Maybe it’s made of a less-conductive materal (e.g., plastic with metallic paint).

Yeah, that’s my understanding.

That’s how I understand it: the volume element surrounding any given point has to be contracting, but it can expand in some direction(s) if it has at least one other direction to contract in for compensation.

As for qualitative differences, I’m not really picturing what the difference would be—but trying to intuit the effect of extra parametric dimensions might be like trying to explain trichromancy to a color-blind person.

You don’t need to talk about it like it’s some kind of hypothetical—the end result would just be identical twins (albeit with an age difference). People have no conceptual trouble with the idea that identical twins are distinct people.

State-scale institutions are always conglomerations of adaptive subsystems (or quickly become so, if they’re not completely dysfunctional). This institutional ecosystem selects for subsystems that use state institutions to perpetuate themselves—and its these systems, not the individuals within them, that increasingly evolve to exploit the state’s authoritarian powers.

It’s a reflection of the state’s earlier aspirations—the justification it used to overthrow the preceding authoritarian state.

The problem is, the more drastic the social and political changes are that the new regime is trying to enact—and the more entrenched the preceding regime was—the more tempting it is to lean on authoritarian vanguardist methods to cut through the pushback. But once they start down that path, the means inevitably become the ends and everything winds up back where it started.

A lot of people are making comments like “to boost Lemmy’s popularity/value”, but I wonder if making a lot of posts with relatively few comments is counterproductive?

Like, if I see a community where the top 20 posts have no comments, I’m reluctant to post or comment there because it doesn’t seem to have an engaged community. A community where the top posts all have long comment threads seems more inviting, even if the top posts go back two weeks instead of two hours.

And on the rusted lid these words appear:
“WE ARE NOT LIABLE FOR DAMAGES OF ANY KIND
THESE WORKS ARE PATENTED BY KITCHENAIRE”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Many sequences of rRNA remain pretty much the same across all known animals. But Han noticed something unusual in those from the octopus: an unexpected gap that broke what’s usually one rRNA fragment in other creatures into two.

Given how widespread and highly conserved ribosomal RNA is, and how simple the mutation appears to be, it seems unlikely that this is the first time it’s arisen in the whole history of animal life. There must be some other tradeoff that octopuses found a workaround for—maybe it’s related to why they’re so short-lived?

You keep treating this like some kind of game… do you know something the rest of us don’t?

I think legislators purposefully write laws in such a way that their ill effects can plausibly be blamed on lawyers (and that lawyers can spare their friends from the ill effects).

They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
For trying to change the system from within
I’m coming now, I’m coming to reward them:
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin

If vampires gets warrants, do they still need to ask permission?

My point is, material from the more distant regions of the protoplanetary disk that eventually coalesce into the planet have to move through the Lagrange points to get to the protoplanet. But once they’re near those points, the gravity of the protoplanet is unable to continue drawing them. So how does the protoplanet’s gravity attract material from farther away than its Lagrange points?

to stay at a Lagrange point takes active adjusting. It’s not a low point in gravity, it’s more like balancing on the peak between the two bodies.

I thought that was true of L1, L2, and L3, but not L4 or L5—hence the stable clusters of trojans at Jupiter’s L4 and L5 points.

The planets form when the material in an orbit condenses into one body. But as soon as a denser patch starts to condense, it will create stable regions at its L4 and L5 points. That is, the same gravitational force that pulls material together to form a planet should simultaneously be pulling material more than 1/6 of an orbit away to its Lagrange points instead of directly to itself.

It’s important to distinguish between predictive models and explanatory models, and between local models and global models.

The title implies an issue with global explanatory models, but the article describes issues with local predictive models.

And Iron Man built his in a cave! With a box of scraps!

The discussion could be relevant to more than just the original poster if other people with similar cases find the same thread later. If the OP is forced to state their jurisdiction, the discussion might be more focused, but potentially less useful to others.

I’m surprised the chip wasn’t sold on the black market before the missile was assembled.