jemorya's comments

A more generous interpretation of their comment is that they are glad that some legal precedence has been set. The same case would not go through courts for another decade.

>Don't forget that the "fruit" for scientists is fame, not the truth.

This is a pretty shocking thing to say. It's not true whatsoever for the field of physics. Is there a particular field or a particular experience you're reacting to? I think I'm overreacting to how general your statement is.

I use this every single day on my locked-down work laptop. It fixes so many sites! I recommend it as often as I can, and I'm surprised that its use is not more widespread.

David Foster Wallace makes the same observation in his article "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction," which I read in the excellent "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" collection of some of his essays.

After a little more than a decade away from video games, I'm finding myself really enjoying 1st person horror games with no combat element: Soma, Amnesia: Dark Descent, and Outlast. This didn't really exist before, at least not games that were so immersive and terrifying.

Soma is especially great. It's utterly scary, it's beautiful to explore (per my taste), and the way the story unfolds really pulled me in.

SubNautica somewhat qualifies if you have a hint of thalassophobia. There is a very small combat element that you can entirely ignore.

Most other games bore my adult self as well, but the above are so compelling that I only play them in the right conditions so that I really enjoy them: alone at night with headphones.

There are some really good responses to lisper's post: what about 96% of the universe's mass, neutrino mass, what about gravity for that matter. (zing!)

The thing about those particular questions is that they only tell us that the standard model is incomplete. Gravity exists. The fact that it's not in the standard model doesn't necessarily mean that the model is broken, just that gravity needs to be added somehow.

What we need more of are instances where the standard model makes a precise numeric prediction and it's dead wrong. That puts a spotlight on every piece of the standard model that went into the prediction.

(Edited for the pun I didn't intend.)

I'm not sure that the information from such experiments is only really relevant to applications in microgravity environments. (Hopefully I'm not misunderstanding your point too much.)

The data points from microgravity experiments don't exist in isolation; presumably there are data points for similar experiments at surface gravity. Removing gravity from a system could say very much about how gravity affects the system, and thus how the system works on Earth.

We also might discover effects so important that it would be worth going to microgravity to get them. Stepping out into the unknown just to learn how it works is important.

(Disclaimer: I know jack about what kind of microgravity experiments are going on.)

Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin

>>This is the case for most novels: you have to read seven hundred pages to get the handful of insights that were the reason the book was written, and the apparatus of the novel is there as a huge, elaborate, overbuilt stage set.

This is a pet peeve of mine in any type of art, especially installation art or sculpture where a clear and simple point can be quite literally expanded into a elaborate and overbuilt set that doesn't add to the impact. Or worse, obfuscates the original idea.

But then there's an explorative type of art where the method and the process is much more meaningful than the insight or punchline that the novel may have been built around. The Waves by Virginia Woolf, for example.

(edited to use my words more good)

I was about to post the same view (though I hadn't bumped into Exploration vs Exploitation before).

One year I decided to blow through as many books as I could, and the next year I took my time and re-read the interesting ones much more closely. If I hadn't spend the previous year getting through as many as I could, I wouldn't have found even half of the interesting ones.

There is a middle ground between consuming as much as possible and carefully reading every book.