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nautilius

888 karma · joined July 4, 2021

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nautilius··on Nobel Prize in Literature 2025: László Krasznahorkai
Sure, stick to the Model T, why not. It had wheels and seats, so there's that.
nautilius··on ACM Transitions to Full Open Access
What’s more, it creates an incentive to accept more papers for publication, with obvious implications for quality.
nautilius··on The metre originated in the French Revolution
To be fair, Americans use decimal already where it’s dearest to the heart: money, ammunition, and filling gasoline.
nautilius··on Hydrogen vs. Battery Buses: A European Transit Reality Check
Efficiency is the standard red herring of the battery crowd - if efficiency was the prime motivation, we would all be driving bicycles and SUV or sportscars would not exist.

What are your other metrics? It’s an electric drivetrain with all advantages, but with the range of a gasoline car. Refueling cNG or LNG is standard in Europe, LH2 works just fine.

Google “burning Tesla” for that ridiculous take on why batteries would be inherently safe.

nautilius··on Abuse at the Max-Planck Institutes in Germany
Main news for me here is that this is (still?) considered newsworthy in Germany.

At top US universities, I’ve been threatened with deportation, yelled at, prevented from going to faculty job interviews, credit to my work removed, papers highjacked and my name removed after I developed the initial idea and the break-thru analysis, etc.

There is no way out: you’re relying on supporting letters of reference from your advisors at least until you’re tenured. Your advisor doesn’t like you? Congrats, he can easily destroy your career before it even started.

nautilius··on Boom XB-1 First Supersonic Flight [video]
A sonic boom is not necessary when moving faster than sound, the Busemann biplane resolves that completely.

There's been considerable work on sonic boom mitigation for many decades. Boom's long nose, flat underside, top engine, small wingspan delta wings are all designs expected to mitigate a sonic boom. Let's see if it works in practice.

nautilius··on Jeff Dean responds to EDA industry about AlphaChip
From personal experience: in Nature Communications the handling editor and editor in chief absolutely do intervene, in my example to suppress a proper lit review that would have revealed the paper under review as much less innovative than claimed.
nautilius··on Canned air is unexpectedly supersonic [video]
That's - not how that works. I suggest you look at any fluid data `riding' that border. "Super compressed" and "ideal gas" are mutually exclusive. "Equilibrium" has even less to do with any of that.
nautilius··on Canned air is unexpectedly supersonic [video]
That's got nothing to do with some fluid behaving like an ideal gas or not. Also, except for very low pressures, vapor does not behave like an ideal gas.
nautilius··on Simulating fluids, fire, and smoke in real-time
Too bad they don't reference the actual inventor of vorticity confinement, Dr. John Steinhoff of the University of Tennessee Space Institute:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Steinhoff

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorticity_confinement

And some papers:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/239547604_Modificat...

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265066926_Computati...

nautilius··on I disapprove of what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it
> The assertion of the US' founders is that such rights are inherent to all people, natural rights, and inalienable.

It very obviously wasn't [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_United_States

nautilius··on Thousandth of an Inch
“Only base 10” is already the measure of choice where it matters most for most Americans: gas, money, ammunition. It works just fine.
nautilius··on 99 Luftballons
Let’s hope we’re not getting to “Vamos a la playa” narrative soon …

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vamos_a_la_playa_(Righeira_s...

nautilius··on Seawater split to produce green hydrogen
So are there strange quarks?
nautilius··on A 50-year quest: My personal journey with the second law of thermodynamics
He was recently on Tim Ferris and discussed his ideas.
nautilius··on Raiders of the Lost Ark turns 40, and is still an unqualified masterpiece (2021)
I’m in the same camp. I love that movie but can’t bring myself to show it to my kids yet with that relationship, the rapey behavior of Jones forcing to get his kisses, and the casual killing.
nautilius··on Live Updates: House Adjourns Again with No Resolution on Speaker
Exactly! Nothing screams “Democracy!” like repeating a vote a dozen and more times until it shows the desired result!
nautilius··on French startup unveils new residential thermo-acoustic heat pump
This makes no sense. Of course sound is a pressure wave - but so is being hit by a nuclear blast wave (after the initial flash). Obviously, the magnitude plays the decisive role here and not it being a pressure wave.
nautilius··on Disagreeable personalities do not have an advantage in power at work (2020)
> We're not jerks. We're people who notice problems. You're shooting the messenger.

The definition is literally in the title: "disagreeable personalities (selfish, combative, and manipulative)".

So, yes, by definition, disagreeable people are jerks. If that's you, then you, too, are a jerk.

That is completely orthogonal to "people who notice problems". If someone thinks that it's necessary to be "selfish, combative, and manipulative" in order to notice a problem, then that person is not only a jerk, but also deluding themselves that they're just misunderstood.

nautilius··on DerDieDas.wtf: If you know the pain of learning the gender of nouns in German
In any case, thanks for putting it out there!
nautilius··on US navy released worst rust photo to date
How is not “maintaining the same level of naval readiness “ not a “loss in capability”? I guess the grapes were sour anyway?
nautilius··on DerDieDas.wtf: If you know the pain of learning the gender of nouns in German
Just in time for my family!

However, the instructions remain hidden behind the browser address bar on my iPhone SE, so it took me a while to figure out what to do.

I thought tapping der / die / das at the bottom seemed like the most intuitive thing, rather than having to learn where to swipe.

Anyway, thank you!

nautilius··on Meta employee buys 12-year lease on cruise ship to see the world while working
Sure, I guess you can hire someone to represent you posthumously to attend your child’s high school graduation or wedding.
nautilius··on “Nobody cares about your blog”
“Surprising” refers to journals, not universities. It’s completely unsurprising (albeit unethical) that universities take the easy way.
nautilius··on “Nobody cares about your blog”
In my experience, journals are surprisingly (?) uninterested in these sort of things. The university will then just refer to the journal and reply that the claim of plagiarism must be fabricated as the journal would surely have done something.
nautilius··on Ask HN: How do you overcome decision paralysis when shopping?
I noticed I did the same thing when looking for hotels - what's the possibly best hotel out there for some reasonable price? Ooh, they have breakfast, ooooooh, but this one has breakfast and a bar, and this one even has a spa and nice hardwood floor!

At some point I made the same switch you describe: what is my minimum requirement so that I do not regret booking the hotel (for me: breakfast, reasonably close to destination, no-smoking on premises, rating above 8), then simply book the cheapest one that fulfills this. Reduced FOMO and time spent, not looking back.

nautilius··on Debunking common myths about the Autobahn
With the only tiny difference being that guns in the US kill orders of magnitude more people than driving on the Autobahn (~50000 vs ~300 annually).

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/02/03/what-the-da...

https://www.zukunft-mobilitaet.net/172160/analyse/tempolimit...

nautilius··on German police arrest 25 suspects in plot to overthrow state
Some people like to not hand over complete sovereignty over their bodies to their state and live in freedom instead.

Oh, and the disincentivizing effect of the death penalty is a long refuted myth.

nautilius··on European teams ditch pro-LGBTQ+ armbands at Qatar World Cup
Here's another good one where some guy gets "arrested, jailed, and prosecuted because he made fun of his local police department on Facebook".

https://ij.org/press-release/new-supreme-court-appeal-asks-c...

Unless in your world jokes on facebook are also "true threats".

nautilius··on European teams ditch pro-LGBTQ+ armbands at Qatar World Cup
> Do you believe had if she been in the middle of the crowd or in an empty parking lot exclaiming the same with a megaphone she would have been arrested?

No, that's my whole point. She said something that the authorities did not like. She did not do anything whatsoever. And she was jailed for it. She was punished by the government for saying something she liked to say.

You consider a single unarmed woman speaking a 'true threat' to a phalanx of armed police men? I guess there's not much right to free expression left then. The cops on the photo sure do look frightened. I guess she can be happy that she wasn't simply shot on the spot.

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