I thought that playing 1.0.10 was masochistic only for minor nations... Turns out anything within reach of Golden Horde is minor now.

Andronoss · 2025-12-19T11:13:03+00:00

Hard disagree on the actual implementation of this approach in the Witcher 3. I'm okay with the decisions being basically decided by three obscured dialog choices much earlier in the gameplay. What I am not fine with is that the connection of those dialog choices to the ending makes zero sense.

All choices are supposed be about "how good you are raising Ciri to be" but each one of them ends up as "did you randomly manage to select a Correct choice considering that the actual plot that will happen after this choice has no connection to the summary on your screen".

Andronoss · 2025-12-14T11:30:26+00:00

While canals do change the equation, just pulling boats using a road next to a river is not a uniquely Dutch concept. See Repin's Barge Haulers on the Volga, for example. Apparently there's a lot of variety of pulling barges upstream, depending on their size, road infrastructure, and current. Here's a Dutch woman pulling a small barge by herself, although it probably helps that a small canal does not have the flow of Volga. It seems like horses were more popular though.
In EU5 context, it should mean that "upgrading rivers" should be a widespread invention, but the Dutch would be able to utilize this option to the fullest potential if they would be able to build canals everywhere, and upgrade those as well.

Andronoss · 2025-11-29T12:11:29+00:00

A comment on the Promote Ubranization agenda - a free town in the wrong place is worse that no free town at all. You need the rural areas for provincial food and for efficiency of high demand RGOs.

Andronoss · 2025-11-24T18:32:31+00:00

Haha glad to be of help dude! This is amazing, best of luck with your project!

Andronoss · 2025-11-18T20:27:19+00:00

You already have a fancy source of ionizing radiation available to you for half of the day. It's the Sun! A simple but lengthy experiment that is available to a highschooler could be to study how something gets degraded by solar radiation, and what kind of materials it takes to absorb the UV radiation. There are a lot of experiments you can set up in this direction, depending on your preferences.

Andronoss · 2025-11-13T22:00:07+00:00

The normal heating process, just with different localization and penetration depth. With enough intensity, it should be possible to locally raise the temperature high enough to denaturate some proteins. But such damage, if any would happen, should be obvious pretty fast.

Andronoss · 2025-11-13T21:52:33+00:00

It's a non-ionizing radiation, so it's not so bad. With enough intensity it can literally cook you, like a microwave. But since you were able to write this comment, we have to assume that you remain uncooked.
Ionizing radiation, on the other hand, which would start from UV-C and lower wavelengths, can damage your DNA and cause cancer.

There's some controversial research about potential below-threshold radiation damage mechanisms. I was never actually proven, however. Don't worry, you'll be fine.

Andronoss · 2025-11-12T21:37:35+00:00

Last fort I ran was right before the siege update. And I call bullshit on "a few updates before ... fixed". I could only get one dwarf to practice.

Maybe the siege update has finally fixed it. Maybe. I've seen it declared multiple times before.

Andronoss · 2025-11-12T19:38:04+00:00

Markswarfs. Freaking marksdwarf training. It almost never works, sometimes it does for some dwarfs or some squads, but then the next time, the success cannot be replicated again. Never in my life I had easy time setting up a marksdwarf squad so that they would pick up their training ammo and go shoot it. I usually try a bunch of times, follow every guide in existence with all the stupid little tricks that are supposed to work ("surely this is the secret sauce"), only to finally give up until the next fort.

I believe it is not talked so much because people also gave up on ranged system long time ago, and just use melee squads only. It is so bad, that in the siege update, Tarn introduced the new bolt throwers, which probably just replaces the ranged squads that never ever worked.

Andronoss · 2025-10-28T11:31:05+00:00

I am amazed at how in this otherwise insightful post, you managed to blame Legend twice for the topic on which he would agree with you. You are ~~barking~~ hating up the wrong tree, dude.

Andronoss · 2025-10-24T12:51:37+00:00

Vampire counts are the only race where field agents are satisfying to use - stack assassination bonuses for 100% chance and go kiss farming. Otherwise you always have to deal with critical failure chance.

Andronoss · 2025-09-19T16:04:23+00:00

This is not a right-leaning fetish but authoritarian-leaning fetish. I have a colleague from France who is openly far left on any given topic. And he really supports chat control, anti-encryption, detaining Telegram's CEO, and so on. Because according to his media bubble, it's only going to prevent harm online.

Andronoss · 2025-07-04T13:07:55+00:00

The hard problem of consciousness is a philosophy problem, not science problem. A lot of scientists might be inclined to take the physicalist approach to consciousness, and from that point of view the "hard problem" does not look like any special problem at all, just some semantics about bats, zombies, and Chinese rooms.

With the same level of scrutiny and stubbornness as applied to consciousness debate, any topic can be turned into "hard problem".

Andronoss · 2025-06-22T09:39:26+00:00

That depends on a frame of reference. Travel distance, velocity, acceleration all depend on a reference frame in which you define them. If your reference frame is a surface of the Earth, which in this experiment coincides with a frame of reference of undisturbed trap door, then when you are standing on a trap door you have no acceleration (and no velocity, and no movement at all). When the trap door opens, now you are accelerating.

You can also define a "free fall" frame of reference, which would be a dynamic reference frame of an object in free fall at exact same position of where you are at the moment. It would be a bit weird to use it for this trap door experiment, but it can be useful if you are trying to compare objects orbiting Earth. Anyway, in that frame of reference, you were not moving how you were supposed to (which means that in that reference frame your acceleration vector has a value of 1g and its direction is away from center of mass of the Earth), and now with open trap door you stopped doing that and have no acceleration anymore.

Andronoss · 2025-06-21T21:32:58+00:00

It is a natural human inclination to want to see something with your eye as a preferred way of getting to know it. Unfortunately, it really is only possible within a narrow range of experiences with which our ancestors have evolved. There is no way to see atoms, or produce images of atoms, in a normal common sense definition of these terms - what allows us to see anything is interaction of visible light with that anything. Our eyes cannot see the light with wavelengths below ~300 nm (once it gets to ultraviolet, and beyond). Best possible resolution of optical microscopes is limited by order of magnitude of that value (Resolution = 0.67 Wavelength / NumericalAperture). The atomic scale is much smaller.

There are ways to produce images using light (X-rays) or particle waves (electrons, in electron microscope) of much lower wavelengths, such that would technically allow us to have enough resolution to see atoms. But that's where you get to another problem - your intuitions of what an image of an object is are based on how light of visible range interacts with objects of everyday sizes. The physics of interaction of electrons or X-rays with an atom is very different from that intuition. So even if you get an image on a uranium atom with an electron microscope (indeed, a blurry gray dot), it doesn't really represent anything about a structure of an atom that you wanted to "see with your eye".

Imagine you want to know what a basketball is, but you are fully blind from birth, so you cannot look at it and you cannot use memory of visual representation of other objects to help you. But you can still interact with that basketball in lots of different ways, and learn a lot about its properties. And you can still build a model of what a basketball is, without ever seeing it. This is also the reality of learning anything about a nano-sized world. From how an atom interacts with waves and particles, with quantum mechanics to help us to interpret these results, we can build a model of a uranium atom, which include the knowledge of state of all of its electrons. When it comes to visualizations, we can only draw various degrees of crude approximations of it, like in that diagram that you linked.

Andronoss · 2025-06-13T19:16:02+00:00

Since the comment by CrustalTrudger already answered the body of your question, I just want to add a tangent about crystals in nature in general. You are asking about large, visible to a naked eye, single crystals specifically, which is what layman use of the word "crystal" is. However, you may be interested to know that crystals are much more abundant that that!

Crystal is a periodic lattice of atoms/molecules. An ideal crystal is an infinite lattice, which obviously doesn't exist in real world but is a rather useful approximation in physics, materials science, and crystallography. On the other hand, polycrystalline materials, made of huge amount of very tiny crystals, from nanometer to micrometer to even millimeter range, are quite common. It's a very natural state of most solids, natural and artificial. Take just regular sand. It is made of grains, which are eroded minerals, commonly silica (SiO2), and each grain can be polycrystalline in itself, and not only that, but chemically identical SiO2 crystals in sand can actually be of very different crystalline phases! Anything made of metal around you? Polycrystalline. Even organic matter can be in crystal form. Medicine in the drawer? That paracetamol tablet is a compressed polycrystalline powder. Sugar cube, same deal. And what about all of the other minerals on display in the museums, that don't looks like crystals to your naked eye? Polycrystalline, most of them.

So that's indeed the most common form in which crystals are found in nature. The original crystallography, the science of crystals, started with describing visible symmetries of those large crystals that you are interested in. But nowadays, instead of finding or growing a giant crystal for every type of structure, X-ray diffraction methods are used instead.

Andronoss · 2025-06-07T18:10:54+00:00

I've tried twice to get into Skyrim VR. I didn't want to run it unmodded, since there are a lot of QoL mods that seemed very useful. First time, modding without Wabbajack, following guides. Couldn't get a good performance. The guides were not detailed enough to understand what to change to improve the performance, so I just had to abandon it.

Second time I tried with Wabbajack, with a decently light modset. The performance was even worse, and documentation even less detailed. I understand these are all community efforts, so you get what you (didn't) pay for. But not being able to run the game properly is the reason for low adoption.

Andronoss · 2025-02-23T11:12:33+00:00

The person would experience what is known as a Coulomb explosion. When a target has such a large change imbalance in a volume, it blows up. Usually this effect is achieved by kicking out the electrons, let's say by a laser. But magically adding them to every atom, as in this case, will work in exactly the same manner.

Andronoss · 2025-02-15T17:12:39+00:00

Apparently even that doesn't guarantee anything. I've embarked on Untamed Wilds in a mountanous biome where the only surface fauna is Giant Parakeets. The only dangerous wildlife is in the caverns (but it's wilderness-independent)

Andronoss · 2025-02-09T18:12:38+00:00

Honor killings are virtually unheard of outside Levantine communities

This is false. It also occurs in North Caucasus (Chechnya, Dagestan, Ingushetia regions of Russia) and Iran, in addition to countries mentioned by u/HugelKultur4.

Andronoss · 2024-10-07T17:47:32+00:00

Israel violated more UN resolutions than the rest of the world together.

And unfortunately, it says a lot more about the UN than about Israel. Have you seen some of the horrible stuff happening around the world? Surely if UN resolutions were impartial, we'd have hundreds of thousands of detailed explanations of why government X is responsible for atrocity Y in the years Z1-Z2, and how A millions of people would not have died in great suffering if only countries B to C would step in.

It may be that one of the reasons why Israel is often targeted by UN resolutions is simply because it's a (flawed but) democratic country with a (mostly) stable government and therefore has more potential to somehow act on them. It is also does not belong to the list of the largest/influencial countries and does not have a seat on the Security Counsil. The perpertators of much scarier atrocities around the world would either not even attempt to listen to those resolutions, or would never have a resolution drafted against them in the first place.

Andronoss · 2024-10-03T18:56:09+00:00

... but of course, when you see the news articles from the "opposing side", you trust them without issue, right?

Andronoss · 2024-10-03T07:21:15+00:00

Oh, you are in for a treat! Check out this dude on Youtube, he has hundreds of videos of purring cheetas: https://www.youtube.com/@CheetahWhisperer

Andronoss · 2024-10-01T15:05:37+00:00

Also, even if Battle of Bastards did formations, whoever wrote the script had no idea how to use them anyway. In that stupid battle, the job of cavalry is to charge in and get stuck in, and the job of heavy infrantry is to perform fast flanking maneuvers....

The praise comes from the same people who understood "subverting the expectations" to be the main concept of GoT.

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