I was just reading https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/7phrbu/what_am_i_missing_here/ , in particular, the response comment about "solving climate change via giant sunshades placed at the lagrangian between earth & sun" I have no idea what that means --but is this realistic? placing giant solar panels between the sun & earth so that: 1. we capture the energy via solar panels before it hits the earth 2. earth is cooler as the lightrays doesn't hit the earth

That would be an excellent question to bring to the annual Jet Propulsion Laboratory open house (dates for this year not yet announced). https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/events/special-events.php

Idea of placing solar plants into space has been around for decades. And it’s totally doable but it’s extremely expensive to lift the materials up there.

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_sunshade - the total area of the panels would be a massive 3.8 million square kilometers, which by coincidence is approximately the total land area of all 50 United States. Navigationally the shade would need to make course corrections to remain at the L1 Lagrangian point because that point is unstable (be slightly off-course and you fall into either the Sun or the Earth) and I think I read the entire apparatus would be like a huge sail in the solar wind.

IMO it describes the human race pretty nicely that instead of thinking how to change our destructive lifestyle on this planet we think how to block the Sun.

I bet if you could somehow poll all of humanity you’d find more attention to the former idea than the latter, but disappointingly less attention on either idea than would be required.

Hey, tangentially, anybody know if Larry Niven’s “Ringworld” books hold up well against time? I read them in the days of the Apple II and the Sinclair ZX (or maybe more like the C64, can’t exactly remember). https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/71/Ringworld%281stEd%29.jpg

what's the distance with respect to the l1 lagrangian / if we atttached lasers there, is the ping time low enough we can mine bitcoin with all the solar energy collected there?

this pitch would hit all the right words for VCs: bit coin, crypto currency, solar power, clear energy, climate change, rockets, space tech

You forgot deep learning!

They say the L1 Lagrangian is a million miles from Earth, so your roundtrip ping time would be almost 11 seconds.

Ah, you can get by without spending a lot of money on pens. I use Pilot Kakuno with a fine nib (Japanese, which I guess makes it SF by European standards). I think the finer nib makes ink dry faster, but then again I used TR for art including markers and sometimes watercolours, so the entire lightly coated/non-absorbent thing was a plus 🙂

https://www.reddit.com/r/geek/comments/6m9l3h/user_explains_why_we_dont_use_pencils_in_space/

Im looking for a conference something similar to International Conference on Fun with Algorithms (http://drops.dagstuhl.de/opus/portals/lipics/index.php?semnr=16004). Does anyone know a conference/journal about funny or unnecessary complicated solutions for engineering/computer-science problems? A year ago, I read a blog post from someone who wrote an interesting paper for such a conference (the conference was named after an inventor or scientist ...) but I forgot what he wrote about or what the name of the conference was 😖

there is a hackathon - not sure if that’s in the same zone - http://www.stupidhackathon.com

Hi clojurians, I have a question about general code of conduct on open source projects

I have a pr on a project that has been hanging for a number of months and the last commit on that project was 2013...so it seems pretty dormant

I tried contacting the maintainer to see if I could contribute/help out in some way (improve tests, help out with the deployment etc) to get things moving but the email bounced

and the maintainer does not seem to have been active for a while (number of years on github)

and I need that feature in other projects I'm working on

I can of course fork and/or re-implement the project myself (it's a one pager and not that much code, distributed under epl), but the last thing I want it to step on somebodys toes etc...so what is the "correct" process in this kind of situation?

@vijaykiran that is nice, but its missing the (pseudo-)scientific component

looks like github is down

Time to go have a sword fight from a chair

How do remote teams handle slack going down? Out of curiosity.

but... that never happens to maven central

that would have a better effect on #tools-deps

does anyone know the name of the font used in this screenshot? https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rakr/vim-one/master/screenshots/new-logo.png

Why does one pronounce Livingstone as li-ving-stun instead of li-ving-stone (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNhE-LQUmOk) One doesn’t say Flint-stun instead of flint-stone either, right?

spoken language changes, written language doesn't always catch up

Worcester, Gloucester … Dorcester

or leicestershire

for a doubly-confusing version

supposedly Pittsburgh would have originally been pronounced like Edinburgh

Portland, Oregon is pronounced “turn back, we’re full”

@chris you pronounce leicester different to Gloucester though. Leicester is more like Lest-aah.

(or so the locals call it)

Was trying to make an easy Clojure implementation in Python by copying the Java source code for Clojure and came to this: https://github.com/clojure/clojure/blob/master/src/jvm/clojure/lang/AFn.java Couldnt this be done in a better way? Is this because Java doesn’t have multiple arguments in methods and has to relay on method overloading?

scala has something similar

I figured it was an optimization

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2426455/javas-varargs-performance

there is actually a call with var args for AFn invoke, but only for >20 params https://github.com/clojure/clojure/blob/master/src/jvm/clojure/lang/AFn.java#L135

android studio is still terrible

sry, having to work on some android stuff today and it’s not fun or smooth 😞

Re: earlier pronunciation thread... try Featherstonehaugh and Cholmondeley ...

@jgh, are you using clojure on android? if so, how is that ?

Do you use IntelliJ normally? And do you have an external emulator?

im not using clojure on android no

normally i dont do any android development and stick to sublime 😉

but occasionally i need to do some stuff for android and it’s always the worst

Kotlin's Android ecosystem may make that a bit nicer