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Heck Yes! Loam! posted:Thread title made me think of this post Huh, apparently Tannen is a German-Jewish surname, too. Checks out, BttF is crypto-fascist.
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Sep 23, 2022 02:52
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haveblue posted:Why is it stupid? Youtube is not a fully autonomous strong AI, every decision the algorithm makes was the result of human input into its priorities. It surfaces and buries videos based on what Youtube's human operators believe optimizes their business, and not based on social good or anything like that because that's how the humans configured it. It may have evolved into a black box that no one person fully understands, and it may have grown far too large to transition to direct human oversight of all content, but that doesn't necessarily protect them from liability or responsibility to fix it I was going to make a joke about corporations being people, too, my friend, but dang, now I'm half-way convinced The Algorithm may have Dial F for Frankenstein'd itself to an emergent alien intelligence 
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Oct 3, 2022 17:30
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Captain_Maclaine posted:Homophobes aren't particularly deep thinkers, generally. To them, any sort of non heteronormative identity is Gross Pervert Sex Thing, without anything beyond that in terms of being or feeling, etc. Not for nothing is a recurring joke in the freeper thread that they obsess about anal more than gay men do.  Culture war stuff is hilarious and 
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Oct 3, 2022 18:38
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Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:Biden is de-scheduling weed, pardoning everyone convicted of federal weed charges, and asking states to do the same.  Also, nice
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Oct 6, 2022 21:04
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This keeps getting brought up over and over, but anyway. If you absolutely, positively have to kill some people and don't want them to suffer, you could suffocate them using nitrogen. It does not trigger the physiological response a human being has to suffocating, since it does not involve messing with the carbon content of the blood stream. It probably isn't pleasant to pass out that way, but it's painless. But the point of the death penalty is to terrify people, and satisfy the torture fantasies of others. This venn diagram probably has an area of over-lap, too.
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Oct 8, 2022 21:31
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Staluigi posted:No they just chased out every single family joint or ethnic restaurant from anywhere in a two mile radius from the metropolitan financial center and replaced it with That Place with Edison Bulbs, Square Stainless Steel Sitting Stools, Chalkboard Menu, Exposed Brick and Dark Wood Accents, A Name Like "Leaf & Pickle" And 32 Dollar Gastrostarters (or 'appetizers' in peon speak) 
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Oct 14, 2022 04:50
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Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:It's not a full colonoscopy. It's a prostate exam. They do the fingers up the butt thing with me every 1-2 years and have a light and a camera. But, I am now learning (somewhat concerningly) that maybe I also need to talk to my doctor about whether that is necessary or if he is just putting fingers up the butt for nothing as well. Well, you  can't be too careful (link contains images of colonoscopy, caveat spector)American College of Gastroenterology case journal posted:A ladybug was found in the transverse colon during screening colonoscopy of a 59-year-old man with no comorbidities. [...] Ladybugs are cherished for being pretty, harmless, and even beneficial friends of farmers.
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Oct 14, 2022 17:12
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Gumball Gumption posted:lol, I'm being glib but the culture war is absolutely a mechanism for radicalizing susceptible people. Arguably it always has been, historically right wing extremists tend to be obsessed with aesthetics. But there is an extra depressing modern element to it where they're not even into occultism and their bastardized version of Nietzsche's ubermensch but instead just which ubermensch movie you watch. Of course this generates a feedback loop, because  : The satirical/grimdark (?) übermensch teevee show The Boys had an episode which featured a random dude getting radicalized by the culture war around superhero branding and racism, proceeding to shoot up a convenience store due to conspiracy brain. And the show has kept amping up their faux social media game since, both within the show and on their twitter and youtube accounts, where they post in-character as the evil corporation from the show. The superhero business, in real life I mean, is monetizing radicalization. And the most recent Marvel universe teevee show had a season-long arc featuring radicalization on twitter as one of the bad guys.We are already dead, and this is Hell, is what I'm saying.
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Oct 29, 2022 00:17
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haveblue posted:For some reason "Help stepbrother I got stuck in the dryer" has recently joined "I'm here to lay some pipe" and "somebody order a pizza with extra sausage?" on the list of cliched porno premises My assumption was it was a joke about some implausible chain of events involving semen-stains and a clothes dryer, but apparently I'm just not hip with the latest porno trends. Thank you SA forums,  remains a wonderful investment 
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Nov 2, 2022 05:49
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NutShellBill posted:Fun fact: 44 billion dollars is equal to the GDP of Romania! It is a fathomless amount of money that I cannot wrap my head around without imagining Scrooge McDuck's Money Bin. Even the escapist fantasy world of the Mouse acknowledges that actual wealth is well beyond the literal cartoon money bin, I'm afraid.  It is kind of hilarious how mister Trump's wild escalator ride made Twitter such a large part in people's lives all over the world, and now it's burning down in a hurry because a man-child got upset at some shitposters and wanted mod buttons 
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Nov 4, 2022 09:22
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Class3KillStorm posted:I hope he loving does it. He won't, but still, 
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Nov 7, 2022 20:33
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Ghost Leviathan posted:But that's literally against every principle of modern culture. How are we defining modern, here? Supposedly the Swedish statesman and chancellor Axel Oxenstierna said "Do you not know, my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed?" as a piece of helpful diplomacy advice circa 1640's.
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Nov 11, 2022 11:01
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Clarste posted:I mean, Plato wrote the Ship of Fools allegory ("the state is a ship being piloted by people who have no idea what they're doing") in the Republic, circa 375 BCE, but the modern idea in question is that becoming rich is supposed to be a meritocracy, unlike all those foolish old ways of picking who governs in the olden times. That's fair. If God picks the King, it's really His fault, but if richness is a reward for being a smarty smart, then whose fault is it our world is run by morons?
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Nov 11, 2022 11:34
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MOD CHALLENGE: Poster should video themselves explain to a 4-year-old why MBAs are silly and smelly Thank Christ I am not a mod 
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Nov 12, 2022 22:43
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Fritz the Horse posted:This is the Aww, but I came in here breathlessly to post this hot take about how 2016 sucked and was terrible. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Nov 16, 2022 07:25
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subforum, please avoid shitposting, image macros, etc. Thanks.
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Discendo Vox posted:So you know you are demanding something meaningless, and are continuing to demand it. I wonder, in any of the classes you teach, do you pause to consider how one messages to people? I believe this may be your topic of choice, in fact.
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Nov 16, 2022 08:31
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It's a shame USPol doesn't have the equivalent to the clancychat rule of the Ukraine war thread, it's pretty loving wild to read goon fanfic about how fusion plants are basically H-bombs waiting to go off. Fission power plants, which are in use today, are sort of similar to fission weapons in that the fission "pile" has a chain reaction going on, which is moderated by neutron absorbers and kept from going super-critical (which is a nuclear bomb). Nuclear fission is a process where very heavy elements (typically uranium) undergo spontaneous fission, which means that the nuclei of the heavy stuff split up, which releases energy. This energy is then typically used as the driving force of a steam engine of some description, where the heat captured from the fission pile is used to, well, heat stuff up and that is then converted into electricity by means of some mechanical apparatus. This process has some unwanted side effects, such as the released neutrons "activating", i.e. making radioactive, materials around the fission pile. A fusion power plant works like the Sun does, or at least that's the idea. Light elements, or their nuclei, fuse together to form heavier elements, and this also releases energy due to marvels of nuclear physics and specifically how atomic binding energies work out. The trouble from an engineering perspective is that the core of the Sun, or any working star for that matter, is what we in the sciences like to call "extremely hot". In the temperatures we're talking about here, matter exists in a form called plasma, which basically means that it's hot enough that the electrons that in normal matter go 'round the atomic nuclei are in fact split off from the nuclei. This means that the atomic nuclei, which have a positive electric charge, and the now-free electrons, who have a negative electric charge, move around independently, and once this electrified soup becomes hot enough, the nuclei start interacting with one another which causes the fusion reaction we're after. Now, it's somewhat of a good thing that plasma is composed of electrically charged particles, because we can use https://i.imgur.com/nB7z6a1.mp4 to (try to) contain the plasma of our fusion reactor. A fairly popular idea, that is utilized in ITER for example, is to force the plasma into a donut shape with magnetic fields. This is also where the big engineering problems show up. First of all, to make the magnetic fields required to contain the plasma donut takes up a lot of electricity. And the containment process cannot be perfect, we will always have plasma escaping its magnetic cage and smashing into the walls of our reactor, which understandably slowly destroys every material known to man, and figuring out what kind of stuff to use for building the walls of our reactor is a Big Question in materials science. And our bright idea of using magnetic fields only really works for charged particles, but when we're talking about nuclear physics, there's always those drat pesky neutrons around, and as per their name they're electrically neutral, and our magnetic fields don't exert a (lot of) force on them. So they will mash into our reactor walls, too, activating stuff and making nuclear waste. Oh, and as mentioned earlier, the plasma has to be hot hot hot, and heating it up to Sun-level temperatures also requires a lot of electricity. All of this is to say that a nuclear fission pile will merrily fission all by itself, hence the idea of a critical mass, where the chain reaction of nuclei splitting up releases enough neutrons that they in turn cause other nearby nuclei to fission, releasing more neutrons, and you can see where the moniker chain reaction comes into play here. A nuclear fusion reactor, in contrast, is very much an artificial, engineered thing that is forced into its configuration by a lot of expended energy. If anything should fail in a fusion reactor, the fusion process will just stop, either because the magnetic bottle fails and our plasma dissipates and smashes into the surrounding walls, or our plasma cools down from the required insane temperatures and there's not enough energy around for our nuclei to fusion. The entire problem with fusion reactors is that we have such trouble creating a macroscopic volume of space where plasma can exist in the first place! It's insane to suggest that the fail condition of any terrestrial fusion plant would be "turning the surroundings into a crater".
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Dec 12, 2022 10:48
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Archonex posted:If you'll note, the point wasn't that it was a likelihood now but instead that with time and advances in the field of fusion (Likely in ease of creating and sustaining the plasma, so a long way off.) some moron would eventually find a way to gently caress things up to an absurd degree. That was my point though, there is no reason to expect this kind of outcome. We know how to make a run-away fusion reaction already, just ignite the lighter-element stuff with a really hot explosion, which is the fission part of a thermo-nuclear bomb. There is no reason whatsoever to suggest that a fusion reactor, intended to run for extended periods of time, should or even could have the properties which would enable a fusion bomb type scenario. These are two engineering problems that are so vastly separated that I'm failing to find the words here. It's like saying some moron would find a way to turn their toaster into a space rocket.
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Dec 12, 2022 11:53
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Archonex posted:I feel you aren't really understanding anything i've posted. That's fair, but whose fault is it that you wrote a few posts about how, maybe, somehow, fusion reactors could turn places into craters? There is plenty to criticize about the discourse around fusion power plants and their supposed salvific properties for mankind's current life-style choices, but making the conversation about A.C.M.E. fusion plants that just blow up for no particular reason isn't helpful nor is it germane.
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Dec 12, 2022 12:18
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Archonex posted:Oh my loving god what forum do you think you're on? This is not somethingpedantic.com. You have robbed me of my sole weapon here by calling me a pedant and then making an accusation which I can only refute by being pedantic  I am not "stanning" for fusion reactors, I am trying to ground the conversation to things which are, at least in theory, plausible, instead of writing Nick Cage action film scripts. If you feel that it's unfair to point out glaring errors in your train of thought vis a vis the physics of fusion, well, OK I guess?
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Dec 12, 2022 12:29
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Archonex posted:No, that is not what I said. Fusion requires extremely hot temperatures. Also, we have absolutely have ran reactors for limited amounts of time that reached temps over a 100 million degrees. The hottest to date that I know of was around 150 million Celsius. Obviously there's no material on earth that can handle touching anything that hot, so the solution is to suspend it in some way in most cases. If the suspension mechanism fails then you have an extremely hot ball of plasma slagging a large part of the hull of the reactor before terminating. Again, this is missing the forest for the trees. You stated, and let's quote it here to be clear, Archonex posted:I apologize if i'm wrong but the problem that I sort of recall reading is that containing a reaction slowly (and sometimes in at times very bad situations not so slowly) slags whatever containment they have and if the shutdown sequence or certain parts of the reactor experience a total failure then oops now you basically have a superb bomb that can and absolutely will immediately vaporize the building along with everything in the locality of the power plant due to potentially as much as 150 million Celsius temperatures (depending on the scale of failure or Chernobyl style mismanagement and intentionally bad design.) and equivalent pressure rapidly expanding outwards if it it isn't shut down. And now you are citing a paper that says that within a very, very small volume of space did a team of scientists manage a temperature of 150 million degrees Celsius. This does not amount to anything resembling "vaporizing buildings along with everything in the locality". Here's an example that might be instructive. What's the temperature of planet Earth? Where I'm sitting, it's literally freezing outside, and the streets are full of ice and snow. Not fun! But, the Earth, as a whole, sits at around 15 degrees Celsius year round. The local temperature is a meaningful measurement when one is considering what to wear outside that day, and we look at the global temperature when we're trying to figure out if the globe is on fire. (Spoiler alert: It is.) We have all sorts of particle accelerators and other scientific instrumentation of the sort where you can, locally, in a very small volume, create exotic environments. This does not, again, translate into somehow magically turning whole blocks of streets into 150 million degrees Celsius weather.
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Dec 12, 2022 13:26
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FishBulbia posted:https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-63950962 Auntie Beeb posted:Despite the leap forward, Prof Chittenden told the BBC there is still a lot further to go until nuclear fusion could be used to power homes. I'm sorry, Miriam still has a stranglehold on diplomatic negotiations when it comes to peace on Planet.
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Dec 13, 2022 16:42
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Captain_Maclaine posted:This timeline is threatening to collapse into a singularity of stupidity. I'm not a cosmologist, but I would say, in my uninformed opinion, that that happened around the time mister Trump took his escalator trip way back in 2015.
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Dec 15, 2022 20:08
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