Activity for Olin Lathropâ€
| Type | On... | Excerpt | Status | Date |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Edit | Post #292800 | Initial revision | — | 2 months ago |
| Answer | — |
A: Merger with a Worldbuilding site? I like Lundin's answer, but with a few changes. Lots of categories are confusing to people. They also spread out the posts of a low-volume site so that any one place looks even more abandoned than if the content were lumped together. I therefore propose having only the following catagories: W... (more) |
— | 2 months ago |
| Comment | Post #292666 |
What you say is well-known stuff, although often expressed more in computer terms than literary terms. A, G, C, and T are the "bits", worth 2 binary bits each. Codons are the bytes, then there are words, start and end of record markers, semiphores that control when a gene is expressed, etc.
Agai... (more) |
— | 3 months ago |
| Edit | Post #292475 | Initial revision | — | 4 months ago |
| Answer | — |
A: Are economic speculation questions on-topic? If the alternative economics is sufficiently well specified and can be at least somewhat scientifically analyzed, then I think this is OK without seeing the specific question. An easy pitfall would be to make this alternative economics so speculative that answers end up being too opinion based as op... (more) |
— | 4 months ago |
| Comment | Post #290690 |
Aerogel is structurally weak. Keep in mind that if you want simulate an Earth biosphere that humans don't need spacesuits to walk around in, then the pressure will be much higher than outside. Even at 10 PSI (about 2/3 of Earth atmospheric pressure at sea level), you still have enormous forces on t... (more) |
— | 11 months ago |
| Edit | Post #290693 | Initial revision | — | 11 months ago |
| Answer | — |
A: Where should my island mountain ranges be, based on my plate tectonics? It looks like you will have uplift, frequent earthquakes, and volcanos in the lower part of your island where three plates are jamming together. In the northern part, the plates are spreading. You'd need volcanic activity to explain mountains there, or even the island existing at all. This would... (more) |
— | 11 months ago |
| Comment | Post #289665 |
<i>"That's not what downvotes are for"</i> they are on meta. Here votes indicate agreement or disagreement, although I suppose downvotes for poorly written posts wouldn't be out of line.
<i>"what proposal is there to disagree ? It needs a name change"</i> In your opinion. It seems at least some ... (more) |
— | over 1 year ago |
| Comment | Post #289665 |
<i>Why the downvote ?</i> Most likely because people disagree with your proposal. (more) |
— | over 1 year ago |
| Comment | Post #289641 |
This site isn't just about world building. If it were, it would be named that. This might be a good place for people trying to build somewhat plausible fictional worlds, but the site is certainly not limited to that, nor does it or should it have a particular focus on that. As the help you linked ... (more) |
— | over 1 year ago |
| Comment | Post #289639 |
No, that's not what I said at all. (more) |
— | over 1 year ago |
| Edit | Post #289639 | Initial revision | — | over 1 year ago |
| Answer | — |
A: Shouldnt this question be moved instead of closed ? First, moving questions rewards people for asking in the wrong place. That's not something that should be encouraged. Second, that's not a great question because it requires following links to get pertinent points. Information necessary for understanding a question must be in the question itself... (more) |
— | over 1 year ago |
| Edit | Post #288786 | Initial revision | — | over 1 year ago |
| Answer | — |
A: Analogue Encryption, without converting to digital It doesn't make much sense to talk about transmitting "keys" when the encryption is analog. Since you want to stay away from digital, the encryption and decryption will need to be done in analog hardware. That has a lot less flexibility than a digital algorithm, so the encryption needs to be more s... (more) |
— | over 1 year ago |
| Edit | Post #288236 | Initial revision | — | over 1 year ago |
| Answer | — |
A: Determining a Practical Bridge Design for a Wide River and Heavy Traffic Look around the world to see what is possible with our current technology. The Golden Gate bridge has a deck 90 feet wide (27 meters) supporting 6 lanes, and its main span is 4200 feet (1.28 km) long spanning a major shipping channel. It's obviously plenty high and wide enough to support the large ... (more) |
— | over 1 year ago |
| Edit | Post #288193 | Initial revision | — | over 1 year ago |
| Answer | — |
A: Could there be a way for a solar system to be very precise, so that the lunar calendar and solar calendar align? First, the fussiness of the people has absolutely no bearing on how their solar system ended up. It is what it is, whether they like it or not. As for the physics, you are basically asking for rotations of the planet and its orbit around the star to be integer multiples. Yes, that can happen, bu... (more) |
— | over 1 year ago |
| Comment | Post #287486 |
The system I described inherently produces DC at a high voltage. That would most likely need to be converted to something else for actual use, but that also seems out of scope of the question. The question is about extracting electrical power from a radioactive lump directly, not what to do with th... (more) |
— | about 2 years ago |
| Comment | Post #287486 |
That's one way, but I thought the OP was asking about capturing the current directly. Each proton that gets emitted represents a current flowing from the radioactive lump to whatever conductor the proton lands on. Your 4.3 MeV figure gives you some idea how much of a voltage gradient these protons ... (more) |
— | about 2 years ago |
| Edit | Post #287395 | Initial revision | — | about 2 years ago |
| Answer | — |
A: How Would the Sport of Wrestling Change in a Microgravity Environment? Drastically. For one thing, pinning your opponent's shoulder to the mat is no longer possible. Very different criteria would be required to determine winning. The different objectives would in turn make the sport very different. The reason pinning against the mat is no longer possible is becaus... (more) |
— | about 2 years ago |
| Comment | Post #287351 |
The whole idea is rather silly in the first place. What services would a ring of aerogel provide either? It's not like you can dock ships at it, store materials in it, have people live it it, etc. (more) |
— | about 2 years ago |
| Comment | Post #287351 |
If you make the ring spin, then it will support itself. When the ring spins to match the orbital velocity at that altitude, it is neither in tension nor compression. Not tethers required. (more) |
— | about 2 years ago |
| Comment | Post #287348 |
<blockquote>Utility fog is a swarm robotics concept in which a mesh of robots barely larger than a grain of pollen (5 micrometer ( m ) bodies and 50 micrometer arms) are dodecahedrons (12 sided polygons) ending in telescoping arms (12 of them) ending in grabbers.</blockquote>
No, it's not. <i>Ut... (more) |
— | about 2 years ago |
| Edit | Post #287277 | Initial revision | — | about 2 years ago |
| Answer | — |
A: Nuclear energy storage Yes, nuclear fission is reversible. Actually, it's more like fission is the reverse of fusion. Fusion is what stars do. Mostly stars fuse hydrogen to make helium. Fusing light elements releases energy, which is how we ultimately get sunshine. It takes energy to result in heavy elements, like... (more) |
— | about 2 years ago |
| Edit | Post #287100 |
Post edited: Removed annoying distraction about why post shouldn't be closed. |
— | about 2 years ago |
| Suggested Edit | Post #287100 |
Suggested edit: Removed annoying distraction about why post shouldn't be closed. (more) |
helpful | about 2 years ago |
| Edit | Post #286992 |
Post edited: |
— | over 2 years ago |
| Edit | Post #286992 | Initial revision | — | over 2 years ago |
| Answer | — |
A: How to reduce tornados in the US Great Plains? Tornados and the thunderstorms that often spawn them are driven by rising columns of air. Such "thermals" are stronger and more likely in open terrain, like is prevalent in Tornado Alley. Let the area be forested. You said you want more rain anyway. Forest would be a natural development of more... (more) |
— | over 2 years ago |
| Comment | Post #286826 |
This is a comment because it's only a knee-jerk reaction and not based on any real knowledge. How exactly is "output" defined. If a company of 100 people makes widgets, then only those that actually physically make the widgets count? What about those that designed the widgets? Those that get the w... (more) |
— | over 2 years ago |
| Edit | Post #286182 | Initial revision | — | over 2 years ago |
| Answer | — |
A: If this earth were cube shaped would it be possible during Magellanic era using a float ship to figure out that the earth is cube shaped? So couldn't earth be odd shaped other than a sphere? No. Something the size of the earth has significant gravity. There isn't material strong enough over large distances to result in anything more than a slightly wrinkled surface for an earth-sized object. Put another way, the vertexes of the c... (more) |
— | over 2 years ago |
| Comment | Post #285964 |
Kinetic energy is mV<sup>2</sup>/2. Each second your engine is putting out (1 kg)(1 Mm/s)<sup>2</sup>/2 Joules, or 500 GJ, which is a power of 500 GW, not 1 TW. Also your exhaust speed is 1 Mm/s. The speed of light is about 300 Mm/s, so you're at 1/300 the speed of light. There aren't going to be... (more) |
— | almost 3 years ago |
| Comment | Post #283283 |
From your avatar, it's clear you are interested in electronics in some form. You may like the <a href="https://electrical.codidact.com">Electrical Engineering</a> site here at Codidact. This site is fairly new and needs people posting content, particularly asking good questions. Tell everyone else... (more) |
— | about 3 years ago |
| Edit | Post #285058 |
Post edited: |
— | about 3 years ago |
| Edit | Post #285058 | Initial revision | — | about 3 years ago |
| Answer | — |
A: How can we grow this community? The issues here are largely the same as with the Outdoors site, including the imported content. My answer to your question in Outdoors mostly applies. A few differences to note: The recent rash of dumb or lazy questions doesn't apply, since we've had barely any questions. It's harder to fin... (more) |
— | about 3 years ago |
| Edit | Post #284294 | Initial revision | — | about 3 years ago |
| Answer | — |
A: Was the total amount of water on earth ever significantly different? It seems that what is now the earth started as an aggregation of rocky material. Large amounts of water were then added by bombardment of comet-like bodies. These contain a lot of ice. (more) |
— | about 3 years ago |
| Edit | Post #284240 | Initial revision | — | over 3 years ago |
| Answer | — |
A: Could a laser using a "light capacitor" rather than a battery work? It seems you want to "store" energy as light by keeping it bouncing around inside a chamber. No, that's not going to work, at least not for more than a few 10s of nanoseconds for a chamber the size of a "large tank". Typical mirrors reflect maybe 90% of the light. Let's say you have really gre... (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
| Comment | Post #283763 |
This question needs to be closed. It's not clear what you are asking. The first two bullet points seem to be irrelevant, and aren't necessarily right anyway. You talk about bureaucracy, but in the end it appears you just want a science-base way to identify humans. If that's really the case, then ... (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
| Edit | Post #283875 | Initial revision | — | over 3 years ago |
| Answer | — |
A: Human elytra flying off a cliff This is probably impossible, but your question leaves off necessary detail to know for sure. If the point is to be able to glide for "a few minutes" after jumping off something tall, then we need to know how tall. The taller the cliff, the more potential energy there is to power the flight. You ... (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
| Edit | Post #283634 | Initial revision | — | over 3 years ago |