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[plzignr]

prince Humperdink also inhales the powder, stating "Iocane powder, I would bet my life on jt".

Humperdink is alive & well at the end of the film.

I think Wesley only tricking Vizzinni by putting poison in the class is also funnier, because the entire rant of deviding a man in half, is correct no matter what route Vizzin is stating.

The correct answer is Wesley is a man who both is intelligent and humble enough to recognize the risk of death, but strong enough (multiple times in fact) to overcome death

[plzignr]

fairy vs walrus results

Y'all on Tumblr are weird. Upon someone posting a poll to see if people would be more surprised to see a walrus show up at their door or a fairy, collectively tumblr decided they would be more surprised to see a walrus at their door. Which is insane to me, the general logic of the people responding is that the mental model of a walrus is more broken than the mental model of a fairy showing up at the door.

This to me, is utter silliness. While the walrus showing up on the door requires more improbable events to happen, it is still not impossible, but the fairy from what we know about reality, is.

In short, y'all are weird and I sincerely hope I can train these walruses fast enough for the sake of relevancy.

[plzignr]

smoky raspy voice as though he's been at 10 packs a day for the last 100 years.

Just like his creator, who should have had this thing enter into the public domain at the death of the creator at a bare minimum.

Mickey Mouse's entry into the public domain comes with significant caveats. While the Mickey Mouse who appears in Steamboat Willie (and other media published in 1928 or earlier) is free to use, there's established precedent that specific elements of a character which appear exclusively in later works which still fall under copyright may be protected, if sufficiently distinctive.

(This is the basis of, e.g., the infamous "Sherlock Holmes can't respect women" lawsuit: the Doyle estate, which at the time owned only a tiny handful of the latest-written stories, the others having already fallen into the public domain, argued that specific personality traits which Holmes exhibits only in those later stories are sufficiently distinctive as to be the valid subject of an infringement claim.)

With respect to various elements of Mickey's visual design, such as his red shorts and signature gloves, the matter is clear: just don't use those for another few years. However, there's another thing Mickey's public domain iterations don't exhibit: speech.

The present consensus among copyright scholars seems to be that "a character speaking" is not sufficiently distinctive as to qualify for protection, but the vocal characterisation with which Mickey Mouse is famously associated may so qualify. So, if you want to be scrupulously safe, you can have him talk, but not in that exact specific voice.

Which raises a fun question: what voice would you give him? Wrong answers only.

[plzignr]

An NPC for D&D, awakened mushrooms on top of animated stone. It is the druid circles arch druid

[plzignr]

how dare you make me feel things about an inanimate object.

Take my reblog while I go weep for poor Oppy

You are working the gate in the afterlife and for the first time ever, something the humans built has shown up to be processed. You’re not sure what to do, this… entity shouldn’t have a soul, but here it is in front of you, freshly dead and awaiting the next life.

[plzignr]

Ghosts & some silly math

I was out and about with people that I had met relatively recently, and while we were getting to know one another one of the topics that was discussed was whether or not I would spend a night in a haunted house, or a house where I knew someone had died.

I chuckled a bit and replied "Of course I would, it's free money". Everyone was rather shocked by this, and even more shocked when I expressed that I would likely do it for no money at all if it was somewhere that I would not normally have access to such as the Crypts or other normally exclusive locations they were shocked by response.

As it turned out, I was the only person in the group who was wholly committed to the premise that Ghosts are not real.

This is essentially how I told them any spooky sounds or creepy things that I might take to be as the restless spirits of the undead would go:

One person went so far as to claim that they had seen a ghost of their grandmother just after she had passed when he was a younger person. This made me wonder, what do people think the conversion rate from human to ghost is? Is it rare in people's mind to become a ghost? If it is... why would a person ever expect to see one? And if it isn't, well, then where are all the ghosts? Like logistically, similar to the fermi-paradox with regards to aliens, does this create a sort of phantasm-paradox? Should the world be inundated with ghosts? Should only a handful of people see them every century.

To get an estimate of how many people have ever died, we first need to know how many people have ever been born. Because, well if your born, you will one day eventually die, and then have the potential to be a haunting apparition tied to this mortal plane.

From this article posted on https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12288594/ it seems that a reasonable estimate is somewhere between 100 and 110 billion people have ever lived. (I found other sources that cited 115 billion, but given the estimates involved it's a reasonable discrepancy I'm just going to take the lower value to be conservative)

Taking the low end average to be 105 billion people that gives us that with the current (using 2021 census data) population size of roughly 8 billion it would mean that  about 7% of all humans are currently alive now, leaving the other 97 billion as potential spirits to haunt our mortal existence. 

Which via inverting to get meters squared per ghost tells us that assuming an equal distrubution of ghosts across the surface area of the Earth, we would need 5.56 million square meters or so for 1 ghost to be found.

This however is assuming that all of the people who had the potential to become a ghost had an equal chance to expire on land or at sea. Considering most people probably die on land since that's the terrain humans happened to evolve to live on, it's more likely that there would be a land ghost as opposed to sea ghost.

Unfortunately there's not really a good method for determining the way in which different people died in ancient times, pre-recorded times, and honestly anything that isn't recent times, so again for the sake of giving ghosts the best possible chance I'll be conservative and assume 92% of people died on land. Given that per this article https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/drowning#:~:text=In%202019%2C%20an%20estimated%20236,of%20all%20injury%2Drelated%20deaths drowning accounted for roughly 7% of accidental injury deaths in 2019, it would seem reasonable to assess that most people die on land, meaning most if not all of these ghosts should be land ghosts.

his means eliminating over 70 percent of the potential area where one might find a ghost (the surface of the sea) won't detract too terribly from the amount of potential ghosts. This changes the above calculation for the surface area of the earth from:

to just 30% of that, which would be

which plugging that into the equation above give

inverting that once again we get that there should be ~2 million square meters per  ghost [in actuality it's ~1.608 square meters per ghost, but let's just round up for simplicity]. Convienently this means that this easily converts to square kilometers per ghost telling us that there is 2 square Kilometers per ghost.

Using this it can now be estimated for a given area how many ghosts a person would expect to see. Say for example Central Park New York, how many ghosts would one expect to see there given the above equations?

Central park has an area of 3.41Km which means there would be 2.12 ghosts in it. Central park per it's Wikipedia page is also visited by about 42 million people annually. This means if one assumes that the path people take through central park is random, the entirety of the park would be walked over 12,000 times. So what are the odds that a person would see one of these two ghosts potentially walking… floating?... Existing, around central park? How many people on average would have seen a ghost in central park, assuming ghosts are real?

Well assuming a human takes up a 1.2 square meter space, and can see out clearly let's say at least 10 meters (around 33 feet) in the direction they're looking, and for simplicities sake we'll estimate their view line in the following way, humans have an FOV of 135 degrees, but only a critical vision of 60 degrees, so we can use the following formula to estimate

hich yields 37.5 square meters of viewable area at a time.

So the odds of looking at the spot in question where a ghost happens to be in central park would be the odds of you looking at the area where a ghost happens to be and there happens to be a ghost standing there [(37.5/3,410) * (2.4/3,410)]*100= .000774%, however this is for each individual person, assuming they only look at the one area directly in front of them, and don't move. If we include the amount of people who visit the park annually and the odds are the same for all of them, meaning we repeated this 42 million times, there should have been approximately 32,507 ghost sightings. Even assuming only 1% of people would report their sighting to someone, that still leaves 325 sightings of ghosts that should in theory have been reported.

Strangely though, despite having known suicides and murders in the park that happen with about the same frequency as to be expected in other places, it is only the building around New York central park that get reports of hauntings.

So if it is common for a person to become a ghost, where are those sightings?

Why wouldn't the expected value for the number of potential ghosts, line up with the expected value of ghost sightings rather than instead heavily favoring locations where famous, or well reported incidences of loss of life occurred?

In short: Where be all the ghosts yo?

[plzignr]

For those of you that believe in Ghosts:

I would like to get a rough estimate for the overall population of ghosts people think exist on the earth, what overall rate do people consider one would turn into a ghost? is it common, rare, incredibly rare? Please re-blog and spread around so that I can get a better sample size.

[plzignr]

Don't Feel Bad for Oceangate

Alright, I’m a little bit late to this, but it’s still showing up in my feed from other things, and I want to talk about it now, because frankly I’m sick of all the rhetoric surrounding it on all the news organizations I ever look at framing it as ‘Oh what a tragic event this was’ & ‘oh you should feel so bad that we couldn’t save those five people,’ & ‘oh what a travesty.’

It is okay not to feel bad for Oceangate. Oceangate was not and is not a tragedy. A tragedy implies a sudden or surprising It was inevitable based on the design of the Titan submersible. Everything about this submersible design was bad. Worse it was known how terrible the design was and it was still used regardless. That makes it in the worst view straight up murder, and in the best view unintentional manslaughter. It was dumb people, [inexperienced/overconfident] engineers, and a CEO making repeated, well documented aggressively idiotic decisions, and people died due to those aggressively idiotic decisions.

Here's the rundown on the list of said aggressively terrible decisions that were known about, and still done anyway:

The body of the submarine was made of expired carbon fiber. Making a submarine out of not expired carbon fiber, in theory, wouldn’t be a terrible idea, but in practice is an aggressively terrible idea. More extensive details below but in short: The more you cycle Carbon fiber in compression, the weaker it gets, no one, least of all oceangate knows the rate of this, all we know for certain is at some point, it will fail and we cannot determine when that point is.

Carbon fiber has an idealized (mathematically computed) compressive strength of around 1 to 3 gigapascals by some measurements in the direction of its fibers while it is new (as expressed in https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/materials-science/carbon-fiber-properties#:~:text=Furthermore%2C%20it%20was%20reported%20that,20%25%20of%20axial%20compressive%20strength) , while most steels have a compressive strength of around 17 to 20 megapascals. Which means that in theory carbon fiber has ~300x the amount the compressive strength of steel (in theory).

This Compressive strength is only in the linear direction of the fibers. So, in reality land, you don’t always have load only in the direction of the fibers, if you don’t have load in the direction the fibers are running… your fibers aren’t supporting any load. And not supporting load in a submarine means that gravity will kill you. More on that later.

If you are really careful and clever about this, you might, be able to get a situation where all your fibers are appropriately aligned so it’s not an issue. God help you if anything causes it to be misaligned so that it’s no longer supporting that load.

The effects of carbon fiber composites under repeated cycling is not well understood-

To simplify engineers have about three levels of understanding of things. They are as follows:

Well understood; meaning there is an equation for it that will give you all the details you need to do a thing and the engineer working it can tell you precisely how accurate they can be with their calculations. For example, Static forces, the analysis of items under a consistent unchanging load, is [for the most part] well understood. An engineer can take a look at a load, and tell you how big a thing of a given material needs to be to take that load, so long as the mechanical properties of the material are also well understood. In short- we know what’s going on, and we’ve got well defined equations for it.

Understanding is incomplete; meaning there are generally guiding principles, there’s an idea of what’s going on, but the mechanisms behind it are not fully realized or not fully calculable. For example, humanities understanding of physics is incomplete. We have great equations for specific circumstances and pretty good ones for general cases with only a few specific cavoites (bear in mind that those few specific cavoites means there is an entire field dedicated to it). In short there’s a general idea of what’s going on, but haven’t quite nailed down all the details and sometimes there’s weird contradictions that might mean one of our premises is incorrect, but overall, we know what we can work with.

Not well understood- Haven’t got a fucking clue.

Load in a submarine from simplifying the physics of it is essentially all of the weight of the crushing depths of the ocean on the exterior, and 1 atmosphere of pressure pushing back on the interior:

This means that your material selected has to be strong enough in compression to withstand the compressive load on it. You need the interior to have 1 atm of pressure as that is what most people are used to (Side note: technically if you wanted to you could in theory push it to higher atmospheres of pressure on the interior so long as the human body is also able to withstand those pressures but if you are selling an experience to rich people you probably want to make them as comfortable as possible so 1 atm is where it stays.)

So because submarines are repeatedly subject to multiple cycles of stress you also want them to be of a material that maintains it material properties, i.e. doesn't get consistently weaker on each dive. I'm going to draw you now a quick picture of what happens to carbon fiber under cyclic compressive loading, and then you will see why it would be a terrible choice for a submarine:

See under cyclic loading you get what are referred to as microbreaks or microtears. This are for small non detected breaks within the individual fibers of the material that fail due to buckling or other compressive stresses. Each tear or break reduces the overall effectiveness of the material, and because this material is not well understood, there is no current way to determine how quickly, or to what extent these microbreaks are occurring and how much they are weakening the material. Not a one. Now Oceangate could have looked into the cycling stresses and determined via experimental data what the expectation for this would be, they could have also attempted to determine this mathematically at the barest minimum. However, they did not do this. They simply ignored it as a problem, and put five people on a vehicle that would constantly get weaker as time continued.

Oceangate was warned multiple times, but multiple people, including their own employees, that the submersible was unfit and had safety concerns. The CEO of the company was warned by industry experts that the submarine was unsafe and would fail due to the repeated cyclic stressing of the carbon fiber. How did Oceangate respond to this? Did they demonstrate how they had mitigated those safety concerns? Did they demonstrate how they had calculated when the device would fail so they knew how deep they could take it on each dive? Did they have a repair plan, or an inspection plan for determining the damage done to the submersible before they took it out each dive again? Did they make the barest, minimal effort to keep anyone paying for $25000 'seat' on this death trap to keep them alive? No. Instead they simply stated they were tired of calls for safety standing in the way of 'innovation'. Which is patently ridiculous on its own merit, but is especially insulting when you consider that there literally was not one single innovation that existed within this patchwork Frankenstein's monster of a submersible. Everything that this submersible had attached to it or that it did, had already been well documented and well known about prior to this submersible existing. In addition to being warned by industry experts David Lochridge, an employee of Oceangate, was fired for expressing his concern that the submarine was not safe and wanted to perform additional nondestructive testing to ensure that the vehicle would be safe for human use.

<iframe width="476" height="267" src="https://abc11.com/video/embed/?pid=13410165" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

The submersible had had multiple power failures, loss of communication, and additional concerns prior to its final voyage that were never addressed.

Just so… so… many general design flaws… 

The weights functioning as ballasts (part of the system keeping the submarine from rising) could only be removed from the submersible by rolling the submersible until the fell off. This could not be done without power to the submersible.

There was no early warning system, and no NDT testing performed to determine if the submersible was still safe to dive

The communication system for contacting the barge was substandard for the depths the submersible was 'designed' (read marketed) to traverse

The window for the submersible was not rated for the depths the submersible was traversing.

What all of this boils down to, is that this submersible, was poorly designed, was known to be poorly designed, had a known chance for catastrophic failure at the depths being traveled to and they sold tickets for it anyway. Stepping onto this submersible was essentially the same as playing russian roulette, the only difference being the passengers didn't even know they were playing.

Feel bad for the people on board if you want to, they may or may not have known the full extent of the issues when they signed that waiver, they likely didn't understand all the flaws in the machine they stepped foot in. But do not feel bad for Oceangate.

[plzignr]

Why I don't like bidets

I'd rather not have bacteria laden water going up the back end thanks.

[plzignr]

nah you're not the asshole, I love space, and I think the intent behind the people working at SpaceX is reasonable. And one thing to understand is that *Most* rockets fail on their first test flight. It's not odd and to be expected for most things.

but what did we learn?

Honestly, nothing. Some of the rocket engines on the starship didn't fire the full duration which caused the instability in the rocket and then the rocket blew itself up, on purpose.

The 'success' was that an onboard computer identified that there was an unsafe flight pattern, and so a detonation was triggered by that system.

SpaceX later confirmed that the explosion was due to Starship’s autonomous flight termination system, a safety measure embedded in the rocket’s software that destroys the launch vehicle if it senses that its course or performance is awry or unsafe. - LATimes

Which, I know SpaceX and every other launch agency has to have a system in place to make sure that if the flight plan is catastrophically altered they can ensure safety of those below... but, maybe... JUST MAYBE you shouldn't cause a rapid disassembly in a public area on purpose as part of the fucking plan.

It is ridiculous to me that if this had happened with any other space agency the news would be up in arms about the incompetency of the rocket and engineers but SpaceX for whatever reason gets a free pass.

Imagine if NASA exploded a rocket in Texas and called it a success.

Look at the lack of coverage of the JUICE mission.

Seems unreasonable not to hold SpaceX to the same high standards.

this is maybe the funniest thing to happen, ever. thank you spacex for once again pushing the boundaries of trashy scifi

[plzignr]

One should embrace the tube. Become woozle.

[plzignr]

Now I can understand

Two neurons sensing each other and trying to connect

Credit: @rockatscientist

[plzignr]

MOTH Lunar Orbit Transporter by Igor Sobolevsky

[plzignr]

Fresh news from Hubble, and it's a real doozy this time: it found a runaway supermassive black hole.

Let me repeat that:

A runaway SUPERMASSIVE BLACK HOLE.

Half the universe away, an immense object born of concentrated primordial chaos, so powerful it once bound an entire galaxy together, hurtles through the intergalactic void. Its flight through the cosmos so unfathomably violent that it leaves a stream of newborn stars two hundred thousand lightyears long whirling in its wake. Gas and dust in the space between galaxies is spread so thin a particle might never touch another for a million years, and yet this escaped galactic core has dragged the matter in its path into fusion.

What a universe we live in!

[plzignr]

JWST Focuses in on Uranus

JWST seems to have no let up in amazing inspirational images, and while it was designed to show us the universe in infra red, to see the light that had been red shifted out of the visible spectrum at the furthest reaches, it's proving its worth rather closer to home too.

Uranus was the first planet discovered by use of optics, as it's just outside of the naked eye limit, and although Voyager 2 briefly passed it, there's a huge amount we don't understand about this enigmatic ice giant.

What we do know is the planet is pretty much on it's side, with a ring that appears to go north to south, and some fascinating moons, particularly Miranda, that almost appears to have been broken apart, and put rather roughly back together again.

So, Uranus has a ring (who'd have thought) but a polar region on the apparent equatorial region, and more elusively, clouds ! Something that really wasn't visible in the original Voyager encounter, and had been a question for astronomers ever since.

While the JWST images are never going to be as good as the Voyager 2 ones, the IR nature of the telescope does make visible things which are impossible to see with the naked eye, and so we can really do more science, and answer questions about this amazing planet.

[plzignr]

Corrections for typical D&D:

It occurs to both infected and natural born, Their rampage must is directed at 'evil' characters/monsters

Fact 3) it is only when they accept the lycanthropy that they gain a measure of control but then in both forms must be the alignment of the lycanthropy

Ergo: smokey the bear is a druid infected with lycanthropy proving to the DM that they match their alignment

Fact 1: In most versions of Dungeons & Dragons, when infected – as opposed to natural-born – lycanthropes transform under the full moon, they assume the default alignment of their type during the ensuing mindless rampage.

Fact 2: In most versions of Dungeons & Dragons, the default alignment of werebears is Lawful Good.

Conclusion: When an infected werebear transforms under the full moon, they go on a mindless Lawful Good rampage.

[plzignr]

the great thing about kerbal space programme is that I can slap together truly kobly feats of engineering and actually have them work

(Crossposted from Twitter, 2020 DEC 19)