eloel-

eloel- t1_j295vgy wrote

If earth had more gravity, we'd need more force to get us out. I don't know if the 50% figure is a tight limit, but at SOME limit, the amount of fuel you need to escape gravity is more than the amount you can carry, so you stay grounded. That's of course a current-tech thing, future tech might fix it.

A larger earth means a larger gravity, hence the connection

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eloel- t1_j2496h7 wrote

>I think you are conflating "diplomat" and "Ambassador" a bit

Ambassadors are diplomats, but not necessarily vice versa, right? Ambassador is just a more permanent (not permanent, just longer lasting) appointment than a lot of other diplomats.

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eloel- t1_j23wkxy wrote

It's closer to a formula than it is to trial and error. There are mathematical methods to estimating square roots, and calculators do not need infinite precision. They iterate over a formula that gets more precise the more you apply it, looking for the desired precision, and then they return the result.

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eloel- t1_j23s8ww wrote

Diplomats are people that represent a country and the country's interest in conversations with other representatives or leaders. They get cool passwords because they need to communicate back with the country they're representing to ensure smooth negotiations and relations.

You often need to work for the government, especially the country's foreign ministry (or equivalent) for a while before you're trusted with the power to represent the country

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eloel- t1_j154i82 wrote

>And football, all of them, are named for the fact you play it on your feet, not how you can touch the ball.

So games like basketball, tennis or volleyball are also "football". That's some weird reasoning.

How is it a useful distinction? What ball games aren't played on your feet?

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eloel- t1_iy5m3ua wrote

VPN - Virtual Private Network. you can use this to pretend you're in a network that you aren't local to. Often used to connect to work or school.

Proxy - A different computer your computer sends/receives messages through. The other end of these messages often believe you're the proxy server, and never know who you are.

Torrent - Download parts of a file from different hosts, and merge them locally to get the original file. Filed are sliced into tiny portions which you then source from everyone seeding that torrent - it is peer-to-peer (e.g the files don't have to hit a server) so it can stay more anonymous.

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eloel- t1_ixqq3k3 wrote

Grading on a curve means setting the most mediocre student to a certain letter grade, say C, and scaling everyone up or down based on that. Means the class will have some fails, some As, and mostly Bs C's and D's

Contrast that with hard number limits (Below 50 fails or above 90 is A), which might mean the entire class could get As or Fs based on the exam difficulty and how the class does.

The first one assumes the class is somewhat normally distributed as far as knowledge on that topic. The second one assumes the teachers are infallible and create the exams at the same difficulty every time. Neither of these hold all the time, so neither method is necessarily better.

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eloel- t1_iuij08s wrote

Of course, good point! We indeed also try to answer questions like "if you have 10 people, split 6/4 or 7/3, how do you elect 2 representatives?", which are much harder to intuit an answer from compared to the case I described. No matter which way you swing that, you can't split equitably so you start finding other reasonable splits.

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eloel- t1_iuic567 wrote

When electing representatives, we often divide cities/states into parts and let each of them elect their own representative. This seems reasonable at first look, but raises the question of who decides where the divides are.

Gerrymandering is when the lines are drawn intentionally to give a certain political faction an advantage.

For example, let's say you have a city of 21 people, and we need 3 representatives. If 8 of them want to vote for A, and 13 want to vote for B, one would expect a 1/2 divide in favor of B.

You could, however, rig the field. If you split the 21 into groups so that it's 4a/3b, 4a/3b, 0a/7b, you can get A more representatives than B. This is gerrymandering.

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eloel- t1_iui4j3n wrote

For the same reason a coin can be balanced on an edge, but rarely if ever lands on it when flipped. The center of mass is higher up when it sits on its smallest edge, which means any imbalance will knock it on a different face. Since dice and coins always have a horizontal and angular movement to them, it's very rare that everything lines up perfectly.

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