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[McTraveller]

Funny thing, that. There is meaningful research into using bombs to starve fires of their oxygen.

[Il Palazzo]

Firebomb the fire with extreme firefighting firepower!

[Frumple]

Funny thing, that. There is meaningful research into using bombs to starve fires of their oxygen.

Somewhat seriously, iirc it's not that difficult to just have a bomber drop anti-fire stuff instead of bombs. Repurposed WWII bombers and whatnot used to be the mainstay for aerial firefighting; mostly replaced with purpose built craft, these days, but the history of it's just about longer than living memory at this point.

[McTraveller]

I wonder what "shape" the quantization of space has.  Is space made of "packed cubes", or is it made of something like packed ellipsoids, with gaps in them where "nothing" can go?

That is, if space is quantized.  Angular momentum and energy and linear momentum are quantized... but are angle and position themselves quantized?

Is the "randomness" of QM somehow due to aliasing effects, where we are trying to measure things that are bumping on that spatial quantization, kind of like when you try to draw a straight line in pixels, it gets aliased unless you "partially" fill some of the cells.  So you can't actually measure it in one cell or another, but it's "bouncing" between two adjacent cells...

[pisskop]

Ive never thought of the 'shape' of space as anything more than a tool for conceptualizations

[King Zultan]

Nothing says firefighting like dropping a nuclear bomb on it to make you forget about the fire.

[Great Order]

When you get your jaw... reangled, for lack of a better way of putting it, during facial feminisation surgery what is it they're doing? Are they just removing massive chunks of jawbone?

[EuchreJack]

I would think they're also moving the jaw bone around.

Like most surgery, I assume there is a lot of discussion about the specifics between the doctor and the patient, and it varies based upon the needs of the patient.

[pisskop]

So you're driving on a relatively clear sunny day, windows down.

Ahead, a man is blowing dirt off the road into a cloud.  A truck is bellowing some black smoke from its stacks.  A lawnmower is kicking up some grass into a frenzy.

How far in distance do you drive before you roll down your window?

[hector13]

So you're driving on a relatively clear sunny day, windows down.

Ahead, a man is blowing dirt off the road into a cloud.  A truck is bellowing some black smoke from its stacks.  A lawnmower is kicking up some grass into a frenzy.

How far in distance do you drive before you roll down your window?

Trick question, you don’t measure how far you go as distance, you measure it as time.

At least that’s what happens in Wisconsin. I have seen billboards use time to say how far away a business is.

[King Zultan]

I live on a dirt road and I've come to realize that if you don't want dirt in the car you don't open the windows while you drive.

[Great Order]

Probably asked this one before, why do we measure internet speed in megabits when everything else is in megabytes?

[hector13]

1Mb/s is more marketable than 125kB/s.

[heydude6]

Probably asked this one before, why do we measure internet speed in megabits when everything else is in megabytes?

The real question you should be asking is why everything is being measured in megabytes, rather than in megabits. Bits are the purer measurement after all.

That answer btw, is that most microchip processors have architectures that are optimized to operate on chunks of data divided into multiples of 8 (ie. the byte). It takes your average processor just as much time to calculate 223 + 32 as it would to calculate 2 + 1, even though the latter is a much smaller pair of numbers, because in the machine code the calculations are: 11011111 + 00100000 and 00000010 + 00000001 respectively. The latter has a bunch of unnecessary leading zeros. As a result for most calculations only the bytes matter. Even 1-bit booleans can be converted to bytes in a compiler.

Network cables deliver their data as a stream of bits, so unlike the 8-bit, 16-bit, 32-bit, or 64-bit processors, that granularity actually does make a difference. When interfacing with traditional processors, we are forced to separate these bits into appropriately sized packets, but if you were operating a hypothetical machine with a 1-bit chip architecture (perhaps some kind of morse code telegram), then you would probably care more about megabits per second rather than megabytes per second.

[Great Order]

Anyone know a program that allows you to drag from one point on the screen to another, and it measures the distance?

Doesn't need to be in cm or anything, it's just that my dissertation requires me to measure some stuff, should have a scale next to it so I can translate from an arbitrary measurement to cm/mm. I just need to be able to measure and it's easier without me having to stick a ruler on my screen.