troyunrau

troyunrau, 2 months ago

4D conspriacy theory: was actually killed by Airbus, because the negative press for Boeing will push the Airbus stock price up…

I feel bad for the guy. This is going to put a wet blanket on future whistleblowers, regardless of the actual cause.

troyunrau, 3 months ago

TV Tropes warning. I’ve always liked this scale, which describes the hardness of sci fi. tvtropes.org/…/MohsScaleOfScienceFictionHardness

Star Wars is about a one, and Star Trek a two (harder but barely), BSG a three. Etc.

troyunrau, 4 months ago

Complete tangent, but alumina, aka aluminum oxide, is usually considered the second hardest naturally occurring material. When it is found in nature, it is given the mineral name corundum and is clear. But if there are some impurities in it, you can get colours. Red corundum is called Ruby, and blue is called Sapphire. In the beauty industry, the same material (mixed with magnetite) is called emery, and lends its name to emery board, and is used in nail files. In the tech industry, it’s used to make the extremely scratch resistant coating on most modern phone screens (basically nothing but diamond will scratch it).

You have subscribed to alumina facts. I’m sorry, the cat facts guy was busy.

troyunrau, 4 months ago

Battery breakthroughs are announced every day. Very few make it to market.

troyunrau, 3 months ago

I’m not mad. Just disappointed.

I kid. Everyone has their own tastes and flavour preferences. I’m a fan of the book and also think Villeneuve did a pretty bang up job with Part One.

All sci fi ages poorly, some ages more poorly. Dune has the advantage of being a universe where they fought a war with computers, thus they’ve more or less been banned. This helps them avoid references to aged tech like most sci fi, giving it a bit of a reprieve there. If you read novels that were contemporary with it, you’ll find a lot of rooms full of tapes for computer systems, and similar. But perhaps that is more your style.

Personally, I dislike “psi” powers in my sci fi. And Dune, like many others in its era, is obsessed with this notion that “you only use 10% of your brain… imagine what you could do it you unlocked more!?” Modern neuroscience has completely pooh-poohed the idea, but if you read anything classic sci fi, you need to tolerate it. In the case of Dune, I tolerate it because the world building is worth it.

troyunrau, 3 months ago

Excellent question. From first principles: mars is about 1.5 AU from the sun. Using the intensity equation (inverse square law), Mars should receive about 1/(1.5x1.5) the amount of solar radiation, or about 44% on average.

Earth gets about 1400 W/m² hitting the top of the atmosphere, but most places on earth only see about 1000 W/m² after the column of air absorbs a bunch of it. Martian air absorbs almost nothing (being very thin), so you’d expect to see about 44% of 1400W/m² – or about 600W/m².

A quick Google search for “mars solar intensity” shows a result of 590 W/m², so that is pretty close to accurate, from first principles.

So 60% as bright, if talking pure intensity. As you say, the human eye has a pretty responsive dynamic range, and this is quite an acceptable number.

For point of comparison, this is the difference between the sun at high noon versus the sun at 4pm for most of the world. On Mars, high noon would have a solar intensity more like 4pm on earth. No where close to your darkness experience with the eclipse.

troyunrau, 2 months ago

I bet this is a falling out with Hasbro execs on royalties. BG3 royalties were a cash cow this year for Hasbro, pushing Wizards (as a division) to be quite profitable, while almost all other divisions in their company lost money.

So now the agreement is over, and Larian is like: we will own the IP on our next project instead of paying $90M to Hasbro… And fair enough – they’ve shown they can kick ass. Hasbro is probably gambling that it’s the IP that made the money, and not Larian being magic in a bottle as a developer. So they’ll kick tires on selling BG4 to another studio.

BG3 will go down in history as the legendary game before enshittification. Larian will make a few great games that don’t sell as well – before selling out to a whale that dumps money on the owner’s front lawn (see also BioWare). The devs who made BG3 will found indie studios and make cool shit for a decade or two. So the wheel turns.