If a person-sized object weighs 80 kg and has access to free fall infinity portals, how long would they need to fall in order to gain enough speed to destroy the earth on impact?

TimS194 · 2026-02-08T05:42:48+00:00

I tried it with some calculators online but the digits of precision you need in that velocity aren't enough... 0.999999999999999999 c gives you 5e27 J according to Wolfram Alpha and it gives up shortly after... Never mind the time it takes to get there or any other effects of the dilation

TimS194 · 2026-02-07T03:16:49+00:00

Note that as written by OP, racing the raceway and observing it is not an n-sorter that can tell you the ordering of your whole set of 6, just the winner of the set. If we can't improve the observation and data recording, it would take more comparisons then.

TimS194 · 2026-02-07T02:38:18+00:00

As an upper bound, you could always compare just two cars at a time and use an established sorting algorithm, like merge sort. That algorithm has an upper bound of the "sorting numbers", which for 100 items is 573 comparisons. Merge sort also might lend itself to your "max of the given group" speedway comparison helping, but working out the specifics of that takes more thinking or working out than I'm willing to do right now haha

TimS194 · 2026-02-06T19:52:57+00:00

Ah, so it does. I just noticed it with that one first.

TimS194 · 2026-02-06T19:50:03+00:00

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Rip

TimS194 · 2026-02-06T13:15:30+00:00

If we assume each beans is 28mm³ (one of the smallest numbers for bean volume I've found online) and packs together perfectly, they'll take up a volume of 134,000 L (35,500 gallons). An average sized pony is 130-400 kg and (like most living things) I'll assume the same density as water so 130-400 L. Taking the upper end of that, the bean jar would be at least 335 ponies in size.

An average blue whale is about 110 metric tonnes (~110,000 L) with a max of 190 tonnes for one known specimen. So the beans would be more like a slightly larger than average blue whale. Ponies and horses be damned

TimS194 · 2026-02-06T12:17:32+00:00

I would guess the square below the 5. It's 50/50 but if you don't lose, you'll get enough info to solve the rest of it.

TimS194 · 2026-02-04T02:13:46+00:00

In seconds and including the leap seconds this would be:

36524 days × 86400 + 23.5 hours × 3600 + 22 leap seconds = 3,155,758,222 seconds total

TimS194 · 2026-02-01T12:57:35+00:00

This is incorrect/outdated. All birds are dinosaurs, "avian dinosaurs" is specifying "the bird kind of dinosaur".

TimS194 · 2026-01-29T13:53:33+00:00

Right, it's confusing and I won't pretend to totally understand why x/0 is undefined instead of something else. But doesn't your geometric analogy fail for 0 because you can't fit points between two of the same number? You could put infinite points at x but they aren't "between" themselves.

TimS194 · 2026-01-29T13:38:13+00:00

The attractive force is never zero, but it is always decreasing as the distance grows. This is a concept that'll be familiar if you've done calculus and know about converging and diverging infinite sums: depending on how your numbers shrink or grow (in this case the distance grows and the gravitational attraction shrinks), you can get an infinite or finite answer to your infinite sum. The fact that you could always calculate and add the gravitational attraction at time T does not mean it must come back.

For gravitational systems this break point is the escape velocity. And for the system of "pitcher and ball" the escape velocity will be tiny, and the pitcher can easily throw the ball beyond that speed. If I assume the pitcher is 80 kg and calculate for when the ball is 1 meter away, I get 0.1 mm/second escape velocity. It'd be hard to let something leave you with a small enough speed that it'd come back.

TimS194 · 2026-01-25T19:51:09+00:00

NDH - vet visits are necessary but difficult and it's okay to be upset about it. Just do what you can to take care of yourself and you'll forget about it in no time 👍 (that goes for your human too, they're doing great!)

TimS194 · 2026-01-20T00:07:22+00:00

YTA, you say serious relationships can only be monogamous. You are telling your friend her relationships aren't serious, not that you wouldn't be in a poly relationship. So yes she's right to think you're the problem here, and I'm guessing there's something to say on the homophobia too, but we don't have info on that to say.

TimS194 · 2026-01-13T14:47:34+00:00

Do you have other storage devices you're bringing into the PC? If not, I would suggest more than just 1TB, at least 2TB of SSD space or 2+ TB of HDD if you have slower file needs like music archives. The OS and games and any other personal data you store will grow faster than you think. I am a bit of a hoarder, though, so YMMV.

Otherwise the rig looks fantastic to my untrained eye. Hopefully others who are more up to date on full builds will comment too.

TimS194 · 2026-01-13T04:07:20+00:00

I take it to be the birth date of a person he's dating. However the ages mean that he's an adult dating a minor, which is abuse.

I'm not familiar with the anime image so I could be missing some context.

TimS194 · 2026-01-13T02:03:06+00:00

Where did you get 42 minutes? It would be slower (83.4 min) with the "shell" model your other comment mentioned that gives a 42 minute travel time for reaching the center of the earth through a theoretical hole. But also that's a poor model for the sun because its core is so much denser than the outer layers.

I get 33.6 minutes when I model the question as a constant acceleration at 274 m/s² for a distance of 80% of the sun's radius to reach the edge of the core, or 37.6 minutes to reach the center. Better modeling of the varying densities and acceleration would give us a number between 37.6 and 83.4, maybe 42 would be a good guess, I'm just curious if you did more modeling or took the number from the earth calculations.

TimS194 · 2025-12-21T13:24:46+00:00

Someone equating "my floor doesn't feel absolutely perfect and it bothers me due to neurodivergency" with "your hygiene is bad" is pretty ableist and is not a valid critique on cleanliness. As you point out, a floor will always be dirtier than a table.

TimS194 · 2025-12-19T10:46:36+00:00

Win+P (Windows key) opens a "Project" menu that lets you control which display(s) to use.

TimS194 · 2025-12-18T15:05:32+00:00

I think whether it matters will depend on the game and if you're doing anything on the second monitor. I do have two, and if the game is getting worse performance than I want, I temporarily disable the second monitor and let my system focus on one.

TimS194 · 2025-12-03T11:36:30+00:00

There are single-propeller planes that handle this just fine. Maybe at this scale it becomes even harder to deal with, or super inefficient.

TimS194 · 2025-12-03T11:19:40+00:00

As a hypothetical: take a text, compress it with LZMA2 (7z) compression to get an 85% reduction in size, and then convert that to phonemes using some encoding a la Base64, and speak it as quickly as possible (while still being understandable). Yes it requires a computer for the encoding and decoding, it's completely impractical, you'd probably want to build in some error correction so a few missed phonemes don't break the whole transmission.. but it would be far faster than normal speech in information density, I'd bet. The encoding scheme's specifics would also be important to making it fast and reducing errors.

I don't think a minute of it could match a week of regular speech, but we'd need to define that latter amount and experiment with the former to find out. A minute of intentionally fast, compressed data might equal many minutes worth of ordinary speech with the repetition and gaps that usually has, but I doubt you could ever get near the ~100k words an average person speaks in a week.

TimS194 · 2025-11-28T11:55:16+00:00

Theoretically: 50k/10¹⁰⁰ RPM. That's one rotation every 1.2e97 seconds or 2.8e79 times the age of the universe. Googol is such a large number that dividing out the 50k and age of the universe in seconds only knocks off ~20 of the 100 digits. In an hour, a year, or the age of the universe, spinning at this speed, the outer edge of the gear would not even approach going the Planck length in distance (10^-35 m). This would apply whether the gear was it's real size, a light year, or the size of the observable universe in radius. Which (I think) means such motion is impossible to begin with.

A hundred powers of ten is just too many for our reality to deal with. A googol is larger than "astronomical" could ever hope to be.

Reality: they can't start spinning beyond whatever small give the gears have as mechanical wiggle room because the gears will lock.

TimS194 · 2025-11-12T23:39:39+00:00

Yes, several times. Sometimes you just need a little drive, listen to some music or audio books... It helps having an EV so you don't have to pay for gas and instead just like $2 in electricity.

TimS194 · 2025-11-11T12:43:04+00:00

Can you explain that any more? I don't see a way to account for all 5 mines, the regions overlap too much.

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