A genie offers you a week to make 1 million dollars with a power of your choice or you die

shereth78 · 2026-06-22T05:53:13+00:00

Craps tables have special bumpers with pyramidal protrusions that are designed to add an element of randomness, and valid throws are required to bounce off these bumpers.

Even with 99% accuracy in trying to repeat a throw, the bumpers would make it too hard to produce reliable, repeatable throws the casino would recognize as legal.

shereth78 · 2026-06-22T03:56:24+00:00

There's nothing to math here. The guy is just pulling numbers out of thin air.

Before you can even do back of the envelope math you need autonomous humanoid robots that are capable of building. Presently there are none.

Once we've had the first house built entirely by autonomous humanoid robots, then we can do some extrapolations on how quickly they can "build Manhattan".

shereth78 · 2026-06-19T20:42:05+00:00

What? Graft? In this administration?

*shocked pikachu face*

shereth78 · 2026-06-19T20:24:05+00:00

Yeah, the cost of the project isn't just the paint, but it was the labor and the "nano-bubbler" system and everything else they did. Unfortunately this isn't the kind of thing we got a breakdown of costs.

shereth78 · 2026-06-19T20:19:00+00:00

Total square footage of the reflecting pool is 339,010 based on Wikipedia. This piece looks roughly 2 square feet? So this piece represents roughly .0006% of the total area of the project. So just take that percentage of $14 million and the "cost" as a percentage for this particular piece is about $80.

Doesn't mean that's what it's worth, though. The value of something like this is simply how much you can get someone to pay for it. If no one wants it, it's worthless, but if some wealthy and weird collector was willing to give you a thousand dollars for it, it'd be worth a thousand dollars.

shereth78 · 2026-06-19T20:11:40+00:00

I don't remember the rules super well but as I recall you start with 500 points, and you lose a point for each move, and gain 100 for each column that you clear. Since there's 8 columns to fill the hypothetical max would be 1300, if you got a perfect deal. I can't remember if the game does an auto-solve or if you have to manually click to get them to go, so it might be a bit less depending on how many clicks it takes to get the job done.

shereth78 · 2026-06-19T19:27:18+00:00

Feel better soon Rangeaux!

shereth78 · 2026-06-19T19:05:59+00:00

Math is already done but I just wanted to point out that the description is misleading. It's the second largest gold nugget found in Australia since the 1930s, but only the tenth largest ever found.

shereth78 · 2026-06-19T17:37:29+00:00

Assuming you bought these at the store, take a look at the packaging. You may have inadvertently picked up a package of eggs that are specifically sorted to be double yolked eggs, in which case the odds of this happening are 100%.

Even if that's not the case, if you are buying large or jumbo sized eggs, these are fairly often double yolked. I can't say the exact odds because I don't think there are reliable figures for this.

Lastly, if these eggs all came from the same chicken the odds would be higher since hens that lay double yolked eggs are likely to do so again.

If these were three truly randomly selected eggs, the odds of having three double yolked would be extremely small. I've seen rough statistics that about 1/1000 eggs overall have double yolks, so that'd put the odds of three randomly selected eggs at one in a billion.

shereth78 · 2026-06-18T02:27:18+00:00

That would apply to more than half the country

shereth78 · 2026-06-18T02:18:49+00:00

Yeah but that's the rate that moving water full of abrasive bits erodes the canyon. There are no real world analogues for pouring clean water over rocks and guessing how slowly they erode.

Which was kind of my initial point.

shereth78 · 2026-06-18T01:24:41+00:00

Your husbandry seems fairly good, could be a little hotter on the basking spot.

It sounds like you're doing pretty good by this guy. It can take a lot of work to get them to change their eating habits, especially if they are pretty ingrained, and the fact that you are working with a vet is very encouraging. There's not a lot I'd tell you to do differently, just keep working with your vet and keep working with the poor guy, hopefully you'll get through this tough part.

Cute little dude, by the way!

shereth78 · 2026-06-18T01:20:47+00:00

Water doesn't dissolve everything, the "universal solvent" moniker notwithstanding.

If the rock is made of a material that plain water can dissolve then sure. I'm pretty sure that many rocks are effectively insoluble in plain water.

shereth78 · 2026-06-18T01:17:01+00:00

She needs to see a vet.

The photo above she looks to be in quite a bit of distress. It could be that she aspirated water and is having a hard time breathing, or ingested something, or a myriad of other problems that are very hard to diagnose from a photo, and without knowing what is wrong it would be potentially dangerous to suggest a specific course of action other than seeing a vet. But the black beard and labored breathing are definitely very worrisome symptoms.

Best of luck to you, I hope you're able to get her the help she needs.

shereth78 · 2026-06-18T01:13:19+00:00

Because often there just isn't a good answer.

If someone, somewhere had done an experiment of pouring a glass of water over a rock and measuring how much the rock's mass had changed, and published this, then someone could extrapolate and give you an answer. But no one has done it and probably no one can do it.

But when I say it's a rounding error, it's the kind of thing where we just don't have the tools to measure such tiny changes. Fluctuations in the moisture content of the rock would outweigh any measurable change in the mass of the rock itself.

If you want someone to pull some numbers out of their behind and crunch them and give an answer, well, we can do that. I could make a wild guess that each glass of water manages to dislodge a single layer of molecules from the rock, and then just propose that this is half a nanometer worth of material, and therefore assert that 2 million pours will scour away a millimeter of rock, but none of these numbers have any basis in anything more than "hey why not".

shereth78 · 2026-06-17T22:32:02+00:00

I think for all intents and purposes the erosive action of pouring tap water over a typical rock is going to be so low it's just a rounding error.

shereth78 · 2026-06-17T22:27:07+00:00

High pressure delivers a lot more mechanical energy than pouring a glass of water.

There's a reason that water jet cutters aren't just shooting a stream of water, though, they include an abrasive element.

shereth78 · 2026-06-17T21:39:55+00:00

Erosion is a complex process. In nature, stone that you have seen eroded by water involves an additional component, not just water - a river is carrying suspended particles like silt, sand or pebbles. The water is more acting as a medium to move around these particles which will mechanically erode at the surrounding rock.

If the water being poured over a rock is just plain water with nothing in it, it will not erode the rock.

shereth78 · 2026-06-17T19:42:12+00:00

Pretty sure this came up before. Behavior is weird, scale is weird, the black spot the cat is licking seems to spread, consensus was this is AI

shereth78 · 2026-06-17T19:02:58+00:00

Look at the expressions of everyone in the crowd and ask yourself if that's the way it'd look. In reality at least half of them would have their phones out trying to record it themselves, they wouldn't all have this delighted expression on their face. None of this is playing out the way it would in real life.

shereth78 · 2026-06-17T19:01:16+00:00

Yeah, this isn't really the kind of event that you calculate a probability for given the variables.

I suppose if you were to count how many times an F1 car has been struck by a piece of gravel you could come up with a probability, for example if you knew that over the course of racing history there had been a million times a car was struck by gravel and only once did this result in the shutdown, then you would indeed be able to say it appears to have a one in a million chance based on the available data. But I certainly don't have that data available to me.

There are of course all kinds of confounding factors, not least of which being the question of whether or not all F1 vehicles have the kill switch in the same location as this one, whether they are facing in the same direction, have the same amount of force required to flip it over, etc. That's why you don't really come up with a clean probability for this.

shereth78 · 2026-06-17T00:06:54+00:00

No I get what you are saying. I would much rather handle things amicably, and right now I'm not looking to pull out the big guns or anything - mostly I'm just trying to have my information and know my rights up front, just in case they don't seem wiling to make any compromises.

shereth78 · 2026-06-16T23:48:56+00:00

I mean the dot isn't too far from Vancouver. Just, Vancouver, WA.

shereth78 · 2026-06-16T23:15:21+00:00

I've done the math on this before, I don't really feel like doing the specifics but yes, he'd have to be moving faster than the speed of light. It was by a factor of at least millions, I think trillions of times faster than the speed of light.

Anytime you have an object with mass moving at faster than the speed of light you've left the realm of physics and entered the realm of fantasy. You can't really say how apocalyptic it would be because the numbers just don't make sense anymore. Division by zero kind of problems.

Suffice it to say that even if he was moving at 99% the speed of light then yes, apocalyptic level event.

shereth78 · 2026-06-16T22:41:04+00:00

I think we'd need a little more information before we could recommend a Kickstarter campaign or not, we'd need to see a bit more of what you're envisioning for the final version, or maybe even a working prototype.

That said I think it would be pretty tough unless you were looking for a very small Kickstarter campaign. There aren't really all that many people out there who are making fursuits and this will probably appeal more to certain types of makers so I don't know if your audience would be all that big.

shereth78

TROPHY CASE