identicaltomyself

[identicaltomyself]

Scurvy.

Different armies and different cultures will meet that nutritional demand in different ways, but staple grains (wheat, barley, corn, rice) dominate rations in part because they also dominated the diet of the peasantry (being the highest calories-per-acre-farmed-and-labor-added foods) and because they were easy to move and store.  Fruits and vegetables were, by contrast, always subject to local availability, since without refrigeration they were difficult to keep or move; meat at least could be smoked, salted or made into jerky, but its expense made it an optional bonus to the diet rather than the core of it. So the diet here is mostly bread; many armies reliant on wheat and barley agriculture came up with a fairly similar idea here: a dense but simple flour-and-water (and maybe salt) biscuit or cracker which if kept dry could keep for long periods and be easy to move

fucks me up every time im reminded that premodern armies were mostly living off bread. i feel like if i just ate bread i would start feeling very sick very quickly. however, he mentions later

Spartan rations on Sphacteria were 2 choenikes of barley alphita (a course barley flour) per man per day (Thuc. 4.16.1) which comes out to roughly 1.4kg

rough calculation says this is something on the order of 150g of protein a day, which is pretty high! it also says its 5000 calories though, which is insane. if we assume its more on the order of half that (worse barley? or something?) that's still like 75g of protein a day, which is pretty solid. why dont we all just live off barley flour + water + salt

[identicaltomyself]

You’ve got a point. I withdraw my ‘dividual’ claim.

Here’s another issue: the natural size of individual companies is very variable in different industries. The smallest reasonably efficient freight railroad or power plant is a billion dollars in capital, that can profit many tens of millions per year, while providing vital services to society. On the other hand, that level of income would describe a giant chain of restaurants, of the sort that your tax is designed to discourage. So do we tax companies of that size high or low?

why not have a progressive corporate tax?

[identicaltomyself]

Because then a profitable company could split and reduce its tax rate, shout really changing anything. With the stroke of a pen, McDonalds could split into thousands of companies, one for each store, each much less profitable. We can tax individuals progressively, but companies are dividuals.

why not have a progressive corporate tax?

[identicaltomyself]

The gravitational attraction on both you and the water would be reduced by the same fraction, so you would float at the same depth. But the force per displacement would be less. That’s “less bouyant” in my book, but sensible people may disagree.

Kind of want to go for a swim above the Mariana Trench. Would be a weird feeling knowing that there’s 7 miles of water beneath you I think

[identicaltomyself]

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B809-810, transl. Marcus Weigelt

#immanuel kant #I am an Immanuel kant fanboy

[identicaltomyself]

Thank you for your understanding. Yes, all the engineers agreed that the “beat with a stick” approach was appropriate, but management felt that since they were paying us money, it was best to provide them with goods and services.

I guess my ideal database is strongly typed, append-only, referentially transparent, any given query is only ever executed once, views are just functions,

[identicaltomyself]

Yep.

The mass was quite dense and unyielding to a drill mounted on a remote-controlled trolley, but able to be damaged by a Kalashnikov rifle (AK-47) using armor piercing rounds.[4][1][2]

[identicaltomyself]

#the reason why Lenin had so much clout was that he kept being right about things

It’s an intellectual’s dream! “Someday they’ll recognize how right I am about things and make me dictator!”

Listening to Revolutions’ Russian series has really left me with the conclusions that

1- The idea that Lenin was, like, the sinister mastermind ruling the Bolsheviks pre-revolution is just kind of an anti-communist fantasy, guy got ignored and out-voted all the time.

2- It was probably not great for the development of politics in the Soviet Union that like 9 times in 10 everyone had to eventually come back and admit Lenin was right all along after whatever else was tried blew up in their face.

[identicaltomyself]

I know that. I went to the right Wikipedia article this comes from, so I know what it is. It just reminded me a lot of oul’s egg.

The mass was quite dense and unyielding to a drill mounted on a remote-controlled trolley, but able to be damaged by a Kalashnikov rifle (AK-47) using armor piercing rounds.[4][1][2]

[identicaltomyself]

Each cell makes a particular antibody protein. There are regions of the antibody that are randomly chosen from a list of possibilities, and then there are short regions that just generate an amino acid sequence completely at random. If they don’t stick to anything in the thymus they get to survive. (The thymus is essentially a museum of every protein in every tissue in your body.). Then if they stick to an invading organism they reproduce like mad.

The antibodies in your blood are made by just a few genes, but immune cells mutate their own copy of the gene, producing the diversity of antibodies. Mostly your body is trying to stay as close as possible to an inherited genome but in the immune system there's innovation.

Uh, something something adversarial environments blah blah intelligence

[identicaltomyself]

Is there atomic transactions?

Presumably query results are returned as iterators? How do you consistent results if someone accesses an iterator slowly while someone else is furiously adding records?

Do you provide atomicity over multiple transactions?

If you implement dates, declare that they must be of a certain format. My employer thought it was a good idea to support customer-defined date and time formats and it turned into an unending nightmare. I had a scheme to store dates as a eight byte floating point number indicating the number of seconds since the turn of the millennium. I figured that gave you microsecond precision until the year 3000, and decreasing precision until the heat death of the universe. It wasn’t enough. A customer defined special semantics for various times just before midnight on 31 December in the year 9999 AD, and insisted that we provide perfectly accurate time semantics over them. We had to switch to an number of nanoseconds since 2000, represented as a 128-bit long integer.

Plus you have to be an expert on leap seconds.

Better to just avoid dates and times.

I guess my ideal database is strongly typed, append-only, referentially transparent, any given query is only ever executed once, views are just functions,

[identicaltomyself]

The mass was quite dense and unyielding to a drill mounted on a remote-controlled trolley, but able to be damaged by a Kalashnikov rifle (AK-47) using armor piercing rounds.[4][1][2]

#is it weird that I knew exactly what object this is #oul’s egg

[identicaltomyself]

The orbital periods of three large moons are in a 1:2:4 resonance, which is probably what you’re thinking of. But the rotational periods of those moons are equal to their orbital periods so they always keep one face toward Jupiter.

It’s surprising that no moons are in a 3:2 rotation lock like Mercury. Our moon is probably far enough away to be feasible for some other ratio to be stable. But it used to be a lot closer, with much stronger tidal forces, and it got stuck in the 1:1 ratio. It’s been that way ever since.

Wonder how lunar-related mythology would be different if the Moon wasn’t tidally locked to the Earth.

#planetary science #i explain stuff

[identicaltomyself]

Well, they know that brain damage from hypothermic anesthesia starts after forty minutes of no circulation. Presumably to establish that, they had to inquire closely into the people whose brains were stopped for shorter periods. And they didn’t find anything.

So apparently the ongoing stream of activity that is the human mind can re-establish itself from zero activity. The homeostatic mechanisms are very strong.

i really like the conception of the mind in exhalation (ted chiang) as not just an object in the form of the brain, but also the irretrievable pattern running through that object, that if you evened out all the action potentials and chemical gradients and then gave it a jump start even tho the structure is still there, something (everything?) would be lost. i dont think we know how much of memory/personality/etc is stored in the pattern cascade and how much is in physical structure but the pattern cascade is a very beautiful image, the idea of the mind as a sort of unlikely (in the space of excitations) self-reinforcing excitation-pattern. especially when im experiencing modified cognition from a non-chemical source, like, it makes me ponder what structural change is going on with the pattern dance

#the mystery of the brain

[identicaltomyself]

Tells you when to set the alarm for an hour earlier because it’s going to be a day for walking to work instead of driving.

I never pay attention to the weather forecast

The fuck imma do, not have weather?

[identicaltomyself]

There’s a plane formed by the location of the starting planet at the start, the location of the ending planet at arrival, and the relative velocity vector of the two planets. You want to depart in this plane to be in a minimum velocity trajectory. It’s usually within a few degrees of the equator. If you’re launching far from the equator, you have to compromise between your launch inclination and the ideal plane for transit.

When sending a spacecraft from Earth orbit to another body like the Moon or Mars, is it better to be as close to an equatorial orbit as possible? Or does it not really matter?

#space #astrogation #celestial mechanics

[identicaltomyself]

Liberalism is the half-assed compromise between everybody and everyone else.

i dont think I understand what liberalism is