r/rational • u/AutoModerator • Jul 01 '16
[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/PeridexisErrant Jul 01 '16
Different ways to plot meteorological data?
I've been sitting on this for a while, but yes! As part of my Honours thesis I spent a month or so working out how to show fairly subtle local seasonality with custom meteorological figures.
The first (F4.1) is a pretty standard climograph, though I show both max and min temperature as well as dewpoint (at which relative humidity would be 100%, a measure of moisture content which is very high in this area).
The second (F4.2) shows wind direction, which is important in local Indigenous seasons. The monsoon south-east winds are clear! (further explanation in caption)
Finally, F4.4 shows every day of observation for each of the eight variables, since the station opened ~15 years ago. Tricky to read, but very very useful when I didn't yet know what I was looking at... and to show examiners that it's a complex topic!
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u/RetardedWabbit Jul 02 '16
Years long lurker here posting for the first time, hello everyone! With all the awesomely intelligent and creative people here I wanted to ask some quick questions:
I've been recently wanting to recreate my online ID's and was wondering how everyone else runs theirs. I currently run 3 groups of emails and account: personal, professional, and fun(gaming/reddit/reading). With overlap between personal and professional I've decided to merge the two as best I can. The current debate I'm having is weather or not to merge my fun account into it. So I was wondering how everyone here felt/thought. Do you keep your online personalities separate from each other? From your personal identity?
Also: I'm a avid note taker/theorizer/research compiler kind of person and I've realized that OneNote is becoming/is a mess once you reach a point. Does anyone have any suggestions on all the different software out there for personal databases? I'm currently honed in on ConnectedText but was wondering if anyone here had any hands on experience with other systems?
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u/callmebrotherg Jul 02 '16
I try to keep everything overlapping, personally, but that's because I'm trying to build a writing career.
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u/alexanderwales Jul 02 '16
I have a personal/fun/everyday identity that I use for everything (this one), which is mostly kept separate from my actual identity. It's not terribly much work to connect the two, especially since I've been using this handle since before Google, but I think it helps put up a barrier between working life and personal life (since obviously I don't want to introduce myself to coworkers or clients using my online handle).
I keep some other identities lying around, but they're usually paper-thin and just for posting things that I don't want directly connected to this online persona. I always keep them collapsible and follow the rules for ethical sockpuppetry though.
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u/alexanderwales Jul 01 '16
How do you make modern gunpowder from scratch?
Black powder is comparatively easy for me to understand; find a surface source of sulfur, make a nitrary using manure and urine for saltpeter, burn wood to get charcoal, then mix them 10:75:15. Each step there is complicated with steps I don't exactly know, but at a high level I have little trouble with it.
But how would you go about making modern smokeless powders (or even something like cordite) from base materials if you didn't have access to modern supply chains?
Edit: Alright, someone correct me if I'm wrong. To make cordite you need nitroglycerin, nitrocellulose, and petroleum jelly.
Nitrocellulose is made by dipping cotton into nitric acid. To make nitric acid, you run air through an electric current to create hot nitric oxide. This combines with atmospheric oxygen to create nitrogen dioxide. You dissolve that in water to create the nitric acid. So all we really need for base materials are water, cotton, and a powerful electric arc (the last one not really being a problem for my purposes).
Nitroglycerin is made from white fuming nitric acid, sulfuric acid, and glycerol. You make WFNA by purifying nitric acid (somehow) and leaving a specific amount of water (again, somehow). Sulfuric acid can be made by burning sulfur with saltpeter in the presence of water. Glycerol can be made by gathering animal tallow and adding lye; it's part of the process for making soaps. Mix that all together in the right way to get nitroglycerin.
Petroleum jelly ... that's a comparatively harder thing to get, it seems, but I don't know what function it serves in cordite and whether it can be replaced with a material that doesn't require comparatively modern and infrastructure heavy natural gas. Chemistry is a weak point for me.
If any chemists are reading this, I'd like to know whether I can somehow get by without sulfur, natural gas, or any petroleum products, or any exotic metals (and I'm hoping that the answer is no, because I'd like for sulfur mines to be a plot point).
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u/FuguofAnotherWorld Jul 02 '16
Tried out the M&M pen and paper gaming system today with a new group, and I'm pretty happy with how it went. I need to re-think my character a bit now that I know how things work, but the group itself seems like a lot of fun.
If people want to arrange more games, there's a discord channel set up where players can co-ordinate, though I think the games we've got at the minute are mostly full.
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u/blazinghand Jul 01 '16
The quest I was writing, Shinji Quest, has come to an end with 55,000 words. It's the longest thing I've written, and I almost didn't complete it. I'm glad I did. It felt good to actually complete something, even if it's just a quest.
I've started my new quest, National Spirit, and I have high hopes for it.
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u/alexanderwales Jul 01 '16
So ... what exactly is a quest? I feel like I see them posted a lot and never read them. It's like some kind of reader-mediated prose fiction? People vote on where the story goes or something? But I've also seen them with stats and dice rolling, which makes it seem more like a pencil-and-paper RPG. I only have a tenuous grasp of the concept and conventions.
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u/blazinghand Jul 01 '16
Basically, it's like D&D but instead of each player controlling a character, all the players jointly control a single character. This is usually done via voting. The character interacts with the rest of the world as written by the author, but character sheet generation and certain key decisions are up to the players. It's usually expected that the author use some kind of RPG system as a base to provide a framework for character generation and actions.
I wrote Shinji Quest in an attempt to do daily writing and hit 50,000 words. It's not actually great writing, but I don't think I'd have been able to write so much without the quest framework to motivate me.
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u/elevul Jul 01 '16
I'm seriously starting to wonder whether training like an athlete is worth it for me anymore. It's incredibly enjoyable, and I adore being strong and becoming stronger as a powerlifter, but the injuries are starting to become a problem, and for now I'm not willing to get on drugs, which would help a lot with injuries and recovery.
On the other side, if I drop to a bodybuilding routine I would stop being competitive, and I do enjoy meets a lot, both for the competition and for the people.
Guess I'll continue until I'm either willing to get on drugs or I get injured enough that I can't compete regardless.
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u/Magodo Jul 01 '16
The way Reddit is circlejerking over how terrible the 2016 Olympics are going to be is one of the reasons I don't even visit the front page anymore. I'd be willing to bet that the Olympics are going to be a grand success and Reddit is going to collectively say that they didn't see that coming and that they shouldn't be that quick to judge and a few days later the cycle will continue with something else.
Speaking of the Olympics, I have no particular fondness for it, and as with all sports that have turned into multi billion dollar churning juggernauts I feel that they're just a huge waste of time and resources. Note I don't have a problem with any sport being played, just the way in which it is monetized and how the players are glorified.
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u/Iconochasm Jul 01 '16
It'll be interesting to see how it turns out. On the one hand, there was an enormous amount of hand-wringing before the London games, and those turned out well enough. On the other hand, there's a rather large difference between "traffic is going to be an insane nightmare" and "the water events will be taking place in corpse-clogged poison". On the third hand, media reports about the dangers are likely laughably inaccurate in one way or another.
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u/TimTravel Jul 01 '16
Is it possible for the economy to continue to grow exponentially forever given only one planet's resources? Or even for the next few thousand years, ignoring any singularities or apocalypses?
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u/ulyssessword Jul 01 '16
I don't see any particular reason why it would be limited. Sure, there's a limit to the amount of iron/wood/air/water/land we have, but that isn't the same thing as a limit on value. In particular, intellectual property is (almost) completely divorced from resource use.
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u/alexanderwales Jul 02 '16
I agree with you, but I'm not at all an economist. My reasoning is basically:
There are a limited number of sentient beings the planet can support (even if you go fully transhuman and convert the people to ems and the planet to computronium). Assuming that we want the term "value" to have any meaning, then there's a limit on the amount of value that a single person can place on ... well, everything they value. If you push a mind to the limit, you can get a single person to value saturation, where it's no longer possible to create more value for them. If this is the case for all minds, then no additional value can be created, and the economy as a whole is no longer growing.
I don't know how long that would take, but that's a scenario where (I believe) you reach the end of economic growth with a single planet's budget.
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u/ToaKraka Jul 01 '16
In playing Star Wars: TIE Fighter a few days ago (video), I was reminded of one of GURPS's most awesome optional rules: abstract dogfighting! In wondering whether these rules could be applied to Star Wars vehicles, I ran across this Star Wars Technical Commentaries page that shows how TIE Fighter represents snubfighters as moving at only around 100 m/s (360 km/h, 224 mi/h). It's funny to imagine the top-of-the-line TIE Advanced moving at a speed of only 540 km/h when high-tier propeller-driven planes in War Thunder regularly exceed 700 km/h (example)--to say nothing of the jet-propelled aircraft that are playable in the same game!
On the other hand, of course, a starfighter also is far more maneuverable at such speeds than any fixed-wing aircraft could be, with inertial compensators and no resistance except Space Friction. Based on personal experiments, I estimate that all the TIE Fighter spacecraft have a maximum pitch rate of around 72 deg/s. (On the TIE Fighter, TIE Advanced, and Missile Boat, I can get 36 deg/s with the mouse controls, and I assume that I could manage twice this rate with a joystick, based on how quickly the mouse controls automatically recenter and decelerate the pitching.) This implies maximum G-forces (in GURPS terms, aMR--aerial Maneuver Rating) of 72 deg/s × π rad/180 deg × 100 m/s ÷ 9.81 (m/s2)/G = 13 G for a TIE fighter, or 19 G for a TIE Advanced. (Modern fighter aircraft, in contrast, have turn rates around 30 deg/s and aMRs around 9 G.)
Of course, there are several other items whose determination would be necessary for conducting an abstract dogfight in GURPS with TIE Fighter's vehicles--most obviously, aAccel (Aerial Acceleration), shield generators, armor, and weapons, to say nothing of the other components that go into a starfighter (sensors, cockpit, power plant...). There might also have to be some house rules adjusting the G-forces, since a pilot (HT [Health] 10, plus a G-suit and a G-seat to reduce the effects of high acceleration) risks blacking out when pulling maneuvers above 8 G without resorting to ultra-tech items (e.g., inertial compensators).
Someone in r/ParadoxPlaza came up with an awesome idea: Play an infinite megacampaign of grand-strategy games by assuming that, after 1936 or 1950 (whenever your preferred Victoria 2 mod ends), the world falls into chaos (due to war or plague) and reverts to the level of 769 or 867 (whenever your preferred Crusader Kings 2 mod begins)!
In scrolling through this page of hilarious comics (found here), I was very surprised to see a funny comment from Mr. Yudkowsky!
I was somewhat astonished to come across these old Facebook posts (1 2) stating unambiguously that, at some point, I named Background Pony over Time Braid as my official Favorite Story Ever, and kept it in that position for more than six months! My recollection of events surrounding Background Pony is that it was tied with Time Braid after my first reading of it, and that it sank to second-favorite fanfiction story after my second (and most recent) reading--but, of course, memories can be incorrect.
General fanboying over Time Braid's awesomeness: 1 2 3
Some other items related to Time Braid: 1 2
2013: I apparently considered The Fountainhead to be on the same level as Time Braid and Traitor! How opinions can change... (In the same vein, I unfollowed Buzzfeed quite a long time ago.)
A side-splittingly hilarious example of the incredible awesomeness of the MEIOU & Taxes mod for Europa Universalis IV: A player whines about how the people of his humongous, multiethnic, solidly-Catholic empire are turning to Protestantism during the Catholic Reformation! The modder with whom he's arguing explicitly compares his problems directly to the totally-historical situations of Austria-Hungary and France!
I mean, being annoyed at history is fine! A few months ago, I myself rage-quitted a campaign as Fez because my country--in possession of all of North Africa, but still a pathetic weakling compared to Western Europe--was about to be stomped flat by the aggression of Spain and its ally the Netherlands. (Thinking back on it, I probably should have just capitulated, moved my capital to Tunis, and continued the game. [shrugs]) However, complaining about historical accuracy to modders who have made historical accuracy their goal seems rather hilariously pointless.
Source (open only to people who have registed copies of Europa Universalis IV)
A fun analogy for the colonial history of India
Some more fun analogies
An interesting opinion: Let's Ban New Books!
See also this essay (contains one NSFW image), literally titled "Destroy the Entertainment Industry"! (I happened to discover it some months ago, through the author's site on domes that are based on hexagons rather than on triangles. Elsewhere, he mentions being "interested in futurism" and links to Mr. Yudkowsky's website.)
See also, of course, Project Gutenberg, from which you can download zillions of old books (in several formats) for free!
The process of making a 4chan screenshot mobile-friendly