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Welcome! 03/05/2016
Welcome, everyone, to the new 910CMX Community Forums. I'm still working on getting them running, so things may change. If you're a 910 Comic creator and need your forum recreated, let me know and I'll get on it right away. I'll do my best to make this new place as fun as the last one!
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Don Edwards
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The GPS devices typically aren't happy if they are receiving signals from less than three satellites at a time. Maybe in the polar regions there's some difficulty with that, but I'm currently seeing six.
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Even if they have perfect adjustment for relativity, they'd still have to recalibrate the satellites periodically. See, there's this thing called the "three-body problem", and even worse, the "n-body problem". Jupiter, Saturn, passing asteroids, and quite a few other things distort the satellites' orbits a tiny bit through ordinary gravitational effects, and that's a complex problem that hasn't been even theoretically solved - for that matter they don't have a sufficiently complete catalog of the bodies they'd need to adjust for either. And GPS is a VERY-high-precision system.
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A normal person doesn't know their boyfriend is a shapeshifting female superhero, with a friend who magically creates and animates fairydolls, with another friend who routinely changes sex, and who occasionally fights or chats with gryphons. (In addition to all the stuff ijuin mentioned.) Ashley already knows the world is weirder than she imagines. During the battle at the mall she demonstrated substantial mental agility for coping with that weirdness, and she came to the party expecting to get more info on just how weird it is. With most of a week to mentally prepare for it. Also, in the next-to-last panel Ashley's face looks slightly non-human to me...
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Story Friday September 06, 2019
Don Edwards replied to Pharaoh RutinTutin's topic in Comic Discussion
Well, first - before we can have a next ice age - we gotta wait for this one to end. Yeah, we're in an ice age right now. It's the third since the end of the oxygen explosion. Outside of these ice ages, which collectively take up about 40 million of the past 540 million years with the current ice age being about 15 million years old, global temperature was *at least* 2 Celsius warmer than today, and often considerably warmer than that. But we happen to be in an "interglacial" within the current ice age. This is a temporary relatively warm period, typically lasting up to about 12,000 years (the current one is about that old right now). The periods that aren't interglacials last tens of thousands of years and are often as much as 2 Celsius colder. -
Ever seen a "crack shipping" thread? The usual procedure is to build a list of characters, then challenge people to randomly select two characters from the list and write a scene shipping them. Roughly preserving their personalities and basic natures, but with little regard for gender identity, sexual orientation, which side of battles they are on, or any other consideration. So, hey, Damien and Arthur Arthur - fair game.
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Newton's theory of gravity is mostly right. Einstein's general relativity is a little more mostly right. Quantum mechanics is also mostly right. But under certain conditions which we can't currently create and haven't been lucky* enough to observe, quantum mechanics and general relativity make bizarre and wildly-different predictions of what will happen - so they definitely are not both completely right, and it's possible that neither of them is completely right. * Or unlucky enough to observe, as the creation of those conditions by natural means would probably turn observers at any useful range into disorganized masses of subatomic particles.
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Story Friday September 06, 2019
Don Edwards replied to Pharaoh RutinTutin's topic in Comic Discussion
Warning: Europeans often (not always) have little understanding of just how big the US. Newark New Jersey to Chicago is a relatively straight drive of 779 miles, estimated to take 12 hours of actual on-the-road time. For comparison: Copenhagen to Basel, Switzerland is estimated at a bit shy of 13 hours (and the bit at the north end is not straight). -
Are you saying that if relativistic time dilation didn't happen we couldn't make a working GPS system? (The one we have, as is, wouldn't work... but we wouldn't have built a system that takes relativistic time dilation into account if we didn't know about relativistic time dilation, and if it didn't happen we wouldn't know about it. Or would already have tested for it and said Nope!)
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NP Monday September 09, 2019
Don Edwards replied to Pharaoh RutinTutin's topic in EGS: NP Discussion
I think the important part is noone told her the game shows attributes this way. It doesn't matter if Justin talked her into playing this game, anyone else did or if she decided to try herself. As I doubt Justin would play the game as a female character (assuming the game offers a choice), he quite possibly wouldn't know that for female characters the game shows that particular attribute in that fashion. -
If Ellen repeatedly copies bird forms for the purpose of gaining the ability to fly, it would be quite credible for Magic to give her a spell that provides bird form, but not such that she can fly without magic - AND ALSO provides a magical ability to fly. Birds are somewhat fragile-boned as compared to non-flying animals of similar size. And the square-cube law says that a human-size flyer (without magic) would have to be really really light and flimsy for its size.
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Actually, on that specific point Keynes was significantly preceded by Henry Ford. Keynes laid out a plan where in economic bad times the government would spend freely to get things moving, borrowing if necessary to do so. Then in times of prosperity the government would cut spending and raise taxes to pay off debt and build up reserves against future bad times. The politicians loved the first half of that plan. The second... well, all that borrowing and spending didn't cause a problem during the downturn, so when things are going well it should be okay to borrow and spend even more wildly, right? Thing is, Keynes had twice publicly expressed disgust at how politicians were mucking things up. He'd built his reputation by laying out in detail the consequences of a specific instance of politicians mucking things up. And yet he gained power and influence by, in effect, assuming politicians would not muck things up - and I can't believe that this genius with this great depth of experience was that stupid. Unfortunately, that means I think he sold out and betrayed his science, the world, and the principles that led him to walk out on the British negotiators at Versailles, for his own personal profit.
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My then-son-in-law had three cats, one of them an orange Maine Coon. Once I brushed that cat and made about 18" of thick yarn from the single brushing. Maine Coons are one of the larger breeds of domestic cat, and also tend to be fluffy-furred.
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Also in 1919, a moderately respected but little-known British economist - who had walked off the British negotiating team at Versailles in disgust a year earlier - published a book laying out the economic and political history of Europe from about 1920 to about 1938. Yes, it was a future history. Yes, he was substantially correct, and this made him an extremely respected and well-known British economist. But not an influential one. This was actually the second time he had walked off a job as economic advisor to the British government, thoroughly disgusted at how politicians mucked things up. In 1936 he published another book, describing the huge benefits to be achieved by having the politicians run the economy. This made him an extremely influential British economist. Of course, the politicians mucked things up. I'm 99.99% confident that he expected them to.
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That means there are a bunch of you young whippersnappers all over our lawn!
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I have an alternate history in the early-mulling-over stages, where the turning point is when Hannibal of Carthage is about a day's march from Rome. Counterfactuals: he decides NOT to stop and rest his army, and a certain messenger does NOT get through to him. A short-term consequence: the Romans temporarily control a big chunk of the Iberian peninsula, but Carthage rules the Italian peninsula. A long-term consequence: Islam does not exist, and Christianity is at most a minor Jewish sect (probably doesn't exist either). To a significant extent, the heat death of the universe has already happened. It's MUCH cooler than it was even a million years after the Big Bang.
