Comment Weird how the priorities seem different! (Score 2, Interesting) 106
Through my glamorless academical career, largely focused on "shit that will help me make a living" (which it has, quite handily), I've heard many derisive opinions that career mathemathicians mostly just goof around with esoteric busywork that is rarely applicable, scarcely useful or meaningful outside of the academical recognition. Many people, often form very closely conected, but somehow more industrial focused disciplines shitting on mathemathicians as some sort of subpar STEM almost stinking of humanities that only the wacked out lazy weirdos who don't care about making money would trifle with.
Weird that those very same voices aren't calling the LLM companies forever-student nerd parasites even though picking off low hanging fruit mathemathical proofs nobody really asked for is the thing they seem most proud of these days!
Comment Re:Ironically I was quite a trekkie until this yea (Score 1) 206
Look, I agree on the politics of TOS being plenty woke. TOS was causing outrages regularly. Sadly, I also find TOS borderline unwatchable as television these days; to my mind, TNG is the first era of startrek vaguely watchable in completeness and having an okay time as far as acting, pacing and storytelling goes. But also, by late TNG, it feels like it already really lags behind the progress of the times, compared to TOS.
I've watched https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... a few days ago, sober, and it was one of the worst expireinces consuming media I've had this year. It was physically painful, and by 1994, they really oughta have known fuckin' better.
The stuff coming out these days seems more concerned with "but what if we're too woke?? what if the fascist spook section really is good and necessary-oh whoops it got eaten by genocidal robots that just came from somewhere for some reason, well I guess it's finally conveniently evil now and we don't have to worry about moral conflict anymore".
Statrek started proper woke, then barely progressed past what was woke when it did, aging like a gen Xer getting upset that racism means something else than when it was sufficient to agree slurs are bad, segregation is bad, but opposing "well meant" racist jokes is step too far.
Comment Ironically I was quite a trekkie until this year (Score 4, Interesting) 206
Comment Weird but kind of cool (Score 5, Interesting) 40
Comment "Purported white-hat hackers" (Score 3, Funny) 41
Comment Re:45 Cybercabs as of Thursday (Score 5, Funny) 153
Comment Re: I'm never ever writing an em-dash (Score 1) 118
Comment Re: maybe it was... (Score 1) 90
the mentioned heating effect is another possible factor
Okay, cool, but the heating effect on your head of stepping into direct sunlight, even wearing a hat and sunscreen is more than the total transmission power of a phone. Even if your apparently unusually large and dense brain somehow absorbed every last bit of energy radiated by the phone (ensuring you're not having a phone call), the net effect would still be less than just sunlight hitting your head.
Comment Re: maybe it was... (Score 1) 90
Comment I'm never ever writing an em-dash (Score 1) 118
Comment Re:How about lining the planes? (Score 4, Insightful) 90
Meaningfully shielding entire (or I guess at least the upper half of) airplane would also make em so much heavier that they'd inevitably end up slower (particularly in climb), which'd in turn mean you'd spend longer time exposed to the radiation and eat into the benefit and further make the boondoggle even more expensive. You're also wasting money on shielding the whole human when much our bodies are pretty resistant. A really high value one is shielding the pelvis because you're protecting both the gonads (cancer risk, also fucked babies) as well as a big bulk of bone marrow (cacer risk as well as weakened in function). Titties are like, the one other spot that might be worth it at these long term exposures because, again, generally high cancer risk that apparently multiplies with these long term exposures.
Also frequent business flyers should just bring their own shielding imo.