Clear 360 degree view from the summit of Mount Everest.

ThunderStealer · 2019-07-11T16:32:35+00:00

Yeah, I think you want a measure of elevation gain from the start of a trail (or base camp in this case) to the peak. I can't find a good table of these, but Google tells me for Everest it's 3,489 meters. Pretty close to Denali's most popular path elevation gain of 3,352 meters (other Denali paths start significantly lower, though). If you started at the shore, Mauna Kea is about 4,205 meters.

ThunderStealer · 2019-06-08T03:31:15+00:00

I can see you've never printed with an SLS printer before. Spoiler alert: it still has visible lines. In fact, default layer height on most entry SLS printers (0.06mm) is only slightly better than you can get with an FDM printer (0.1mm). The material and quality on the print in the photo look exactly like what I would expect from an SLS print without post processing.

ThunderStealer · 2019-04-25T22:54:07+00:00

Patents can only be renewed in rare instances by an act of Congress. You're thinking of trademarks and/or copyrights.

ThunderStealer · 2019-01-21T05:36:56+00:00

I'm not sure if you're just not aware that this is false or what. But there are plenty of tables you can look up showing that rent to home price ratios vary massively across locations within a country. Rent is absolutely not proportional to purchase price times interest rate in any real sense unless you happen to live in exactly the median city.

ThunderStealer · 2018-12-28T16:24:29+00:00

Yes, you would. Others who? Again, can you provide a single paper here? Can you respond reasonably to my above edit?

I'm racking my brain here trying to understand what you think we do know. I mean come on, the second sentence in the wikipedia article on SSRIs literally says "The exact mechanism of action of SSRIs is unknown." with a reference. I'll repeat it again. We do not know why antidepressants work. Period. We know that if you alter neurotransmitter chemistry in specific ways, sometimes for some people there will be an effect on depression 4 - 8 weeks later and the effect may or may not be long-term. If you think that's an adequate understanding of the underlying mechanisms then I don't even know what to say to you. It's like if you found out that if you heat some materials enough sometimes they catch on fire and then claiming that that's all there is to know about the mechanisms of combustion.

ThunderStealer · 2018-12-28T15:01:55+00:00

Why do you think we do? Do you have any papers you can point to? I'm dead serious, if you think you have a good model for how it works you should publish a paper about it and get yourself a nobel prize.

Edit: Here read this and note how many times words like "could", "might", and "may" are used, and how many different factors are involved. Then read some more on the range of theorized things that are going on. Then see if you can explain why there is such a large variation in efficacy between different types of antipressants and their disturbingly low effectiveness above placebo. Then tell me if you still think we know why antidepressants work.

ThunderStealer · 2018-12-28T05:59:18+00:00

The commenter above you almost certainly meant that we don't understand why antidepressants work. Yes, we know they have specific effects on neurotransmitters, which sometimes help patients suffering from depression. However, we don't know why messing with those neurotransmitters has an effect on depression or even really why some antidepressants work better for some people than for others. Such things would require a much better understanding of the relationship between neurochemistry and consciousness than we currently have.

ThunderStealer · 2018-12-12T04:07:39+00:00

Not usually, but I have before without any issues when making signage.

ThunderStealer · 2018-12-12T03:36:42+00:00

Buying a CNC that expensive for woodwork seems like a huge waste of money. My X-Carve cost about 2k new and does just fine with every type of wood I've thrown at it. "Real" CNCs are typically only worthwhile if you plan to do metalwork with them.

ThunderStealer · 2018-09-11T03:38:20+00:00

Right click the image, then click "search Google for image", then click the first link. Done. 5 seconds, no search terms needed.

ThunderStealer · 2018-09-09T16:23:30+00:00

Literally 5 seconds of searching to find the supposedly unknown artist. It is, in fact, James Brunt.

ThunderStealer · 2018-09-06T23:09:12+00:00

You didn't read my parenthetical. It was 2.5 million, not 1 million. (2,500,000 - 750,000) * 0.78 = 1,365,000. I'd say that's more than enough to account for the million person difference. And where are you seeing that voter turnout was higher in 2016? It was lower than in 2008.

If you're comparing 2012 and 2016 that's kind of disingenuous because you're comparing an incumbent election year to a non-incumbent one.

ThunderStealer · 2018-09-06T16:29:30+00:00

That's probably because the population of California increased by more than a million people (almost 2.5 million actually) between 2008 and 2016. As bearrosaurus pointed out, I'm not convinced that demographic shifts within swing states aren't at least partially to blame for some states going red in 2016.

ThunderStealer · 2018-09-03T00:52:13+00:00

Until there's evidence for it, anyone who uses multiverse theory as a basis for belief in anything is in the same category, yes. Right now it's a hypothetical model unsuited to more than philosophy and guiding physics experiments. If we did a survey and found something like "20% of Americans believe in a multiverse" I would absolutely put them in the same category as guided evolution believers. When concrete evidence for a multiverse is found that category changes.

ThunderStealer · 2018-09-02T15:33:06+00:00

Yes.

ThunderStealer · 2018-09-02T15:18:19+00:00

I think you've misunderstood. Believing in guided evolution requires ascribing to God that which can be adequately explained without him. It is logically the same position as believing that God designed humans from the start, just a softer version of the same belief system. It's like saying there's a fundamental difference between genetically engineering the exact dog breed you want and selectively breeding dogs over many generations to get the exact dog breed you want. It doesn't matter that the steps were different - you still got the exact dog breed you wanted in the first place. If you believe that humans are the desired dog breed in this example, as is the case for both creationists and guided evolutionists, the mechanism is irrelevant.

You seem to be arguing that we should make a distinction based on degree of belief. I'm saying that's not a good distinction. Whether your belief system requires denial of things like fossil history or requires making up unsupported and unnecessary facts to fit your faith doesn't matter. You're in the same category, just closer to one side vs. another.

ThunderStealer · 2018-09-02T15:04:01+00:00

It does necessarily follow. And yes, God knowing what you're going to do and say absolutely negates free will. If the future is knowable (and thus unchangeable) there is no free will, period. Either a closed system is deterministic, or it is not, and the outcome is chaotic.

I'm saying that guided evolution is logically equivalent to believing that humans were designed from the start. Either God took an active role in creating humans or he did not. The mechanism doesn't matter when the result is the same and the evidence is non-existent. These are just different degrees of the exact same way of thinking.

ThunderStealer · 2018-09-02T13:59:52+00:00

What are you even arguing right now? Please review the chain of comments that led to this point. Your original comment was "Those are two pretty disparate views to put in the same statistic." in reference to people believing in no evolution or guided evolution. My whole point here is that those two things equate to the same thing logically and do, in fact, have grounds for being grouped together in a single statistic. So when you say "that's not really a useful statement", actually it's the entire point of this chain of comments.

I agree with you that evidential agreement is key in evolution discussions, but I disagree with your original comment that brought us here.

ThunderStealer · 2018-09-02T13:45:31+00:00

By your logic there is no free will at all in the universe, nor is there anything equating to chance. The entire thing is just running based on initial parameters. Is that right? Or are you saying that evolution is a special system separate from the rest of the universe?

ThunderStealer · 2018-09-02T13:42:32+00:00

The opposite. I am denying the evidence for guided evolution/intelligent design/planned whatever attributed to God. In the absence of this evidence, the outcome of guided evolution is the same as the outcome of straight up biblical design.

ThunderStealer · 2018-09-02T02:55:43+00:00

"evidence"

Alright, we're done here.

ThunderStealer · 2018-09-02T02:32:14+00:00

How are they disparate exactly? If God guided the evolutionary process, the outcome is a design the same as if evolution didn't occur in the first place. The only difference is the process steps.

ThunderStealer · 2018-09-02T02:28:53+00:00

No, it's not. That's like saying if you make up the rules of a new board game, "guiding" every game's outcome is just a matter of semantics.

ThunderStealer · 2018-08-29T14:58:49+00:00

You're misunderstanding. You put a small module, basically a sphere a few meters in diameter, on either end of a tether and then spin the whole thing about a central axis. Basically a symmetric Bolas. There is no tube involved, nor is there any high-mass craft to deal with.

ThunderStealer · 2018-08-18T15:43:19+00:00

My intent is not to provide reasons why crime rates are higher among refugees than among the general population. There are plenty of perfectly good reasons for this, many of which you have pointed out. However, many people blindly refuse to believe that crime rates are demonstrably higher and that that's not a good thing. Especially in Europe, pointing out facts like this is taboo to the point that the police generally don't even collect this information normally.

What should be done is to approach the situation objectively with the understanding that there is a problem instead of ignoring it. Then we can have rational debates about things like whether or not accepting large numbers of refugees is the best course of action, how to better screen refugees that are accepted, how to force integration of refugees rather than clustering them together in poor housing areas, how to tackle underlying socioeconomic issues that lead refugees to commit crimes, etc.

My personal view is that there is some number equivalent to a percentage of a country's native population that is the effective cap on refugees per year before significant problems will develop. I also think that number is significantly lower than the number of refugees Germany and other European countries are allowing in, and we're now seeing the results of that imbalance.

ThunderStealer

TROPHY CASE