"Venus: ..... Your plane would fly pretty well, except it would be on fire the whole time, and then it would stop flying, and then stop being a plane."

The comments on flight in different atmospheres reminds me of a crucial lesson from white water rafting: unless your raft is moving sufficiently fast, the rudder has little or no effect. Which explains why the first time we went without a guide we got stuck about every 100 yards and fought a lot. ;)

This brought back memories of playing a lunar lander game on a 110 baud teletype back in the 1970's. You could change parameters to simulate a Mars lander, Venus lander, Earth lander, etc. The trick was to land without running out of fuel or hitting too hard and crashing.

Neither of your comments makes any sense whatsoever. You can follow up if you want to, but I won't be answering, because you have no idea what you are talking about.

Yep. I scanned the publication, and it makes exactly the mistake I predicted. Basically, the study gives the infrastructure cost in kWh/GB which includes end user equipment power, datacenter power, etc. Then, the study multiplies that by an average game size of 8.8GB to get the footprint. The mistake is not…

This result just cannot be right. There's got to be an incorrect assumption somewhere. If I had to guess, the researchers aren't taking resource amortization into account.

Well said. I was thinking why I like church. One of several reasons is the "random issue generator". I get a weekly reminder to be kind, generous, nonjudgmental, forgiving, etc. Then I thought, "Why not program the AI to not *need* reminding and self-examination"? But then the AI would be an annoying goody two…

One top 10 list of non-human animals ordered by intelligence: chimp, pig, dolphin, parrot, whale, octopus, dog, elephant, squirrel, cat.

Is that you, Desmond Morris?

I think, like a lot of stuff, having a wall or not is a cost-benefit thing. For example, homes in my middle class neighborhood don't have walls. Neighbors know each other, watch each others' kids, and there's no problem leaving doors unlocked.

I think walls were a way to amortize scarce resources. I imagine in ancient times, the cost and effort to secure every individual dwelling was relatively high. It was more effective to surround and secure clusters of dwellings with a common wall to reduce resources spent on securing single dwellings. For a…

I look forward to going to church every week, and it definitely makes me feel happier, but damned if I could explain *why* it does. A lot of my friends seem perfectly happy without it.

This is an awesome proof of concept. I'd have much preferred doing away with the robot to avoid biasing the results. It doesn't look like the receiver subject's ears are blocked, plus he can feel vibrations and air currents. Perhaps the testers randomized the movement to eliminate the bias. They probably wanted…

For a low impact, go either way decision, I always flip a coin. Then, the coin having decided, I sometimes take the other choice. Either way, I choose and get on with it.

Oh goody. With the built-in ultrasonic screech you can set my teeth on edge *without* scraping your cutlery across the china.

I have always admired this guy. Genius.

By the looks of the proprietor, whatever's in there is squeezably soft.

Every horror film ever made where idiots don't just get the hell out at the first sign of weirdness. Oh no. Instead they go *into* the basement/cave/ductwork/shack/cornfield/etc.

I can vouch for the Arduino Cookbook. Handy reference and sometimes quicker than searching online.

I apologize. You are absolutely correct.