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Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest

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Lailoken said:
First, You're flat out wrong. There is a reason that mathematicians say that if you haven't changed the world before you're 30 you are never going to. Where most disciplines require a career accumulating the resources to pursue them mathematics mostly just requires intelligence and paper. Logarithms were a purely cognitive invention which permitted anybody with a device in their pocket carved out of firewood to calculate faster than everybody else in the entire history of the world working together could. Slide rules made humans the first species to ever land on the moon. The discipline follows motivation. This is a setting where the character who specializes in conducting 12-dimensional math and programming because of the whole "slightest mistake and you and everybody you have ever cared about suffers a fate worse than death" thing was trained by a sealmaster hyperparanoid about sealing failures due to having been trained from the age of at least six years old to combat them as well as what was probably the greatest sealmaster to ever live.
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You're seriously claiming Hazou is a mathematical genius on the level of Euler or Von Neumann? Revolutionizing mathematics centuries ahead of IRL. Oookay then
Lailoken said:
Second, dust works just fine and finely ground charcoal would probably be the optimal fuel, but there are both flammable liquids and gasses which could be used. There is a reason that the US has classified research on a system which could accelerate liquid metal to hypersonic velocities to protect against anti-tank missiles or charged plasma to significant enough fractions of the speed of light that even if their charge didn't wreck the electronics of an ICBM it would hit with enough velocity to produce enough penetrating high-energy photons to induce enough photofission to fizzle the nuclear warhead. Using blank cartridges in an automatic grenade launcher which was selected because it simultaneously shot at a frequency which resonated with certain vital human organs was discontinued because the unoptimized muzzle was too destructive to accurately serve as a non-lethal crowd control system. Asuma has been depicted as smoking cigarettes. I absolutely guarantee you that somebody has figured out how to blow smoke rings.
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Optimal for what? You're making a bunch of vague pronouncements. This is IMO a bunch of gish gallop.

Be concrete and specific, what are you trying to do? How will adding a vortex ring to youthanizers accomplish it? If you start linking papers I'd be happy to read them.

Lailoken said:
My life has presented me with a great many reasons and opportunities to spend a great deal of time thinking about how to destroy things. It is not an exaggeration to say that an entire geographic basin is not know as "The Great Glowing Lake of Boiling Glass" or even the continued existence of the human species is only due to my somehow still believing in mercy and forgiveness. People slightly less morally generous than me are the most likely resolution to the Fermi Paradox.
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Look, I can't tell if you're serious. If you are, I don't think there's any point in engaging further.
 
Lailoken said:
First, You're flat out wrong. There is a reason that mathematicians say that if you haven't changed the world before you're 30 you are never going to. Where most disciplines require a career accumulating the resources to pursue them mathematics mostly just requires intelligence and paper. Logarithms were a purely cognitive invention which permitted anybody with a device in their pocket carved out of firewood to calculate faster than everybody else in the entire history of the world working together could. Slide rules made humans the first species to ever land on the moon. The discipline follows motivation. This is a setting where the character who specializes in conducting 12-dimensional math and programming because of the whole "slightest mistake and you and everybody you have ever cared about suffers a fate worse than death" thing was trained by a sealmaster hyperparanoid about sealing failures due to having been trained from the age of at least six years old to combat them as well as what was probably the greatest sealmaster to ever live.
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Wasn't there a thing earlier in the story where Kei referenced some of the Mori clan secret mathematics and Hazou was just left behind? I was left with the distinct impression that for all that Hazou's sealmaster math is applied to 12-dimensional contexts he doesn't actually use very high-level mathematics when doing any of it.
 
Just read the update. Fuck fuck fuck.

@Velorien super points for AFKEI. I doubt anybody else caught it, or would even know how to begin researching it. I think we might have our new character. Who better than someone subjected to outlawry and destined to found an important community? Damn, Ami is good.


Shrooms said:
Is this actually a quote people say? I've never seen it before and I found nothing when searching for it.
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I've heard and read it before from prominent mathematicians. Unlike virtually any other STEM discipline math mostly just requires intelligence instead of a career spent accumulating the credit to assemble the resources to pursue something novel, so mathematicians who are capable of real breakthroughs tend to prove it very early.


Sir Stompy said:
You're seriously claiming Hazou is a mathematical genius on the level of Euler or Von Neumann? Revolutionizing mathematics centuries ahead of IRL. Oookay then

Optimal for what? You're making a bunch of vague pronouncements. This is IMO a bunch of gish gallop.

Be concrete and specific, what are you trying to do? How will adding a vortex ring to youthanizers accomplish it? If you start linking papers I'd be happy to read them.


Look, I can't tell if you're serious. If you are, I don't think there's any point in engaging further.
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I'm saying that this setting is not reality. We already know that he is conducting twelve-dimensional math because in this setting there is a much greater motivation to have developed advanced mathematics than in the real-world equivalent timeframe and mathematics is unique as a discipline because it is entirely conceptual. If you had a time machine there would be nothing stopping you from going back and teaching a caveman calculus. Hazou doesn't need to be a genius. He has been trained by some of the best people to ever live in a discipline which is built on being very, very good at math for very, very motivating reasons.

Optimal for energy density. Presumably reduced boron and alkali metals haven't been discovered yet.

I am being completely serious. I know how Fermi constructed the Chicago Pile-1 by calculating neutron emission velocities and interatomic distances. I know that this would allow the difficult isotope separation step to be replaced by chemical separation and that while that would require an implosion lens which was difficult to design in the 1940s is trivial for anybody with a modern computer. I know how to salt the nuke with enough strontium or cobalt to Dr. Strangelove all animal life on the planet. I know how to use completely unregulated asymmetric restriction enzyme materials and information to take a notoriously short virus which prompted two chief executives of the global hyperpower and convert it into DNA to insert into the spare room of the much more complex and durable virus which has killed more people throughout history than anything else. I know it's possible because one of the reasons the Soviets were able to supply so much vaccine was that they did it in an era before CRISPR made it child's play. I know how to insert it as a plasmid to be produced and emitted by strains of anthrax or botulism designed to have its spores germinate in facultatively anaerobic environments to cross-link carbon bonds and turn the world's least elastic energy commodity into useless sludge. I know that the Canary Islands are on the edge of a megatsumai capable of wiping out large parts of southern Europe and spreading as far inland of North America to wipe out Washington DC. I know how to trigger the supervolcano under Yellowstone to wreck the western half of the continent and probably trigger the overdue major earthquake on the far side to produce a tsunami to wreck the coastlines on the other side of the Pacific. I know that aside from humans and whatever organism created the oxygen catastrophe Azolla is probably the only single species to cause a global extinction event and that now that the sun is brighter the Earth entering another icehouse stage combined with the delayed response time to emitted volcanic CO2 would quite possibly result in a rebound into a runaway greenhouse turning it into another Venus.

That's just what came to mind with a minute's thought. Organizing every way I know of destroying things would literally require constructing a formal reference catalog.
 
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Lailoken said:
I am being completely serious. I know how Fermi constructed the Chicago Pile-1 by calculating neutron emission velocities and interatomic distances. I know that this would allow the difficult isotope separation step to be replaced by chemical separation and that while that would require an implosion lens which was difficult to design in the 1940s is trivial for anybody with a modern computer. I know how to salt the nuke with enough strontium or cobalt to Dr. Strangelove all animal life on the planet. I know how to use completely unregulated asymmetric restriction enzyme materials and information to take a notoriously short virus which prompted two chief executives of the global hyperpower and convert it into DNA to insert into the spare room of the much more complex and durable virus which has killed more people throughout history than anything else. I know it's possible because one of the reasons the Soviets were able to supply so much vaccine was that they did it in an era before CRISPR made it child's play. I know how to insert it as a plasmid to be produced and emitted by strains of anthrax or botulism designed to have its spores germinate in facultatively anaerobic environments to cross-link carbon bonds and turn the world's least elastic energy commodity into useless sludge. I know that the Canary Islands are on the edge of a megatsumai capable of wiping out large parts of southern Europe and spreading as far inland of North America to wipe out Washington DC. I know how to trigger the supervolcano under Yellowstone to wreck the western half of the continent and probably trigger the overdue major earthquake on the far side to produce a tsunami to wreck the coastlines on the other side of the Pacific. I know that aside from humans and whatever organism created the oxygen catastrophe Azolla is probably the only single species to cause a global extinction event and that now that the sun is brighter the Earth entering another icehouse stage combined with the delayed response time to emitted volcanic CO2 would quite possibly result in a rebound into a runaway greenhouse turning it into another Venus.

That's just what came to mind with a minute's thought. Organizing every way I know of destroying things would literally require constructing a formal reference catalog.
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The newer, stronger version of the Marine copypasta
 
Lailoken said:
I'm saying that this setting is not reality. We already know that he is conducting twelve-dimensional math because in this setting there is a much greater motivation to have developed advanced mathematics than in the real-world equivalent timeframe and mathematics is unique as a discipline because it is entirely conceptual. If you had a time machine there would be nothing stopping you from going back and teaching a caveman calculus. Hazou doesn't need to be a genius. He has been trained by some of the best people to ever live in a discipline which is built on being very, very good at math for very, very motivating reasons.
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Okay, sure. But does Hazou even know calculus? You can't do this stuff without it. So he would need to invent that first.... and so on and so forth for 8 centuries of math.

I'm not saying it's flat out impossible for things to be different. I'm saying that what is and isn't different is QM fiat and they ain't gonna say yes. It's not even unsimulationist, the EN population is tiny compared to IRL and mathematical geniuses are distributed according to population.
Lailoken said:
Optimal for energy density. Presumably reduced boron and alkali metals haven't been discovered yet.
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How exactly does a vortex ring improve energy density? Energy density of the fuel? Of the explosion? Why bother with a vortex ring? By what mechanism does the vortex ring increase the energy density?
Lailoken said:
I am being completely serious. I know how Fermi constructed the Chicago Pile-1 by calculating neutron emission velocities and interatomic distances. I know that this would allow the difficult isotope separation step to be replaced by chemical separation and that while that would require an implosion lens which was difficult to design in the 1940s is trivial for anybody with a modern computer. I know how to salt the nuke with enough strontium or cobalt to Dr. Strangelove all animal life on the planet. I know how to use completely unregulated asymmetric restriction enzyme materials and information to take a notoriously short virus which prompted two chief executives of the global hyperpower and convert it into DNA to insert into the spare room of the much more complex and durable virus which has killed more people throughout history than anything else. I know it's possible because one of the reasons the Soviets were able to supply so much vaccine was that they did it in an era before CRISPR made it child's play. I know how to insert it as a plasmid to be produced and emitted by strains of anthrax or botulism designed to have its spores germinate in facultatively anaerobic environments to cross-link carbon bonds and turn the world's least elastic energy commodity into useless sludge. I know that the Canary Islands are on the edge of a megatsumai capable of wiping out large parts of southern Europe and spreading as far inland of North America to wipe out Washington DC. I know how to trigger the supervolcano under Yellowstone to wreck the western half of the continent and probably trigger the overdue major earthquake on the far side to produce a tsunami to wreck the coastlines on the other side of the Pacific. I know that aside from humans and whatever organism created the oxygen catastrophe Azolla is probably the only single species to cause a global extinction event and that now that the sun is brighter the Earth entering another icehouse stage combined with the delayed response time to emitted volcanic CO2 would quite possibly result in a rebound into a runaway greenhouse turning it into another Venus.

That's just what came to mind with a minute's thought. Organizing every way I know of destroying things would literally require constructing a formal reference catalog.
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I think I see heart of our disagreement.

Knowing how to do something in theory is not the same thing as knowing how to do something.

But also, if building a nuke is so easy, why is Iran fucking around with centrifuges? They can't read? Come on, this is just more gish gallop.
 
Sir Stompy said:
Okay, sure. But does Hazou even know calculus? You can't do this stuff without it. So he would need to invent that first.... and so on and so forth for 8 centuries of math.

I'm not saying it's flat out impossible for things to be different. I'm saying that what is and isn't different is QM fiat and they ain't gonna say yes. It's not even unsimulationist, the EN population is tiny compared to IRL and mathematical geniuses are distributed according to population.

How exactly does a vortex ring improve energy density? Energy density of the fuel? Of the explosion? Why bother with a vortex ring? By what mechanism does the vortex ring increase the energy density?

I think I see heart of our disagreement.

Knowing how to do something in theory is not the same thing as knowing how to do something.

But also, if building a nuke is so easy, why is Iran fucking around with centrifuges? They can't read? Come on, this is just more gish gallop.
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Most people are idiots. Most people don't like being reminded of their inadequacies. Everybody with power has very strong incentive to use that power to structure society in such a way that it favors people with power at the expense of those who don't have it regardless of merit. As power distribution becomes less and less proportionate smaller and smaller numbers of people are in the top tier and collusion towards that end gets easier and easier in a self-reinforcing process.

The vortex ring doesn't increase the energy density, it conveys the mass and energy to target because it is a dynamically self-sustaining structure which is reinforced when energy is added to it as in the fuel it is carrying burning as it rotates into contact with the ambient atmosphere. Firenados are a thing for a reason. Finely ground carbon just happens to be the most energy dense material easily available. Boiling metal might be better due to the higher mass density producing more of an impact.
 
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Shrooms said:
Tbf if Lailoken did have that knowledge and got TOO explicit the feds would probably look more closely so that's not exactly something that can be shared trivially to prove you know it
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My point is that knowing how to build a bomb is pointless because nobody can get their hands on enough fissile material without literally a billion dollars.

If this wasn't the case, someone would have done it by now. There are very strong incentives for terrorists/freedom fighters everywhere.
 
Sir Stompy said:
My point is that knowing how to build a bomb is pointless because nobody can get their hands on enough fissile material without literally a billion dollars.

If this wasn't the case, someone would have done it by now. There are very strong incentives for terrorists/freedom fighters everywhere.
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I'm obviously not an expert, but I think a dirty bomb would be a lot easier and more efficient for a terrorist. They just need a sufficient amount of radioactive material, strap it to a bomb and they have a way to spark massive amounts of fear and irradiate an entire area. Not a lot of schooling or googling necessary, they just need the radioactive materials. The fact that (to my knowledge) this hasn't happened implies that it is very difficult to get your hands on a sufficient amount of material.
 
@Lailoken , the technobabble related to sealing is technobabble. Please don't take it to imply that Hazō has deep knowledge of real-world advanced mathematics. If you want a more palatable answer, the story is being translated from Elemental Nationsese and English doesn't have concepts related to chakra movement so I've shifted it to the language of mathematics in order to convey some of the feeling albeit none of the actual meaning.


Velorien said:
You should join the Discord. Everyone there is accustomed to seeing @eaglejarl's weekly "Resurrect Jiraiya already!"
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Weekly? You have a flattering view of my patience.

MrRobot said:
Where i find the link to [the Discord]?
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@MadScientist has it in his signature and I've added it to post #2. Also, here: Discord - A New Way to Chat with Friends & Communities

roobee said:
Huh? Wat hazou do [that will make Akane mad at him]?
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She told Hazō to go apologize to the families of the murdered yakuza. Haru did the murdering but Hazō is his Clan Head and therefore responsible for everything Haru does. Y'all didn't do it so Ino is saying that Akane is going to be irked.

Inferno Vulpix said:
This is true, but the context for the afterlife rift is that after being introduced there was a QM disagreement on whether or not it should lead to a full afterlife arc since we, you know, didn't really do anything to earn it. In the end, it was ruled that the portal was slowly closing and any afterlife rescue efforts beyond the Daizen proof of concept would be impossible, but as we have since seen the rift scar provides some guidance on how to earn our afterlife rescue arc.
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This.
 
eaglejarl said:
She told Hazō to go apologize to the families of the murdered yakuza. Haru did the murdering but Hazō is his Clan Head and therefore responsible for everything Haru does. Y'all didn't do it so Ino is saying that Akane is going to be irked.
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To expand, Akane told Hazō that an apology from him would make people think that the Hokage made him do it (since normally a clan head would not choose to lose face by apologising to civilians), which in turn would discourage other ninja from copying Haru and bullying/murdering civilians instrumentally.

roobee said:
Anyone remember what this was?
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Kei told the clan she was unilaterally cancelling the Pangolin deal. Mari used her skills to socially obliterate her, and Tenten used emergency measures to get her out of there at the last second.
 
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Velorien said:
Really? I can think of few things more MfD than discussing how best to make completely unnecessary weapons of mass destruction.
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I just felt the need to try disuade thing from going political if you flow the because this is the "There are very strong incentives" and political rants is a fast way to get the tread locked. Discussing the ways to causing death on scale is verry on brand trough.
 
Maybe we can still do it ourselves? Sure it's a little redundant to have Haru and Hazou apologize on separate trips, but idk maybe it'll work out.
 
Velorien said:
Even if Hazō were to apologise in person as she insisted, after such a delay nobody would believe he was doing it on the Hokage's orders.
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This strikes me as very strange for some reason. It's not like all the deaths happened at once, so this apology tour would have already been fairly late for the early deaths. Unless the Hokage publicizes his meetings with Hazou for some reason, I don't see why people would expect any specific meeting to be about the Yakuza deaths and therefore start some kind of apology countdown, and for that matter, Hazou himself had to find this out from Asuma after it had been going on for some time, so how is everyone else in the know about it but not him? There was a few weeks for it to disseminate in between finding out from the Hokage himself in a private meeting and sending Haru to apologize, yes, but it goes back to the "why does everyone else know the timeline on this already, and if they do why is now specifically too late rather than before when the murders just began, or did they know Asuma talked to him about it at that specific meeting" thing.

Of course, Akane could just be wrong in her intuition too, and no one would actually interpret it the way she was expecting, since she did find out about all the deaths at once. But then, Kei kind of seems to agree with her opinion in this chapter and then said it was too late so... I guess the 'inventing a fate worse than death to punish Haru' was not good enough to convince people Hazou got in trouble with the Hokage :p

I'm pretty tired right now so hopefully this made sense and I'm not hallucinating something crazy :rofl:
 
Shrooms said:
This strikes me as very strange for some reason. It's not like all the deaths happened at once, so this apology tour would have already been fairly late for the early deaths. Unless the Hokage publicizes his meetings with Hazou for some reason, I don't see why people would expect any specific meeting to be about the Yakuza deaths and therefore start some kind of apology countdown, and for that matter, Hazou himself had to find this out from Asuma after it had been going on for some time, so how is everyone else in the know about it but not him? There was a few weeks for it to disseminate in between finding out from the Hokage himself in a private meeting and sending Haru to apologize, yes, but it goes back to the "why does everyone else know the timeline on this already, and if they do why is now specifically too late rather than before when the murders just began, or did they know Asuma talked to him about it at that specific meeting" thing.

Of course, Akane could just be wrong in her intuition too, and no one would actually interpret it the way she was expecting, since she did find out about all the deaths at once. But then, Kei kind of seems to agree with her opinion in this chapter and then said it was too late so... I guess the 'inventing a fate worse than death to punish Haru' was not good enough to convince people Hazou got in trouble with the Hokage :p

I'm pretty tired right now so hopefully this made sense and I'm not hallucinating something crazy :rofl:
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It does seem kinda bizarre sometimes that there's so much information asymmetry between the NPCs and Hazou. Pretty much everyone is instantly privy to intimate details of Hazou's private conversations and Hazou is just stumbling along in a fog of perpetual confusion regarding other people's lives.

From an outside universe perspective it makes sense, since the writing is for the players, and the players know about Hazou's life. But like, it seems pretty unlikely that the gossip train is that good, and if it is that good, Hazou should be getting better gossip.
 
Sir Stompy said:
It does seem kinda bizarre sometimes that there's so much information asymmetry between the NPCs and Hazou. Pretty much everyone is instantly privy to intimate details of Hazou's private conversations and Hazou is just stumbling along in a fog of perpetual confusion regarding other people's lives.

From an outside universe perspective it makes sense, since the writing is for the players, and the players know about Hazou's life. But like, it seems pretty unlikely that the gossip train is that good, and if it is that good, Hazou should be getting better gossip.
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It'd be pretty interesting if we were regularly fed interesting rumors and gossip floating around the village. It'd give us a better feel for the vibe and morale of Leaf, and provide leads that we could choose to investigate further or act on. Or just confirmation that some of the stuff we're doing is working out.
 
Sir Stompy said:
My point is that knowing how to build a bomb is pointless because nobody can get their hands on enough fissile material without literally a billion dollars.

If this wasn't the case, someone would have done it by now. There are very strong incentives for terrorists/freedom fighters everywhere.
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Sentient Tree said:
I'm obviously not an expert, but I think a dirty bomb would be a lot easier and more efficient for a terrorist. They just need a sufficient amount of radioactive material, strap it to a bomb and they have a way to spark massive amounts of fear and irradiate an entire area. Not a lot of schooling or googling necessary, they just need the radioactive materials. The fact that (to my knowledge) this hasn't happened implies that it is very difficult to get your hands on a sufficient amount of material.
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It really isn't. If you take the dirty bomb route you don't even need the purification step. Even depleted uranium can be made to achieve criticality with graphite and heavy water assembled in the correct geometry and it's basically trash used as ballast and tank munitions for its density because it's cheaper than tungsten. That's not even considering the other available sources of radionuclides. A schoolchild assembled his own nuclear reactor in his backyard out of bulk purchased expired fire detectors. Fusors have been built as school science projects and used as neutron sources in subcritical breeder reactors.

The reason for the specific nature of the Iran deal is the same as why Israel hasn't openly admitted to having nuclear weapons, why South Africa stopped pursuing them, why Ukraine gave up the ones they inherited from the breakup of the Soviet Union. Once you join the nuclear club the rules change and you get put on the priority hit list if things go sideways for anybody even if you have nothing to do with it. Being on the brink of joining the big boys club gets you most of the benefits without the downsides.

Stupid terrorists are stupid. Smart terrorists know that there are better ways to get what they want. One convinced the global hyperpower to waste trillions in mismanaged wars which ended up mismanaged enough to create ISIS while getting killed their soldiers who hadn't even been born yet when they started because he used fourteen people with box cutters to spike the country's transportation fatality rate by approximately 14% for a single year.
 
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Please stop discussing terrorism and real life WMDs. Building then in our fantasy world is fine. Also, if the hostility could be dialed down a notch that would be lovely.
 
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