AdamHovorka

As far as debugging goes, when you try to open it, does it break easily? Can you see any signs of... tunneling? And when you knock on it, would you say it makes a "whoomp" or a "thud"?

​It seems weird to say I "want" to have a mental disorder, but for what it's worth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesthesia Also, there's this: https://xkcd.com/936/

​Huh. Archive.org looks different now. Well, not the header, but the actual site anyways. Not that I don't trust their abilities, but might it not be a good idea to use that copy to make one of our own? Preferably more reader friendly? I'd take the lead, but my new job is kind of wreaking havoc on the everything right now.

If it's just static files, I'd recommend GitHub Pages. It's free, it can be hooked to a custom domain really easily, and it gives you practically unlimited storage (I think there's a repo limit somewhere around 10 GB, but you can just stick some of the content in another repo if you ever hit it; it shows up as another folder).

If worse comes to worst, there's always Discourse, by Jeff Atwood and friends (the Stack Exchange people). (Full disclosure: I have no idea what your hosting situation is like, and if it's anything like mine this may be impossible because I've been trying to install it on and off for a couple months now, with no success. Ruby+Docker just doesn't seem to like me. However, UX-wise, Discourse is very pretty.) Here's their perspective on spam prevention: https://meta.discourse.org/t/what-about-the-spam-problem/2724/4

If y'all are interested, I could try to put together a system for running some kind of a spam detection regex golf competition.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/feelreal/feelreal-vr-mask-and-helmet This could be interesting, and I'm curious about/skeptical of their method of scent replication, but what I really want to know is why the lady in the video is so poorly dubbed.

Fluid dynamics and ASCII art do, apparently, mix. http://nkwiatek.com/experiments/ascii

​And that is why the next section I'm working on is weaponry and defense.

​I'm glad you asked! I actually wrote a small web app to calculate that stuff, and forgot to stick it in here! ahov.co/spin As far as material strength goes, 1g is well within current material strengths; everything we build here has to withstand at least that much just from being on the surface. The rim is closely analogous to some types of bridges, and the spokes—well, I can't think of an analogous structure off the top of my head, but we're good up to at least 250m as seen in the Kalpana One station designs. (Mental simulation suggests we're good indefinitely; it's only 1g at the rim, and fades out towards the center, but I don't have any math to back that up right now.)

*Bump* Just added the "section" on space habitats. 17 pages of new text, if I were to have copied the PDF in, but I didn't 'cause that would have been... y'know... Again, reviews, comments, rants, etc. are greatly appreciated.

I made a thing: ahov.co/pen It needs a decent sized audience for it to work well, and Byte just made me realize that y'all qualify as living, breathing human beings for the most part. You should get on it and help distract me from my finals this week. 'Cause that's a good idea, obviously.

PSA: If your Nginx instance is mysteriously refusing to forward requests to upstream servers, check to make sure it was actually compiled with proxy support instead of just assuming. Took me a freaking day and a half to figure out. Well actually that... that probably isn't useful to anyone but me. But still. The more you know.

​No, having multiple generators along one shaft isn't against the laws of physics, but electromechanically they will reduce down to just one. As for whether that would allow you to create some kind of feedback loop, bear in mind that energy can be neither created nor destroyed (first law) and it will trend toward entropy (second law). If you'd like to share your design in more detail, I can help you find the flaw. ​It's... an analogy... ​According to the Special Theory of Relativity, travel at even 1c (the speed of light) is impossible for anything with a positive rest mass. Photons, with a zero rest mass, always travel at the speed of light no matter what (and you'll measure them as going that speed no matter how fast you yourself are going, 'cause physics). Particles with an imaginary rest mass, which we call Tachyons, always travel faster than light, but as of yet we've never seen them in real life so good money says they either don't exist or they're really really hard to detect. If you were to attempt to go 20c, and had a non-zero acceleration time, what you would see for the first, oh, ten million meters per second would be fairly normal. At around fifty million meters per second, if you looked out the window, everything in front of you that we here on Earth see as red would look like it was green, and everything behind you that was supposed to be blue would look orange thanks to the Doppler Effect (the same reason car horns passing you suddenly drop in pitch, i.e. the BEEEEEEEEWwooooooo). At two hundred million meters per second, everything around you (if you can manage to see more than a blur before you pass it) will seem to be experiencing only one minute for every minute and a half you count off (and they'd see the the opposite - they'd say you're the one slowing down). At around 250 million meters per second you start to notice that the rest of the universe is shrinking in the forward direction; things look like they're only about half as thick as they should be (and again, anyone else would say the same exact thing about you). Now, note that this whole time you think you've been accelerating steadily at, say, a whopping 20 gees (which, FWIW, as a biological human, you could absolutely not survive). According to you, this trip has so far taken about two weeks. But everyone else says it's taken a lot longer. See, for them, you stopped accelerating at the full 20 gees a long time ago. At this point it looks like you're only accelerating at about 10 gees thanks to that same pesky forward contraction. Another 30 million meters per second later and you'll look like you're only pulling about 8 gees. Another 15 million and you'll only be pulling 3. I think you see where I'm going with this. It's a real life example of Zeno's Paradox; if the closer you get, the slower you go, you'll never actually reach your destination. Physics just won't allow it. So unfortunately, going 20c is impossible. (That is, unless you pull some other magic out of your hat as in the FTL section above, but I've made pretty sure they aren't time machines either. Sorry.)