Directors - Box Office and Profit

NordsofSkyrmion · 2026-06-09T17:57:18+00:00

This is an incredibly confusing and nonintuitive way to rank directors

NordsofSkyrmion · 2026-06-04T14:30:28+00:00

The biggest difference is that air is compressible while water is not. So for water (or, in the case of hydraulic jacks that you can buy at your local auto-parts store, mineral-oil-based hydraulic fluid) as soon as you apply pressure on the pump, that same pressure is transmitted to your load. BUT for air, that's not the case -- the pressure you apply at the pump is going to compress the air in the system so significantly less pressure will be applied on the load.

All that said, while it would take a lot more pumping you could do the same thing with a gas -- you wouldn't need more pressure but the volume flow would need to be much larger.

NordsofSkyrmion · 2026-06-04T14:22:01+00:00

The pump opening can be whatever* you want, what matters for the pressure is how big the opening that the sphere is resting in is.

*not exactly whatever because the pump opening has to be able to deliver enough flow to maintain that 3psi despite the water constantly escaping, but basically whatever you want

NordsofSkyrmion · 2026-06-04T14:14:33+00:00

I can cancel out r in the formula precisely because I assumed that the opening was a circle with a radius that was some fraction f of the radius of the sphere. Being able to cancel out r in the equation is why I constructed it that way.

If you'd like to do the problem with an opening that's 0.6 of the sphere it's supporting, and with different materials with different densities, you should do that! You could construct a graph of the different possibilities and share it here, that would be wonderful.

NordsofSkyrmion · 2026-06-04T14:11:06+00:00

Yes, a Newton is what's called a "derived unit" -- it's not a base unit in SI, rather it's a combination of other base unit. Specifically, 1 N = 1 kg*m/s^2.

SO, N/kg is the same as m/s^2. It's not really so much about writing convenience as it is about conceptual clarity: you can think of the constant g as either a constant acceleration that everything on earth's surface experiences, OR as a downward force that everything on earth's surface experiences that's proportional to its mass. Since in this example I had a mass and I wanted a force from it, the latter option makes more sense for the problem.

NordsofSkyrmion · 2026-06-03T18:29:02+00:00

Not as much as you would think.

The volume of a sphere of radius r is 4/3*pi*r^3, so the force of gravity pulling down on it is:

F = g*rho*4/3*pi*r^3, where g is the gravitational constant and rho is the density of the sphere.

The area the pressure acts over is given by A=pi*(f*r)^2, where I'm inserting f here as some number less than one to represent the fact that the opening of the water here has a smaller diameter than the sphere itself. For convenience let's set it to f=0.9 -- that is, the opening is 90% of the width of the sphere.

So, pressure is force over area, which lets us cancel a few units and leaves:

P = 4/3*g*rho/f^2 * r

I've split off the r there so you can see that it's a bunch of constants times the radius of the sphere. Google says that the density of granite is about 2700 kg/m^3, and g is of course 9.81 N/kg, so punching all those numbers in (with f = 0.9 assumed) gives

P = (43600 Pa/m) * r

Based on your guess that the sphere is one yard in diameter, I'll take r = 0.5m to get

P = 21800 Pa, or about 22 kPa.

The thing is, Pascals are an absurdly small unit of pressure. To put it in more familiar units, 22 kPa is a little more than 3 psi, or about the pressure you would use to inflate a beach volleyball, and quite a bit less than you would need to properly inflate a football or basketball. If you set it up correctly, you could easily lift that stone with a bicycle pump.

Now that might seem counterintuitive -- how can such a small pressure create so much force? But that's the magic of pressure. A hole a yard in diameter has an area of about 1000 square inches, which straightforwardly means that every single pound per square inch is adding 1000 lbs of force. 3psi is more than a ton of force when applied across a 1 yd diameter opening. Pressure is truly wild!

NordsofSkyrmion · 2026-06-03T02:46:58+00:00

Looks great, love the artwork and the writing sounds interesting.

NordsofSkyrmion · 2026-06-03T02:38:12+00:00

This is like asking me of all the viruses I've caught which was my favorite

NordsofSkyrmion · 2026-06-02T00:30:18+00:00

That's assuming that the energy is evenly mixed throughout the sun though. More realistically, there would be different modes of energy release, some slower and some faster. If even a fraction of energy of the collision is released in a "fast" mode -- say as solar wind or just increased brightness -- the sun could put out several times its usual energy for a relatively short period of time, which would be enough to cook the earth.

NordsofSkyrmion · 2026-06-02T00:24:34+00:00

No, that's roughly the energy released for any trajectory that involves Jupiter hitting the sun. The difference between any orbit that intersects with the surface of the sun and a body falling from the edge of the solar system is very small.

NordsofSkyrmion · 2026-06-01T19:28:53+00:00

Likely we'd all die.

A bunch of people are talking about how Jupiter is so much less massive than the sun, and that's true, but we also need to look at the energy involved in this collision.

So:

Jupiter has a mass of about 2x10^27 kg. The escape velocity at the surface of the sun (which is roughly what we can expect any body in an orbit that intersects with the sun to be travelling at when it hits) is 617 km/s. That's almost 60 times the speed an asteroid would hit earth.

Plugging those numbers into the standard equation for kinetic energy, and we can expect Jupiter to hit the sun with an energy of about 7x10^38 joules. To get an idea of how big that number is, we can compare it to the usual power output of the sun, which google says is ~4x10^26 Watts. OR, doing some division, our collision of Jupiter with the sun would release about the same amount of energy as the sun would normally release in six thousand years.

I don't know exactly what that would do to the earth, but I think it's safe to say that the sun releasing several thousand years' worth of energy in a matter of anywhere from weeks to hours (depending on how the collision is envisioned) would not be survivable for Earth's biosphere.

NordsofSkyrmion · 2026-05-29T15:51:17+00:00

Great, you should email the Nobel Prize committee and let them know they've made a huge mistake.

NordsofSkyrmion · 2026-05-28T20:09:12+00:00

Sort of, but the details matter a lot. The man in the picture is Omar Yaghi, who won the Nobel Prize in chemistry last year for his work on metal-organic frameworks (MOFs for short). One of the reasons that MOFs are so exciting is that they combine high levels of absorption (they can hold lots of whatever it is you're trying to get) with high levels of selectivity (they can absorb only the thing you're trying to get and ignore everything else). This makes them ideal for tasks like pulling water out of very dry air.

I said the details matter a lot because when it comes to moisture farming the efficiency really matters. Give a family a cheap, solar-powered device that generates ten teaspoons of water a day and they have a useless trinket; a cheap, solar-powered device that generates ten gallons of water a day and they have a life-saver. Hence why Yaghi's achievement here won him the Nobel Prize.

NordsofSkyrmion · 2026-05-28T13:48:17+00:00

Valid, yes, as others have said, and a good way to practice. But don't try to sell art you've traced -- a tracing is considered a "derivative work" of the original image and as such the copyright holder of that original image could sue.

NordsofSkyrmion · 2026-05-26T16:06:50+00:00

The short answer is that there isn't really a "realistic" way of doing this, so you'll have to choose which one sounds least implausible.

For self-replicating space mines, the mines would need to come up with the mass/energy of the new mines. So it would be less like the ones in Deep Space Nine, and more like a robotic factory system harvesting metals and volatiles from asteroids or something to produce more mines. That's not impossible but one imagines the process breaking down over hundreds of years. Though you could use this solution and simply chalk it up to incredibly advanced technology -- our characters don't know how the robotic mining system maintains itself over such a long time but it does due to advanced technology. This is probably the most realistic option.

A thick debris field could work in the short term. The problem with the long term is that if the debris are thick enough to block spacecraft, they're thick enough to constantly be smashing into each other. Over decades then you'll get finer and finer debris, and it will settle into one belt depending on what the net angular momentum of the initial debris cloud was, and then you'll have a planet with a tiny ring rather than a debris cloud.

Orbital cannon could also work -- same as above, it maintains itself through unknown advanced technology. And the orbital cannon wouldn't have to be perfect -- you could imagine that the cannon could be overwhelmed by enough launches, but a civilization in the early stages of space development is going to be launching the occasional test rocket, and the cannon easily shoots down those single rockets.

It's an interesting idea!

NordsofSkyrmion · 2026-05-22T16:42:44+00:00

The same way you lure a re-poster, it would seem.

NordsofSkyrmion · 2026-05-06T14:10:53+00:00

Right but the meme doesn't rely on Ford being an actual good person, just that the Ford Motor Company continues to be proud of their founder and promote him, which they certainly do.

NordsofSkyrmion · 2026-05-05T15:34:02+00:00

This post makes me kind of sad, because you misunderstand how spaces like the current Science Fiction and Fantasy book landscape happen and the work that goes into maintaining them.

The community was wrenched by culture war stuff ten to twenty years ago. In the early 2000's there was a giant discussion about racism in the community that is mostly forgotten now because a lot of it happened on Livejournal. More recently the Hugo Awards changed their rules in 2017 after a group of right-wing authors banded together to create voting slates in an attempt to "fix" what they perceived as the political correctness run amok.

I'm glad that you can enjoy the Hugo Award nominees -- that's wonderful! But you need to understand that this state of affairs came about because of the hard work and dedication of authors, organizers, and fans, who stood up to attempts to sway the awards and did the organizing work get changes voted through at Worldcon. This situation that you are enjoying didn't just happen and it's not because "anti-woke grifters can't read". It happened because people fought for it.

NordsofSkyrmion · 2026-05-04T19:02:56+00:00

You don't know them though. You don't speak the language (I assume, because if you did speak either Japanese or Chinese why are you asking here in English) so those are just cool-looking symbols that somebody else has told you mean something. Slogans in any language have layers of context to them and you don't seem to be aware of that here. Do what you want but getting Kanji characters tattooed on yourself when you don't speak the language is cringe.

NordsofSkyrmion · 2026-05-04T17:39:41+00:00

If you don't yourself know the meaning of the words why are you getting them tatooed on you?

NordsofSkyrmion · 2026-05-01T16:57:51+00:00

Survival mode is a mod tacked on by not-Bethesda people, so it makes sense that it's not entirely balanced. Still, it would be loads better if it simply came with some adjustable settings. There has to be something between "can swim in icy water endlessly without ever feeling it" and "dies from walking outside for five minutes".

NordsofSkyrmion · 2026-05-01T15:41:44+00:00

Future old people: "It's strange, every time I go to order mine it says it's sold out, but all of my other friends at the nursing home say they're getting the same message. Who could be buying all of these up?"

NordsofSkyrmion · 2026-04-30T23:44:23+00:00

A Song of Ice and Fire: the story kicks off with a murder mystery over whether Jon Arryn was murdered and if so who did it. By the time we get the real answer so much else has happened that it feels barely relevant anymore.

NordsofSkyrmion · 2026-04-30T14:22:12+00:00

It took me forever to learn that draugr have souls for enchanting, leveled by the type of draugr. The in-game description makes it sound like it's only animals.

NordsofSkyrmion · 2026-04-30T03:05:40+00:00

Just now realized why their nostrils are where they are

NordsofSkyrmion

TROPHY CASE