Recent content by newjerseyrunner

I was discussing the Fermi Paradox with a coworker at lunch and he made a very good point that I hadn’t considered and I don’t really hear mentioned on the topic: distribution. The assumption that if ET was everywhere, we should see it everywhere. The point was that that should be true for...

*Bright flash of light and a being appears before me* God: I am god. Me: Cool... so are you like some billion year old self-improving alien AI or something? God: ... No... I am the lord. Me: Oh... Are you a Matrioshka brain? God: ... You're making this difficult. I created your universe. Me...

My wife posed a theoretical similar to this last night while watching the show Supernatural. I also was thinking about the concept that technology that is sufficiently advanced becomes indistinguishable from magic. The more I think about it, the more I see that idea as paradoxical...

I'm trying to see if I can calculate the peak draw weight of my bow based on the draw length and the velocity of the arrow and a known shape of a curve, but I'm not quite sure how to make such a function, if there even is such a way. This is the shape of the draw weight plotted against...

Are you aware of the concept of an "in-place" constructor? It may be called other things too, but that's what I call it. You can recall a constructor by using placement new operator. ala: void * someMemoryChunk = malloc(sizeof(myClass)); myClass * ptr = new (someMemoryChunk) myClass()...

The thought experiment about Venus was purely about the human reaction to such a thing. In the story I wrote, humanity is the ultra-high energy creature, it's from the point of view of a creature who's chemistry takes place in liquid nitrogen instead of water.

I liked the Star Trek episodes like this. I can think of two, one from Voyager where they encountered a planet in some time accelerator, and another from NexGen? where they discovered a silicon based lifeforms in a mine. The story is a short story in the format of a nature journal article...

Oh, you were referring to the creatures themselves? Yeah, they simply wouldn't perceive things that didn't happen at their pace, it'd just be a flash. But since their environment itself is in deep freeze, every other life form and geological processes also happen in super slow motion. When...

There tech isn't really that important to the story. I would imagine any mechanical structure would jam quickly and overheat, it'd be no different that spamming your space bar a thousand times in a second. Electronic interfaces probably just wouldn't poll fast enough to register. You could...

I have two separate inquiries that may seem unrelated at first, but aren't. Firstly, I'd like to propose a thought experiment. Say someone studying Venus suddenly discovered incontrovertible proof of a biosphere on the surface, and a vibrant one at that. Eventually, Venus will disappear in...

No. I'm not sure what it's called. The first function projects a 2.5D point to a 2D screen, I'm trying to reverse the projection. I don't know x or y position, in fact, I need this distance calculation to figure that out in order to texture it. It's for determining distance from a camera...

I have this function that I need to reverse. I can't figure out how to reverse it though, I should be able to take the resulting int, put it through a function with the height value and get back distance. Normally, when I get stuck, I just ask wolfram alpha to solve it for me, but that...

Pretty sure that the end of the episode happened a mere days after the nuclear war. All he seemed to have time to do was to organize the books he wanted to read. With the exception of acute radiation poisoning from huge doses at once, any negative effects would take a long time to develop...

I'm confused why you think such a thing is a nonstarter because of the square cube principal. There have been animals on this planet that were much much bigger than humans. Quetzalcoatlus is thought to have weighed close to a thousand pounds. The air density at the time was likely very...

I think it's a safe assumption that you are considering whether an alien archaeologist might be able to detect that an advanced civilization existed on this planet millions or billions of years after we're gone? Or maybe wondering if it's possible that another civilization arose here and was...