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[–] Awakening 0 points 2 points (+2|-0) ago 

Have you ever used AGI's STK software?

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[–] The_Cat [S] 0 points 3 points (+3|-0) ago 

Nope, I tend to use highly specialized academic software. And a whole bunch of stuff that I write myself.

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[–] Awakening 0 points 2 points (+2|-0) ago 

Can you explain to me how elliptic curves work for writing encryption?

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[–] Gorillion 0 points 3 points (+3|-0) ago 

What's the scuttlebutt on Climate Modelling in your world? Are we fucking shit up or is the earth just doing it's thang and not really bothered?

Obviously this flows into the big question: how much overt or subtle pressure is placed on you guys to produce results that play into a certain political worldview? And what happens if you don't produce "sexy" results that play well with MSM style stories?

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[–] The_Cat [S] 1 point 3 points (+4|-1) ago  (edited ago)

We're fucking up the planet and our climate on an unprecedented scale. This has been found, established, verified and confirmed over and over again. And it's getting worse. More warming means less ice means more warming means more methane means more warming etc etc. If we don't get our shit together right now, we're fucked. We're probably already too late.

There is no overt pressure. Officially we're allowed to research whatever the fuck we want. But whether you get funding depends heavily on how much you publish, how high impact you publish, and if your research reaches news outlets etc. So in that sense, there is a LOT of subtle pressure to produce "sexy" research. What's sexy varies from time to time and domain to domain. Nanodots are sexy, and so are neural networks and machine learning. So if you do a machine learning/neural network study on nanodot properties, the government is going to be all "shut up and take my money". Meanwhile, research into high pressure material properties gets a big shrug, which leads to me currently doing research for free because the funding ran out. How's that for financial incentive.

Edit: If you want accurate and reliable information about climate change, Skeptical Science is clearly explained and very well sourced.

[–] [deleted] 0 points 3 points (+3|-0) ago  (edited ago)

[Deleted]

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[–] The_Cat [S] 0 points 6 points (+6|-0) ago 

Average penis size is 14 +/- 2 cm. Ten miles is about 16.1 km. So that gives you 117 396 +/- 16 771 penises. So 100k to 140k dicks.

Of course, that number goes way down once you start counting per thrust. By like, a factor of 3?

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[–] kittysaysmeownow 0 points 5 points (+5|-0) ago 

Do you think we might live in one, do you think that's a viable theory?

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[–] The_Cat [S] 0 points 7 points (+7|-0) ago 

It's not impossible. But it's also not very relevant. Even if our universe is a simulation, that doesn't make it any less real for us who live in it.

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[–] 8985629? ago 

Well, if you know it's a simulation, you know the rules don't have to make sense. Presumably the "real world" has to make sense. I think the most relevant place this matters is: A simulation can be set (in order to save resources) to only properly simulate a certain area, everything else is just assumed until it needs to be rendered. Presumably, reality doesn't have this constraint.

So whether things happening in distant places are real until that information is called upon or not (a tree falling in a forest where nobody's around to hear it, so to speak) is pretty relevant. How big that area of rendering is (bigger than our planet? our solar system? our galaxy?) is also relevant.

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[–] goatboy 0 points 2 points (+2|-0) ago 

It matters for those of us who want to turn ourselves in to computer viruses. If this isn't a computer simulation, then we'll be wasting our lives in the pursuit.

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[–] 8931125? 0 points 4 points (+4|-0) ago 

This is the most pragmatic way to view this question.