As much as I remember 'bout PNP and NPN questions on my radio technician's licensing test from when I was 11, the whole description is a journalistic goofusism.
What I remember is the semiconductor substrate is doped to favor a particular charge--positive or negative--and so it acts according in an electrical circuit. If you have two N-type materials wired into a circuit with a P-type material separating them, the N-type material will resist electrical current flow because electrons want to move into a negative-charge area. Apply charge against the P-type material and it starts moving negative charge out of the N-type materials, and you wind up with a P-type channel between the two wires--a CONDUCTIVE P-type channel.
That's, of course, a messy description. The point is you're not moving holes through P-type material and electrons through N-type material; you're only moving electrons, and altering the charge of areas of the substrate. Semiconductor gates are highly-complex engineered structures, not cables that allow you to swap void with electron.
Then let me be direct. Since a dog can catch a ball and can't understand a parabola, that's proof you are wrong.
No, it's not.
You use brute force learning. Muscle memory and eye-hand coordination are terms for learning something without learning how you did it.
No, I don't. When I practice piano, I focus on the techniques which I struggle most with. I identify what specific technical concepts I'm weak in when I can't play a certain piece, and direct my attention there. By brute force, you would just sit down and go, "Duhr, this song r hard, I must r 2 practice." Maksim Mrvica didn't do that; he sat down and said, "Hmm, this part trips me up... I have trouble with Sus7 chords in the Dm scale, so I should drill on those." Herman Li did the same when practicing guitar. Oatsngoats practices Super Metroid speed running in the same way, and moved from casual times to within 20 seconds of world record in under a year; meanwhile people who just do speedruns straight through day after day without picking out their weaknesses and practicing those, specifically, have sunk five times as much time and effort into it and are barely faster than when they started.
Then tell us. Otherwise, it sounds like you don't actually know.
Catching a ball? It's visuo-spatial. The temporal lobe handles spatial reasoning, essentially taking in the visual data from your eyes and generating an internal simulation of the world around you (you're not living in the real world, but a simulation that closely matches it). Same as anything else, you learn more rapidly if you actually pay attention, take notice of those exact conditions which repeatedly cause you trouble, and repeat them. Some scientific studies have observed improvement in learning if you focus on those situations and play them back internally, replaying the visual and spatial information through your brain and letting it experiment internally--that is, you can get better at catching a ball by thinking *really* *hard* about catching a ball, if you actually follow the ball's path and your physical actions in response.
Cognitive therapy is more effective for treating depression because the brain always follows the least energy-demanding path. If you always focus on depression, it becomes hard to be not-depressed; if you push back, you'll become mentally drained. If you push back *all* *the* *time*, if you reframe (less energy), and if you generally develop long-term mental habits to control depression and anxiety, those mental problems diminish. Essentially, the therapy targets executive functions, putting pressure on the brain until it reroutes some of its default pathways to follow more desirable mental behaviors. We often call this "Habit".
Ben Pridmore can memorize the order of 27 decks of cards in 3 minutes because he converts the cards into a number system, which is then converted into a system of visual imagery, which is then stored spatially. He's spent a lot of time reviewing those images and drilling the ones that are slow or weak, so can reuse them pretty readily. He also uses a more highly-compressed system than most speed cards contestants, storing more cards in fewer images and fewer spatial locations; it takes longer to learn that system than a simple PAO, which itself takes a hell of a lot longer to learn than a mnemonic major system.
I was always better at math because I make heavy use of reflection. Check the CIL manual on MSDN. I'd look at any mathematical behavior and identify how it interacted with every other mathematical behavior, creating strong associations between my entire body of mathematical knowledge. I'd forget large bodies of concepts and formulas, and then re-derive them whenever I needed by looking at other relationships and working out how that stuff operated. I used to get ahead of my teachers by deriving new concepts before we reached that chapter in the book.
To supply power for Europe, you'd need around 4.2 million acres of land, or approximately 5.3 times the land area of Rhode Island. That's bigger than Connecticut; in fact, it's CT and RI put together. It'd be more than half the land area of Belgium, and more than a sixth of Portugal.
SO, for every X people on earth, you need cX acres of land. For every cX acres of land, you can install solar generation to support aX people. Is (a) less than 1? If so, you'll ultimately devote more land to panels than to people.
We already devote more land to food than people. Population expansion will eventually create land scarcity not *first* in the form of places to live, but in the form of resource generation area. Power will compete with food, and population growth will temporarily halt; then we'll rip out all these solar plants and install something that takes 1/100 of the space, and population will begin swelling again. That's how scarcity controls population.
Of course that's unlikely to happen quite as such, since we'll first run out of land that's useful for food *or* solar, and expanding production of either into that land will take more *labor* per unit of either electricity or food generated, creating scarcity (the cost of those goods will increase due to the increased wages paid per unit good, and the amount of labor devoted to other goods will reduce due to needing to divert said labor to energy or food). The contention described will happen, just not across the whole surface of the earth; and the solution will be to plop down a nuclear plant somewhere not useful for food or solar panels anyway, thus giving us access to even more land area.
I don't think you know what the word strawman means
A strawman is when you make an argument different from the one at hand, attack it, then use that to claim the original argument was bad.
For example: I showed that the size of a solar installation is big. I did this by comparing it to both the land space used to generate food per person--which makes it easy to grasp what 6,000 acres *means*, instead of seeing it as an arbitrary number--*and* to the population supported on a land area. The latter was my direct argument:
That second figure holds a lot of weight: to go all-solar at this efficiency, 72% of the land must be solar, assuming densely-packed apartments filled with families (New York apartment projects).
The arguments against "you will need a *lot* of land to support a high density population with solar" were in the form of "LOL YOU TALKING ABOUT GENERATING FOOD! HAHAHAHA WE R NOT 2 GENERATE SOLARZ ON TEH FEWD LANDZ!!!" That is: I argued that city populations would need solar installations geographically *larger* than the city, and everyone else came back with the STRAWMAN ARGUMENT that solar isn't consuming our food production.
I gave those figures for comparison of scale, you dumb donkey fucker. I've said that four times, and you're still trying to create a strawman by creating an argument I never made and presenting it as my argument.
Are you saying I'm as loony as those people who think we can power nuclear reactors using bananas instead of uranium?
Insulation on the outside is not nailed on the house. How should that work on houses made from stone? It is cemented or glued.
On concrete, brick, and concrete block walls, tapcon masonry screws are inserted into the substrate to hold on wooden firing, between which we insert rigid foam insulation. The foam is friction-fit (wedged in), and a finish siding such as aluminum or vinyl is attached by horizontal cross bar attached to the wooden firing, which braces the insulation in place without penetrating mechanical fastening. In such installations, the loss occurs through the masonry fasteners drilled through the wood and concrete.
In my country we have 10% unemployment... ridiculously somehow trick calculated down to 5% or less. Who cares if those unemployed work on roofs or "produce nothing"?
You have money which you spend on goods and services. To produce those goods and services, you must employ labor. Your money pays the wages of that labor. If you place labor carrying out other tasks, you must also pay that labor; but without an increase in the basic productivity, there won't be buying power--that is, money with purchasing power--to offset those wages. Thus, to create these new jobs, you must eliminate other jobs.
You can't create employment by snapping your fingers and saying "MORE JOBS!" If you could, someone would have hired these unemployed people so they could get the money you're not yet spending.
You've said a lot of nothing. You haven't explained how your brain works out where things go. The topic is fascinating; it has a lot to do with visual and spatial processing, as well as with more basic functions like the brain reorganizing itself so that impulses travel along a path of lowest energy demand. Any mental effort involves jumping off that track.
Essentially, you've described slow, brute-force learning. Practice is, in a cognitive sense, an activity which generates errors; deliberate practice is a particular form of practice which optimizes the speed of learning by focusing on the most weak technical skills in a goal-oriented fashion, using constant and immediate feedback mechanisms to allow continuous correction of the largest errors while generating those errors intentionally by repeating the weakest skills. There's a large difference between that and the naive method; anyone who's spent their whole life playing the same songs on piano day in and day out and never gotten any better should make obvious that's not the most effective way to learn.
I had a weird dream the other day involving a high-temperature superconducting film of carbon nanotubes with a tungsten atom inside. The film was woven back and forth on a nanoscopic level, sort of in that compressed zig zag manner like corrugate; that, taken as a linear unit, was then drawn in a trace inductor scheme (a spiral of wire), making a trace of superconducting air-gapped tungsten impregnated carbon nanotubes.
Apparently my brain was trying to work out implanting a microscopic nano-super-indacitor into a contact lens, providing field power reception and storage in one unit (capacitor AND inductor) to draw overlays directly onto OLED display positioned over the iris.
Waiting for them to move from supercaps on chip to supercaps on silicone hydrogel.
Efficiency is what reduces disease, poverty, and human suffering. Your experiences are limited by your ability to use your time efficiently; society's balance is limited by the efficiencies of its broad systems--economics, education, government, the like. Your inability to maximize the efficiency of your life limits your leisure time and the quality of your leisure time; while the inefficiencies in society means somebody else doesn't get leisure time, since they're too busy starving in the frozen wasteland we call a back alley mid-winter.
Why catch fish efficiently when you can do it with joy and pleasure, or flair and gusto?
Of course. I'm rich. I just sip my champagne, unzip my pants, and piss on the starving homeless with flair and gusto.
Yet I made a comparison illustrating the breadth and scope of providing power for ALL OF EUROPE, showing that we'd need a land area of ALL OF CONNECTICUT AND RHODE ISLAND.
The original discussion wasn't about this cute little toy to light up 0.0002% of the world, but the viability of lighting up 0.01% of the world.
The ones I first worked out on my own were that all whole numbers were the result of the sum of a single set of only primes raised to powers (2^3 + 5 + 11^2) or the *product* of a single set of primes raised to powers (2 * 3^2 * 7). Then some teacher told me there was no chain rule for integration, and I found the chain rule essentially a mental mathematics strategy for solving complex derivatives, so I took the next 40 minutes to analyze several integration exercises and produced integration by parts (which we learned about a week later--what a waste of time). Simple stuff.
My favorite one was physics tensile problems. I *hated* tensile problems. To solve a tensile problem, we had to carry out a seven-step algorithm in which we'd break down each angle into its horizontal and vertical component vectors, then solve the right triangle for each, and combine the solution's horizontal and vertical vectors, solving for the hypotenuse.
In that picture, consider T1 and T2 as the length of those sides (they're the tension on each rope or whatnot they represent). M is the hanging mass. As it turns out, you can get a triangle by placing a line of length M between the top left point (where angle Theta is) and the bottom right vertex (where T2 meets the vertical wall); or by moving T2 *without rotating it* such that any of its vertexes connects to any of T1's vertexes, and then connecting the remaining two with a line of length M. I recognized this largely by mathematical result.
Pick a set. You'll either end up with two sides and an angle or two angles and a side. You can now glance at this diagram, apply the Law of Cosines, and solve it in one step. When I showed my physics teacher, he said he didn't see any mathematical reason that would work, although it *did* work on every problem we tried. Should have asked the Asian chick who took every form of math there was when she went to college; my teacher was largely a materials science type of guy.
Obviously, this one's my favorite because it's a *much* simpler way to tackle an irritatingly tedious problem *and* my academic superiors could never understand why it worked. That means I didn't waste my time figuring out some mathematical trick I could have found by flipping a dozen pages ahead in the book. As far as I know, this is a known technique, but *very* few sources mention using either the law of sines or the law of cosines to solve tension triangles.
This is why math was always fun for me. I reflected a lot on how it all fit together.
Building a solar facility isn't a no-op. It's not like you can say, "We built a house there and put sheds and structures all over the place, and tromp all over it with machines and boots; but nobody paved it, so we didn't destroy the ecological habitat." You definitely do not want ecological habitat thriving among your solar panels and concentrating reflectors.
Most of what I said is platform-agnostic. We happen to not put solar thermal dishes on roofs, but they still take up a lot of space and are still comparable to rooftop solar: rooftop solar still capitalizes on already-used land, and so doesn't have to be as efficient. It's the other drawbacks that come into play, which are the same if you're doing PV panels, burning coal, or running a nuclear ABWR; each technology and each particular mode of deployment has its own strengths and weaknesses in terms of start-up cost, fueling costs, land area usage, waste, and maintenance.
You said power generation at point of use frees us from infrastructure needs. Whether that's solar PV, solar-thermal, geothermal, gas line, or nuclear, the counter-argument I gave applies. Granted, you can get a lot more power out of a nuclear generator strapped to your roof; but then you need a whole nuclear generation management facility on your roof, and on the next roof, and the next, and they all waste nuclear fuel because they have to overgenerate some of the time AND HAVE NO INFRASTRUCTURE TO SHARE POWER.
Transit of any electricity--nuclear, solar, faerie labor--incurs the same losses. That doesn't change either.
All in all, you just responded to a concrete argument of "you're making shit up and arguing against that" with "Uh. Well. Your mom."
More to the point, I know how people are capable of catching a ball. Have you ever wondered why you can just look at something, see it moving, step to where it's going to be, and grab it? How about throwing a rock and hitting it, even though the impact point is 20 feet away and it'll take a second to get there, with both objects moving? Don't you need some serious algebra to work that out?
I not only know why, but I know how to leverage the same facilities to do other things. Hell, I know why a few weeks of therapy is more than twice as effective as drugs at long-term curing of severe depression. I know why Ben Pridmore can memorize the order of 27 decks of cards in 3 minutes. I know why I was always better at math than my classmates.
You, on the other hand, seem to be focused on small outcomes. Someone explains an efficient process of planning and architecture to you and you go, "... oh. The pieces all make sense. I knew all this shit already!", even though you didn't. You knew about the pieces, but not about how to assemble them, or how to leverage them to accomplish things well beyond what you'd have thought your level of skill could accomplish. It's a common behavior in human thought processes; people are often not introspective, reflective, or creative.
We're talking about the fabric of space-time being curved. That means your 3D space is essentially a hyperplane perpendicular to a particular point on a fourth spatial axis. The word "curved" obviously both does and doesn't have the same meaning.
If you flex a 2D plane and draw a straight line across it, you get a curve because the plane is curved. This is trivially demonstrated by drawing a straight line on a sphere. What you just described is, essentially, a 3D space being curved in the same way, and then some bloke tries to travel across it in a straight line, and finds it takes the least energy to follow a curved path.
(At least I think that's what you just described; I pinned a few things and just tried to visualize 4D space and see where things would naturally go if pushed. Humans should not visualize 4D space. Even if you could do it, you'd never be able to describe it; we use language to indicate experiences, and can't understand language if the words aren't pinned to experiences we've had.)
Slashdot Mirror
As much as I remember 'bout PNP and NPN questions on my radio technician's licensing test from when I was 11, the whole description is a journalistic goofusism.
What I remember is the semiconductor substrate is doped to favor a particular charge--positive or negative--and so it acts according in an electrical circuit. If you have two N-type materials wired into a circuit with a P-type material separating them, the N-type material will resist electrical current flow because electrons want to move into a negative-charge area. Apply charge against the P-type material and it starts moving negative charge out of the N-type materials, and you wind up with a P-type channel between the two wires--a CONDUCTIVE P-type channel.
That's, of course, a messy description. The point is you're not moving holes through P-type material and electrons through N-type material; you're only moving electrons, and altering the charge of areas of the substrate. Semiconductor gates are highly-complex engineered structures, not cables that allow you to swap void with electron.
I dunno. How hot was it during the medieval warm period?
Then let me be direct. Since a dog can catch a ball and can't understand a parabola, that's proof you are wrong.
No, it's not.
You use brute force learning. Muscle memory and eye-hand coordination are terms for learning something without learning how you did it.
No, I don't. When I practice piano, I focus on the techniques which I struggle most with. I identify what specific technical concepts I'm weak in when I can't play a certain piece, and direct my attention there. By brute force, you would just sit down and go, "Duhr, this song r hard, I must r 2 practice." Maksim Mrvica didn't do that; he sat down and said, "Hmm, this part trips me up... I have trouble with Sus7 chords in the Dm scale, so I should drill on those." Herman Li did the same when practicing guitar. Oatsngoats practices Super Metroid speed running in the same way, and moved from casual times to within 20 seconds of world record in under a year; meanwhile people who just do speedruns straight through day after day without picking out their weaknesses and practicing those, specifically, have sunk five times as much time and effort into it and are barely faster than when they started.
Then tell us. Otherwise, it sounds like you don't actually know.
Catching a ball? It's visuo-spatial. The temporal lobe handles spatial reasoning, essentially taking in the visual data from your eyes and generating an internal simulation of the world around you (you're not living in the real world, but a simulation that closely matches it). Same as anything else, you learn more rapidly if you actually pay attention, take notice of those exact conditions which repeatedly cause you trouble, and repeat them. Some scientific studies have observed improvement in learning if you focus on those situations and play them back internally, replaying the visual and spatial information through your brain and letting it experiment internally--that is, you can get better at catching a ball by thinking *really* *hard* about catching a ball, if you actually follow the ball's path and your physical actions in response.
Cognitive therapy is more effective for treating depression because the brain always follows the least energy-demanding path. If you always focus on depression, it becomes hard to be not-depressed; if you push back, you'll become mentally drained. If you push back *all* *the* *time*, if you reframe (less energy), and if you generally develop long-term mental habits to control depression and anxiety, those mental problems diminish. Essentially, the therapy targets executive functions, putting pressure on the brain until it reroutes some of its default pathways to follow more desirable mental behaviors. We often call this "Habit".
Ben Pridmore can memorize the order of 27 decks of cards in 3 minutes because he converts the cards into a number system, which is then converted into a system of visual imagery, which is then stored spatially. He's spent a lot of time reviewing those images and drilling the ones that are slow or weak, so can reuse them pretty readily. He also uses a more highly-compressed system than most speed cards contestants, storing more cards in fewer images and fewer spatial locations; it takes longer to learn that system than a simple PAO, which itself takes a hell of a lot longer to learn than a mnemonic major system.
I was always better at math because I make heavy use of reflection. Check the CIL manual on MSDN. I'd look at any mathematical behavior and identify how it interacted with every other mathematical behavior, creating strong associations between my entire body of mathematical knowledge. I'd forget large bodies of concepts and formulas, and then re-derive them whenever I needed by looking at other relationships and working out how that stuff operated. I used to get ahead of my teachers by deriving new concepts before we reached that chapter in the book.
None of these are special g
To supply power for Europe, you'd need around 4.2 million acres of land, or approximately 5.3 times the land area of Rhode Island. That's bigger than Connecticut; in fact, it's CT and RI put together. It'd be more than half the land area of Belgium, and more than a sixth of Portugal.
SO, for every X people on earth, you need cX acres of land. For every cX acres of land, you can install solar generation to support aX people. Is (a) less than 1? If so, you'll ultimately devote more land to panels than to people.
We already devote more land to food than people. Population expansion will eventually create land scarcity not *first* in the form of places to live, but in the form of resource generation area. Power will compete with food, and population growth will temporarily halt; then we'll rip out all these solar plants and install something that takes 1/100 of the space, and population will begin swelling again. That's how scarcity controls population.
Of course that's unlikely to happen quite as such, since we'll first run out of land that's useful for food *or* solar, and expanding production of either into that land will take more *labor* per unit of either electricity or food generated, creating scarcity (the cost of those goods will increase due to the increased wages paid per unit good, and the amount of labor devoted to other goods will reduce due to needing to divert said labor to energy or food). The contention described will happen, just not across the whole surface of the earth; and the solution will be to plop down a nuclear plant somewhere not useful for food or solar panels anyway, thus giving us access to even more land area.
I don't think you know what the word strawman means
A strawman is when you make an argument different from the one at hand, attack it, then use that to claim the original argument was bad.
For example: I showed that the size of a solar installation is big. I did this by comparing it to both the land space used to generate food per person--which makes it easy to grasp what 6,000 acres *means*, instead of seeing it as an arbitrary number--*and* to the population supported on a land area. The latter was my direct argument:
That second figure holds a lot of weight: to go all-solar at this efficiency, 72% of the land must be solar, assuming densely-packed apartments filled with families (New York apartment projects).
The arguments against "you will need a *lot* of land to support a high density population with solar" were in the form of "LOL YOU TALKING ABOUT GENERATING FOOD! HAHAHAHA WE R NOT 2 GENERATE SOLARZ ON TEH FEWD LANDZ!!!" That is: I argued that city populations would need solar installations geographically *larger* than the city, and everyone else came back with the STRAWMAN ARGUMENT that solar isn't consuming our food production.
I gave those figures for comparison of scale, you dumb donkey fucker. I've said that four times, and you're still trying to create a strawman by creating an argument I never made and presenting it as my argument.
Are you saying I'm as loony as those people who think we can power nuclear reactors using bananas instead of uranium?
Death stalkers and scarabs live in places with no plant life.
Insulation on the outside is not nailed on the house. How should that work on houses made from stone? It is cemented or glued.
On concrete, brick, and concrete block walls, tapcon masonry screws are inserted into the substrate to hold on wooden firing, between which we insert rigid foam insulation. The foam is friction-fit (wedged in), and a finish siding such as aluminum or vinyl is attached by horizontal cross bar attached to the wooden firing, which braces the insulation in place without penetrating mechanical fastening. In such installations, the loss occurs through the masonry fasteners drilled through the wood and concrete.
In my country we have 10% unemployment ... ridiculously somehow trick calculated down to 5% or less. Who cares if those unemployed work on roofs or "produce nothing"?
You have money which you spend on goods and services. To produce those goods and services, you must employ labor. Your money pays the wages of that labor. If you place labor carrying out other tasks, you must also pay that labor; but without an increase in the basic productivity, there won't be buying power--that is, money with purchasing power--to offset those wages. Thus, to create these new jobs, you must eliminate other jobs.
You can't create employment by snapping your fingers and saying "MORE JOBS!" If you could, someone would have hired these unemployed people so they could get the money you're not yet spending.
You've said a lot of nothing. You haven't explained how your brain works out where things go. The topic is fascinating; it has a lot to do with visual and spatial processing, as well as with more basic functions like the brain reorganizing itself so that impulses travel along a path of lowest energy demand. Any mental effort involves jumping off that track.
Essentially, you've described slow, brute-force learning. Practice is, in a cognitive sense, an activity which generates errors; deliberate practice is a particular form of practice which optimizes the speed of learning by focusing on the most weak technical skills in a goal-oriented fashion, using constant and immediate feedback mechanisms to allow continuous correction of the largest errors while generating those errors intentionally by repeating the weakest skills. There's a large difference between that and the naive method; anyone who's spent their whole life playing the same songs on piano day in and day out and never gotten any better should make obvious that's not the most effective way to learn.
I had a weird dream the other day involving a high-temperature superconducting film of carbon nanotubes with a tungsten atom inside. The film was woven back and forth on a nanoscopic level, sort of in that compressed zig zag manner like corrugate; that, taken as a linear unit, was then drawn in a trace inductor scheme (a spiral of wire), making a trace of superconducting air-gapped tungsten impregnated carbon nanotubes.
Apparently my brain was trying to work out implanting a microscopic nano-super-indacitor into a contact lens, providing field power reception and storage in one unit (capacitor AND inductor) to draw overlays directly onto OLED display positioned over the iris.
Waiting for them to move from supercaps on chip to supercaps on silicone hydrogel.
Oh I get it. He just said, "... dah. Whatever."
Efficiency is what reduces disease, poverty, and human suffering. Your experiences are limited by your ability to use your time efficiently; society's balance is limited by the efficiencies of its broad systems--economics, education, government, the like. Your inability to maximize the efficiency of your life limits your leisure time and the quality of your leisure time; while the inefficiencies in society means somebody else doesn't get leisure time, since they're too busy starving in the frozen wasteland we call a back alley mid-winter.
Why catch fish efficiently when you can do it with joy and pleasure, or flair and gusto?
Of course. I'm rich. I just sip my champagne, unzip my pants, and piss on the starving homeless with flair and gusto.
So they have an incentive to provide well-made products and reasonable warranties.
It sends HTTP requests. You don't know that the third party mirrors don't keep apache logs, do you, Mr. Anderson?
Yet I made a comparison illustrating the breadth and scope of providing power for ALL OF EUROPE, showing that we'd need a land area of ALL OF CONNECTICUT AND RHODE ISLAND.
The original discussion wasn't about this cute little toy to light up 0.0002% of the world, but the viability of lighting up 0.01% of the world.
Did you learn how to catch fish efficiently, though?
That feature is called apt-get upgrade.
Closed is not not open.
The ones I first worked out on my own were that all whole numbers were the result of the sum of a single set of only primes raised to powers (2^3 + 5 + 11^2) or the *product* of a single set of primes raised to powers (2 * 3^2 * 7). Then some teacher told me there was no chain rule for integration, and I found the chain rule essentially a mental mathematics strategy for solving complex derivatives, so I took the next 40 minutes to analyze several integration exercises and produced integration by parts (which we learned about a week later--what a waste of time). Simple stuff.
My favorite one was physics tensile problems. I *hated* tensile problems. To solve a tensile problem, we had to carry out a seven-step algorithm in which we'd break down each angle into its horizontal and vertical component vectors, then solve the right triangle for each, and combine the solution's horizontal and vertical vectors, solving for the hypotenuse.
In that picture, consider T1 and T2 as the length of those sides (they're the tension on each rope or whatnot they represent). M is the hanging mass. As it turns out, you can get a triangle by placing a line of length M between the top left point (where angle Theta is) and the bottom right vertex (where T2 meets the vertical wall); or by moving T2 *without rotating it* such that any of its vertexes connects to any of T1's vertexes, and then connecting the remaining two with a line of length M. I recognized this largely by mathematical result.
Pick a set. You'll either end up with two sides and an angle or two angles and a side. You can now glance at this diagram, apply the Law of Cosines, and solve it in one step. When I showed my physics teacher, he said he didn't see any mathematical reason that would work, although it *did* work on every problem we tried. Should have asked the Asian chick who took every form of math there was when she went to college; my teacher was largely a materials science type of guy.
Obviously, this one's my favorite because it's a *much* simpler way to tackle an irritatingly tedious problem *and* my academic superiors could never understand why it worked. That means I didn't waste my time figuring out some mathematical trick I could have found by flipping a dozen pages ahead in the book. As far as I know, this is a known technique, but *very* few sources mention using either the law of sines or the law of cosines to solve tension triangles.
This is why math was always fun for me. I reflected a lot on how it all fit together.
Einstein didn't own a computer, you anesthetized testicle.
Building a solar facility isn't a no-op. It's not like you can say, "We built a house there and put sheds and structures all over the place, and tromp all over it with machines and boots; but nobody paved it, so we didn't destroy the ecological habitat." You definitely do not want ecological habitat thriving among your solar panels and concentrating reflectors.
Most of what I said is platform-agnostic. We happen to not put solar thermal dishes on roofs, but they still take up a lot of space and are still comparable to rooftop solar: rooftop solar still capitalizes on already-used land, and so doesn't have to be as efficient. It's the other drawbacks that come into play, which are the same if you're doing PV panels, burning coal, or running a nuclear ABWR; each technology and each particular mode of deployment has its own strengths and weaknesses in terms of start-up cost, fueling costs, land area usage, waste, and maintenance.
You said power generation at point of use frees us from infrastructure needs. Whether that's solar PV, solar-thermal, geothermal, gas line, or nuclear, the counter-argument I gave applies. Granted, you can get a lot more power out of a nuclear generator strapped to your roof; but then you need a whole nuclear generation management facility on your roof, and on the next roof, and the next, and they all waste nuclear fuel because they have to overgenerate some of the time AND HAVE NO INFRASTRUCTURE TO SHARE POWER.
Transit of any electricity--nuclear, solar, faerie labor--incurs the same losses. That doesn't change either.
All in all, you just responded to a concrete argument of "you're making shit up and arguing against that" with "Uh. Well. Your mom."
More to the point, I know how people are capable of catching a ball. Have you ever wondered why you can just look at something, see it moving, step to where it's going to be, and grab it? How about throwing a rock and hitting it, even though the impact point is 20 feet away and it'll take a second to get there, with both objects moving? Don't you need some serious algebra to work that out?
I not only know why, but I know how to leverage the same facilities to do other things. Hell, I know why a few weeks of therapy is more than twice as effective as drugs at long-term curing of severe depression. I know why Ben Pridmore can memorize the order of 27 decks of cards in 3 minutes. I know why I was always better at math than my classmates.
You, on the other hand, seem to be focused on small outcomes. Someone explains an efficient process of planning and architecture to you and you go, "... oh. The pieces all make sense. I knew all this shit already!", even though you didn't. You knew about the pieces, but not about how to assemble them, or how to leverage them to accomplish things well beyond what you'd have thought your level of skill could accomplish. It's a common behavior in human thought processes; people are often not introspective, reflective, or creative.
Now tell me what creativity is.
It'd be nice to cut off support for Windows 7, 8, and 8.1 just like XP.
Your computer is broken? Uh. You're using Windows 8.1. Get Windows 10 bye.
There will be no more updates to Windows 8.1. Go away. Get Windows 10. We're only writing these patches once.
Debian phones home and tells them what software I have installed.
BO-BO-BO
We're talking about the fabric of space-time being curved. That means your 3D space is essentially a hyperplane perpendicular to a particular point on a fourth spatial axis. The word "curved" obviously both does and doesn't have the same meaning.
If you flex a 2D plane and draw a straight line across it, you get a curve because the plane is curved. This is trivially demonstrated by drawing a straight line on a sphere. What you just described is, essentially, a 3D space being curved in the same way, and then some bloke tries to travel across it in a straight line, and finds it takes the least energy to follow a curved path.
(At least I think that's what you just described; I pinned a few things and just tried to visualize 4D space and see where things would naturally go if pushed. Humans should not visualize 4D space. Even if you could do it, you'd never be able to describe it; we use language to indicate experiences, and can't understand language if the words aren't pinned to experiences we've had.)