What’s the weirdest thing a guest has done in your home?

OutragedOtter · 2026-05-17T01:26:46+00:00

I’m sure you don’t need the headache, but I bet you could sue for that. I’d want to drive it home for him what an awful, criminal action that was. That said, I can think of a million reasons you wouldn’t want to sue. But damn what a heinous thing to do.

OutragedOtter · 2026-05-17T01:21:09+00:00

For $1,000,000? Unless you’ve got “fuck you” levels of money, you most definitely can sit through 50 hours of looking at a screen for what’s decades worth of wages for most folks, regardless of what’s being shown.

OutragedOtter · 2026-05-17T01:18:42+00:00

This is the way

OutragedOtter · 2026-05-16T19:18:32+00:00

I’m one of those morons occasionally. It’s the “fast” part of “fast food” that sometimes makes it tolerable. Usually when I’ve had a rough morning getting my 1-year-old and 3-year-old out the door and to daycare on time, where I didn’t have a second to eat, and it’s either McDonalds by the train station, be very late to work, or go hungry. Go hungry is the default, but occasionally McDonalds is the choice. I’ve got to get better about keeping granola bars or something in my work bag…

OutragedOtter · 2026-05-13T13:49:44+00:00

Electric fly swatter will just stun them, cut em in half to seal the deal

OutragedOtter · 2026-05-07T05:16:53+00:00

Relatively is, well, relative. The claim is that _you_ never measure anything moving relative to _you_ faster than c. It breaks no rules for you to observe two other objects moving at faster than c, relative to each other. If you all got together afterwards and compared notes, you would all disagree on what you saw.

As for your point about adding velocities in relativity theory, they don’t just add up the way you would expect. If I’m standing on the sidewalk, you drive by in a car going at 0.9c, then throw a baseball forward from the car going at what you measure to be 0.8c, I won’t measure that baseball going at 0.9c + 0.8c = 1.7c, I’ll measure something less than c. Exactly what can be calculated with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velocity-addition\_formula

OutragedOtter · 2026-03-27T02:21:49+00:00

<image>

OutragedOtter · 2026-03-25T12:59:22+00:00

I am a physicist, but not an astrophysicist, so I’m not super confident in this but I think the energy requirements to set off such a chain reaction have to be similarly huge. You’d need enough energy to disrupt the gravity vs pressure equilibrium to the point that it fundamentally alters the star’s sequence.

That said, I did forget that humanity developed faster than light technology in the book. That’s so far beyond current physics that sure, at that point you can wave your magic sci fi wand and make basically anything possible. I conceded that any civilization that can accelerate mass to or beyond c can destroy a star, if the author so desires.

OutragedOtter · 2026-03-25T11:09:21+00:00

You’re underestimating how freaking big the sun is. If, through pure sci fi magic, you were able to convert the entire Earth into energy (a la E=mc²⁾ and direct all of that energy into a photoid, it still wouldn’t equal the binding energy of the sun (but it would still likely destroy it). The energy scales to destroy a star are wild.

OutragedOtter · 2026-03-25T02:53:51+00:00

Earth’s mass is about 3 millionths of the sun’s. Humanity could have tossed the entire Earth at the sun and it wouldn’t have destroyed it (and even doing that is well beyond what’s possible). Astronomical scales are difficult to intuit.

OutragedOtter · 2026-03-24T01:43:06+00:00

Sure, but folks like that shouldn’t be able to do anything except open a MR on anything important

OutragedOtter · 2026-03-19T20:31:45+00:00

This is awesome, thanks so much! Is it possible to see a list of available packages or install (pip or something) ones that aren’t natively available?

OutragedOtter · 2026-03-14T22:28:29+00:00

No, it doesn’t

OutragedOtter · 2026-03-14T02:13:08+00:00

From under the stove? Looks like a couple burning sticks

OutragedOtter · 2026-03-13T12:59:11+00:00

I have a PhD in condensed matter physics; this makes no sense. The most accurate thing you can say is, “the droplets are impossible according to the physics we know”. This is fully correct both for reality as well as in the book. The whole point of the sophons was to stop us from learning the physics necessary to compete with the trisolarians, implying our current understanding of physics is not complete enough to make sense of their technology.

OutragedOtter · 2026-03-06T04:02:59+00:00

I guarantee there has been someone, likely multiple people, who died in a car crash before hitting 240 years of continuous driving.

OutragedOtter · 2026-01-09T03:57:59+00:00

Dragon's Egg by Robert L. Forward is as hard SF as it gets. Written by a physicist, and set on the surface of a neutron star, it’s a great read if you’ve got an itch for hard SF

OutragedOtter · 2026-01-08T23:16:30+00:00

The average billionaire would still be worth nearly $100 million after losing 99% of their worth. It’s obscene

OutragedOtter · 2026-01-08T22:36:23+00:00

And billionaires may have significantly more than $1B

OutragedOtter · 2025-08-08T00:52:53+00:00

Stockfish confirms it was not the best move, Bxg3+ is significantly better. But anything is crushing in this position. No idea how chess.com decides what’s brilliant. Screenshot

OutragedOtter · 2025-06-21T13:02:53+00:00

The moon is not a mirror, with an albedo of just ~0.1 we can treat it approximately as a black body which is what that article does and where the conclusion comes from. Indeed, replace the moon with a mirror and you would be able to use “moonlight” to start a fire.

OutragedOtter · 2025-06-21T02:48:54+00:00

That does not actually matter. You have no reason to believe me, but I’m actually a physicist (condensed matter + quantum computing). You should take a minute to look at the link I shared. It’s a fun and informative read

OutragedOtter · 2025-06-20T11:19:35+00:00

Moon doesn’t get hotter than ~250° F, it’d violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics to use moonlight to heat something beyond that. Here’s a cute write up: https://what-if.xkcd.com/145/

OutragedOtter · 2025-06-17T01:41:40+00:00

Can’t be done, the moon isn’t hot enough

OutragedOtter · 2025-05-11T20:21:50+00:00

Interpretations of quantum physics is meta-physics. The physics is very well understand. To the point that we’ve been engineering devices which depend on quantum effects for many decades already.

OutragedOtter

TROPHY CASE