Lol, thought from the thumbnail it was a clover leaf that color.

What a dumpster fire. That series is like the last two (okay, maybe just the last one) Star Wars movies.

I take that back. The intro scene (I think intro?) of Pike was good.

Those nacelle struts are pretty large, that’s not an issue. I have always wondered what the point of the design was, but getting to the secondary isn’t a problem. They aren’t going through the nacelle.

But 17, probably not.

I get why it’s better in so many ways. But for the topic of this particular post, it could have made things worse. As in a return trip soon after once you get moving. Whereas physically disturbing things sometimes encourages completion.

Part of good website design back then was to set up the webpage so it shows the structure first, then fills in over the rest of the time, and also why interlacing was used a lot for images, so you could see the image gradually form over the load time vs. top to bottom or nothing at all until the end.

If you’re really old enough, you remember being able to read the BBS text as it came in.

And then the opposite, atoms are mainly empty space too. As Sagan said, matter is composed chiefly of nothing. But also as Feynman pointed out, when we feel something, like the arm of the chair that our hand can’t go through, that’s not actually matter touching, but the forces within resisting each other.

Reality in both directions gets weird if you start looking at it, and yes, we can understand the concept of scale, but to really “see” it is not possible.

Epic Spaceman did a video talking about the scale of the galaxy, and it’s stuck in my mind since then. If the galaxy was the size of the US, our solar system would be just outside of Denver, and it would be the size of a thumbprint (the SOLAR SYSTEM). And even that requires you to grasp the true size of the US from coast to coast, which is itself difficult even knowing the distance.

Yes, the wiki had a quote from an art museum that I suppose had showed the photo, saying “The spectacle of consumerism appears composed in an organized, rigorous, formal fashion. The presented image is hyperreal. While it is rooted in reality, it is somehow more than real; it is familiar and yet there is no physical space quite like it. By portraying such heightened constructions of our shared existence — from the dollar store to the soccer field to the sprawling cityscape — Gursky’s photographs act as symbols of contemporary life.”

I don’t know if the colors are enhanced in any way, which would then make it hyperreal. They seem to be what you’d see normally, just all at once.

Technically you might be right. Normally the 10^80 atoms is referred to as amount of atoms in the known universe, but that’s calculated by known galaxies, and we know of structures larger, as well as speculate if there’s an edge at all. But still, the jump from 10^80 to 10^120 is a lot.

I don’t know if I could call it hyperrealistic, as the colors are the colors. Maybe the aspect of seeing it all at one time vs. at ground level in the aisle is the overload. But it’s the same message that parts of the film Koyaanisqatsi showed, consumerism at scale is out of control. I had a science teacher in high school get a copy of that movie after it came out and show it to us, and so many scenes of everyday things, but shown differently, in their entirety, really made me wonder wtf. I don’t think it hit many of the others the same way, but I got the point.

Obviously you don’t know much about velociraptors.

The north polar area is where Arrakeen and other settlements are. They are the more pleasant areas, they only have to close up during the hotter parts of the day.

The equator is where the constant sand storms occur that are “impassable”. One thing I didn’t realize, Arrakis isn’t large, it’s about the size of the Moon, but more dense, so the gravity is about 0.9 of Earth.

That’s just a matter of circumstance. How many of them would stay that way if you knew them?

I usually don’t have a problem with persons individually. But as a herd animal, people suck.

Where does this scene rank on the list of most paused moments in the series?

As have many others, since it’s a close and similar star to the Sun. Andy Weir said the main reason for using it was to have similar stars close enough to each other to make the spread believable.

Anarchy, avoiding the conditions.

The why of mass is “just” more material within the same unit area.

What always gets me is how adding one more of the pieces of matter, specifically another proton, changes the very properties of that atom, sometimes dramatically.

There’s been a few videos on Youtube lately discussing using a particular Qwen model that lets you load only particular expert sections at a time onto the GPU and the rest in RAM. This one was the first I watched (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8F_5pdcD3HY), I haven’t tried it, but it makes sense on why it would work.

There are different levels of AI books, and websites like BN and Amazon ask on their submission what specifically was done by or assisted by AI to get a read on what authors are doing. Full AI written based on a bunch of prompts gets garbage, I agree there, and it’s also the easy route so the market is being flooded, especially the low effort ones, since that’s far easier to do than actual prose from AI. But AI can also have a subtle aid to an actual writer. I realize some people are dead set on zero AI, period, and I understand the reasons. It sucks we’ve gotten to this point where some incredible things can be done, and yet so much as been ruined by that progress too, when it could have been done better and more honestly.

I’ve used AI for coming up with assets for the cover, then using Gimp to add, modify, and make the final product. The books were done mainly to see if I could put them together and was fun to do. The hard part is actually selling any, it’s a nightmare for the same reason, oversaturation.

I will say that BN’s website sucks big time. I thought Amazon’s was flaky but figured it out, but I’m surprised I ever got books onto BN as much as it hangs, and I haven’t been able to get onto my account in a while to even see how the books are doing there, but I doubt I’ve sold any because I haven’t seen evidence, and I question who goes there now to buy a book.

Fix your website!

Oh, and they also just raised the minimum print price to like $14.99, so no cheap books, and if you have a low cost book there, no one is going to buy it now for those prices. Brilliant.

Clicking on newer revision lets you walk through time.