I dont think Ive ever even pretended to think they are, for me children, especially babies and toddlers, give me a pretty bad case of the uncanny valley effect and look eerie and cause discomfort, as well as anxiety since Im even less sure than usual what they’re going to do and dont want someone’s kid getting hurt because of something I failed to notice. I dont hold it against them or hate children for it, its not their fault after all, but I do try to avoid being around them where practical.

If they’re calling a brain their original processor, these robots could be a result of successful transhumanism rather than conventional robots, ie, they could be humans that have made themselves into robots, rather than robots built for some specific purpose. In that case, they might create child robots and grow them over time to reproduce, just because they find that mode of reproduction familiar and wish to continue it.

1442? surprised its not 1444

From the light’s point of view, that distance should get reduced to zero due to length contraction anyway if I’m remembering correctly?

echidna I understand, but why cat?

Cassini (misread your comment as “what are you talking about”)

Hey, it’s not Mars’s fault that Saturn destroyed it’s robot by burning it with it’s atmosphere…

sounds like Bolo

I think you have an unrealistic estimation of how much most people understand the topic of communism, if you think not labelling different types of communism as the same ideology is living under a rock. More than half the country doesn’t even realize that socialism and communism aren’t complete synonyms, and a good fraction think paradoxically that center right liberalism is somehow communist.

Basically, I think you’re doing this: https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/average_familiarity_2x.png

Last time one of these threads popped up, I saw someone suggest that it might have been a holder for some of those bottles with pointed bottoms the Romans had, don’t remember the name. I’m not sure if this is a hypothesis with any level of acceptance, but it feels like it could be plausible just from looking at the thing, having different sized holes would allow different sizes of bottle to fit, and you’d want feet for each possible side that it could be resting on, which would explain the prongs.

In what sense is this semantics or bad faith? I meant this sincerely.

As I understand it, “real communism” is supposed to be some kind of stateless society. As the GDR was, well, a state, it clearly did not achieve that. Nor would it ever have been likely to, as actually doing what was ideologically promised would have required those with power within that system to relinquish that power, which is incredibly rare as it conflicts with human nature.

Isn’t a lot of engineering basically applied physics though anyway? Just reversed, such that rather than studying or predicting how a physical system should behave, you’re trying to take what has been learned over time and use it to work backwards to create a system that exhibits desired behavior

I didnt really pivot to anything, I was very unsure what I wanted to do at that point, and being quite bad at learning virtually, which of course most everything had temporarily pivoted to at that time, I took an opportunity to move in with a family member in a different state that I liked better. Ive not gone back to school since as Ive been worried about spending a lot of time and effort and money on something that I cant see through to completion again or wont like using. Ive ended up working a low volume manufacturing type job at a company that makes measuring equipment (microscopes and spectroscopy devices and such like that), which Ive found tolerable enough as the work has some amount of variation, isn’t too physically or socially demanding, and at least has some scientific relevance (it doesn’t involve doing any science, but scientists cant do their work without the right equipment, so making some of that equipment still feels helpful in some small way). Ive thought about going back at some point if I can come up with something Im sure I’ll prefer doing, but so far have not and have no immediate plans.

If theres anything that I took away from my 3 years of trying to get a physics degree before burning out on it around covid hit, its that like half of physics seems to be just figuring out what approximations you can safely make to turn something infeasibly complicated into something that can actually be worked out

Not sure why nobody would expect an italian inquisition of food, they literally have a unit in one of their law enforcement agencies trained to do things like find fake extra-virgin olive oil. Ive seen people jokingly call it “the italian food police” even. If anybody was going to run a food inquisition, itd be the italians

Stargate is the best “star-” franchise imho.

The moon’s day length is so long that it wouldn’t make any sense for any crewed mission to use it, they’re going to need their own lights on an arbitrary 24 hour cycle anyway, so there’s no reason not to have every future crewed mission there use the same one

Basically any interest of mine, doesn’t matter what it is, I’ll easily end up rambling on and on about it if the conversation goes there. I tend to end up rambling to people I know about geckos a lot, with varying degrees of interest on their part.

Me, who misread the caption at first, who knows Plato is a philosopher