I wonder if anyone has made a physical galactic orrery.
Maybe it's harder than it seems. Does a definite galactic plane even exist? The ecliptic is defined by Earth's orbit, not a mean of all the planets. IIRC Sun's rotation plane is not aligned, not should it matter.
If there's a way to measure galactic plane, independently of Sun's orbit around the galaxy center (that also seems difficult to determine) it would involve measuring positions and trajectories of many very distant objects.
I believe such data exists--examine the movement of all galactic objects you can. That will give you a center of mass, the galactic plane is the plane such as to minimize the total distance from objects to the plane.
Yes, an example is "Local stellar kinematics from Hipparcos data" [0]. Afaict: stars have color (red or blue shift) which represents relative motion; Hipparcos is a large large dataset from an eponymous satellite; fancy math determines relative motion based on position and inferred distance.
My pet realization: most of the power increase has been spent on graphics at an ever growing resolution, including in resolution not only the number of pixels, that's a squared number, but also color depth and FPS.
Dealing with graphics has shadowed how hugely powerful the modern computers are. We're noticing now because of AI.
That said I think programmers do notice the performance outside of AI when they use software that surfaces how fast modern machines are which we do more than most.
I can remember when compiling a Linux kernel was “start it and go watch star gate” now I barely have time to boil the kettle for a cup of tea.
I don't know anyone who supports both ideas at the same time. Are you saying that philosophers do?
Every guy saying that free will doesn't exist is arguing exactly this. Physical causality considered an obstacle to freedom implies that the conscious entity is somehow outside the physical world.
That's backwards. People saying that there's no free will because determinism is implying that human consciousness is outside the physical world. Actually that's what TFA is about and makes a great job explaining it.
My comment was responding to energy123 questioning there are philosophers that are both materialistic and consider human consciousness is "special". The moment you separate consciousness from all the physical processes that support it (and that's what negating "free" will arguing that it's caused by material forces) you're placing it in a different "plane".
That's hardly an unheard-of position, there are many thinkers that fall for this.
That's strange, hard determinists are eliminativists, and eliminativists don't believe in consciousness, but I never saw them speaking about both at the same time.
In case you don't get it: you don't get to set the discussion terms. You can argue all you want yourself, but my point is already made. If you want a list, search for "hard incopatibilism" or "hard determinism" and you get it.
Still never unlocked the mysteries of those TSR programs though.
I made a bunch of those, in TurboPascal. Just needed to save registers (including stack and heap segments) and hook some key combination. One of them was used commercially for installations by a very big company.
Testing was a little prone to spectacular failures. But once the general procedure was debugged, it was easy as pie.
What seems to me is the ads seem less staged and processed than current ones. They're wilder and not as softened as every media are now.
As for people pointing at lifespans for the healthy part, how much of the change is systemic use of anticoagulants? And of course less tobacco, but I wouldn't rush to say people are in much better shape now.
That's the main reason. Also marine archeology is expensive. I once heard an archeologist saying that if the rests have passed centuries underwater, one more is less harmful than looters.
Underwater sites are particularly harder to protect from looters than above / underground sites. If the stakes are high enough, scuba diving is a reasonable option for the criminally minded.
It wasn’t long before Costa Concordia was looted for its treasures.
Passengers possessions - e.g. jewelry, watches. Technical equipment on the ship. Items from the on-ship shops. Interesting artefacts (ships bells are often a prized loot from wrecks).
Some applications that we use in smartphones are very useful, like the alarm clock. I have begrudgingly adapted to their quirks and privacy implications. I'd rather program my own versions, same for smartwatches.
Alarms I can understand, but that's been a feature of standard watches almost since they were invented I think. I'm looking for something that requires a programmable device to be meaningful and so far the ideas are fairly thin on the ground :-) I get the techy appeal though, and agree wholeheartedly about the value of having total control over a device if possible.
In case you're still reading... standard watches alarms are useless to me. Even regular alarm clocks were not very effective for my kinda morning sleepwalking.
Smartwatches are a godsend: I can set multiple alarms with chosen intervals, volume and ringtones, that never stop and place the phone easily at the right distance.
I could even improve on that and the same could be said of most phone apps. Recording and positioning are the most interesting features if they can be decoupled from big brother's eyes.
I glanced at this question at work, now reading it to find interesting ideas, but also want to share something: six months ago I bought a motorcycle. It was a no-brainer, commuting time is now half compared to the subway and after decades it's invigorating to be back to two wheels, not only physically but also mentally.
Maybe not very niche, but you'll quickly find there are many sub-cultures around biking (some of them very friendly) and an endless variety of interesting tech: engines, suspensions, electronics, injection mapping, IMUs, gear materials, GPS... routing is its own rabbit hole.
It's not necessarily very expensive. A middleweight bike that will take you everywhere can be bought for less than 10k. Add a grand more for gear and insurance.
Maybe it's harder than it seems. Does a definite galactic plane even exist? The ecliptic is defined by Earth's orbit, not a mean of all the planets. IIRC Sun's rotation plane is not aligned, not should it matter.
If there's a way to measure galactic plane, independently of Sun's orbit around the galaxy center (that also seems difficult to determine) it would involve measuring positions and trajectories of many very distant objects.
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