I don't think the Mandelbrot Set itself persay is all that useful, but its 3d relatives like Mandelbox, Mandelbulb, etc sure generates some amazing landscapes... I could totally picture that used in games or movies. It's amazing the diversity it can do with some parameter changes - steampunk machinery and evolving spacescapes, reactors / futuristic computers, art deco, extradimensional beings, alien cities, floating viny landscapes, transforming robotics, things hard to describe, etc.

I'd love to have a house / secret supervillain lair that looks like this one ;)

I cannot help but notice that you have some errors in your understanding of what the biblical account of the fall of mankind actually was, such as suggesting that man was cursed by god when man was not... only the serpent and the earth were cursed... man was simply punished, and even through this punishment, there was an act of mercy, in allowing man to continue to exist rather than simply striking them down immediately, and a promise that would one day be fulfilled by Jesus, whose death would be sufficient atonement for all transgressions by man, for all time both in the past and the future to come (but although this was sufficient atonement for all sin, and such forgiveness is offered to all of mankind, it cannot remove the consequences of it for those who remain unrepentant because to do so would be to invalidate the point of giving man a free will).

However, the phrasing of your question really only highlights the incomplete understanding that people have of the bigger picture that is God's plan. I can't claim to have all of the answers, but it's certainly not my fault if you are going to endlessly pursue the deluded notion that you think you know more than any God possibly could, so don't try to imply that my inability to address your questions suggests that would make your views necessarily right and mine wrong.

Of course that seems unfair to us, because we don't know what the future holds.... God does. Freeing all of those in the interim from the consequences of evil would be equivalent to God revoking personal responsibility that humans should take for having free will in the first place. It may seem, from a human perspective that perhaps mankind, particularly given their position and ranking in creation, was simply too naive or even simply stupid to deserve to ever have free, given the pain and suffering that it would ultimately cause.... but again, we are not God... God's plan, whether or not we will ever understand it before finally meeting him in person, is righteous, loving, and perfect, and creation in completion will ultimately attest to all of that in a more complete way than anyone can imagine.

If you want no part of that on the allegation that God is somehow immoral, well.... that's your free willed choice, and God isn't going to take that from you.... God still made you eternal, however. and you will still bear the consequences for that choice for all eternity... consequences that God does not impose on anyone artificially, but actually only arise out of being separate from God in the first place. If this seems unfair to you, again, see the point I made above about how in a human perspective, it might seem that man was perhaps too ignorant to deserve this magnitude of responsibility in the first place. God doesn't make mistakes, however... and had a reason for doing this that we simply don't yet have the ability to comprehend.

The notion that we might consider it completely unimaginable to envision how all of the evil in the world that has existed will have ever been somehow worth it all, or that what is apparently unfair to people who must endure a world with evil in it suggests that God is somehow actually malevolent is in truth more of a testament to our own finiteness, not God's.

The majority of major, targeted hacks (rather than just sweeping the net for vulnerabilities) - aka, the kind of stuff that the US military cares about - involves sending emails or making phone calls and introducing yourself as Bob from IT, and sorry to bother you but there's a problem that we need to discuss with you, but first a couple questions...

They don't need script kiddies, they need social engineers. Question number one in the job interview should be "Is your native language Russian, Chinese, Farsi, Korean or Arabic?" And even as far as the more traditional "hacking" goes, rather than script kiddies they're going to need people who are going to custom analyze a given system and assess it's individual vulnerabilities, people with real in-depth understanding. One would presume that in most cases that the sort of targets that the US military wants to hack are going to keep themselves pretty well patched to common vulnerabilities.

AIs doing hacking? What are you talking about? This is the real world, not Ghost In The Shell.

... free will without any downsides

If you seriously think about that for even a moment you should realize how inherently self-contradictory that notion is. If there are no down-sides, then in reality, you aren't really free to do anything that is bad for you in the first place, so you don't actually have the capacity to actually act on your so-called free will, defeating the entire point of having any alleged free-will in the first place.

I just want the search engine to stop changing what I'm searching for. I don't want to have to quote every word like I have to do with Google to make sure that the word is actually in the page, and by "the word", I mean "the word I type, not a word that Google things may be similar to the one I typed". It's worst when you're searching for foreign words, product names, acronyms, or whatnot and Google tries to treat them as if they're English words and declines them or chooses synonyms.

"Did you mean X?" is fine. Even "Searching for X (see original results here)", if you're very confident that the person made a common spelling error or whatnot. But just going in and swapping out words as if this is expected behavior? Terrible. At least let me disable it if you want to do that...

Beyond all this: I do like how one can do simple commonn operations on Google - math, conversions, etc. The more of these the better IMHO, so long as they have a standardized format - be they tracking numbers, flight lookups, whatever. It's okay in my book to be a bit Wolfram-y.

Keep the interface plain, simple, the sort of thing that'll work on any browser, from a modern Chrome to a simple text-only browser. Only use javascript where it's not essential for the site to work. Here's an example of something that would be a good use of javascript: if you need to track clicks, like Google does, do it through javascript rather than by having a link redirect like Google does. I hate how I can't just right click and copy link on Google without getting some massive Google redirect link.

Just my thoughts. :)

As you say.... you can't have it both ways. Either we are free willed or not...

Apparently you don't know the meaning of the words "for fun".

About 10 years ago I worked on simulating a rocket with electric turbopumps for fun. The concept was the exact same as theirs - minimize the number of parts that have to operate in harsh environments to reduce cost, maintenance and risk of failure. You don't even need any penetrations of the propellant lines, the rotor of the electric motor is the compressor itself.

I have no clue whether the design will actually be practical. But it's certainly not new. I'm sure I'm not the first person that this concept occurred to.

I'm not sure why you were flagged as a troll, because most of those are actually pretty good questions. Ultimately, however, most of those questions cannot reasonably be answered at this time because no experiments have been designed to address them, either because nobody knows how to design experiments that could practially address such questions, or else simply because of our own incomplete understanding of the universe.

It is, however, a far cry to suggest that simply because we do not yet (or will ever) know everything there is to know about the universe is somehow sufficient to probabilistically suggest that the things that we *do* believe that we know about it at any one time are actually entirely wrong... which I suppose someone may have interpreted your post as, and why it may have been flagged as a troll. To be fair, there are plenty of things that we don't even know about the universe that we actually *CAN* observe, while trying to conjecture about aspects of the universe that we have absolutely no technological means to objectively observe (nor based on our current understanding, are we ever likely to) can only be the subject of conjecture, and not science.

Long story short, you aren't liable to find any scientifically sustainable answers to those questions here, and because of how short a period of time that humans ordinarily live compared to the age of the cosmos, you are probably also not likely to find such answers to them in your lifetime. So while you can ask those questions, you shouldn't be surprised when you don't receive helpful answers.

They talk about how they need to regularly pick up and relaunch balloons when they come down. I don't see why they would need to design the balloons without any sort of reinflation system. The leak rate is tiny, right? So:

1. A little more solar panel area than they already need.
2. Hydrogen filled instead of helium filled.
3. Tiny container of sulfuric acid (hygroscopic - self-dilutes down to a given concentration with atmospheric moisture)
4. Electrolysis cell (sulfuric acid is used as the electrolyte in some types of electrolysis cells).

Problem solved. Sulfuric acid draws moisture from the air, and during the day the solar power electrolyzes it it to produce a minute trickle of hydrogen into the balloon, which replaces the minute trickle that leaks out. Your balloon's lifespan is now as long as your electronics and envelope last.

Indeed, the figures Musk cited a couple years ago was that over 80% of the part count of a Falcon 9 is sourced in-house; it's a critical part of their approach to keeping costs down. He wanted to do that with Tesla as well but it proved impossible, only about 20% of their parts (at the time) were produced in-house. Unsurprisingly the biggest problems in their early days came from external suppliers, like the gearbox issue on the Roadster.

ESAB is a Swedish company. What use is it to NASA to dote largess on a Swedish welding firm?

I'm actually rather disappointed with ESAB here. I have one of their MIG welders from the 1960s and it still works; they're a respectable name.

I feel bad for NASA mind you, in that I don't think many of their problems are their own. They get all sorts of legacy systems forced upon them due to political reasons ("You can't do decision X that would be more efficient because 1000 people in my district would lose their jobs"), they never get the funding to engineer new things from scratch based on lessons learned, etc. I do wonder, mind you, whether their heavy reliance on external contractors is something they could reform.

1. That's not "a" study, it's from a metastudy. The simple fact of the matter is, while the news makes a big deal of any study that shows a statistically significant difference between genders, most of these statistically significant differences are barely above the level of noise.

2. Where are you getting that quote from the paper? A search for those words doesn't reveal that.

There absolutely are some very demonstrable differences in certain psychological regards - mainly sexual. The most obvious of these, for example, is the fact that women are more likely to be attracted to men and men to women. But that's far from the majority of studied sexual differences that get so much play in the press. " With very few exceptions, variability within each sex and overlap between the sexes is so extensive that the authors conclude it would be inaccurate to use personality types, attitudes, and psychological indicators as a vehicle for sorting men and women. "

3. Girls are far less likely to get involved in chess to begin with in all countries (again, the fact that children mimic sex distribution of behaviors of the previous generation, no matter what they are in the particular society one is in), so one shouldn't be surprised that this is reflectected in the highest levels. Chess, as a competitive sport, has always been predominantly a "men's sport", internationally. But as XKCD notes, this is changing. The Polgár sisters are a great example. Their upbringing was an experiment by their father; to see what would happen if children were raised with extensive training in a specialist intellectual topic from an early age. One ended up an International Master while the other two ended up as Grand Masters, with Judit ending up one of the world's most powerful players of any gender. Their father's choice removed gender self -selection from the picture.

4. Oh please, you're not seriously going to pretend that there weren't tremendous pressures in Victorian society for women to not be involved in STEM-style careers, or that they weren't usually expressly banned from such. Even women who took them up as hobbies (usually well-to-do women) were often strongly advised against it, that it was harmful to a woman's delicate composition to be mentally straining one's self (a risk of the catch-all Victorian women's distorder "hysteria"; the cure for "hysteria" was to refrain from all serious physical and mental activity). This is the culture that ours came from, and it's been a slow incremental process of moving away from it ever since. The fact that you'd call "citation needed" on that is absurd, that's like "A normal human hand has five digits [citation needed]."

5."I'll see your 50% and raise it to 100%" - how does this even make sense? Women are 50% of the population (roughly). Nobody is talking about disinteresting men from pursuing STEM careers. There's already interest there. The goal is to try to also get more interest from women, to work against the carryover cultural connotations of STEM as "men's work".

6. " Are there laws or even customs, that prevent girls from entering a STEM field and excelling in it" - it's like you didn't even read my post.

7. "But what if it is bilogicial — as seems perfectly probable?" - not according to the actual research. And if one person wastes their time trying to become a physicist when they'd have made a better fry cook? Well whoop-di-freaking-doo. The world is still a better place.

I once coded for a game, Eternal Lands, where I discovered a major security bug. The game had a feature where if a person said a URL, it would turn into a clickable link. This was opened via a popen call. No input sanitization. Aka, vulnerable to injection. A person who simply speaks a malicious URL and makes it look like something interesting to click (hiding the insertion command in the path) could run it on anyone's computer who clicks to open the link.

Big problem. Simple fix. But try as I might, I couldn't get them to let me fix it. They were fine with me writing a whole new special effects graphics system for them, but one simple input sanitization, noooo, the popen works, let's not mess with it and possibly "introduce a bug"! Eventually it took me writing a sample command on the forum that would make a file in the user's home directory (which anyone who knows anything about unix commands could make far more malicious) by clicking on the URL. Suddenly they let me patch the system immediately (and deleted the forum thread... I don't blame them).

I didn't want to have to resort to that. But I didn't want a potentially dangerous exploit sitting in the system.

I never got approval to fix all of the other potential exploits in their system. Their networking protocol was terrible. I only ever saw the client code, but there was literally zero authentication that the server was who they said they were and that packets weren't malformed. Their entire security model was "let's initiate a TCP connection to a hard-coded IP and unconditionally trust everything that we receive". I can't imagine what their server code is like. But they wouldn't even let me add in trivial bounds checking to make sure that the packets weren't oversized - the most minimal of sanity checking.

The fear of changes breaking stuff often leads developers to neglect security. Changes to improve gameplay or graphics? Of course, our users will love it! Changes to the protocol? Nonono, the protocol is working, why risk breaking it?

The short of it? Don't have too much faith that that MMORPG you're playing isn't hackable in a way that could be nasty to your system.