Random Question of the Day
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Plus, you can never know when the 23 % will hit.
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@Zecc said in Random Question of the Day:
Plus, you can never know when the 23 % will hit.
Random question of the Day: is roulette made more or less fun depending on the result probability of non-success?
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@Tsaukpaetra said in Random Question of the Day:
@Zecc said in Random Question of the Day:
Plus, you can never know when the 23 % will hit.
Random question of the Day: is roulette made more or less fun depending on the result probability of non-success?
Roulette is made marginally more fun, compared to other casino games, by the variety of bets you can make: colors, odd/even, high/low, rows, columns, corners, five- and six-number bets....
Only game even in the same category of diversity is craps.
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@da-Doctah said in Random Question of the Day:
Only game even in the same category of diversity is craps.
No, that's a crappy game.
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@HardwareGeek said in Random Question of the Day:
@da-Doctah said in Random Question of the Day:
Only game even in the same category of diversity is craps.
No, that's a crappy game.
Then pass. Don't come. Maybe it's just not your field; that's only natural.
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@HardwareGeek said in Random Question of the Day:
Constant speed drive
Abbreviated CSD - tell that the
people 
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@jinpa said in Random Question of the Day:
Are Latinos a race, or just an ethnic group?
Are Hispanics a race or just an ethnic group?
this is a weird concept, we have all races in latin america and we're all latinos in the US definition if I understand it
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@sockpuppet7 said in Random Question of the Day:
the US definition if I understand it
Here's your mistake. Don't even try to understand it. This would be like trying to learn programming by reading NodeJS code.
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@boomzilla said in Random Question of the Day:
Certainly calls into question the gingerbread house from the Hansel and Gretel story.
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@boomzilla said in Random Question of the Day:
What if one of the construction workers who built your house was big into cheese sandwiches for lunch?
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Then there's probably a cheese sandwich wrapper embedded in one of the walls.
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@PleegWat said in Random Question of the Day:
What if one of the construction workers who built your house was big into cheese sandwiches for lunch?
Only matters if he is part of the foundations.
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@Zerosquare said in Random Question of the Day:
Then there's probably a cheese sandwich wrapper embedded in one of the walls.
And that would be a good thing.
Oh, wait!
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To what extent is people's avoidance of giving straight answers to straight questions a function of fearing that the other person will get credit for their knowledge? (AKA information hoarding)
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That's very context-dependent, isn't it?
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@jinpa No. I just tend to see more nuance than average. The more vague I think your question, the more complex the answer I provide has to be to provide you with the information you need to take an actually informed decision based on the answer.
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@Zerosquare said in Random Question of the Day:
That's very context-dependent, isn't it?
I’m generally very vague because it makes it sound like I don’t know anything so I’m less likely to get more work to do.
.
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.I can feel @HardwareGeek lining up a quip.
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@dkf I have not had to ask you a work question, but what I'm referring is the frequent occurrence where the response has nothing to do with my question and the respondent does not ask clarificatory questions to try to understand the question.
For example, suppose I am working on Task X, and I have a very precise question. The response I get would have been appropriate if my question had been, "Help me with Task X!! I am completely helpless on Task X!!" rather than a precise question.
I also give less background information when asking a question than I used to because I have found how easy it is for simple minds to get distracted by the background information rather than focus on the actual question. If I keep the question simple, it becomes obvious more quickly whether they are able to focus their minds on the actual question.
Sometimes I do ask open-ended questions (like most of those I post here), but sometimes I have precise questions. The wording of my question generally distinguishes between the two.
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@jinpa I used to get called upon to give presentations to random groups of people at my job. Such topics as "the new data-entry tool for bookkeeping statements". I learned early on to push back a bit before setting up the talk: "what's the area and level of expertise of the people I'm going to be addressing?" because you tell worker bees different things than you tell the people who flew from 400 miles away because only managers and above get to travel (and will then have to relay what little they absorb and actually understand of the step-by-step to their own underlings when they get back). Or find out if they're expecting a monolithic data dump, or am I to give them opportunities to ask questions along the way so I know if I'm leaving out background I didn't know was important.
The problem is that if you're a true novice, you don't even know what questions to ask at first, which was the original point of the "For Dummies" books.
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@da-Doctah said in Random Question of the Day:
which was the original point of the "For Dummies" books.
A concept I found hilarious when I found "Windows 95 Registry For Dummies" was a real book with real actual documentation in it about the Registry and its workings.
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@Arantor said in Random Question of the Day:
@da-Doctah said in Random Question of the Day:
which was the original point of the "For Dummies" books.
A concept I found hilarious when I found "Windows 95 Registry For Dummies" was a real book with real actual documentation in it about the Registry and its workings.
The real one that tickled me was "Microsoft Works for Dummies". Especially since a lot of the jokes I create involve rearranging word order.
When they got beyond IT and started doing things like "Chess for Dummies" and "Card Tricks for Dummies", I started watching, but I never did see one called "Ventriloquism for Dummies".
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@da-Doctah "Welding for Dummies"
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@accalia "Fucking for dummies"
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@accalia said in Random Question of the Day:
@da-Doctah "Welding for Dummies"
Still looking for "Brain Surgery for Dummies".
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Random Question of the Day: Does Alien pass the Bechdel test?
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@da-Doctah said in Random Question of the Day:
Random Question of the Day: Does Alien pass the Bechdel test?
Yes. Lambert is alive for most of the movie, and she and Ripley certainly talk about things other than men.
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@HardwareGeek I was thinking more about Ripley and the Xenomorph, which has been established as female.
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@da-Doctah But the xenomorph isn't named.
Wasn't Alien the original benchmark for passing the Bechdel test?
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@da-Doctah said in Random Question of the Day:
Ripley and the Xenomorph
I haven't seen the movie, but does it actually talk? If so, I'm going to get the Harkness test going.... 😏
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@Tsaukpaetra said in Random Question of the Day:
@da-Doctah said in Random Question of the Day:
Ripley and the Xenomorph
I haven't seen the movie, but does it actually talk? If so, I'm going to get the Harkness test going.... 😏
Cue the Doctor just warning you to stop it, Harkness saying he was just saying hello, and the Doctor suggesting that “for you, that’s flirting”.
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@Arantor said in Random Question of the Day:
@Tsaukpaetra said in Random Question of the Day:
@da-Doctah said in Random Question of the Day:
Ripley and the Xenomorph
I haven't seen the movie, but does it actually talk? If so, I'm going to get the Harkness test going.... 😏
Cue the Doctor just warning you to stop it, Harkness saying he was just saying hello, and the Doctor suggesting that “for you, that’s flirting”.
Our mutant babies will fuck the galaxy!
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If you were suddenly sent back in time to before the 18th century, and for some reason decided to use our current units of measure (rather than pick whatever references are available at the time), how would you/could you do it?
Assuming you somehow know/remember all the required conversion factors, the 7 SI base units are all you need. Out of those, 4 are not really relevant until you get to at least 19th century level science. So you're down to m/kg/s.
As a first approximation, you can fall back on some of the historical definitions or some basic experiments to link them e.g. the s as the period of a pendulum, the kg as the mass of 1 dm^3 of water. But you still need one fully external/arbitrary definition.
Historically the metre was defined from the earth's circumference, and the second from the length of the day so you could use those (the kilogram originally was defined as a reference to another unit which is amusing as it ended up being the last unit to actually use an arbitrary physical object as reference!). But both of those definitions are fairly hard to translate in practical terms without some at least 18th century technology (e.g. accurate watches...).
So, is there any other vaguely acceptable way to get a substitute definition?
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@remi The length of the day could most certainly be measured using technology available thousands of years ago. You just wouldn't necessarily pick a second specifically.
Determining when to start and stop counting can be done by observation of shadows cast by the sun or by astronomical observations (but they give different day lengths) both of which have been practical things for longer than the water clock has existed.
Determining the metre is harder because it requires triangulation and a level of accuracy you won't really get before the 18th century, as you need to deploy fairly sophisticated instruments (for the time) on top of various mountains. Also, the measure of the metre isn't exactly one millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the Equator along the Paris meridian. There were errors in the triangulation.
Determining a temperature scale is straight-forward. Making the glassware for a thermometer, again, it requires a certain level of skill at glassware manufacture.
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@remi Since I've stopped growing (taller, at any rate), I've known how long 1 meter is . Considering that spine compresses during the day and such, it's not very precise, but would be a good start.
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@dkf Water clock or similar to get a divisible measure of day would probably work, yes. Good thinking. Of course you're limited to the accuracy intrinsic to "1 s = 1/86400 day" which we know is wrong, but that's obviously going to be the case anyway.
Length can be derived from time with e.g. a pendulum, so that would be enough. The meridian is definitely not the right way to go, and I think the fact that historically this was very quickly abandoned is a good hint of that.
Temperature is indeed not-too-hard, though my thinking is that if you're reinventing modern science/engineering, you can go quite far without being able to accurately measure temperature -- not that temperature doesn't matter in a lot of things (it does!), but that being able to measure it precisely is probably not the first thing you'd need. It's a toss to me whether you'd need mol/K/A first (cd is definitely last). I guess it would depend on which branch of the tech tree you're going for.
@Applied-Mediocrity I guess that would work as well, yes. But that's sort of cheating (well, it's not like I laid out detailed rules...) in that you're using an object that you managed to transport with you, which is what I was trying to exclude by mentioning the time-travel. But points for lateral thinking, definitely.
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@remi said in Random Question of the Day:
Length can be derived from time with e.g. a pendulum, so that would be enough. The meridian is definitely not the right way to go, and I think the fact that historically this was very quickly abandoned is a good hint of that.
Sure, but was the original wrong definition. Before that, you had various sorts of length measures; metrication long predates the metre. In some ways, for much of recorded history your problem will be persuading people why they shouldn't just use the size of the appropriate body part of the local monarch... (
)Temperature is indeed not-too-hard, though my thinking is that if you're reinventing modern science/engineering, you can go quite far without being able to accurately measure temperature -- not that temperature doesn't matter in a lot of things (it does!), but that being able to measure it precisely is probably not the first thing you'd need. It's a toss to me whether you'd need mol/K/A first (cd is definitely last). I guess it would depend on which branch of the tech tree you're going for.
K or A first out of those three, but probably K since then you have the ideal gas laws and thermodynamics and that will make manufacturing easier by far. Moles are... well, you can largely ignore them and just use ordinary weight/mass. Having the concept of the periodic table will be more useful than the concept of moles.
With apologies to the little gentlemen in black velvet.
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@dkf said in Random Question of the Day:
Sure, but was the original wrong definition. Before that, you had various sorts of length measures; metrication long predates the metre. In some ways, for much of recorded history your problem will be persuading people why they shouldn't just use the size of the appropriate body part of the local monarch... (
)In practice, yes, you could reinvent science with just any set of reference units, the important part is to have clearly defined "universal" units. If you don't pick the SI ones, all that will change is the value of the constants (e.g. g) but if you've managed to recreate enough science to get to the point where you bother about this, you probably have enough science to easily measure their values in your chosen units.
My initial question was based on some long stream-of-consciousness daydreaming about some sort of "fictions usually assume the person sent back in time has an almost perfect memory, I wouldn't be able to remember half of the sciency things" and then "what if you happened to have some sort of encyclopedia with you" continuing on "conversion factors for everything would be annoying" and "how could you even compute those factors without having our own units" which led to the question.
K or A first out of those three, but probably K since then you have the ideal gas laws and thermodynamics and that will make manufacturing easier by far.
Arguably A would open the whole field of electricity which is a major thing in our lives. But kind of like K where a lot of things depend on temperature but not necessarily being able to very accurately measure it, you might be able to do quite a lot of electrical stuff without being able to accurately measure intensity (or voltage, resistance etc. which are all derived from there).
Definitely not accurate stuff and fiddly things like electronics, but there's tons you can do with electricity before getting there. Just light bulbs/heating/small motors are enough to revolutionise a pre-modern world, and basic versions don't require accurate measurements of intensity (just plug a bulb, if it's too dim you need "moar powa!").
So yeah, K or A first, I don't know.
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@remi said in Random Question of the Day:
if it's too dim you need "moar powa!"
More importantly, once it's getting bright, it probably needs "less powa!" or it will go pop. Late-era incandescent bulbs which did not need this adjustment require quite specific materials, including working tungsten and inert gases.
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@remi Getting steam power will definitely help with getting electric systems going. If nothing else, it will make the manufacture of wire easier (as well as being a convenient way to drive generators).
If you really want to bootstrap an industrial revolution early, the key things will be making high precision machine tools. Those were transformative in their day and could be done on a scale where watermills would be sufficient for motive power.
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@dkf I guess if we take history as a starting point (and that's the only data point that we have!), you're right on all counts. K (or C, or F, R...) was conceptualised, and defined, well before people even thought about A (though
André-Marie Ampère was born before William Thomson Kelvin but that's not really relevant). And the industrial revolution was started by many things but clearly high precision machining was one of the early drivers.But it's a fun (???) thought-experiment to try and imagine if things could go some other way if you cheat the "discover things" part by assuming you already know everything and just lack the actual physical objects to do it. I suspect we'd go for electrical stuff much earlier than historically. But then you need to manufacture wires, and motors, and various components (even without getting into electronics) and maybe you'd need to go into manufacturing first (like it happened historically). Or maybe not, after all. Maybe what you need first are more chemical processes to produce various materials.
I don't really know, nor care. But I lost time thinking about that, and now you do too.
There is an extremely high likelihood that this train of thoughts was bootstrapped by me re-reading Riverworld from PJ Farmer. Which btw would get a
(at least for the first book) if I bothered to post in that other thread.
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@remi said in Random Question of the Day:
you need to manufacture wires
Wires are pretty easy to make. Copper has been known and worked since antiquity. If you can drill small holes in some harder material — ideally steel, but iron or even bronze would do — you can draw wire. Practical insulation doesn't need advanced materials, either. Depending on the intended use, some can be insulated with braided fibers (e.g., cotton or linen). Where that would be too thick (e.g., motors or transformers), wires can be insulated with lacquer, shellac, or natural latex rubber. Some of these choices aren't ideal, but they can get you started until you can develop better materials.
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@remi said in Random Question of the Day:
I don't really know, nor care. But I lost time thinking about that, and now you do too.
Whatever you're doing, machine tools will be useful. Simple ones like a lathe don't take high tech to do, but getting tooling going is a key stage in any high-tech development as it will let you build systems to scale up. Without scale, you'll just be this crazy guy in his garden shed; with scale, you get to have many more guys and bigger sheds.
You might also need to "invent" steel manufacturing. Or even brass. And you will need microscopes, so knowledge of optics is also useful.
There is an extremely high likelihood that this train of thoughts was bootstrapped by me re-reading Riverworld from PJ Farmer. Which btw would get a
(at least for the first book) if I bothered to post in that other thread.Mysterious Island by J Verne is another inspiration for these sorts of things.
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@remi said in Random Question of the Day:
But it's a fun (???) thought-experiment to try and imagine if things could go some other way if you cheat the "discover things" part by assuming you already know everything and just lack the actual physical objects to do it. I suspect we'd go for electrical stuff much earlier than historically. But then you need to manufacture wires, and motors, and various components (even without getting into electronics) and maybe you'd need to go into manufacturing first (like it happened historically). Or maybe not, after all. Maybe what you need first are more chemical processes to produce various materials.
Now I'm thinking of L. Sprague de Camp's Lest Darkness Fall. A man visiting Rome in 1938 finds himself in Rome in 535. To make ends meet he decides to invent brandy: turns out there's quite a bit of industrial infrastructure needed to make brandy that wasn't that easy to come by in the 6th Century.
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@dkf said in Random Question of the Day:
Mysterious Island by J Verne is another inspiration for these sorts of things.
IIRC they "cheat" by having some stuff salvaged from the original shipwreck and/or "magically" delivered just-in-time later. Or maybe I'm confusing with l'École des Robinsons (uh, English title is apparently Godfrey Morgan?!?), I've got to admit it's been decades since I read either of those.
But yes, there are many such stories. Starting, of course, with Robinson Crusoe.
@Watson said in Random Question of the Day:
Rome in 535. To make ends meet he decides to invent brandy
Google seems unclear as to whether distillation was invented in the far past (2000 BC or earlier) or in the Middle Ages. In either cases, it seems clear that was for medicinal purposes initially, and all common distilled alcohols date from the Middle Ages or later.
TIL.
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@remi Distillation by boiling requires relatively complicated hardware. I expect freeze-distilling is older.
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@PleegWat since the blurb I could read on the search results (i.e. without bothering clicking on any link) put some of the oldest traces of distillation in the middle east, I don't think it was freeze-distilled. Though of course since those traces are likely archaeological (as opposed to written) traces, it's possible freeze-distillation wouldn't leave much trace.
ETA: well, I'm wrong (
) and the earliest evidence seems to be written rather than archaeological, according to wiki.But I'm not convinced you really need complicated hardware to do some crude form of distillation. I'm pretty sure you could achieve some results with just pottery vessels. Probably not much, which probably in part explains why it wasn't used for anything but extremely niche cases (alchemy, basically), but still...
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@PleegWat It mostly requires tubes, either in glassware or metal (copper, lead, etc.) I suppose it would work in ceramic too? Exactly how to arrange things depends on what you are distilling, but the other parts (simple boiler, bucket of water for cooling) are relatively simple to do and exist since prehistory. Tars and resins for sealing around the exit of the tube from the bottom of the cooling bucket have been available since forever; they occur naturally.
Doing it well requires thermometers. Inventing them is recommended.
Water clock - Wikipedia
