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Cake day: June 28th, 2023

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  • Thank you for providing an example.

    Let’s say E is everyone’s second choice, but nobody’s first choice. E is the first candidate eliminated because E got 0% of the vote.

    Let’s say it shakes out like this:

    40% A E C B
    21% B E A C
    20% D E C B
    19% C E D B <- You

    40 A D 39 D B 21 B D

    60 D 40 A

    First round, E is eliminated despite being the most popular candidate by far.

    Second Round, C, followed by B. D wins.

    But if 3% of A voters switched to C, then A would have won because D would be eliminated, sending their votes to C, which would have eliminated B, sending those votes to A. But D and C voters hate A, so it’s in their best interest to also vote for B. And now we’re back to fptp

    When considering the quality of a voting system, you want voters to be honest (i.e. not strategic in their votes). Voters should pick the candidate they agree with, not the candidates they think they must support to avoid a catastrophe.

    Read more here.













  • themeatbridge@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzDimensions
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    2 days ago

    FWIW our current understanding of spacetime includes multi-dimensional time, which is why we experience more or less time when we are traveling at high speed or experiencing strong gravitational fields. It’s sort of like moving diagonally across a room, except entirely different.




  • I always recount the story of the Hovercraft Christmas.

    There was one toy I wanted for Christmas. We were firmly middle class growing up, so it wasn’t like I had all the toys, but I was old enough to know that my parents were footing the bill and getting an RC hovercraft was going to mean I only get one present that year.

    Iirc it was called the Typhoon, or maybe the Typhoon II.

    The commecials showed it zipping across land and water, jumping off ramps, bouncing off a lake, etc. It was the coolest fucking thing ever. I begged my parents for it, and would not shut up for months about getting an RC hovercraft.

    Christmas comes, and wonderous joy, I got the hovercraft! Life is good, but the battery needs to charge. Shit, OK, we plug it in and let it charge all day while we go do the normal Christmas family visits. Everyone I talked to that day got a lesson in how hovercrafts work, and how it can travel on a pocket of air to move across land AND water.

    We got home late that night. It was probably after 10pm, way past everyone’s bedtime, including my parents who had been up all night making the Christmas magic happen for my younger siblings who still believed. But I put my fucking foot down. I had waited for months to get my hovercraft. I had waited all day for the battery to charge. I would not wait another god damned minute to go zipping around the backyard. So, my dad and I put coats on over our pajamas, went out to the driveway, and fired that bad boy up.

    I can still perfectly remember the sound of the fans turning on, and the little rubber skirt inflating. Sure enough, the hovercraft was floating on a pocket of air! But the driveway was on a mild incline, so the hovercraft started to drift sideways. Then I hit the throttle and… nothing. Just the sound of the fans spinning, but no motion.

    Bzzzzz. BZZZZZZ. Bzzz Bzzz Bzzz. The fans spun impotently against the inertia of the hovercraft. It wouldn’t move at all, except to sadly drift towards the gutter. My dad gave it a little nudge with his foot, and it got stuck on a tiny stone chip.

    I learned a lot about physics from that one night, but I learned even more about advertising.




  • You know, everyone hates that guy, but he was the only reasonable person in that movie.

    Ghosts aren’t real, and the Ghostbusters were reckless. Egon and Ray built an unstable containment apparatus without permits or inspections in an old firehouse with shoddy electrical wiring. They built back-pack carried laser weapons capable of annihilating a city block with an errant crossing of the streams.

    Ray also manifested StayPuft Gozer.

    Venkman was a charletain and a fraud, as well as a narcissistic sociopath.

    Winston was just a guy they hired off the street.

    Shutting down their nuclear “ghost containment” apparatus was the responsible thing to do. Walter Peck deserves a medal, or maybe a prosthetic device for his downstairs mixup.