Posts for Warp

1 2 3 4
307 308
Posted: 3/27/2021 7:04 AM
Quote
Warp
Banned User, Former player
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
DeHackEd wrote:
Your personal autonomy ends where someone else's begins.
It's not that simple. For example, you donating a kidney could save someone's life. However, should you be forced to donate your kidney against your will? (Yes, I know the situations aren't fully comparable. That's not my point. I'm just commenting on the absolutist stance of "your personal autonomy ends where someone else's begins" as a general principle. You cannot be forced to save your own life, but you also cannot be forced to save someone else's life in all possible situations. There are gradations.)
Posted: 3/26/2021 3:42 PM
Quote
Warp
Banned User, Former player
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
BrunoVisnadi wrote:
I don't see such a difficult dilemma here. Saving people's lifes/preventing deaths are usually very broadly accepted reasons to restrict individual liberties or enforce obligations.
The problem here is that the death rates are low, and the vast, vast majority of people will not die of it. There are many things in this world that cause millions of deaths every year, but for practical reasons we can't just go and ban those things altogether, or force people into doing something that may avoid those things. For example, traffic accidents kill over 1 million people very year, but this is something we unfortunately have to live with, because it's not practical to, for example, ban cars completely. Also, there's a general philosophical principle in human ethics that you cannot force a person to save his own life against his will. If, for example, a person is mortally sick and there is a medicine that could cure him, you cannot force that person to take the medicine if he doesn't want to. This is the principle of personal autonomy. Of course the question becomes a lot fuzzier and complicated with infectious diseases, especially with ones with a low mortality rate. One problem is that vaccines are not 100% harmless to 100% of people. There exist contraindications to taking vaccines. For example, some people may experience allergic reactions to some component in the vaccine. But even then, it's a difficult moral dilemma whether you can forcefully inject someone with a vaccine against his will. As said, if the fate of the entire humanity were at stake, and we were facing a total extinction event caused by a viral pandemic, the question would be simpler. However, we are not. The problem is, when the disease has a relatively low mortality rate, where would you draw the line? If one person in a billion is likely to die from the disease, would you resort to forced vaccinations? If not, then what would be a death rate after which you would?
Posted: 3/26/2021 10:14 AM
Quote
Warp
Banned User, Former player
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
BrunoVisnadi wrote:
The covid vaccine should be absolutely mandatory.
That's another ethical and socio-political dilemma that has no unambiguous straight answer. Can people be forced to take medicine, especially for a disease that has such a relatively low mortality rate? It would be one thing if this were the end of humanity unless something is done. In that case the answer is much easier: Either we bypass all declarations of human rights and ethical questions and force-vaccinate all people, or else the entirety of humanity just dies. The temporary suspension of human rights is justifiable in such a case because without that action there would eventually be no humans to have those rights in the first place. However, this is not such a case, not even close. Thus the ethical dilemma is much harder. It's not a black-and-white clear situation.
Posted: 3/26/2021 5:51 AM
Quote
Warp
Banned User, Former player
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
Vaccine hesitancy has become quite prominent lately, especially in some countries (such as France, oddly enough), and especially among certain political segments (but we should stay out of politics in this thread, so I'm not going there). On one hand this is understandable. After all, these particular vaccines are not "normal" vaccines in that they have been rushed to the market significantly faster than normal. Normally a vaccine requires a testing period of 5 to 10 years before it's widely accepted by health officials, but these vaccines were accepted as an emergency measure in less than one year, which is a world record for a vaccine to be administered at this scale. Many people are wary in that long-term side effects of one or more of these vaccines is not known, for the mere reason that the vaccines have not existed but for less than a year. Who knows if they'll have some severe side-effects in 2 years or longer? Especially since several of these vaccines are not normal traditional vaccines, and need very special substances and conditions to be stored. People are weighing the relatively low mortality rate of the disease against a vaccine that has been rushed to the market with significantly less testing than normal. On the other hand, the vaccines are surrounded by a lot of misinformation. Two of the vaccine brands are RNA vaccines, but they don't "change your DNA", they aren't "genetic treatment". The mechanism by which they work is complicated, but they do not change the DNA of any of your cells. (There's also the misconception that RNA vaccines are the only type of covid-19 vaccines that exist. In reality, there are two RNA vaccines, four conventional inactivated vaccines, four viral vector vaccines, and two protein subunit vaccines at this moment.) All of this raises the question of morality of choosing not to take a vaccine. This is actually something I have been thinking for quite some time, since many years ago, not just in conjunction with this pandemic. More precisely about the influenza vaccine (and now about the coronavirus vaccine, of course): If you get infected by the disease (eg. influenza, or the coronavirus) because you deliberately chose not to get vaccinated, and then you proceed to infect another person, who then proceeds to die from the disease, how much moral responsibility should you carry? That person effectively died because of your conscious deliberate choice. You may not have chosen to become sick, nor did you deliberately infect that other person, but you did deliberately choose to not get vaccinated, which then directly caused this chain of events. This is a very difficult ethical dilemma.
Posted: 3/21/2021 11:48 AM
Quote
Warp
Banned User, Former player
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
NxCy wrote:
When I move from A to B, who's to say how many 'events' have occurred? I could reasonably say one event has occured, namley the event of moving from A to B.
I suppose the infinity comes from the question: "When you finally reach the tortoise, how many times have you traversed the distance between you and the position of the tortoise at that moment?" In other words, how many times did you traverse the gap between you and the tortoise (if the tortoise had stayed stationary each time you started to traverse a gap)? In theory you could mark the point at which the tortoise is currently, and every time you reach such a point, you mark a new point where the tortoise is, and there would be infinitely many points. Alternatively, "how many times did you share a position with the tortoise that it was previously in during your travel?"
Posted: 3/21/2021 9:53 AM
Quote
Warp
Banned User, Former player
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
Zeno's paradoxes (yes, plural; it's not just one paradox, but a collection of thematically related paradoxes) essentially deal with the question of how it is possible, in the actual real universe, for infinitely many things to happen in a finite time. The most known and archetypal one is this: Achilles starts running towards a tortoise far ahead, while the tortoise is walking in that same direction. After a certain amount of time Achilles will have reached the point where the tortoise was at the start. However, by this time the tortoise will have moved a certain distance. Thus Achilles will then reach this new point where the tortoise was at that moment in a finite time, but by that time the tortoise will have again moved a certain distance. And so on and so forth. Achilles will need to run an infinite number of these ever-decreasing gaps before he reaches the tortoise. It's easy to dismiss this thought experiment as funny but silly. Of course we can calculate the time it takes for Achilles to reach the tortoise and that's it. The infinite number of gaps is compensated by their exponentially decreasing length, so the total length of all gaps is finite, and thus can be traversed in a finite time. However, many philosophers contend that the math doesn't actually explain the actual paradox. It gives us the answer of what the finite traversal time is, but it doesn't explain what the original paradox is actually wondering. And that is: How is it possible, in the actual real universe we live in, to perform an infinite number of steps? This is not the imaginary universe of mathematics, with its zero-sized points and infinitely perfect circles. This is the real world, where infinities don't exist. In other words, the paradox is actually as relevant today as it was 2500 years ago. The math doesn't give an explanation of the paradox, it just tells us the measurements of it. I am thinking that, perhaps, what the paradox is actually asking is whether the universe is continuous or quantized. Maybe quantum mechanics solves the paradox somehow? Maybe Achilles does not, in fact, perform an infinite number of actions because he can only move at planck length distances at a time, and will stay at each point an absolute minimum of one planck time unit before... I don't know... teleporting to the next planck unit position? This would make the number of steps taken by Achilles finite, because he can only be at the total distance divided by the planck length positions in between. On the other hand, it raises the question of how moving from one planck position to the next happens. (It may also be that I am talking complete BS here because I honestly and literally have no idea how planck lengths and planck time affect the universe and the position and movement of objects in it.)
Posted: 3/12/2021 12:02 PM
Quote
Warp
Banned User, Former player
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
Note that even if a game appears to be in the PD by the criteria above, it's still a gamble whether you can actually safely use it however you want or not. That's because some companies (sometimes even quite famous and big-name companies) are extraordinarily unscrupulous in claiming rights they don't actually legally have, and fighting for these alleged rights (which they can afford to do, because they are often really rich). There exist numerous examples (not necessarily video games but other types of work) where individuals or corporations have claimed rights they don't actually have, sometimes copyrights, sometimes other types of right, and have been extraordinarily zealous in fighting for these rights, essentially becoming copyright bullies. They may be legally in the wrong, but they get away with their appropriation of false rights because they are so rich and big, and effective at intimidating individuals with legal action. (And, frankly, even if you were completely in the right and the company completely in the wrong, would you have the money, time and fortitude to go into a legal battle against such a company? Life just isn't fair sometimes.) (The only video game example that I can think of is The Tetris Company, which has claimed copyright on the very concept of Tetris. Not just the name, not just the individual games in the series, but the concept of the game itself, the game mechanics. This is unambiguously uncopyrightable in pretty much any country, as has been confirmed by many copyright lawyers, and it would never hold in any court, but they don't care. And other companies and individuals have never bothered challenging them on it.)
Posted: 2/24/2021 8:27 AM
Quote
Warp
Banned User, Former player
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
Speaking of that, I think it would be a good idea to add the SHA-256 hash of the distributed exe file (and perhaps other, even more secure hashes). (Sure, only something like 0.1% of people will actually check the hash of the downloaded file, but at least the option would be there for those who want to be extra sure.)
Posted: 2/24/2021 8:19 AM
Quote
Warp
Banned User, Former player
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
I really think that chess games should be played on the hardest difficulty (that's not "infinite thinking time") because playing on the easiest difficulty might make for a shorter run but is too trivial. (I don't usually care for "triviality" in TASes, but this is one category of games where I make an exception, because it makes sense.) The length of the run shouldn't be an issue in these cases.
Posted: 2/3/2021 4:30 PM
Quote
Warp
Banned User, Former player
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
Chanoyu wrote:
The flat ends of the shaded circle-halves, if connected to each other, form a square.
The semicircles aren't necessarily of the same size.
Posted: 2/3/2021 1:29 PM
Quote
Warp
Banned User, Former player
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
You are right. There isn't enough information. The two blue shapes should be semi-circles. (I'll change the picture to be more accurate.)
Posted: 2/3/2021 12:19 PM
Quote
Warp
Banned User, Former player
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
What is the area of the shaded part, compared to the entire circle?
Posted: 1/6/2021 2:10 PM
Quote
Warp
Banned User, Former player
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
From the Michael Penn youtube channel a problem apparently originally published in some math magazine in 1987, which has a nice solution: Suppose b is an integer larger than 1. Evaluate the integral from 0 to infinity of floor(log_b(floor(ceil(x)/x))) dx
Posted: 12/11/2020 9:14 PM
Quote
Warp
Banned User, Former player
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
What is the radius of the smallest circles?
Posted: 12/11/2020 9:11 PM
Quote
Warp
Banned User, Former player
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
Samsara wrote:
The most depressing thing in the world is the idea that caring about people is "progressive" as opposed to "literally how humanity should have always been from the dawn of humankind". I'm truly sorry your worldview has been so corrupted by your bigotry.
That's always the go-to excuse of social justice ideologues when called out on their oppressive and discriminatory policies. They want to severely restrict people's freedom of speech, as well as mandate compelled speech. They want harsh punishments for people who merely express their dissenting opinions, or do not conform to the compelled speech rules that they are trying to impose. This includes trying to get them fired from their jobs, having companies refuse to offer them their services, them being shunned from society, them being thrown in jail, and in the most extreme cases even physically assaulted (which has become more and more common in later years). They want racial segregation, and advocate for ending legislation that forbids racial segregation, discrimination and favoritism (something that they tried to do eg. in the state of California). They want people treated differently based on race, sex and other such characteristics, they want racial and gender discrimination eg. in hiring and school enrollment, they want separate spaces for people based eg. on race. There's a good reason why they are called with the moniker "regressive left". And that's just a few examples. The whole list would be quite long. And they have been more and more radicalized by the year. Just a mere 5 or so years ago they almost never resorted to physical violence in order to push their agenda. They merely resorted to physically blocking people's free movement, disrupting events with loud noises, pulling fire alarms and so on, and harassing people they didn't like mostly via words and defamatory smearing campaigns. Nowadays, however, they have become so emboldened that they regularly physically assault people and burn buildings. But when called out on these totalitarian oppressive policies, they always resort to the same excuse: "It's just caring about people." You see, they are the ones with "empathy". I'm sorry, but I'm not buying it. People with empathy do not assault other people, harass them, lie about them, organize smearing campaigns, discriminate against them, nor destroy their property. That's not empathy. That's bigotry and totalitarianism.
Posted: 12/9/2020 6:16 PM
Quote
Warp
Banned User, Former player
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
Sorry for asking trivial questions about Doom demo files, but I'm curious to know if they encode keypresses that are then "played back" by the game, or whether they just encode player and enemy position and orientation at each frame. I'm assuming it's the former. I also assume that the inhumanely fast turning speed is achieved by mouse turning controls. I suppose it could be theoretically achievable with real-life hardware?
Posted: 12/6/2020 6:45 AM
Quote
Warp
Banned User, Former player
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
NxCy wrote:
Chanoyu wrote:
I'm thinking your hypothesis is false, but I just have a thought, and that's far from a proof. A rational number can be written as x/y. By allowing negative a1 etc., you get the 1/y part. But what about a number x/y where you need the same number p1, p2, or p3 to make both x and y?
In that case the numerator and denominator wouldn't be relatively prime and you could simplify the fraction.
Yeah, the sketch proof I was thinking of was precisely related to the most-simplified fraction consisting of relatively prime numbers, which by definition don't share any prime factors, and therefore the hypothesis should work.
Posted: 12/5/2020 4:09 PM
Quote
Warp
Banned User, Former player
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
Ok, now something more original that I thought of recently. (Well, "original" at least in the sense that this is not something I just saw somewhere, but it's something I thought of myself. It may well be either false or a known result, but I haven't encountered it.) The fundamental theorem of arithmetic essentially means that any natural number n can be written as this kind of product: n = p1a1 ⋅ p2a2 ⋅ p3a3 ⋅ p4a4 ⋅ ... where p1, p2, p3, etc. are all the prime numbers, and a1, a2, a3, etc. are non-negative integers. Hypothesis: If we lift the restriction of a1, a2, a3, etc. being non-negative, ie. we allow any integers, then the above is true for any positive rational number n. (I have thought of a kind of sketch of a proof of this, but I'm not sure if it's correct. I might also be missing some rather obvious counter-example...)
Posted: 11/28/2020 9:28 AM
Quote
Warp
Banned User, Former player
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
FractalFusion wrote:
This is known already and there are probably hundreds of proofs out there (induction, difference of powers formulas, etc.)
I would like to repeat the question I already presented some years ago to a somewhat similar response: Do all the math challenges posted here need to be something for which nobody has ever found nor published a proof? Is this thread titled "some math challenges", or is it titled "unsolved problems in math"? And on that note, googling for the answer isn't much of a "math challenge". The only slightly challenging thing might be to find the correct search terms, but I don't think that's the type of "challenge" this thread is for.
Posted: 11/25/2020 10:51 PM
Quote
Warp
Banned User, Former player
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
Something easier then. Prove that: 13 + 23 + 33 + 43 + ... + n3 = (1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + ... + n)2
Posted: 11/21/2020 9:57 PM
Quote
Warp
Banned User, Former player
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
In Magic: The Gathering the keyword "scry n" means "look at the top n cards of your library (ie. deck). You may put any amount of them on the top of your library in any order, and the rest on the bottom of your library in any order." For example, "scry 2" means that you look at the top 2 cards of your deck, and then you may choose to put both of them on the top of the deck (in either order), or both of them on the bottom of the deck (in either order), or one of them on the top and the other on the bottom. If you can get arbitrarily many consecutive "scry 2" effects (there are ways to achieve this), it can be relatively easily proven that you can use them to reorder your entire deck in any order you want. So my question is: Suppose your deck has currently 50 cards, and you can apply as many "scry 2" operations to it that you want. How many such "scry 2" operations do you need, at most, to reorder your entire deck in a particular order?
Posted: 11/16/2020 4:53 PM
Quote
Warp
Banned User, Former player
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
p4wn3r wrote:
Anyway, now I have a list of all 2x2 matrices whose product is obtained by just concatenating their base 10 digits.
Now you'll have to prove that there are only finitely many.
Posted: 11/11/2020 7:05 AM
Quote
Warp
Banned User, Former player
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
It has been about a million years since I last saw an integral using polar coordinates, but given that every point on the curve is "visible" from the origin without crossing other points in the curve, wouldn't that be the proper approach?
Posted: 10/28/2020 5:21 PM
Quote
Warp
Banned User, Former player
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
I suppose this slightly relates to physics, at least technically speaking: I recently purchased a 120-hertz display (to replace my older 60-hertz one). The https://www.testufo.com/ site shows three images scrolling horizontally at the same speed, but the top one updates 120 times per second (if you have a 120-hertz display), the middle one updates 60 times per second, and the bottom one 30 times per second. I was puzzled why the 60-hertz scrolling image looks visibly blurrier than the 120-hertz one. If you pay really, really close attention you might just barely see the 60-hertz image moving in a slightly less smooth manner than the 120-hertz one, but this effect is very hard to notice. The major difference between them is the clear difference in blurriness. If they were randomized, it would be very hard to tell which one updates at 120Hz and which one at 60Hz by looking at the smoothness of the motion, but it's extremely obvious by looking at the blurriness. But why does it look blurrier? I don't think the web page itself blurs the image. Thinking about it for a while, I think I figured out the reason: It's probably mostly caused by pixel response time. Pixel response time is the average time that it takes a pixel to change color. This display is categorized as having a 4ms pixel response time. I wouldn't be surprised if in a 1ms display the 60Hz image would look much sharper. So, what I'm thinking is that in the 60Hz scroll, the picture makes bigger jumps. Due to pixel response time, the image remains visible both in its previous position and its new position at the same time, for a little while. It may be just like a millisecond or two that they are visible at both positions, but still enough to notice. In the 120Hz scroll the pictures are of course also visible at two positions at a time for a millisecond or two, but the difference is that the distance between these two images is half of that of 60Hz. That's why the 60Hz version looks blurrier: The image copies are farther apart from each other, making the result look blurrier than in the 120Hz version, where they are closer together. One way to test this theory would be, as mentioned, test with a 1ms display (which has otherwise the same resolution and dimensions). I don't have one, though.
Posted: 10/23/2020 4:33 PM
Quote
Warp
Banned User, Former player
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
Does this have anything to with the question of why nuclear fusion releases so much energy? Also, on another tangent: Does a charged battery weigh more than a depleted battery?
1 2 3 4
307 308