Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin
Is the Great Attractor a Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann? (jgeekstudies.wordpress.com)
124 points by gwern on July 2, 2016 | hide | past | favorite | 42 comments


One nit:

> Interestingly, the spell enlarge person from the tabletop RPG Dungeons & Dragons agrees with half of the law (Cook et al., 2003). To double in size, the target of the spell has its weight multiplied by eight, in accordance with the “cube law”. However, the target receives a fixed Strength modifier of +2, instead of having an increase proportional to his/her base Strength value, which would make more sense.

The strength scale is nonlinear to begin with. I don't quite remember for sure, but I think it might be exponential, in terms of bench-pressing ability. It's meant to reflect that adding 100kg to your weight limit is far more useful if it's a doubling than if it's 10%.

---

Also, Tengen Toppa runs on DETERMINATION and IRON WILL, and the laws of physics therefore do not apply.


He's also wrong about The Ring.

The escape hatch is a naked singularity, created by the supermassive superstring structure rotating around it fast enough to skew the gravity envelop. Superstrings are an integral part of the book; the entire structure is made of them, along with Xelee spaceships. One small piece of one isn't what broke reality enough for the escape hatch, they just used them as scaffolding.


Mine is the drill that will pierce the heavens!

Now with that out of the way, that's pretty cool. I think it's interesting how the idea of a 10-million-light-year-tall robot was taken seriously in this way; given the comparisons with existing robots (in fiction and real life), I like how the conclusion that was reached is "it's unlikely but possible." It gives me hope that maybe, out there in the universe somewhere, there's something awesome like that hiding.


And apparently given the size, the whole fight took something like 8 billion years...

or 23 minutes


This is quite possibly the nerdiest thing ever written by man. I've never seen so many references in a blog post about an anime robot. Nevertheless, I liked it.


Giga Drill Breaking !!!!

Spiral Nemesis!?

Seriously i thought no one watches Anime on HN. Since this landed on the front page it means there is still quite a few.

Off Topic: When we discovered Gravitational wave, i wonder and asked how far are we from creating Goldion Crusher, aka Gravity Shockwave Generating Division Tool.


It's probably because Hacker News is serious about not being Reddit and goes about maintaining an aura of seriousness better than most Internet forums.

That, and - for me, at least - most technology / startup news stories don't give too much room to drop references to my favorite cute, harmless, adorable magical-girl animes like Puella Magi Madoka Magica and the homage Yuki Yuna Is A Hero.

(and by "harmless" I mean "dark psychological horror with a death toll rivaling _Game of Thrones_")


>(and by "harmless" I mean "dark psychological horror with a death toll rivaling _Game of Thrones_")

SPOILERS!


Naah, "spoilers" would be more like intimating that the title character has to kill her old mentor after she goes crazy and starts shooting her friends. (If something like that actually happened, which I'm pretty sure it didn't.) Just letting someone know that they shouldn't expect the series to end with frolicking in a sparkling happy dreamland filled with pink cherry-blossoms at the corner of Good Morning and the Country of Sweets? That's nothing. :P

If you want real spoilers go watch the train scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqPntVlsN-k


>If you want real spoilers go watch the train scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqPntVlsN-k

Wow, they made that a lot worse in the dub. Or maybe it was always that bad and I couldn't tell because of Japanese politeness in the original script.

Damn.


You mean, like when--

Oh, right. That'd be a spoiler. :P


> "Seriously i thought no one watches Anime on HN."

Really? Anime is a firm fixture in geek culture, and whilst there are plenty of people that don't like it, I'd suggest you're more than likely to find fans in the HN audience.

Gurenn Lagann is a great anime, pretty short but it's a good ride whilst it lasts. I kind of miss the OVA era of anime, most anime now seems to get dragged out too long (such as Naruto, still relying on fillers to pad out the story even though the manga finished over a year ago). When anime was distributed on video tape or DVD the creators couldn't really fall back on fillers, and the stories were better for it.


Blame someone milking the property for profits...

I prefer series where they stop airing the series for a year to continue production


> "I prefer series where they stop airing the series for a year to continue production"

I agree to a point. A year seems about right to keep interest high. Sometimes the wait can get too long though. I enjoyed the first series of Attack On Titan, but it looks like we'll have to wait until 2017 for the second series, meaning there was a gap between series of 4 years. It'll have to be something pretty special to make it worth the wait IMO.


It is party because if they do 2nd series too quick it will catches up with the Manga.


> Seriously i thought no one watches Anime on HN. Since this landed on the front page it means there is still quite a few.

Surprisingly, this submission has done way better on HN than it did when I submitted it to /r/anime or my G+. I'm just glad somewhere properly appreciated it...


> Off Topic: When we discovered Gravitational wave, i wonder and asked how far are we from creating Goldion Crusher, aka Gravity Shockwave Generating Division Tool.

I suspect you know this, but... infinitely far, sorry. :P


Arh... Yes... Because we dont have G-Stone yet.


This is funny. Suppose there was a giant fight taking place, would it take millions of years before we notice the first punch?

btw here is a size comparison of various mecha, guess which one is the biggest. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XbeVosPszo


That plothole is resolved in the anime/manga. Sort of. It's a mental battle that takes place in a parallel dimension.

TTGL is trippy. Worth marathoning on Netflix since it's short for an anime.


8 billion years according to some sources


For some reason, I thought this was going to be about the Lorenz Attractor...

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lorenz_attractor_yb....


Eh-he-hem.

WHO THE HELL DO YOU THINK I AM!

Gurren Lagann will always be the best explanation for galaxy-scale astronomical anomalies, just as the Getter Emperor will always be the best explanation for planetary-scale anomalies.


Small comment: The first link to a video in Youtube is broken: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9qeOhJ9dbg


Wow, even though I despise all this "geeky" culture as represented on, say, xkcd, this one magazine is actually quite awesome. "Is the Great Attractor a TTGL?", "The biology of giant war centipedes", etc — this stuff is actually fun to read.

Funny that they accept only manuscripts submitted "as a Microsoft Word document" though.


Do you think if you submitted an RTF or even a TXT they would turn you down?


For them to be truly geeky, they should accept LaTeX.


Maybe LIGO will find lots of black hole mergers there.


[flagged]


The author is brazillian, so english is most likely not his first language. Linguistic and cultural trends and sensitivities are not the same everywhere.


Thank you for highlighting the sexism built into the Portuguese language.


Actually, the sexism is all English. Other languages have gender-neutral words for the English "man", such as the greek "anthropos", human. That's the word that sentence would be translated to, and "human" encompasses all genders.

I don't speak Portuguese, but it's not inconceivable that they'd use "humanidade" in this context, rather than "homem".



GP is obviously aware of that way of using 'man'. That's why they're asking people to stop doing that. Besides, a dictionary* simply describes the way we use words - those ways can change. Language is not set in stone.

* descriptivist, as most are


Part of the privilege is that it's invisible. "Things have always been this way."


You (like almost all SJWs out there) seem to misunderstand the meaning of "privilege".

"Privilege" is something given by a royal or government decree to some specific person or group. The normal state is "unprivileged", and "privileges" are to be eliminated by rational society.

Meanwhile, when speaking of sexism and racism, there is no "privilege", because the "unprivileged" state is not normal (and the whole society is not mean to be reduced to it). You might speak about "discrimination" or "oppression", but "privilege" seems to reverse the meaning.

Semantics nerd out.


Why? Words can have more than one meaning.


I don't have references on this, but if there's a meaning that's used 99.999% of the time, it probably influences the way we perceive the other meanings. So the typically used man=male meaning bleeds into the man=civilization meaning, creating the sense that men are the most important part of our civilization...


> I don't have references on this

And others disagree with this, and consider your efforts unnecessary. I don't think the two camps will ever agree, mostly because it's very hard to prove that using "man" as a synonym for "humanity" implies that women aren't a part of humanity.


Just stop. No one is going to hand you an award for this. "Man" being a synonym for humankind didn't stop being a thing because some guys felt guilty somewhere.

Edit: looking at all of the damage this has spawned, I'm sorry. Blame me. I didn't think everyone was going to get taken out from this.


We would prefer that you humans use the term "its" in the future to denote your total insignificance in the cosmos.


Pro tip: you're not John Oliver. Stop pretending you are. You realize no one who says that is trying to be a dick, right?


I agree, but look at the awful thread your comment spawned.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: