engines they were attached to. They discovered that the reciprocating engine was a drag on the turbo.
That discovery gave us the jet engine.
- Comment on New thermoelectric generator converts vehicle exhaust heat into electricity, boosting fuel efficiency 6 days ago:
The exhaust gases get pushed
The “pushing” (exhaust stroke) isn’t particularly relevant.
When the valves close at the beginning of the compression stroke, the pressure in the cylinder is atmospheric: zero psig. The valves don’t open until the piston has risen (compression) and fallen (power) again. Without combustion, the pressure at the time the exhaust valves open is again at atmospheric. The gasses were compressed, and re-expanded.
With combustion, the pressure at the bottom of the stroke is substantially higher than atmospheric: the combustion event has radically increased the pressure of those gasses. At the end of the power stroke, just before the exhaust valves open, the pressure inside the cylinder is still extremely high.
It is the expansion of those gasses - not the “pushing” of those gasses - that drives the turbo.
I think it might be beneficial to think about the next evolution in aircraft propulsion. The turbocharger operates by expanding gasses through a power turbine, and using that energy to drive a compressor turbine. Remove the cylinders and pistons from the path, carefully tune those turbines, and you have a turbojet.
If the pistons are “pushing” the turbocharger, the turbojet would be impossible. It is the expansion of the gasses, not the displacement of the pistons, that drives the turbocharger.
- Comment on What keeps Americans from being mad about the state of their country? 1 week ago:
Police Procedural shows.
Law and Order, Criminal Minds, NCIS, CSI, Lie to Me, Dexter…
Basically, anything that makes people think that police are more effective at solving crime than they actually are.
- Comment on Bad UX is keeping the majority of people away from Lemmy 1 week ago:
It would be nice if I could use (my name)@(mydomain) and just point (mydomain) at whichever public instance, without having to spool up my own instance.
- Comment on Who here does NOT have intrusive thoughts? 1 week ago:
The people who say they don’t experience intrusive thoughts are liars. They are too anxious about how the world would react if they told anyone they sometimes think about jumping off a roof, or driving into oncoming traffic.
The people who don’t actually have intrusive thoughts are psychopaths. Lacking empathy, they don’t even consider how such actions would affect anyone around them. They do, or do not, as they choose.
The healthiest are the people who recognize in themselves behaviors they don’t observe in their peers, and they are concerned enough for everyone’s safety to risk being seen as abnormal.
There is a difference between “intrusive thought” and “suicidal/homicidal ideation”. Experiencing these ideas as irresistible urges to partake in the behaviors might warrant a trip to a pshrink.
Experiencing them as vivid scenes of violence and destruction, without a compulsion to actually act on them, is not unusual or concerning. They’re your own private action movies; Enjoy them.
- Comment on Bad UX is keeping the majority of people away from Lemmy 1 week ago:
If they find Lemmy “too hard to understand”, do we really want them here?
- Comment on US aircraft carrier collides with merchant ship near Egypt, but no injuries reported 1 week ago:
Don’t. Touch. Our. Boats.
🍄
- Comment on Did UCLA Just Cure Baldness? 1 week ago:
Sure, but no need for combs, hair product, trips to the barber… I shave my face in the shower, and just keep going.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 week ago:
I agree that a mold of their vagina isn’t going to help.
However… Have you ever met someone whose OCD compulsion is Kegel exercises?
- Comment on AI chatbots unable to accurately summarise news, BBC finds 1 week ago:
I’m more interested in the technology itself, rather than its current application.
I feel like I am watching a toddler taking her first steps; wondering what she will eventually accomplish in her lifetime. But the loudest voices aren’t cheering her on: they’re sitting in their recliners, smugly claiming she’s useless. She can’t even participate in a marathon, let alone compete with actual athletes!
Basically, the best AIs currently have college-level mastery of language, and the reasoning skills of children. They are already far more capable and productive than anti-vaxxers, or our current president.
- Comment on AI chatbots unable to accurately summarise news, BBC finds 1 week ago:
It found 51% of all AI answers to questions about the news were judged to have significant issues of some form.
How good are the human answers? I mean, I expect that an AI’s error rate is currently higher than an “expert” in their field.
But I’d guess the AI is quite a bit better than, say, the average Republican.
- Comment on In light of recent events, here's OpenStreetMap editors discussing naming of the Gulf of Mexico 1 week ago:
New Mexico? You mean “South America”, right?
(Everything south of the Rio Grande is now “Mexico”. Except for the
PanamaAmerica canal.) - Comment on Man who lost $780 million in Bitcoin in a landfill now wants to buy the entire dump before city closes the site 1 week ago:
Check out Rai stones.
Although the ownership of a particular stone might change, the stone itself is rarely moved due to its weight and risk of damage. Thus the physical location of a stone was often not significant: ownership was established by shared agreement and could be transferred even without physical access to the stone. Each large stone had an oral history that included the names of previous owners.
In one instance, a large rai being transported by canoe and outrigger was accidentally dropped and sank to the sea floor. Although it was never seen again, everyone agreed that the rai must still be there, so it continued to be transacted as any other stone.
- Comment on What is acceptable amount of microplastics you would allow into your brain? 1 week ago:
And yet, we’re both wearing plastic bags…
My point is that synthetic fiber is the area we have to focus on to address your primary concern.
- Comment on What is acceptable amount of microplastics you would allow into your brain? 1 week ago:
Tires are, indeed, a major source of microplastics, but tires are used outdoors, and you probably spend most of your time indoors.
Check your lint trap: those are the kind of microplastics you have in your brain.
- Comment on What is acceptable amount of microplastics you would allow into your brain? 1 week ago:
Please post a picture of the tag on the shirt you are wearing right now.
The overwhelming majority of microplastics in your body are polyester fibers, and most of those originally came from textiles.
- Comment on If scientists could make you immortal but could only do it by transferring your consciousness into a single video game for ever, which game would you choose? 1 week ago:
Pong.
- Comment on The English word "four" has 4 letters. Are there any other numbers where the English name for them has that many letters? 1 week ago:
The fifth letter of “fifth” completes the word.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 weeks ago:
Emails are permanent records. Your focus seems to be on how they sound to the initial recipient.
My concern is how they sound to the person reading them six months or two years later. What I have found is that the longer the delay between having written the email and it being read, the more pissed off the reader is when they are reading it. If the problem is big enough that they need to come back to me two years later, the reader is probably not going to appreciate the lighthearted jests I originally included.
My work emails with colleagues are brusque and formulaic. I don’t include enough content to even begin to guess at mood or emotional state.
I’m not saying you should use email this way. I’m saying that I have little use for adjectives, articles, and my recipients rarely have need for a scroll wheel. I can’t imagine ever using either an emoticon or an emoji in a work email.
- Comment on Virtualizing my router - any experience to share? Pos/cons? 2 weeks ago:
I used the same approach at the family business for years without any major problems. Go for it.
- Comment on Trump signs order establishing a sovereign wealth fund that he says could buy TikTok 2 weeks ago: