RhynoD

RhynoD t1_jef4idw wrote

To add some clarity:

Gross - total amount before factoring losses or costs. If you own a store selling widgets and you sell $5000 worth of widgets one day, that's your gross sales. But, you have to pay your employees, pay your electric bill, and order more widgets to sell. All that costs, oh, $4000 for that day. Thus, you get net sales of $1000 ($5000-$4000).

Domestic - having to do only with your own country. So, like, Amazon does a lot of business overseas and that counts towards their gross sales, but that money isn't coming into the USA so it isn't part of the USA gross product.

Product - generic term for all of the value of everything made or sold.

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RhynoD t1_ja7ynr0 wrote

Pretty much all automatic cars have a "gear" or setting for engine breaking. Even my Prius with a CVT has it: a separate button for Park, then you "shift" to put the car in Drive, Neutral, Reverse, or B for engine Braking. I don't think I've ever needed to use it, but it's there.

Automatics that don't have a CVT may not have a dedicated Engine Braking setting but they should have a forced 1st, 2nd, and/or 3rd gear (or Low and High which is 2nd or 3rd). The computer is locked so that it won't shift higher, which you can use to engine brake.

Finally, there are the "semiautomatic" cars or automatic with a semi setting, where you can "shift" like you're in a manual but the computer and automatic transmission does the actual physical shifting of the gears; they just do the shifting when you say to rather than when the computer wants to.

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RhynoD t1_ja7xnrr wrote

Keep in mind that the scale is logarithmic. Going from 5 to 6 isn't a small increase in power, it's 10x more powerful, and 7 would be 100x. So, 3 is the kind that people may not even notice at all, 5 is a bit shakey, maybe some stuff falling off of shelves, and 7 is buildings falling.

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RhynoD t1_j9orhne wrote

There are a few possible explanations.

One is that the animals may just be better at preventing or dealing with cancer. We know the, for example, part of the hardiness of tardigrades comes from special proteins that are really good at repairing DNA. It could be that large animals have similar tools that we haven't identified yet.

An odd possibility is "supercancer". Cancer is deadly because as tumors grow they suck up vital resources from functional tissues and organs, and physically get in the way of the organs. What if a tumor had its own cancer? The secondary tumor would suck up resources and choke out the primary cancer, just like cancer normally does to healthy tissue and organs.

Because the animals are so big, tumors can grow for longer and get bigger than they could in smaller animals like humans. That gives more opportunities for supercancers to develop inside those tumors.

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RhynoD t1_j97ot6k wrote

Maintaining a stable chain reaction is surprisingly difficult. The neutrons that come from out of the fissioning heavy atoms are going way too fast. The neutrons aren't blasting into the other atoms so much as merging with them and causing them to become unstable. If the neutrons are going too fast, they just bounce off and nothing happens.

Yes, putting fuel pellets close to each other increases the odds that the neutrons will bounce around, slow down, and then cause another atom to split. However, unless you just put a lot together, that won't happen - at least, not at a rate that maintains the chain reaction.

Nuclear bombs get around this by using conventional high explosives to compress the nuclear fuel while also setting off another nuclear fuel with a much lower half-life that spits out a huge number of neutrons. Enough neutrons are released and the nuclear fuel has been compressed enough that even with a pretty low chance of the neutrons causing more atoms to split, enough of them split anyway and boom.

Nuclear power plants use a moderator like water, which slows the neutrons down without (hopefully) absorbing too many of them. The pellets are separated by the moderator so that as a few atoms naturally fission the neutrons are slowed down by the moderator. When they get to the other fuel pellets, the neutrons are going slow enough to have a high chance of interacting and causing more fission - releasing more neutrons, etc. The process is controlled by controlling how much of the fuel is exposed to the moderator and other fuel pellets, and by controlling "shields" made out of a material (like boron) that absorbs the neutrons without doing anything, blocking the chain reaction.

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RhynoD t1_j6pi2q5 wrote

I think that hypothesis more accurately explains why reptiles did not rise back up to the dominant roles that mammals filled. The fungi were fed in part by the massive die-off of plants and animals following the meteor.

There are also some evidence to suggest that a mass extinction due to natural climate change at the time was already beginning and the meteor cranked what was already a huge ecological upheaval to 11.

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RhynoD t1_j6nkzsz wrote

  1. It may be thousands of cores in the GPU, but probably not.

  2. The GPU is almost its own complete computer system that comes with everything else needed to run, where the CPU is only the CPU and maybe an OK heat sink and fan. The GPU unit comes with its own cooling solution, its own RAM, essentially its own motherboard to control the chips and interface with the actual motherboard, etc.

So to take the analogy way too far: the CPU is just the PhD mathematician but you still have to pay for pay for his office and air conditioning and all the paper he needs to do the work and the whole campus full of TAs and whatnot.

The GPU is like paying for the entire elementary school complete with teachers, cafeteria, and supplies, and you drop that entire school onto your campus next to the PhD's office.

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RhynoD t1_j6nia1p wrote

Conversely, I have heard arguments that the misconception was that any part of the universe, infinite or otherwise, was a single point. Rather, all points were infinitesimally close, but not occupying the same space and not truly one point. In that case, the universe would continue to be infinitely large and infinitesimally small.

But I don't know enough about math or physics to know or argue one way or another.

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RhynoD t1_j6jb07i wrote

That explanation is good but I think it underestimates just how much energy it takes to evaporate water, especially at scale. Yeah, you can use a power plant but we're already struggling to generate the power that we need in ways that aren't destructive to the environment.

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RhynoD t1_iy8w3cu wrote

Minecraft is procedurally generated. The world does not exist if it isn't loaded because you are in that section of it. Every time you load a section, the game uses the seed to rebuild that section based on a set of rules.

For example, the rules might say: start with bedrock here. If the seed value is X, put stone above it. If there are Y number of stone blocks within such and such distance, the next block should be magma. If there are such and such magma blocks, put diamond ore. If there are already diamond ore blocks within a distance, or Redstone instead. When it's at least so high up, put dirt.

Every chunk is built like this, based on the seed. Since the seed stays the same, the world can be rebuilt to be exactly identical every time you load in. When you make changes to the world, the seed is changed to make sure the change you made appears the next time.

It's like, instead of someone memorizing an entire story, you just give them a title and they invent the story as you go along based on that title. When you leave, the story is forgotten but you save the title. The next time you want that story, you give them the same title and they follow the same rules and end up creating that exact same story from scratch.

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RhynoD t1_ixz0b8g wrote

All of the components in your PC are tested against static electricity.

If your drive is plugged in, it's grounded and any stray charge will pass harmlessly through the case and never touch any of the electronics inside.

If it is not plugged in, there is no path to ground and the charge will not pass through the drive at all.

If you pulled off the case, you are already doing something dumb and likely to damage your drive regardless of any static charge. Even so, the amount of charge you'll get from a mild static discharge is unlikely to damage any components. At most you might corrupt a couple of bits of data, but honestly even that is unlikely.

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RhynoD t1_iufpv5m wrote

Ceramic is very hard. Not in the general, colloquial sense of hard, but in the Mohs Hardness Scale. That scale measures whether or not something can scratch something else. Diamond is the hardest on this scale - not because you can't break diamond. Diamonds are pretty brittle, you can easily crack or shatter them with a hammer. But you can't scratch them.

Tempered glass is made by putting the glass in tension. You cool the glass so that the outside shrinks, compressing the still-hot inside. When the inside then cools, the outside is frozen in place so the inside pulls tightly on it the inside contracts. The glass pulling on itself keeps the molecules from moving, and holds it all together strongly so it's very hard to break.

By scratching the surface, ceramic breaks the tension, releasing all of it throughout the glass.

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RhynoD t1_itreqyh wrote

It's not possible for an already made file like that to exist. Unzipped zip bombs can be many thousands of petabytes, which are themselves a thousand terabytes each. Most computers have a few terabytes of storage at most (which is the point of the zip bomb) and even if they did, unzipping files that big would potentially take years (also the point of the zip bomb).

If you started with an actual file to compress it would take up that much space and take that long to compress. You'd zip bomb yourself.

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RhynoD t1_itpo01r wrote

Volts are what the wall pushes, amps are what the device draws. The device will attempt to pull as many amps as it can/needs. The wiring in your walls can only handle so much amp draw before overheating and melting. It would be possible to install thicker wires that handle more amps, but that would be expensive and unnecessary.

Your breakers have specific amp limits, usually 15 or 20. If a device (or several devices on the same circuit) try to pull more than the rating of the breaker, the breaker trips and cuts power, preventing the wiring from melting and starting a fire. A fuse does the same thing, except a fuse has a piece of wire that is supposed to overheat and melt at a specific amperage which again cuts power and protects everything else.

Some circuits in your house will have more expensive, thicker wiring and a higher amp breaker for devices that need it - like your dryer or water heater.

The vast majority of North American homes will be primarily 15 amp circuits/breakers, with a couple higher amp breakers for, like, your kitchen (for the microwave and electric stove and whatnot), and then a couple dual-phase 240v circuits and/or with 30 amp breakers. You might also see a 30 amp breaker elsewhere, like a garage, maybe if you have an electric outdoor heater, but that 30 amp circuit will have thicker, more expensive wiring.

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