Thank you!

I appreciate the comparison and analysis. I’ll keep it in my “maybe I’ll tackle it someday” list, but I’ve mostly moved away from writing that is hostile to the reader.

I don’t have a problem with complex concepts, even when they ultimately go over my head. I don’t even have a problem with stylistic weirdness in service of the message. I draw the line at writers who treat me like an imbecile, whether directly or through their own sense of superiority.

Actually, the long “Giving Tree” excerpt in one of the reviews reflects my own views. If that means we might already share opinions, then I for sure don’t need to suffer abuse along the way. 😀

An obvious problem with my attitude is that I then shut myself off from discussing the merits of a work.

I just read a description and a few reviews. I’ve decided that, for me, it’s unlikely to be worth the effort.

Do you think it was worth the effort for you?

Structurally, the most challenging book I’ve ever read was “The Message of THE QUR ĀN” by Muhammad Asad.

Start with the fact that the QUR ĀN itself is extremely non-linear. So much so that I think that this alone requires a great deal of study to address.

The text is 2 columns, the original Arabic adjacent to his English translation. There are copious and often long footnotes. The footnotes cross reference other footnotes, sometimes in chains. I read only the English.

I had to read it 4 times. Once just ignoring footnotes. Again, this time including just first-level footnotes. Again, following footnote chains back to their sources in the text. Finally, to reread just the text after pretending that I had everything figured out.

It took me a year to get through it to my satisfaction, although it was not the only reading, or even major project.

There is also the MRI intended to help kids understand what they will be going through.

Only if those people can also be infinitely packed into the distance the leading truck (the set of wheels) manages to travel.

Which, I guess is fair play in a thought experiment involving different sizes of infinities. :)

Thanks. This is the first time I’ve seen a jokey enough presentation to feel comfortable in treating it as a hypothetical reality rather than a moral/ethical exercise.

🤣

Don’t worry, the first body or two will take care of it!

Yes, or come to a halt. You’d be surprised at how little it takes to reduce the already low friction to nothing. A bit of blood and a bit of resistance will bring it to a halt pretty quickly.

It’s always better to gain a full understanding of the system when trying to make important decisions.

The trolley has two sets of wheels, leading and trailing, both of which must remain on the same set of tracks.

The switch is designed to enable the trolley to change course, moving from one set of tracks to the other.

Throwing the switch after the leading set has passed, but before the trailing set has reached the switch points will cause the two sets to attempt travel on separate tracks. The trolley will derail, rapidly coming to a halt. If the trolley is moving slowly enough to permit this action, nobody dies.

Source: former brakeman (one of the people responsible for throwing switches), section hand (one of the people responsible for installing switches), and railroad welder (one of the people responsible for field repairs of switches).

Interesting. One of the chemicals they reference is tetrachloroethylene. According to this Wikipedia article:

Perhaps the greatest use of TCE is as a degreaser for metal parts. It has been widely used in degreasing and cleaning since the 1920s because of its low cost, low flammability, low toxicity and high effectivity as a solvent. The demand for TCE as a degreaser began to decline in the 1950s in favor of the less toxic 1,1,1-trichloroethane. However, 1,1,1-trichloroethane production has been phased out in most of the world under the terms of the Montreal Protocol, and as a result, trichloroethylene has experienced some resurgence in use as a degreaser.[17]

My grandfather had Parkinson’s. I would imagine that he had plenty of exposure in his work as a mechanic from about 1925 on.

I agree with everything you’ve said, but modern technologies aren’t the only issue. The fact is that many food crops are hybrids that don’t breed true, and it’s been like that for many decades. That is, you can save seeds, even legally, but within one or two generations the plants revert to form, losing their desired characteristics and “hybrid vigour”.

To the best of my knowledge, there is no such thing as a GMO wheat. Yet saving seed at scale hasn’t been viable since at least the 1960s.

I also prefer thematic instances, but try to find appropriate communities within those instances. Just because it’s coming from NASA, doesn’t make it astronomy.

Depending on which aspects of the project you think are important and want to discuss there are a few communities here that might be relevant.

Earth Science includes environment, and environmental impact seems to be the most popular talking point so far.

Noise and other forms of pollution are public health issues and there is a local community for that, although I’m not sure it’s really a great fit there.

Physics might be another choice due to the fact that a lot of physics is going into the engineering of something that reduces sonic booms.

Or maybe you just need to find the right thematic instance. For example, I’m registered on slrpnk for my climate, energy efficiency, and anarchism fixes.

That’s what 3D printing is for…

I think for maximum uselessness, they should not be overlapping spheres, but deform at the interface, like soap bubbles or rubber balls. As long as the spheres are the same size and modelled with the same “surface tension” or “elasticity”, the “intersection” of two sets would then be a circular interface with an area proportional to what would otherwise be an overlap (I think). If the spheres have different sizes or are modelled with different surface tension or elasticity, one would “intrude” into the other.

Multiple sets would have increasingly complex shapes that may or not also create volumes external to the deformed spheres but still surrounded by the various interfaces.

Time to break out the mathematics of bubbles and foam. This data ain’t gonna obscure itself!

Might there actually be utility to something like this? Scrunch the spheres together but make invisible everything that is not an interface and label the faces accordingly. I suppose the same could be said of the shape described by overlapping. (Jesus, you’d think I was high or something. Just riffing.)

Interesting. That page says “few vertebrae”, but the image makes it look to me like a full set.

On the other hand, if I found an animal with no ribs and pelvis and only the rudimentary limbs typically found in fish, I’d tend to say that the skeleton was missing. Or at least, ahem, skeletal.

Thanks. My first impression was that there was some funny business, but then I found what I thought was a decent article.

Are you serious? They really have what amounts to an exoskeleton? Or maybe it’s more accurate to call it a whole-body rib cage?

Just searched and found this fun article. Not really a skeleton but a collection of really stiff hairs or feathers (loosely: the genes are the same ones responsible for “other skin appendages” in vertebrates).

New word! Thanks.

I made a half-assed guess as to its meaning based on the fact that I’ve heard of an elite basketball player by that name. I got pretty close, according to urban dictionary.

All roads lead to PIE. Or is that from? Oh, and maybe not “all.”

But seriously, I went through a linguistics phase in my reading and came away with the sense that Proto Indo European is a lot closer to us than it seems at first glance.

I wasn’t clear. My fault. I was referring to power, landline, natural gas, and water networks.

Virtually every developed country has managed to get power and landline service to the vast majority of those who live outside urban centres, including farmers and ranchers. In addition, places like Saskatchewan managed to do likewise with natural gas and, occasionally, with water suitable for inexpensive municipal and even in-home treatment.

I’m not a telecommunications engineer, so I could be way, way off base, but it strikes me that a similar project could get real broadband into every household that is hooked up to the power grid.

It doesn’t have to be wire or fibre to the home. Modern terrestrial wireless technologies can probably get the job done quicker and simpler in many cases. Although I think it’s worth pointing out that SaskTel was laying so much fiber in the 1980s to support its own production facility. If short-sighted government hadn’t killed that project, I’d probably have had fibre a decade ago instead of waiting on appropriate terrestrial wireless technologies that still show no sign of getting here. We don’t have any cell service and we’re actually getting further away in a sense, since every upgrade has reduced range and new towers are not being built to fill the gaps. Instead we’ve been stuck with crap like ExploreNet and now Starlink.

Developing countries and truly remote areas are already leapfrogging physical connections to go direct to wireless.

My cousin has a farm in Saskatchewan that is 5 km from the nearest neighbour, 20 km from the nearest village, 60 km from the nearest town, and 150 km from the nearest city. That farmhouse had power before WW2, telephone by 1950, and natural gas by 1970. They still don’t have proper broadband, despite having had dial-up internet at the same time and for the same price as anyone in our largest cities.

The same people and programs that got every other network to every household?