The point the other commenter is making, which I fully agree with, is that I can have legitimate reasons for not wanting to update. Windows shoving updates down my throat when they can potentially break critical stuff on my machine is pretty much just equivalent to forcing malware on me.

I’ve been doing the same thing, went back to read it now, and I have to admit I had a good time. Even though it took time to manually turn my comments into gibberish, it gave some hilarious results!

That would be fine, I can live with choosing two of those for any given account.

What I hate is when the company offering the service forces its choice on me. I may be reliant on logging into some specific account without access to my phone, but then along comes company X and says “NOPE! Your account security is more important than you being able to access your own stuff. We’re completely on board with locking you out of your own accounts in the name of security.”

To be clear, I’m talking about personal accounts. Those on a network where I’m responsible for preventing a breach are another matter of course.

I’m surprised you’re getting downvoted so heavily: Is it really that controversial of an opinion that I want to be able to make the choice between reliable accessibility, efficiency, and hardened security for my personal stuff?

Of course: On a corporate network I have a responsibility to have a very secure account so that I’m not a weak point, I’m not talking about scenarios where my account being breached exposes others that I’m responsible for.

I’m talking about my personal accounts. I may want to choose to have a password and no 2FA, for the simple reason that I may want to be able to access my account from a library computer or internet cafe without having access to any of my devices. That reliable access may be more important to me than having heavier security, and nobody has any business asking me why, because it’s my data that I’m choosing how to protect. However, that’s become pretty much an impossibility by now, with everyone shoving 2FA and whatnot down my throat, regardless of what I want.

If I happen to lose/break my laptop and phone simultaneously, which is not unthinkable given that I carry both on me pretty much every day, I’m pretty much locked out of everything.

A protein is like a really long chain of simple monomers (amino acids), that you can think of as a long string of differently coloured beads. The ordering of the beads somewhat determines how the protein functions, but the major factor that determines it is how this long string is bundled up, i.e. “folded” (think of a ball of yarn).

A DNA sequence tells us the sequence of the amino acids in a protein, but tells us nothing about how it is folded. It is of great interest to compute how a protein will fold, given its sequence, because then we can determine how and why it works like it does, and use gene-editing techniques to design proteins to do the stuff we want. This requires huge amounts of computational power, so you get the fold@home project :)

Thanks for contributing!

To be fair, the result of this calculation only depends on the area/volume ratio of the human. I used the specific cylinder, because humans are roughly cylindrical, and have a volume of roughly 100 L. The surface area of a regular human is probably a bit larger than that of a cylindrical one though.

I’m actually a chemist, thankyouverymuch

#Chemistry Is When There’s Too Many Electrons For The Physicists

;)

The math actually says that we might quite possibly get nuclear stuff. I checked because at first I intuitively thought the same thing as you.

Assuming

• cylindrical human, 2m tall, 25 cm diameter.
• air displaced from the point you teleport to is instantly moved to form a monolayer (1 molecule thick) on your surface.
• The displacement of air is adiabatic (no heat is transferred, which will be true if the displacement is instantaneous)

Volume of displaced air: ≈ 100L = 0.1m^3 At atmospheric conditions: ≈ 4 mol

Surface area of cylindrical human: ≈ 1.58 m^2 Diameter of nitrogen molecule (which is roughly the same as for an oxygen molecule) : ≈ 3 Å Volume of monolayer: ≈ 4.7e-10 m^3

Treating the air as an ideal gas (terrible approximation for this process) gives us a post-compression pressure of ≈ 45 PPa (you read that right: Peta-pascal) or 450 Gbar, and a temperature of roughly 650 000 K.

These conditions are definitely in the range where fusion might be possible (see: solar conditions). So to the people saying you are only “trying to science”, I would say I agree with your initial assessment.

I’m on my phone now, but I can run the numbers using something more accurate than ideal gas when I get my computer. However, this is so extreme that I don’t really think it will change anything.

Edit: We’ll just look at how densely packed the monolayer is. Our cylindrical person has an area of 1.58 m^2, which, assuming an optimally packed monolayer gives us about 48 micro Å^2 per particle, or an average inter-particle distance of about 3.9 milli Å. For reference, that means the average distance between molecules is about 0.1 % of the diameter of the molecules (roughly 3 Å) I think we can safely say that fusion is a possible or even likely outcome of this procedure.

I am now sitting on the wing of a plane that is about to take off. Gonna try to Tom Cruise it. Will post updates soon.

This put words to thoughts and feelings I have had for a long time, but have not been able to express accurately. Thank you, well written.

I’ve seen reference to research showing pretty much what you’re saying: Inadequate pay gives dissatisfied employees, but raising pay above a certain level only gives very short term increase in employee satisfaction. The conclusion was that pay has to be high enough that people feel fairly compensated, but further increasing it has little to no long-term effect.

In Norway we have the stereotypical Norwegians “Ola Nordmann” and “Kari Nordmann”. Ola and Kari were quite common names a couple generations ago (not so common now). “Nordmann” literally translates to “Norwegian [person]”, but is also a not-too-uncommon last name.

We typically talk about them if we’re describing something or some situation and what the stereotypical Norwegian would do/think.

Don’t know about Saturday, but “lørdag” comes from the Norse word for “washing day” because the vikings were surprisingly hygienic for their time, and bathed/washed themselves once a week.

I definitely agree that breaking best practices in a way that could lead to UB or hard-to-find bugs should give point deduction. The sole requirement shouldn’t be “write standard compliant code”.

However, a test does not simulate a real-world development environment, where you will have time to look through your code with fresh eyes the next day, and maybe even have someone review your code. The only thing a test reasonably simulates is your ability to solve the “thinking” part of the problem on your own. Thus, deducting points for trivial stuff that would 10/10 times be caught, either by the compiler, the developer or the reviewer, but isn’t “strictly correct” just seems pedantic to me.

To be fair, other than the example by OP I have a hard time coming up with things that wouldn’t be either caught by the compiler or are very bad practice (which should give point deduction).

I have to admit it sounds stupid to deduct points for that anyway, a test should measure your ability to reason, not your ability to remember trivial formalities.

I have a masters degree in materials chemistry and engineering. When people find that out they often say stuff like “I could never understand that” or similar.

I am of the firm belief that I could teach anyone everything I know given enough time and motivation. The thing is, I don’t think there’s anything special about me that makes me capable of doing what I do, other than thinking chemistry is extremely interesting. I don’t have a more capable brain or anything. I’m just a bit of a nerd.

I absolutely agree that way too many people have the misconception that you have to be “special” to do a lot of the things many people find hard. It’s all about being interested enough to spend time learning it.

Maybe not your generic “discussions”, but at c/askscience we can discuss interesting (and more or less absurd) scientific questions and hypotheticals, if you’re into that kind of thing ;)

Great answer! I’m just commenting because I think this would be a question that would be nice to post on c/askscience where I regularly lurk and look for cool questions to answer, but where there aren’t too many questions being asked yet :)

I’m one of the people that thinks the world is probably going to shit (mass migration from uninhabitable land, wars over water / farmland etc.) but I don’t use that as an excuse to not do anything. My reasoning is that even though I honestly think everything is going to shit, I might be wrong, so the best I can do is plan to go down fighting to make the world better. Either the world burns, and I can say with integrity that I tried my best, or we somehow pull through and prevent the worst prognosis from becoming reality. Either way, slacking is a bad idea.