Recent content by russ_watters

The first word of the next sentence of the article is "periodic". I guess what you are implying/asking is whether a wave can be non-periodic/oscillating. I don't think so.

I'm not sure what that's supposed to mean; it seems to me that corporations are heavily regulated and frequently held accountable for public safety issues caused by their products. I agree with @PeterDonis ; I don't see how there's a problem to be solved here in terms of identifying who has...

Nah, if that were true it would mean basically all astrophotos are "fake". They are brightened to the limit of available data. They might have 65,000 levels of brightness (16bit) and only use the bottom few hundred for most. Plus the dynamic range is huge. Solar eclipse photos might be half...

From CNN: https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/31/science/nasa-artemis-ii-what-to-watch-for Ehh? I don' think so, that's more than 12 g's including the one they already have. I'm not sure where they get that, but it's in the google ai result. Chicken or egg...

This is a twist on what @Dale said, a fallacy that the box is a constraint or limitation and that therefore ignoring the box increases the chance of finding something new. It's not true and is just an excuse for not taking the effort to learn what's in the box. [Even setting aside whether the...

Said in reply to a 12 year old looking into Japanese metallurgy. I hope it's original @Baluncore but even if not, it's a great turn of phrase.

Seriously, @Chloren , to be thinking about this stuff at age 12 is impressive and admirable. Stick with it, there's an enormous amount of fascinating science and history to learn on metallurgy.

It's an unanswerable hypothetical, but the distance between "probably never would" and "proof positive" is probably pretty small from a practical standpoint so I don't really understand what the value is in trying to establish it as "proof positive". But the width of that hair seems to be...

As I've said before, the flaw in almost all AI doomsday movies is that they skip or gloss over the fatal error: giving AI control over the nukes. If we don't make that very obvious mistake, they can't nuke us. And it isn't AI-hyping tech bros that can hand-over control of the nukes. They...

Millions, absolutely. Even if we assume it will be that bad, we've seen stampedes for worse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klondike_Gold_Rush https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamestown,_Virginia

Apropos; he's tabled the Mars thing in favor of the Moon. Details thin at this point though: https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/08/science/elon-musk-spacex-priorities-moon-intl-hnk As I said before I think Mars is fantasy for right now, but the moon is doable if we (Musk) choose to (depending on...

What's the premise? If it's anything like Dr. Strangelove, The Terminator, The Forbin Project, or War Games, they all have the same flaw. Note, my position is almost exactly the inverse of that on all counts. AI doesn't have to be actually "intelligent" or have "agency" or whatever, to be a...

What does that mean? Because I'm pretty sure the sum of my [net (?)] global travel has me around halfway back from the moon. Or do you mean you were born in the US but now live in India? But anyway, I've done exactly one circumnavigation, on a trip to the Philippines where I traveled West on...

It's getting there, yes.

[Sigh] Not sure if this is an exceptionally low effort OP or a crank-yanker, but just to move this along: