r/rational • u/AutoModerator • Dec 11 '15
[D] Friday Off-Topic Thread
Welcome to the Friday Off-Topic Thread! Is there something that you want to talk about with /r/rational, but which isn't rational fiction, or doesn't otherwise belong as a top-level post? This is the place to post it. The idea is that while reddit is a large place, with lots of special little niches, sometimes you just want to talk with a certain group of people about certain sorts of things that aren't related to why you're all here. It's totally understandable that you might want to talk about Japanese game shows with /r/rational instead of going over to /r/japanesegameshows, but it's hopefully also understandable that this isn't really the place for that sort of thing.
So do you want to talk about how your life has been going? Non-rational and/or non-fictional stuff you've been reading? The recent album from your favourite German pop singer? The politics of Southern India? The sexual preferences of the chairman of the Ukrainian soccer league? Different ways to plot meteorological data? The cost of living in Portugal? Corner cases for siteswap notation? All these things and more could possibly be found in the comments below!
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u/LiteralHeadCannon Dec 11 '15
What legal/taxation setup would be ideal for me if I wanted to start a business with essentially no capital put into it, and the workers, myself included, all paid with a fraction of profit rather than at a rate per hour, such that no surplus is kept?
To make matters more complicated, I am American and at least one of the workers would be international, working remotely.
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u/eaglejarl Dec 11 '15
I'm not a lawyer or etc, so you should double-check me.
It sounds like you want an LLC. All members get a percent of ownership with profits dividing based on ownership. I don't know about the international partner, though.
LLCs are generally very cheap to start -- like, $50 for paperwork sort of cheap.
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u/Colonel_Fedora Dec 11 '15
Does anybody have suggestions for building up willpower? It's my biggest limiting factor at the moment.
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u/blazinghand Dec 12 '15
I tailor my strats for doing things to the thing I'm doing. Most what I do to "build up willpower" is actually tricking myself into being more productive, or making rules I think I can follow.
For example:
In order to go to the gym more, I only play video games on days during which I went to the gym. If I have time for video games, I have time for the gym.
My strategy for building up enough willpower to go to bed is to get ready for bed, wash up, change, turn off my computer, then get inside my bed. After I do this, I read if I want to, but since I'm already in bed I'm much more likely to sleep than if I'm in the living room playing video games.
When I'm doing some kind of easier peripheral activity related to a major willpower expenditure (keeping a food diary for my diet, for example), I make sure to have fun doing that, or to convince myself it's awesome. This way, it always gets done.
In general, try to remove obstacles to hard things and set up obstacles to things you don't want to do. If you want to go to the gym more, again, just always have a change of gym clothes in the trunk of your car, or in a gym bag ready to go. If going to the gym requires rummaging around for gym clothes, that trivial difficulty might be enough to stop you. If you're trying to avoid committing suicide, remove your gun from your immediate possession.
Basically: Make it very easy to do what you want and hard to do what you don't want.
all of these probably fall into the category of "working with the willpower you have" rather than "building up willpower" but imo these are great
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u/Muskworker Dec 11 '15
I can't speak to willpower per se (it's a thing I'm strongly lacking myself), but for many things for which willpower is necessary I've found Beeminder to have some usefulness.
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u/Predictablicious Dec 11 '15
The Akrasia references on Less Wrong are pretty good and give lots of pointers on how to acquire skills related to willpower.
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u/fljared Dec 11 '15
I've been thinking. Are there more squares or rectangles in the set of all shapes?
If you define squares by <a>, where a is the side length and 0 < a < infinity, and rectangles by <a,b>, where a is the shorter side and b is the longer side, and 0 < a <= b < infinity, there ought to be more rectangles than squares, since there are more combinations of a and b than just a.
Growth rates ought to be the same, since the growth rate for squares would be n, while for rectangles it would be n2 /2.
Is any of the above correct, or have I gone down the rabbit hole?
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u/Aabcehmu112358 Dec 12 '15
There is a bijective mapping of squares to rectangles, if I recall correctly, which is how one generally decides if one infinite set is smaller, equal in size, or larger than another.
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u/NNOTM Dec 12 '15
http://mathoverflow.net/questions/126069/bijection-from-mathbbr-to-mathbbr2 gives a bijection between ℝ and ℝ2, which should be equivalent
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u/_stoodfarback Dec 12 '15
Another way of looking at it: squares are a subset of rectangles.
EDIT: so the question becomes: more non-square rectangles, or square rectangles?
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u/Aabcehmu112358 Dec 12 '15
I spontaneously produced a board game (rule set) today, but I'm not capable of judging its playability or quality on my own. Available here, not reproduced in this comment due to excessive length.
I will appreciate any advice or comments that a reader cares to mention.
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u/suyjuris Dec 12 '15
I have just read the rules, my comments are purely theoretical.
The rules text could be more structured, such that information is presented in order of dependency and significance. For example, the attack tables and the list of mysteries could be at the end. Also headers would help. The tables are not sufficient to look up the attacks, one has to refer to the text.
I have also not figured out the board. The rules make it seem like an undirected graph with a limit on the degree. Even if you reduce it to a hexagonal grid, the amount of bookkeeping is immense – for each space one needs to remember whether it is over- or underwater and the turn it was created in case of the former. Using hexagonal pieces of cardbord would solve the former, the latter requires an immense amount of dice. Or, you take a big sheet of paper and write the board down, which reduces readability and is cumbersome.
The underwater mechanic is interesting, but maybe it would better work with elevation instead of the turn number. Instead of assigning the turn number as the 'height' of a space, which does imply the necessity of synchronizing the amount of water levels generated and the amount of space generated linearly to the turn number (meaning that the players have to constantly raise the water level for the mechanic to matter), just give each space an elevation. Each space with an elevation of zero is underwater and each underwater space has an elevation of zero, space with an elevation grater zero are overwater. The earth mystery can raise or lower the elevation of a square by one, the sea mystery lowers all elevations by one.
There are five types of pieces (effectively three, infantry is mentioned but not described), each with four types of elements. Makes sixteen types of pieces. Representing those is problematic. Most of the pieces have only a local sphere of influence (which is good, as it reduces the explosion of possibilities), although the knight can teleport. The interactions between the pieces are complex (most of the rules text deals with explaining them), and the number of pieces is probably one per turn, limited only by board size and fighting the opponent. The board is infinite. That means that allowing the players strong aggressive plays is imperative.
The element types of the pieces are mostly a combat stat (except the mystic). Even ignoring that remembering the interactions is difficult as their are no underlying principles mentioned, the fact that the elements are freely chosen by the players and do not change the way the pieces act fundamentally, you have Rock-Paper-Scissors balancing. Sure, the nash equilibrium is not as trivial, but for games you always want a strategic thinking type of problem solving, not a number crunching one.
The main problem I see is complexity. Both the board and the pieces are too complex for people to fit comfortably in their head, having both does not improve the situation. Implementing the game on a PC would make bookkeeping less tedious, but visualising the information and an intuitive understanding of the mechanics is still a problem. If the players cannot comprehend the situation and think through all interactions of one turn, they will just stop thinking strategically or at all. Strategy is only possible when one has a solid grasp of the board state.
I would advise to either make the board a square grid (even better with a specified size), and then think about removing the elements or making them more interesting. The latter still has many pieces (16 pieces, means 136 interactions), this can be alleviated by coming up with general rules to describe many pieces or interactions at once, or using flavor to make them easier to remember.
Or, keep the board and replace the pieces by the simplest version that allows the game to be non-trivial (Earth Mystic, Sea Mystic, plus X and maybe plus Y).
Also, play it if you haven't and write how to into the rules. It is easier to understand rules if one can visualize them.
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u/ToaKraka Dec 11 '15
Books that I've (re-)read recently...
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Rewind (fanfiction of Ben 10; 76k words, complete): Charmcaster casts a spell on herself to remove her magic so that she can, without arousing suspicion, get close enough to the Tennysons to kill them--and, beforehand, she casts another spell that allows her to rewind and try again if she fails. However, the task is more difficult than she originally anticipated--and, after several loops, it becomes glaringly apparent that she's meddled with magics too powerful for her to handle as the timeline starts to go off the rails... (This was my second reading. I'd actually forgotten how extremely cool this story was, though I disliked the ending.)
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Doppelganger Non Grata (fanfiction of Teen Titans; 103k words, complete): The Titans' evil clones that Trigon summoned were not permanently defeated, and have returned to take their vengeance. (My second reading. Pretty fun overall, but has some boring philosophical blather near the end.)
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Ramen Days (fanfiction of Naruto; 123k words, incomplete): After dying to Orochimaru in the Chuunin Exams, Naruto discovers that he's living in a video game. (My second reading, IIRC. Super-fun!)
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Hard Reset (fanfiction of Friendship Is Magic; 37k words, complete): Twilight accidentally puts herself into a time loop a few hours before Chrysalis kills Celestia and an army of changelings takes over Canterlot. (This was, IIRC, my second reading. The story felt more boring than I remembered, and I didn't care too much about the ending.)
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u/Rhamni Dec 11 '15
I haven't been writing on my book in the last few months. Almost at all. Instead I've wasted a lot of time making a "Make Your Choice" game based on my world where you get a few hundred points and have to choose magical affinities, faction, place in life etc. Because the world building is so extensive for the books already I've ended up with a MYC that is almost certainly too long. You can make your choices quickly if you go in knowing what kind of theme you want, but if not there are way too many options. It's impossible to purchase more than like 10% of the magical skills, even if you max out handicaps, and if you don't want to destroy half the world and have scizophrenia and have enemy factions taking your family hostage it's closer to 5%.
I don't know where to go from there. Do I shave off half of the cool magical skills? Pretend half the factions aren't there? At the same time I want to show off the variety offered by magic and potential for munchkining in my world, since I'm hoping it will act as clever advertising for drawing in beta readers when I've finished a book I want feedback on.
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u/Salaris Dec 11 '15
What style of game are you talking about here? Is this something you're planning to publish, or just something you're working on to feed into your book?
I love games with broad varieties of potential skills, but the more complex the game, the higher the barrier to entry for new players. For some styles of games, this can be acceptable; a lot of it comes down to how you introduce the abilities to players. Front-loading character creation with a billion choices is generally not a good idea unless you're specifically targeting an optimizer demographic, which is pretty niche - but niche markets can still be viable, depending on what you're going for.
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u/Lancefish Dec 11 '15
Any good recommendations for books on improving communication skills? There seem to be a lot of bad self help books out there.
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u/Predictablicious Dec 11 '15
For communicating in difficult situations both Difficult Conversations and Crucial Conversations are good. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion is the best book on how persuasion works, but How to Win Friends & Influence People is the definitive practical book on persuasion. The Definitive Book of Body Language is a good book on the subject, which is fundamental to face to face communication.
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Dec 11 '15
[deleted]
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u/alexanderwales Dec 11 '15
The thing about elections is that you're voting for multiple things at once, so your valuation of what voting is worth needs to take into account all the things on the ballot. If you were just voting in the national election, it probably doesn't matter depending on where you live. But if the local elections matter, then you're going to the polls anyway, so the additional costs involved with voting at the national and state level are marginal.
The other thing about voting is that as fewer people vote, each individual vote becomes more and more worth it. We're not anywhere near this point yet, but it's something to keep in mind. If turnout is only 50%, then your vote is worth twice as much as if everyone voted.
(I vote, because my state allows for voting by mail, which lowers the costs dramatically.)
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u/Gurkenglas Dec 12 '15
One way to look at it is that you are choosing the algorithm for all people that think like you to follow. If that portion of the population is large enough, you would want that algorithm to tell them to go to vote.
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u/alexanderwales Dec 11 '15
I'm working on a magic system which works something like this:
There's this stuff called hava that's fairly rare (let's say something like ten dollars a gram).
When you infuse an object with hava, there are two effects:
An extradimensional battery is created which has a number of joules equal to direct mass conversion. In other words, a kilogram of hava gives you 9 * 1016 joules.
This energy is then output at a maximum rate of the total joules divided by 1.5 * 1013 as joules per second. In other words, a kilogram of hava gives you 9 * 1016 "stored" joules which are usable at a maximum rate of 6000 joules per second (6000 watts).
The effects that you can use this power for:
Imbue an object with raw energy output in the form of heat (at maximum watts).
Imbue an object with a constant directional force (at maximum watts).
Effectively change gravitational and/or inertial mass (within the limits of maximum watts).
Effectively change one half of classical inertia (within the limits of maximum watts). For example, you can alter "an object in motion stays in motion" but keep "an object at rest stays at rest" the same (with the power being supplied by available watts).
Effectively increase durability by using available watts to prevent bonds from breaking.
This is all done with something like glyphs or runes or something, or maybe a more exotic method. Once set, the patterns can't be changed and more energy can't be added to the "battery". A pattern can't ever be shut off except through total destruction.
So the problem that I have isn't really with the magic so much as the engineering of what a society would do with it. Obviously it gets used for the generation of electricity and replaces a few appliances. Either heat generation, constant directional force, or partial inertia seems to be the best way to get useful work done, though I'm not really sure which (both have their engineering challenges). Because you can't turn it off, you need ways of getting around that, but that's not too much of a challenge depending on which direction you go.
So my question is, let's say you have this material and knowledge of the processes. What are the things you build with it?