• 6 Posts
  • 31 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: February 26th, 2025

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  • A huge factor is how much data you can process at a given time. Often, in the end it’s not that complicated per sample of data. But when you need to run on terra bytes of data (let’s say wide angle telescopes or CERN style experiment) you need huge computer to simulate your system accurately (How does the glue layer size impacts the data?) and process the mountain of data coming from it.

    Nowaday, practically speaking it’s just a building full of standard computers and software process dispatching the load between the machines (which isn’t trivial especially when you do mass parallel processing with shared memory)






  • In democracy, citizen decide how the tax money is spent by voting, usually it’s an indirect vote : you elect people to vote the budget, which makes sense considering the difficulty on the tax. But typically, left wing will put more money in education, healthcare, and rehabilitation programs while right wing will put money in police, militaires and supp rt outsourcing essential services to private corporations. Stuff can be complex as you need to pay pensions, state worker, fulfill international commitment (EU budget, NATO budget) and maintain all the existing infrastructures, and only then you can invest/re-allocate budget (which can trigger an outrage, cutting welfare expense or closing a hospital can have dramatic consequences for citizen)

    If there isn’t enough money se government can borrow money, typically they don’t go the bank but say they need X billions for Y years and find investor ready to lend them this money (it tends to be quite safe, do you foresee US or Germany not paying their debt in 5 or 10 years?) alternative is to print money (aka inflation) or raise taxes. For structural investment that will bring monee, it makes sense to pay them over 10 years with the extra tax yield thanks to the new highway/university/dam. However, it also means that instead of “taxing the rich” you borr w their money and give them back, while us commoner do n’t directly see our tax money ney back








  • Russia attacks EU, US stay neutral, US stay neutral, China leverage on Russia being busy to invade Eastern Russia, the conflict spread to former colonies where Russia, China, France, UK are already in cold war. Meanwhile, Turkey finally attack Greece, and Iran takes the opportunity gain influence most likely with their spy network.

    As usual, America stays neutral, until US get dragged in the war (Taiwan or Israel) while Argentina wait for the last day to formally declare war. Not sure whether Japan would invade China or take back the Sakhaline island

    TL/DR : Russia/Turkey/Israel versus EU/China/Iran.

    As you see I am absolutely not an expert



  • putting them on display in museums would make them less available for study.

    Very often, it’s the other way around, museum are a storage plage for scientific/historical/artistic artifact and the be in display is a bonus.

    Government own many objects that have an important historical value, and they can’t sell them (beside law, imagine the scandal if the French gov sell the mona Lisa or if US gov sell Neil amstrong spacesuit) so better having them in public display



  • Neighbour,

    The small neighbourhood bookstore, hardware store, or food store may not be as cheap as a big brand, but the staff usually know what they’re talking about (nice in a bookstore, important in a hardware store when you have no idea on how to fix a leak). Moreover, they’re here, and don’t need 3 days of delivery.

    Finally, shops nearby are part of what makes a neighbourhood nice, some people know it, and will spend the extra cash to not complaint about their dead/empty neighbourghood



  • That’s a lot of questions…

    We do have a pretty good understanding of physics, using the standard model we could predict the Higgs Boson, and the muon’s abnormal magnetic moment with an incredible precision. While cosmology isn’t as precise yet, we’re now in the precision cosmology era so new forces don’t come out of the hat.

    A few new force I may think off

    • Modifed gravity is an alternative theory to dark-matter which would require gravity to behave differently with low acceleration, . While, there is good reasons to think it’s not working, it’s not yet strictly excluded, so a new force can come from here

    • Inflaton, would be the force associated to the so-called dark-energy which explain the universe expansion. However, the property of the inflaton particle still have to be understood, but that would be a new force

    • Higgs field being a boson, it’s a force

    • Supersymmetry is a pretty popular extension to the standard model (as it would solve a lot of problems, and provides theoretical candidate for dark-matter) and it involved a new batch of boson --> New force