New answers tagged reality-check
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AI training
Your evil overlord wants to make robots that ruthlessly collect sunflowers. Your evil overlord doesn't know how to program robots to collect sunflowers. Sure, such problems are easy to solve within the confines of a nice cubical robot testing arena, but not in the real world. (Have fun programming your robot to work a 9-5 job to make money to ...
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Traffic flows are very complex. There are fairly simple situations in which adding an additional road can increase journey times compared to the road not existing.
Any good traffic control system does many things, such as times the lights at successive junctions so that (as much as is achievable) drivers reach the next light at green. This keeps traffic ...
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This is a very interesting idea and one that I would like to look into. One factor that I would like to point out, is that all of the bows made today are for firing one arrow. so trying to fire multiple arrows will not work. If someone were to make a bow that was specifically designed for multiple arrows, the Idea might actually work. You could also work out ...
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using some simple, non-distracting device in the car
First I want to address this specifically. It's not possible to not be distracted. That's just not a thing. I'm a driver, and I'll make the bold claim that anybody that says otherwise is either
deluded or lying. I've caught myself spacing out trying the turn the radio up, imagine what it'll do to people ...
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With a few modification I think it could be pretty good. Here are a few things I think need to be adjusted/kept in mind:
other traffic laws must still be obeyed, some one can't just park on a traffic light to collect money
the amount of money you are willing to pay has to go to everyone waiting at the light AND be influenced by the amount of time the light ...
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Gridlock
Well, the first problem that comes to mind is gridlock. A lot of math and light coordination goes on to optimize traffic while preventing gridlock, especially in large cities.
Disenfranchising the poor
The sad fact is this policy clearly benefits the financially well off. This means you could force poor people into a situation where they can't ...
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Apart from the other answers pointing out this is fairly possible with modern/future technology, I would like to point out another reason this is impractical and will probably not be developed further:
Balance
Iron man seems to hold his own when boosted from the bottom, balancing himself with boosters on his hands. But in reality balancing on boosters from ...
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Human body has most of its mass made of the water - about 50%-75%, with proteins at about 10-15%, bones and minerals at max 5% (based on some quick searches)
What problems would come up from the matter in a human body being less dense?
A significant lower body density should mean primarily less water (or an organism using a lighter fluid for sustaining ...
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This is one of those ideas that is cool but extremely impractical at best, as you'll see in this thread on Portal's boots for some other ideas for achieving the same effect. The short version there is that it might be possible to find something, but it would be extremely hard to be effective in any kind of reasonably sized package.
While you're talking ...
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As you need for your story.
During the series, they find a lot of opposition from various individuals and factions with their own philosophies and motivations, including an oligarchic council of magicians that govern the affairs of magic users on a global scale.
When your characters encounter individuals or groups of individuals, there will often be one ...
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Flip the question. What is the deity/deities getting out of this equation?
They will want to offer precisely as many contracts as suits their needs. No more, no Less.
A god of war may go on a magician forging spree to drum up war, or support a war effort. Presumably the presence of or need for war is the benefit to such a god.
A god of healing will offer ...
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The solution may be more plausible if you abstracted the money away by one level.
Imagine that every traffic light at an intersection has an automated load-balancing system. It automatically balances the times each light is Green/Red to maximise throughput through the intersection and reduce wait time. It operates mainly on number of cars waiting vs. ...
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Sure. They have jet packs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAJM5L9hhBs
Jet packs have been a sci fi staple since Flash Gordon. The land assist suits they have in Call of Duty are lifted straight from Heinlein's Starship Troopers, 1958.
I pictured the jump units in Starship Troopers as big, but the marines were wearing full exosuits and so were not ...
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Translucent for who?
I.e. they may be translucent for human eyes but, if they use vision, very likely they won't be translucent for the members of the same species.
Translucency will require:
weak absorption of radiation with wavelengths the receiver (watcher) uses. I.e. some plastic may be opaque in VIS, but translucent/transparent in IR
refraction index ...
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a certain amount of money that she/he will pay once the car has gone through the intersection.
Ok, so I'll bid one million dollars every time I see a blocked intersection down the road, but change the bid to $0 once I'm close enough to make it through the intersection even if the green turned yellow at that moment.
Or I could start a VIP business: run a ...
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Yes, rain-bearing pyrocumulus clouds can form over any sufficiently intense heat source, typically forest of brush fires (but also atomic bomb explosions). There's no reason why a correctly-engineered volcano, given the right humidity and prevailing wind, should not generate one of these downwind of the crater. What it won't generate is a hurricane, being ...
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So basically a steppe mammoth.
They fulfill all your criteria
-Herbivore, check
-Front limbs longer than back limbs, big check
-Tusks, huge check
-Long tail, well long for a large mammal, plus there is no reason you could not use a slighlty modified one with a longer tail, just say it is sexual selection.
-Ox like head, well minus horns anyway.
-...
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Not to be cheeky but. . .
Your Behemoths evolved from Paraceratherium (Indricotherium)
The main difficulty is these guys living in the desert. Presumably they roamed the savanah where there was much more food for a large animal. Modern desert animals tend to be small.
I propose they do not live full-time in the desert but are migratory. They move from ...
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Is it possible for a virus (or other parasite) to make its host crave sex? Absolutely and easily. Sex drive is pretty much driven by hormone production and it's trivial for a parasite to tweak the production of a hormone or two. Testosterone would be a likely candidate (it increases libido in both women and men) and maybe something that reduces ...
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They’d be filter feeders that eat highly dense pollen.
The transhumans you describe sound very much like the Astomi from Orion’s Arm.
They’re filter feeders who live in specialised space habitats that include plants that produce large amounts of pollen that they feed upon. They do this by using a layer of fine hairs that cover their bodies that collect an ...
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This is not realistically possible, unless your transhumanism includes serious cybernetics, in which case "breathing" would stop being a thing anyway.
The vast majority of the food you digest serves as fuel. Your body reacts this fuel with an oxidizer taken from the air to provide the energy you need to survive and maintain the high activity of an animal.
...
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After some research, I find that your Chocobo is a Gastornis
Gastornis fits in most of your criteria:
Herbivore
While Gastornis was thought to be a fearful predator just like the phorusrhacid terror birds, it's now believed to be a peaceful herbivore (see this site:https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/phenomena/2014/02/27/giant-prehistoric-bird-...
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Song.
Do you wonder why you, an ordinary (but special!) human, know hundreds, maybe thousands of songs? Why you can sing along to songs that were on the radio many years ago? Why do tiny kids love songs and want to sing? It is our birthright. Before we could write, and maybe before we could talk, humans could sing. That was how humans preserved their ...
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Intersection control is just CPU scheduling in disguise, for which there is ample research already existent. The limited resource (intersection, CPU) is allocated to multiple clients (cars, jobs) in order to maximize utilization of the resource, among other things. There are costs associated with changing jobs (stopping and restarting traffic), there are ...
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I think so. Toxoplasmosis is a cat-based parasite which affects other mammals to make them more likely to be eaten by cats, so there is a precedent for illnesses (not a virus in this case) to alter the behaviour of other species.
This is not a deliberate decision no the part of the parasite. Those which affect their hosts in the "right" manner are more ...
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"Vibroblades" or more commonly known as ultrasonic blades already exist in real life. They use some sort of vibrational element, typically a piezoelectric module, to to vibrate a blade at ultrasonic frequencies (~40kHz). Most commonly they are used for fine detail hobby work or manufacturing. They typically use small scalpels or hobby blades as actual ...
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$<joke \ start>$
the virus completly shutsdown all cognitive functions in the brain leaving the host in a zombie like state while stimulating certain parts of the hypothalamus causing sexual arousal.
I think the scientific term in humans is puberty
$<joke \ end>$
It would be the perfect way for a sexually transmitted virus to propagate.
...
answered 2 days ago
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Consider it as an equivalent to rabies. The virus wants to spread, if it's a sexually transmitted virus then it would encourage sexual behaviour as a means to spread itself through a population.
It wouldn't survive as a zombie virus though as it has to increase, not decrease, attractiveness to other potential partners.
Something more like Fry's worms in ...
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Prions were found in sheep muscle too. Lower concentration that in the brain, won't affect humans (as yet). Not much handwaving required to push it into higher concentrations and able to cross the species barrier.
Study suggest prion diseases can be transmitted by blood transfusion too
Ah, btw, scrapie can be transmitted by milk.Also interesting in this ...
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Prions Can Be Spread In Multiple Ways
Fatal Familial Insomnia is a prion disease that is being spread genetically through a few families. It is completely fatal and resists all treatments.
Chronic Wasting Disease is a prion that has decimated populations of Cervids (deer family) across North America and Europe. It is spread through the exchange of body ...
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Mixing Money and Public Infrastructure always has unseen results that you don't expect
I'm going to put a different take on this, and refer instead to human nature.
The issue with money being mixed with public infrastructure is that systems become exploited in a way that many in government DON'T expect. 2 examples:
Toll Roads - Private Toll roads in ...
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Crystal growth cannot propogate faster than light in anyway that would transfer information. In other words, imagine there are two points in the crystal medium, A and B, distance d apart. Point B cannot crystallize because of any event at point A that didn't occur at least d / c units of time in the past, otherwise information has been tranfered faster than ...
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The big problem here is that it will greatly reduce the throughput of intersections.
A major part of designing intersections is balancing throughput with latency. A traffic light that never switches maximizes throughput in one direction -- vehicles never need to stop for the light -- but maximizes latency in the other -- vehicles wait forever for their ...
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It will cause chaos. One of the things that traffic lights do is restrict the volume of traffic on the road beyond the signal. There is a counter-intuitive characteristic of traffic (typically on freeways, but a signalled road will exacerbate the problem) that when volume gets to a certain point it goes from free-flowing to stopped, and you can make people ...
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I don't think that SPECIFIC situation works because of the nature of an intersection, but let me state the same type of plan in a slightly different scenario:
On freeways I often encounter a ramp to another freeway that backs up (Sometimes for quite a long way). A common response is for people to get out of the lane and into a faster lane, but then to try ...
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It kills one of the main uses of traffic lights
One of the best uses of traffic lights over stop signs is to allow intersections of very large (high volume) roads with very small (low volume) roads. If I am the only car at a stop sign intersection with a 3-lane, packed road, I will never get to go. Stoplights fix this problem by forcing the high volume ...
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The current atmosphere is just fine
As you're aware, plants are mostly carbon, and they get it entirely from carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. They get extra nutrients from the soil, but in much lower quantity. Since you allow drinking, you should be able to enrich the water with all the minerals needed. Clearly trees exist, so the mechanism for converting ...
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It depends on what you mean by propagate. Phase velocity for an EM wave can be greater than c.
https://van.physics.illinois.edu/qa/listing.php?id=16704&t=faster-than-speed-of-light
Nothing is actually traveling faster than light. This makes intuitive sense if you looks at a wave machine, like in this classic video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=...
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The specific question that can be answered is, can the crystal propagate at faster than c. That is, if it started growing at some disturbed location and spread out from there, could it exceed c.
The answer to that is a flat no. Crystals operate on electromagnetism. Electrons and positively charged nuclei. If you get a crystal really exotic you might ...
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Information can't travel faster than c. That's what the implication of light speed boils down to.
Crystal formation faster than c would require that atoms at some great distance change position/structure before any "signal" could reach them to let them know to do so. While they might spontaneously crystallize on their own, it wouldn't necessarily be in an ...
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U.S.A. vs North Korea might trigger a response from China, especially if unannounced... as well as Russia, mostly because Early Warning systems would see a missile launch but there would be some time between launch detection and trajectory projection to target... not a lot... they would certainly know before impact and there's a 30 minute window between ...
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This system is probably the way of the future with the exception of traffic lights, which will become nonexistent as soon as we have self driving cars.
Automated negotiation of right of way for autonomous driving is a real research subject. Sadly I can't find the video but my university is testing a system where AI driven cars negotiate in some fashion in ...
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Circular intersection also called "Roundabaouts" or "elipticalbouts".
Also this is not a thought expirement. This is Auction experiment. So - how much you are willing to give for a $1. The best profitable option is of course 1 cent. But if two people are participating the best option would be to give 99 cents.
But people don't think this way. They want to ...
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While an interesting thought, I can see a few major flaws with this system:
You are never the only one to arrive at an intersection. You will almost always be behind someone. They might not have the same financial status or preferences, and might opt to wait instead. This means you might have to pay not only your share, but also their share to get a green ...
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiosynthesis_(metabolism) - "eat" PU238 once every 20 years or so, the stomach equivalent produces melanin which, in its activated metastable form, is circulated by the blood stream to carry the necessary energy into the cells. Biochemistry is no longer needed as a source of energy, all the other supporting processes are tuned ...
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This will be a massive undertaking, and is probably not economically viable enough. As other answers pointed out, saturation the entire atmosphere with nutrients is near impossible, and a gigantic inefficient waste. But even if it can be done, this will not negate the need for food production, as the nutrients will still need to come from somewhere.
This ...
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While possible, I don't think that a society of transhumanists would do what you're proposing as it would be a massive waste of resources. Saturating the entire atmosphere with enough "nutrients" to make it practical for transhumans to use would be a colossal effort and probably completely destroy all native ecosystems. Most air never gets inhaled by humans ...
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Have you thought about making these humanoids undergo photosynthesis?
That way, they can get many of their nutrients without even the need for air, just sunlight.
I'm no biologist, but it seems like your people would then only require water and the air we know.
Furthermore, it seems like your second point counters any issues that might arise.
EDIT: As you ...
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The only thing that bothers me in the picture is intelligence in species adapted to an aquatic life style.
There need to be an evolutionary pressure from the environ to develop it - if a species can live without intelligence, it will. Maybe similar with the transition from jungle to savanna - not enough food to forage (is all seaweed toxic?), all the prey ...
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I agree with your proposition that the availability of Tin is the proximate cause of the end of the Bronze Age and the rise of the Iron age
It makes sense that if there were greater tin deposits that the start of the iron would have shifted. But given that iron was often a by-product of bronze smelting, Mediterranean societies made a small number of iron ...
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