Based on the evidence, it seems someone out there has harnessed it (see: Pentagon UFO disclosure movement)
The idea of zero-point energy is that our vacuum is metastable but not the absolutely lowest possible energy state, and that we're currently in a local minimum. Pump energy into a vacuum in the right way and the vacuum could maybe get over that 'hump' go down into a lower energy state, and release energy in the process. Okay, fine.
I'm highly dubious of how well quantum field theory can even apply to these kind of conditions, since we don't have a unified theory. But even if it is, we know that energy levels found in e.g. CERN, or any number of other supercolliders across the world, aren't enough to trigger vacuum decay, because they haven't caused vacuum decay. Ditto with the energy densities found in the nuclear bombs. Or cosmic rays. Or anything else on Earth.
When Einstein disproved Isaac Newton's theory of gravitation, apples did not start falling up. Newton's Laws are still approximately good for a wide range of masses and speeds, and you have to get well outside those masses and speeds to see Newton start to break down. Same here. If there is a way to somehow force the vacuum into a lower energy state, the trigger point has to happen well beyond any energy we can currently explain or make accurate predictions for. And that's a pretty broad range.
In other words, in a best-case scenario where some pretty dodgy assumptions are true, you have to spend a LOT of energy to get energy. Which means it's nothing like the free energy the video describes.
I fully agree with Alphas, which I enjoyed as much as a lot of you did, but while I enjoyed No Ordinary Family at the time, I don't know if I'd still enjoy it if I rewatched now. Some others I'm similarly ambivalent about:
- The Lost Room: Amazing show, packed a lot of fascinating plot and worldbuilding into six episodes, and definitely held up to a second watch...but it completed the story it set out to tell, and I'm not convinced a second season would have been an improvement. I'd certainly watch a second season, were one ever made.
- Counterpart: Genuinely stellar acting by J.K. Simmons; probably the best "one actor plays two characters" role I've seen since Christopher Reeves as Superman. But the show started out pretty left-wing and got more and more left-leaning as it went; I'm actively glad it got cancelled when it did, because season 3 was certain to be garbage if it had continued.
There's a couple I would have loved:
- Green Lantern: The Animated Series: Cancelled after one two-part season. Took a lot of typically-lazy comic book plots and made them interesting and fun again. There was an episode in which a mind-controlling alien was loose on the ship, alternately possessing one hero at a time...and unlike every other cartoon, the alien was not stupid and did not give any obvious tells as to who was being controlled. The episode was like a PG version of John Carpenter's The Thing. Solid show, and it really elevated the source material.
- The Cape: Summer Glau really was the Angel of Death for 2010s sci-fi and superhero shows, wasn't she?
And there's one that I'm really on the fence about:
- Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency: A show made during the incredibly brief window (the far-off year of 2016) where a woke reimagining of a book, bearing almost no resemblance to the source material, could actually be used to make a good story. Yeah. I know. Hear me out.
The deadliest assassin in the world is a hundred-pound girl, capable of killing dozens of trained men by herself, protected by nothing but plot armor. We've seen this done now loads of times, and it's always horrible. But here, her plot armor is literal. The universe itself will not allow her to be hurt when she's progressing the plot; guns will misfire, locks will turn out to be rusted and break, and whoever she kills will turn out to be a terrible person who deserved to die, because that's how protagonist-centered morality works.
But the story takes this trope to the logical conclusion. When she tries going against the plot, suddenly she's just a hundred pound girl with no fighting skills, stamina, or training. She has no idea how to aim a gun, because normally she just sort of waves a gun in the general vicinity of her target and it becomes a perfect headshot by luck. When she tries to kill Dirk Gently - who has more plot armor than she does, being the title character - suddenly he miraculously dodges four bullets in a row, and when she gets hurt, she shuts down entirely in a mental breakdown, since she's never in her life felt pain before.
Plenty of other tropes are used like this. The girlboss who can fight a man toe-to-toe, takes no nonsense, and whose only flaw is not being confident in herself? She's one of the main characters...and it turns out that if you have crippling self-doubt, you don't just overcome it with a speech telling you to believe in yourself, and that self-doubt will slow down your reflexes at a critical time.. And it also turns out that being able to fight one average man still means you lose instantly if you fight three or four men, or if you fight a male soldier with the same training you have. The whole show is written like this.
But...it was Max Landis, and it was 2016. As much as I loved it, that show walked a knife's edge between quality and garbage, and there's just no way Landis would have been able to walk that edge any longer than he did, if he even wanted to.
Krypto was always kind of dumb, but will move merch
Krypto is the sort of silliness you could only get away with because it was the Silver Age and everything was silly, but the 1970s novella Starwinds Howl was actually good in a Jack London sort of way, and is legitimately worth reading.
Related, but I miss the days when we had writers making good stories out of stupid ideas, instead of now, when writers make stupid stories out of good ideas.
There is an actual Debian package (or was, in 2011) called Suicide Linux, which wipes your hard drive if you type an incorrect command in the terminal. I wonder if that'll be included.
Happy Thanksgiving!
I can't imagine a faithful adaptation (in $CURRENT_YEAR + 10) that keeps the speech about government "being reduced to its proper place", or portray the giant coup to take over the planet in Triplanetary heroically.
Yes - the episode was called "Dough Ray Me", after the titular Dough Ray that could make money from the sound of bells. Scrooge McDuck, as you expect, actually realized how bad an idea this was (since inflation would kill the value of his swimming pool full of gold coins) and told them not to use it, but he was the only one not blinded by greed at the start of the episode.
If it makes you feel any better, they also called Idaho and Montana for Trump with 0% reporting. None of those states are exactly a surprise.
My advice would be to make blueprints of the basic stuff; anything like a steel furnace array or a set of electric miners etc., figure out once, and then make a blueprint of it. It's way easier to place stuff down to fit a blueprint than it is to just place things down off memory, even for obvious or simple things, and that gets you to the point of automating construction bots that much faster.
I'd say it's entirely reasonable to have bots within four hours of starting the game, even if you don't really know what you're doing. And the bots of course solve the 'single unit' problem.
Same here. I'm typing this while waiting for my railgun prerequisites to finish so I can build a fusion-powered spaceship and reach the edge of the solar system. That "Beat the game in 40 hours" achievement is going to be really tough to get.
You’re not aware of this because you just came here from Reddit.
Wrong - he's been on this side of the Internet for a while; he showed up from time to time on KIA1 back when we were all on Reddit circa 2015. And he's been pushing for censorship the entire time. He knows exactly what he's saying and for some reason chooses to say it anyway.
The situation's exactly the same as in Asimov's short story "The Machine That Won The War". Everybody knows that the numbers they're getting from other sources are fake, so they have to fake up their own numbers to try to compensate...and soon enough, the greatest computer in the history of the world is more-or-less useless because it has no real data to work with.
I understand why those phrases originated, what with YouTube's audio auto-censorship algorithms. But it worries me that a lot of people use the terms and censor themselves even when not on YouTube, because it means that they're learning their speech patterns primarily from YouTube.
I have written articles that debunk:
1- the "photo electric effect" , for which Einstein got the Nobel prize.
This explanation doesn't make sense:
Atoms are all like spheres. The electron-shells form a sphere around the nucleus. These shells themselves all react to light. If the shells receive a certain frequency of light, they will start to resonate. If they resonate for some time the shell can reach the next state, or even release an electron.
Like a glass resonates at a certain tune. If the resonating takes long enough, the tune can even break the glass. Different glasses react to different frequencies of sound. Just like different atomic shells react to different frequencies of light.
Wineglasses only break at the specific frequency (well, a range of frequencies), and if you raise the frequency too much, it'll stop resonating and won't break anymore.
So if we saw that metals emitted photons only when light was at a specific frequency, resonance would make sense. But what we actually see is that metals emit photons only when light is at or above a certain frequency, without an upper bound on the frequency that will cause photoemission. That simply isn't resonance, not for wine glasses or mercury or any of the other examples you give.
Agreed - the episode "Heaven Sent", which is just a Capaldi monologue, is phenomenally good. But then the very next episode falls flat as soon as the Wild West standoff is over. For one shining moment we got to see what he was capable of as an actor when there was nobody else getting in the way.
I quite liked every episode with Nicholas Prentice (played by Alex Diakun and somehow made to look like an uncanny lizard-man), a time traveler who (among other things) showed up at the assassination of Obama, in an episode aired fifteen years before Obama was elected.
The reason u/ModsAreAIDS is arguing with you on this is that last year, there was a high-profile case in which a juvenile was declared incompetent to stand trial after two armed robberies, and then let go, after which point he shot someone else in the head.
It looks like this is specific to Minnesota law and specific to juveniles:
Since the law requires cases to be suspended – even when they involve violent crimes – judges can’t order juveniles to be held in detention or released under law enforcement. Judges’ hands are also tied in these cases because they have no authority to order children to get treatment to restore them to competence. Even if they did have that power, there are no competency restoration programs in Minnesota tailored to juveniles.
But you might see why others are worried that "ward of the state" isn't as permanent as in your experience, given that it's already happened once.
It's amazing that the best adaptation of Edgar Allen Poe's "The Raven" remains unironically a five-minute cartoon starring Darth Vader and Homer Simpson.
Dobson's comic, you can read here. The ComicCon picture of the cosplayer is here; allegedly, the guy in the tan shirt is Dobson, but from just this picture it's hard to tell. The original Twitter post this all came from is from a suspended account, but it was archived here.
There's a bunch of plot and character development that happens throughout season 1 that impacts the rest of the series, and it ends on a four-part cliffhanger going into season 2.
So, if you want to watch SG-1, I'd recommend to start with the pilot episode and then skip to episode 10, "Thor's Hammer". You'll have missed all but one of the cringe episodes (14, "Hathor"...it's bad), but won't miss much of the good stuff.
Please don't ban Imp again, or at least not for months like his last ban. By starting with the conclusion every single time and working backwards, he makes it clear how ridiculous identity politics can get. If anything, he helps all the rest of us think through situations individually and not in terms of stereotypes...if only because, in the back of our minds, we have a little voice saying "That reflex assumption you just made sounds a bit like Imp".
Yes. Great show, a lot of the core plotlines and characters still hold up today. The writers originally made Samantha Carter an insufferable feminist, until midway through season 1, her actress (Amanda Tapping) went to the writers and told them that genuinely capable women don't talk or act the way Carter did. The writers then not only changed course, but made it so that losing the feminist chip on her shoulder was in-universe character progression.
I genuinely cannot fathom this happening in a mainstream TV show today.
I liked Jonas Quinn, in part because it was hilarious that 'Jonas Quinn' is a way less alien name than 'Corin Nemec'. I was disappointed in SG:U that they had an entire episode on Langara and - after mentioning in SG:1 that the Ori had occupied the planet - didn't use the excuse to bring Nemec back for a cameo. Or, if he wasn't available, at least have an offhend mention of "Oh, Director Quinn's not gonna like this..." at the end or something, just to confirm that he's doing okay.
The special effects budget doesn't yet exist to do Lensmen justice.
Still, good to see a fan. Hot jets and clear ether!
The Casimir Effect doesn't violate the law of conservation of energy, and doesn't show a false vacuum; it's analogous to saying that capillary action, which is sometimes referred to as 'negative pressure', means that there's a way of getting less than zero air.
But also, the Casimir Effect was known theoretically for fifty years before it was experimentally verified. The same theory which predicts Casimir also predicts that there's absolutely no way to get energy out of it, and doesn't require our vacuum to even be false to begin with. If you want zero-point energy, you have to go well outside any scale that current quantum field theory can explain. And as I said earlier, that range is pretty broad.
I'm definitely replying to your comment in a vacuum. You're the one saying that it's a false vacuum, not me.