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[Descan]

well that is the whole point of Musk's Gigafactory, so...

which is an absolutely fucking massive factory just for producing car batteries that let a car drive 335 miles. (a car that isnt exactly cheap)

you want to use those to smooth out the power needs of the entire world?

last i heard it was for all his batteries, including the residential and commercial batteries

[Max™]

I was trying to figure out how to reconcile some of the many-worlds interpretations of quantum mechanics, where each possible outcome of an event coexists with the 4-D shape of the universe, so the phase space of a 4-D universe would be... hell this is another region where language is not built to handle it, mathematics though?

Though now I've got the idea in my head of taking the 4-D point > sphere rotation to produce the cone-hat-ball universe and expanding it to fill a 5-D shape, but besides blooming them all out of the same point I can't figure out how to do the full rotation along the new axis, and can't figure out what it would represent in a physical sense... but I guess you could handwave it into something like the layman "alternate universe" idea, but either every cone-hat-ball slice is the same, or they're randomized from the point, hmmmm... I guess overlapping parts of the (x, y, z) slices along the t axis is fine, so I don't really know why I shouldn't be looking at overlapping the (x, y, z, t) volumes along the w axis.

If it was a smooth continuum then the volumes most similar to our own being found adjacent to our own volume would be a clean result.

Hmmm. I must ponder this out more.

You're rotating the unit ball. It's rotationally invariant no matter how many dimensions you're dealing with. Unless I've misunderstood exactly what you're trying to do here.

I was thinking more of something like a 5-D cone, but I keep coming back to it suggesting a big-bounce type of scenario, and then somehow I wound up reading a pdf on how to crochet hyperbolic planes.

[Dozebôm Lolumzalìs]

So just to make sure, a 0-sphere is a point, a 1-sphere is... a line?

[Dozebôm Lolumzalìs]

But a point is 0-dimensional. Shouldn't a circle be a 2-sphere, because it is 2-dimensional? Where's the logic?

Wait, no it wouldn't be a line, it would be two points.

Edit: Ah, I get it. A 0-sphere is two points. It's the boundary of a 1-ball.

[Dozebôm Lolumzalìs]

Sounds awesome.

[Eric Blank]

Thank god its not just me then! I'm already mathed out today

Oh, I do recall at one point someone was going to test that cute microwave engine thing in orbit. Has that happened yet?

[Max™]

Yeah, I was doing pretty good, and then my brain went all "Barbarians of Gor" over a plan with the missus and I got zero thinking done above the waist.

[Sergarr]

PULLMAN, Wash. – Washington State University biologist Mechthild Tegeder has developed a way to dramatically increase the yield and quality of soybeans.

Her greenhouse-grown soybean plants fix twice as much nitrogen from the atmosphere as their natural counterparts, grow larger and produce up to 36 percent more seeds.

Tegeder designed a novel way to increase the flow of nitrogen, an essential nutrient, from specialized bacteria in soybean root nodules to the seed-producing organs. She and Amanda Carter, a biological sciences graduate student, found the increased rate of nitrogen transport kicked the plants into overdrive.

Their work, published recently in Current Biology, is a major breakthrough in the science of improving crop yields. It could eventually help address society’s critical challenge of feeding a growing human population while protecting the environment.

Who was saying here that we need to start reducing world population ASAP or we'll all starve, again?

[Putnam]

brb putting on WSU shirt

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Because that's what we need, ever increasing intense monocultures, making all our food out of soybeans and locust in order to efficiently support an endlessly boondoggling population to pander to the child frenzy of suburbanites and religious fanatics alongside the growth model of debt economy as we only weaken the overall structure of human civilization.

These windfalls? They're not free. They've all come with severe risks. This only encourages more monoculturing. Do you have any idea what would happen if a corn blight we couldn't contain mutated and spread, even for just one year? Or worse, a rice blight? It could happen tomorrow. Every single day we rely on an at-risk base is a day it could start to come crashing down on top of us.

You are not going to beat nature. We can live in harmony with the rest of the world or not, but make no mistake, we cannot go toe to toe and survive in a desirable way. We're about as close to that level of understanding and technological aptitude as the Romans were from artificial intelligence.

[Max™]

I'm curious how old you are, MSH, if you don't mind my asking. I don't think it will explain the weird apocalyptic bend or anything, just curious if it's a young guy who's passionate about this, or an old man ranting or what.

I mean, you take things which could sound reasonable, but then go a few extra steps into "YOU MANIACS, DAMN YOU, DAMN YOU ALL TO HELL!" territory.

I mean, you're talking about setting up monocultures and monocrops, the US has about 1.4 million km² of arable land in use, with tons of different crops across it all.

It also has around 130,000 km² of land devoted to a specific type of crop.

See if you can guess which one, corn maybe, wheat, ooh, tobacco might be it!

Got your guess in mind?

Spoiler: Click to see if you figured it out. (click to show/hide)

It's grass, our lawns, bluegrasses, zoysias, bentgrass, bermuda, st. augustine, they're all present in various amounts, given water, fertilizer, regular mowing, manual weeding, pesticide, and of course... donations from dogs.

Indeed, they're actually helpful in reducing the urban heat island effect, and draw down a good amount of carbon dioxide, anywhere from 12~35 Gigatonnes of CO2 per year conservatively and wipe out the 1 or 2 Gigatonnes of CO2 we exhale along with most or all the ~33+ Gigatonnes of CO2 we emit. They also take a fuckton of water, lots of which winds up as runoff.

So hey, there are things to get mad about, really the whole "let's use ethanol to reduce CO2 emissions" turning into "LET'S GROW ALL THE CORN FOR ETHANOL" is kinda crazy, and naturally monocropping is a problem, just not sure if it's quite in the "goddamn it fuck it all you stupid bastards deserve to die" sort of territory you make it sound like.

[Gentlefish]

PULLMAN, Wash. – Washington State University biologist Mechthild Tegeder has developed a way to dramatically increase the yield and quality of soybeans.

Her greenhouse-grown soybean plants fix twice as much nitrogen from the atmosphere as their natural counterparts, grow larger and produce up to 36 percent more seeds.

Tegeder designed a novel way to increase the flow of nitrogen, an essential nutrient, from specialized bacteria in soybean root nodules to the seed-producing organs. She and Amanda Carter, a biological sciences graduate student, found the increased rate of nitrogen transport kicked the plants into overdrive.

Their work, published recently in Current Biology, is a major breakthrough in the science of improving crop yields. It could eventually help address society’s critical challenge of feeding a growing human population while protecting the environment.

Who was saying here that we need to start reducing world population ASAP or we'll all starve, again?

Sweet, that's literally across the state line for me. Wonder if the U of I helped in that research; we have our own food sciences labs, too.

[Reelya]

We can make more people and not starve, that's not an issue. There are many other problems associated with having too many people however. Making more food doesn't help with those.

[scrdest]

So long as it doesn't open up a vulnerability, couldn't you just shove that gene sequence into any old cultivar and bypass the whole 'super monoculture' thing?

From the looks of it, it works in a different way. It's a purely regulatory modification by the way it's worded. So it would only work on plants that use the same kind of pathway to transport nitrogen, and it would be limited to plants with rhizobia.

[Bumber]

It also has around 130,000 km² of land devoted to a specific type of crop.

See if you can guess which one, corn maybe, wheat, ooh, tobacco might be it!

Got your guess in mind?

Spoiler: Click to see if you figured it out. (click to show/hide)

It's grass, our lawns, bluegrasses, zoysias, bentgrass, bermuda, st. augustine, they're all present in various amounts, given water, fertilizer, regular mowing, manual weeding, pesticide, and of course... donations from dogs.

Indeed, they're actually helpful in reducing the urban heat island effect, and draw down a good amount of carbon dioxide, anywhere from 12~35 Gigatonnes of CO2 per year conservatively and wipe out the 1 or 2 Gigatonnes of CO2 we exhale along with most or all the ~33+ Gigatonnes of CO2 we emit. They also take a fuckton of water, lots of which winds up as runoff.

Objection! Not a crop.