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Cake day: April 6th, 2025

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  • Okay, again, I agree this is not in the slightest practical, but also, again, a train accelerating is not vertical g, horizontal g tolerance is much, much higher than vertical g tolerance, especially “eyeballs in” and it increases greatly the less time it is for. Some early experiments showed untrained people could handle around 20g for less than 10 seconds. Also blunt force risks could be mediated almost completely by ramping the acceleration slowly, first reminding people to brace, then gently forcing them back in their seats. Again, ludicrous, nothing designed for comfort of human passengers is ever going to be designed to accelerate anywhere near that quickly and it’s completely unnecessary anyways.






  • There is an expression in science that needs to be used more in polysci 'all models are wrong" The right wing vs left wing political spectrum is a model of political ideologies and a very simplistic one at that. It is also used interchangeably for fundamentally different political tenants. Large government-small government, authoritarian - libertarian, capitalist - socialist. Models are only as good as their ability to predict reality and they are always wrong, they are just simplified models of reality. The moment you are confused saying “but if this country is X-wing, why are they Y” You are either misunderstanding the model, misapplying the model, or are misunderstanding the actual value of a model.










  • To make something able to handle higher g forces you must make it heavier, if it is heavier you require more fuel and launch power to get it to orbit. Mass drivers for orbit are of fairly dubious utility, especially for all but very compact very dense payloads. Being higher altitude at launch is of even more dubious utility for rocket launches, very little of a rockets energy is spent gaining altitude against gravity, as all fuel used fighting gravity is wasted. The bulk of a rockets thrust is used accelerating the rocket to orbital velocity. Even airplane launched rockets see limited use. For reference, the delta v (a measurement of how much a rocket can change the velocity of its payload) budget for low earth orbit is generally 9,300 to 10,000 m/s, the orbital velocity there is about 7,800 m/s. We’re talking about a fairly small fraction of a rockets ability saved before we figure in the expense and risk with making your payload and stages so much stronger and risking your delicate and typically much more expensive than the rocket payload with a much more physically violent launch. And the first chunk of a rocket launch is when you burn off a ton of the fuel while the rocket doesn’t get that much lighter relatively speaking, you’re mostly paying for fuel at that part of the process, and the fuel is far and away the cheapest part of a rocket.