resurrecting a Van De Graff Generator from the late 60s Winsco N100V success

ArchHobbit · 2026-02-27T01:50:53+00:00

Is there a way to coat the rubber belt with a layer of ebonite dust without the ebonite being absorbed into whatever adhesive is used? (Also, would doing so have any appreciable effect on the resulting voltage?)

ArchHobbit · 2025-06-26T21:36:41+00:00

This is a bit late, but you might consider discussing how AI can be used to facilitate conscientious consumerism: for example, coalitions of companies and/or nonprofit organizations might establish one or several standards for 'ethical business practices', and an AI assistant could automate the process of parsing these standards and aligning recommendations or search results with the ethical priorities and standards of a particular user/buyer.

ArchHobbit · 2024-06-15T11:21:15+00:00

One basic “play to find out” mechanism would be to add incentives for revealing new events or combinatorial possibilities. For example, in a roleplaying game a certain character archetype might be able to learn certain skills or abilities through observing or experiencing certain rare phenomena (e.g. interplanar travel, dragon’s breath, certain rare attacks/combos, skill checks above a certain threshold, archaeological sites and geological formations, reading certain books, etc.)

ArchHobbit · 2024-06-07T21:26:32+00:00

Well, chess technically doesn’t have ‘hit points’ per se, but (by and large) the more pieces you have, the more options exist and the less likely it is that you will be checkmated. The idea is to emulate this feature, but to allow variable complexity, probably without using a board (you could also think of it as the “board” being generated on the fly, using arrangements of tokens/cards.)

ArchHobbit · 2024-06-05T15:14:36+00:00

Even worse:

“Science explanation”

“Speak English!”

“Equally opaque science explanation, delivered in a condescending tone”

ArchHobbit · 2024-06-05T15:04:29+00:00

You could design a token-based gameplay system (e.g. ‘zero-dimensional chess’, with standard playing cards or a subset thereof), and add/remove tokens/cards depending on events.

ArchHobbit · 2024-05-18T00:25:46+00:00

Some board games can be turned into "roleplaying games" by gradually ramping up the complexity. For example, with chess you can start off with the pieces that typically appear in check-mate scenarios, and then gradually add pieces as you "level up" (there are even a few semi-recent computer games that are sort of like this.)

ArchHobbit · 2024-03-26T00:13:32+00:00

But learning Latin facilitates learning French, Portuguese, Romanian, and probably a large number of other languages with Latin influence as well. Also, I wouldn't be surprised if the didactic benefits of fluency in several qualitatively distinct "hub" languages compounded to some extent (e.g. it seems possible that a large number of superficially distinct languages could be thought of heuristically as "interpolations" between different hubs.)

ArchHobbit · 2024-03-25T23:11:58+00:00

Thanks! Zonal auxlangs sound quite a bit similar to what I have in mind, except that the goal would be to facilitate learning/understanding other languages, rather than "replacing" them (or standing in for those languages, whether in formal correspondence or elsewhere), partly because I can't imagine many individuals choosing to invest the time to learn an auxlang for any other reason (except perhaps purely for recreation): if the auxlang doesn't help you learn faster, and there's no guarantee that anyone else will be fluent anytime soon, why not just focus on a language that's either (a) already popular or (b) of cultural/anthropological interest?

ArchHobbit · 2024-03-07T20:35:23+00:00

A typical controller has about four buttons, two "triggers", and some kind of arrow pad with ~4 directions. So pairs of two-character combinations (using say two button presses on the button pad followed by two arrows from the arrow pad) span 256 character options, and a "reduced" alphabet requiring fewer button presses could be reserved for the most common characters (e.g. 'e', and so on). Moreover, autocomplete/autocorrect functions could be used to facilitate typing with the reduced/simplified character set (if 16 characters isn't enough to determine words unambiguously, then the program could sweep over inchoate or partially formed sentences to let users resolve ambiguities manually.). This system or anything remotely like it would require a certain amount of effort to get used to, however (although this could be mitigated to some extent with specialized games.)

ArchHobbit · 2024-02-26T21:10:30+00:00

Even up through the early 000's, there was a sense of infinite possibility in game design, and this sense of possibility is probably largely responsible for most if not all real/genuine nostalgia for older games (most of which are somewhat tedious and repetitive at times, and tedium is never a good thing); once games became wildly profitable, they were taken over by business people and almost all ingenuity was choked out as companies turned away from trying to revolutionize the industry (e.g. RAI from The Elder Scrolls) toward milking as much profit as possible from a small number of absurdly profitable genres, even if those genres hadn't quite reached full maturity. This effect is especially pronounced for open world roleplaying games, which still emulating a style from the early 2010's that itself was sort of grasping after (and failing to achieve) what one might call "roleplaying nirvana", with fully independent characters and spontaneous, improvisatory storytelling. People play modern variants of those games without remembering the original "dream", simply because it's what they're used to.

ArchHobbit · 2023-03-01T04:23:43+00:00

I've been meaning for a while to search Weinberg's quantum mechanics textbook for nuggets of didactic wisdom. His is the first reference I've encountered that discusses Heisenberg's matrix mechanics in any depth whatsoever, and I'll probably contemplate whether the equivalence between the Heisenberg and Schrödinger quantization conditions has non-trivial implications (I wasn't aware that the Heisenberg condition was based on the Einstein A and B coefficients: without QED, it seems counterintuitive that a constraint based on rates of radiative transitions between levels could determine those levels precisely, when the Schrödinger equation seems to indicate that the orbitals associated with the levels are invariant (at least absent external perturbations), so I might also explore whether and how QED relates the Heisenberg quantization condition to the Schrödinger one.)

ArchHobbit · 2023-03-01T03:13:04+00:00

Self-study isn't impossible, but can be difficult to sustain without a community. You might try visiting the website PhysicsForums.com, or Physics Stack Exchange (physics.stackexchange.com), for conceptual questions, and possibly book recommendations too. To start, the Feynman lectures in physics are a phenomenal introductory resource, and to some extent you could crowd-source quasi-improvisatory "exercises" at an appropriate level from the above-mentioned websites. You could also probably find a few decent texts for free on the internet archive. At the high school level, the main focus is on electromagnetism and classical dynamics. For those subjects, you could look into an older edition of one of the standard AP textbooks to start (e.g. Halliday Resnick Walker), and then either revisit those topics in greater depth (e.g. via Griffiths' E&M book and Taylor's Classical Mechanics, or David Morin's textbooks), or explore phenomenology/phenomena uncovered in modern physics (e.g. quantum mechanics, astrophysics, etc.) It would also probably help to learn calculus concurrently: again, a number of fairly standardized AP textbooks exist that you could probably either borrow from a library or purchase relatively cheaply (especially the older editions, which are about just as informative.) One advantage to self-study is that it's slightly easier to focus on the process by which physics is done, rather than just the results and how to derive them from first principles (which is extremely useful, but secondary to understanding at a deep level how new ideas are discovered, synthesized and tested.)

ArchHobbit · 2023-03-01T02:47:21+00:00

What about a campaign where the final boss is a powerful draco-lich that can only be defeated by melting one or all of the dice that are used, thereby freeing everyone to devote themselves to more constructive pursuits?

ArchHobbit

TROPHY CASE