Recent content by DaveC426913

Pleased to see my favourite, Hofstadter's Law, in-the-wild...

John Varley's 'The Black Hole Passes'? Ouch! He is no slouch in the sci-fi world. No wonder it put you off all other sci-fi.

Problem with AI is that the more details you add to a scenario, the more it will forget. You'll get all the way to a plausible solution and then say "What?? We established fifty paragraphs ago that the body was Venus-sized! Why are we back to a small asteroid!? Start again!"

I'm sure someone else has mentioned it but Earth's Roche limit is about 18,000 km, as is your Venus-size planet's Roche Limit. The planets would suffer - not merely earthquakes - but disintegration. The effect on the atmosphere will be lost in the midst of the liquefaction and disintegration...

*Ahem* should have been Careful with your diction in homework assignments.

Sailor has entered the chat. Welp. There's no prop, so it's not prop walk. 'at's all I got. I'm out.

Some perspective: Water is quite capable of staying solid just as any other molecule or mineral. Cold enough, it can be as hard as iron. And we don't tend to talk about iron sublimation a lot. It is only the fact that we humans exist near the triple point of water that makes us think it is...

Where does Ahmed come in? I don't see that account anywhere. Is Ahmed an entirely fictional aspect of the story you're writing?

I don't understand what I'm looking at here. Is this an artist's depiction of what vibe coding will look like in a world where we can all change our IRL avatars to animals? Is this an animated film developed by AI?

Due East is 180 degrees from due West. I am capable of conceiving of directions as being "near" and "far" from each other. If I am sailing in a boat, a heading of 20 is a lot nearer to 10 than is to a heading 60. Of course, the implications of that logic are that 350 is a lot nearer to 10...

Perhaps, but helping the OP understand why it doesn't work on a thermocouple is part of helping them understand why it does work on a human.

A simple test for this (at least in principle) would be to test how cool the room "feels" subjectively versus its objective temperature as measured by a thermometer.

Managed to get a pic. Came out both worse and better than I expected. (She sat still long enough that it isn't just a blur, but it looks way better when she's standing on her four paws.) When you come out of the bedroom without your glasses, and you just see blackness with these four glowing...

If I go to bed and leave the basement light on, it shines in under the door into the living room, forming a perfectly-collimated, one-inch-high plane of light across living room floor. The floor is too oblique to be lit, so it's pitch dark, but anything on the floor has a one-inch-high...