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Comment Re: Easy fix (Score 1) 247

Google is your friend.

Took all of 5 seconds to find examples like this from Wired.

The first link in the list has this regarding CAFE regulations of the time:

Domestic automakers predicted that fuel economy improvements would require a fleet primarily of subcompacts. In 1974, a Ford executive testified that the standards could “result in a Ford product line consisting . . . of all sub- Pinto-sized vehicles.”

Comment Re:I love KSP, but sometimes... (Score 3, Interesting) 99

Everything else in KSP has had months of testing (perhaps even years) and they change fundamental things like the aerodynamics model without letting it be tested by the established community?

But isn't that so in the Kerbal spirit? ;) Hmm, what's the coding equivalent of forgetting a ladder? :)

Comment Re:I love KSP, but sometimes... (Score 4, Interesting) 99

Yeah, the old aerodynamics was pretty horrible. Add a nosecone to your blunt-tipped rocket and it increases the drag? What kind of logic is that? It needed to be fixed.

There's a couple balance issues I'd like to see fixed, mind you. For example, it's possible to make small solar ion-powered aircraft in Kerbal. But only small ones, because all of the ion engines available are tiny, and all of the fixed solar panels are tiny, so while technically it's possible to make bigger craft, the necessary part spam makes the game unplayable. Fuel for ion engines is also absurdly and unrealistically expensive for no obvious reason. Yet solar panels and RTGs produce orders of magnitude more power than they should for a given size, if ion engine power to thrust ratios for a given ISP are used as the baseline.

Drop xenon costs, tweak power production / consumption for existing hardware, and add in nuclear reactor power sources (after all, they have nuclear rockets, we know kerbals understand nuclear physics), and and you could balance that out pretty well in terms of both gameplay and at least slightly more approaching realism.

(Note that one may be tempted to say that the ion thrusters are far too high power, but at least that's plausible if we assume that they're MPD thrusters with some type of advanced cooling system - you can get crazy power to weight ratios (by ion standards) out of MPD thrusters if you could somehow supply them many megawatts of power and dissipate all the waste heat - they manage it in pulsed mode, at least. But Kerbal's solar panel area-to-thrust ratios at the given ISP are not even close to being compliant with the laws of physics)

Comment Re:Awesome! (Score 5, Interesting) 99

I love how true that all is. You have Musk making Kerbal references in his tweets. I've seen engineers from SpaceX doing likewise. I was once chatting with a researcher working on a Titan probe concept and he responded at one point with something like, "Well, like what one experiences on Eve in Kerbal Space Program...."

The development team really should be proud.

Comment Re:danger vs taste (Score 1) 630

Thank you, but I said nothing about calories. Did I? I don't see it anywhere. I commented that a sugar SUBSTITUTE actually has more sugar than substitute in it.

By mass only, but thats a complete red herring since you use far less of it than you would of actual sugar.

Nobody is ever going to make a mass-market pure Stevia product because it's way too hard to use - it's just way too concentrated of a sweetener. Trust me, I've used it, I usually have to resort to weighting it out on a jewler's scale. It's silly to point out small amounts of sugar filler; for a given amount of sweetness you'll never consume a significant amount.

They could use something else that wasn't a digestable carb instead.

No, people like you and "food babe" would freak out at the names of indigestible carbs far worse than you do with dextrose. And dextrose won't alter the texture or flavor of the food product like many indigestible carbohydrates such as resistant starches would.

I was talking about ingredients in Stevia products; she has the documentation.

She has a page full of claims, half of which are laughable BS that she just made up, as is her typical modus operandi.

Right. Ok. Whatever. I don't think I told you to believe everything she's ever said, did I?

You're the one who linked to a running joke, its your problem.

Comment Re:danger vs taste (Score 1) 630

I just gave you a link to a peer-reviewed study which studied its breakdown components in the bloodstream and you're still claiming otherwise? Tsk tsk. And to help you out with what you're confusing, you're mixing up aspartame with olestra. Olestra is the food additive that doesn't break down in the small intestine, passes through, and if eaten in excess causes loose stools or related problems. The quantities of olestra used, since it's a substitute to fats, are significant. The quantities of aspartame used are far too small to have such an effect even if they didn't break down rapidly in the intestines (which has been amply documented that they do).

Comment Re:danger vs taste (Score 1) 630

find it humorous that you are ranting about me for "anecdotal evidence" when you just challenged someone to "prove me wrong right now in just a couple weeks" by using the same kind of evidence.

Surely you'll admit that "I experienced it myself" is better than "some TV 'documentary' whose name I don't remember had some woman who claimed it"

The human digestive system does not throw away energy from digestible substances.

Uhhh, yeah, it can. Maybe there's more to this than you know? Ok, the digestive system may not, but the excretory system can.

Link

The interior surface of the small intestine is composed of microvilli that dramatically enlarge its absorptive surface, accounting for an extraordinary efficiency in absorbing consumed substrates: 98% of all digestible carbohydrate is absorbed; 95% of all fat is absorbed; and 92% of all protein is absorbed.

That's the baseline. How much more efficient exactly do you think your particular digestive system is than 98% of carbs, 95% of fat and 92% of protein?

Comment Re:Money (Score 1) 140

HOV lanes usually increase traffic (less total people flow per minute) as they're underutilized for peak flow. They're quite politically popular for the Left however, and that's more important than infrastructure, apparently. Make them toll lanes instead, with the toll being "free" if you're not driving solo, and now the Left and Right can enjoy equally. You'll also get far more people along that highway per minute as the lane gets closer to ideal load.

Comment Re:We have prototypes of these, working (Score 1) 125

Are you claiming that there are no vehicular lighting standards in place, or that you can't instantly recognize the position and orientation of a car in the dark based on its lights alone?

Identifying cars based on their lights may be complicated, but it's by far the simplest method of identifying cars by CV at night.

Comment Re:1D compression, AKA "Serialization" (Score 5, Interesting) 129

Just about any dimensional space can be represented in fewer dimensions, or even 1 dimension

But that all misses the point here. The point of the holographic principle is not that one can imagine a 3D encoding onto a 2D surface, e.g. a holograph, but that the maximum possible information in a volume is not proportional to volume, but to surface area. That implies the fundamental mechanics of the universe can't be something like "voxels". We observe a universe which we can measure in 3 spatial dimension down to the Plank length, in principle, but that can't be what's really going on, at least if the holographic principle holds.

Comment Re:danger vs taste (Score 2) 630

I took a look at buying Stevia in the store awhile back. I am also a reader of contents labels, so I put it back on the shelf really fast. The first ingredient listed: dextrose

Boy you're a really clever one aren't you, catching onto secret calories in stevia that nobody else did?

First off, stevia is available in many different forms. Stevia is many times more potent than sugar in terms of sweetness, it's extremely hard to use pure (I have pure stevia - to use it pure you have to make very large batches and very tiny measurements!). To dilute it down you obviously have to mix it with something. There are all sorts of mixes, but there are two main categories: those that try for parity with sugar in terms of how much you use (which generally mix with maltodextrin), and those who try for a product that is much sweeter than sugar but not as extreme as pure stevia (these can come in a variety of forms, but a common blend is with dextrose). So yes, the dextrose has calories - but it's far outmatched in terms of sweetness by the stevia therein, so you only need to use a very small amount (depending on the ratio of the blend). The 1:1 parity versions as mentioned use maltodextrin, which is also caloric - but it's so light and fluffy that there's very little mass (and thus calories) per unit volume; basically, what the stevia is blended with is mostly air.

More fun facts about stevia here [100daysofrealfood.com].

Hahaha, Food Babe? Are you joking? The woman who says she hates air travel because they compress your bodies with high pressure air and it restricts your digestive organs? And how "the air that is pumped in isn’t pure oxygen either, it’s mixed with nitrogen, sometimes almost at 50%. To pump a greater amount of oxygen in costs money in terms of fuel and the airlines know this!" Or her microwave rant, where she talks about how microwave ovens are evil because once water has been microwaved it no longer crystalizes into pure forms when frozen, but rather into forms similar to water that has heard words like "hitler" and "satan"? This is your information source?

Yeah, I think I'll stay over here in the real world and not get my information from a living joke, thanks.

Comment Re:Not a theory! (Score 5, Interesting) 129

The word "theory" implies that it is testable.

"Falsifiable" is a better word here. You don't need to be able to do controlled experiments (tests) in order to have a solid theory - an influx of new observations of the universe as we find it works just as well.

And the holographic principle is certainly falsifiable.

1) It imposes a limit on the amount of entropy in any given volume - find a system which can be in more than the allowed number of states, and isn't inside a black hole, and this theory is dead.

2) It sets a really high value on the entropy of black holes. Black holes become the dominant source of entropy in our universe. This has consequences in cosmology that are fundamental, if the only reason entropy is increasing in our universe is this assigning of entropy to black holes. There are certainly physicists playing with that idea, as it could be career-making, true or false.

3) It has deep implications for the evolution of black holes - how they evaporate. This will be a lot harder to prove (I don't think we'll validate Hawking radiation in my lifetime), but might be possible to falsify by finding a black hole that's clearly not allowed by theory.

Heck, there are implications for particle physics that are still being understood, and lots there is testable now with the LHC. The more and farther you reason from a premise like this, the more likely it is to matter to something easy to measure, or at least possible to measure.

The reason the discovery of the Higgs boson was such a big deal is that it confirmed a bunch of really abstract theory in quantum mechanics that is very, very far from anything we can measure, except at the end of this very long chain of reasoning there's this prediction of this new oddball particle (that there's no other reason to expect - it come from deep in the abstract math of QM, not from anything else we measured). So finding that particle confirms that whole crazy chain of logic. Something similar will eventually happen for the holographic principle.

Comment Re:danger vs taste (Score 1) 630

Having a strict target is not impossible, and when the difference between consumption and expenditure is on the order of 500 calories, you have room for error on both ends - on your estimation of your consumption and on the estimation of your burn.

There was a rousing ITV, or BBC, I don't remember, documentary on a woman

Whoa - throw away all of the scientific data, there's an anecdote here involving an TV show about an uncontrolled experiment whose data we can't see and whose name you can't even remember!

The human body works on calories. The human digestive system does not throw away energy from digestible substances. It's energy in vs. energy out.

Comment Re:Easy fix (Score 5, Informative) 247

Except of course, if you read the article (I know,must be new here) Ford actually _won_ the Pinto case and while they had previously (before the court case) agreed to install that plastic wall, the expert opinion was that it wouldn't actually accomplish anything and wouldn't have made any difference in the specific situation of the court case.

It's like saying horses should all be recalled because someone might fall off of them. Pintos were no more dangerous than other similar cars from all the other car companies. It's just how small, light cars were built in the days of high gas prices and associated regulations. Technology has advanced since then, but there are still trade-offs.

What most people "know" about Pintos is largely media-driven, not factual.

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