beautiful_boater

beautiful_boater, 7 months ago

Wow, 14/24 that was more difficult than I thought. TBF I haven’t fully reread the Silmarillion since Middle School, but I didn’t expect it to be quite this hard.

beautiful_boater, 7 months ago

Man, I just went to a good seminar today on finding habitable exoplanets that emphasized that we currently need ground based telescopes, because it is still impractical to make 30+ meter telescopes in space and would be very expensive, even if could be done. But progress is just launching a bunch of bullshit into orbit to avoid real investment in infrastructure like fiber and other telecommunication lines.

beautiful_boater, 7 months ago

They can’t make them non-reflective enough to not interrupt really deep observing. Also, that just shifts the problem around. If they are absorbing in the visible, they will likely have huge amounts of blackbody radiation in IR, sub/millimeter, and radio. You would need to make a satellite out of dark matter to not interrupt astronomy.

beautiful_boater, 7 months ago

sci-hub has already been mentioned, but I will say that though it is not piracy, depending on the field, you can find free version “pre-prints” of papers on arxiv.org and socarxiv.org

beautiful_boater, 7 months ago

But imagine the quality of service. Unfortunately, the rice in the back kitchen has been spilled, and no food will be prepared until the staff counts all the grains of rice.

beautiful_boater, 8 months ago

You know, there is an obvious solution…JUST MAKE CLEAN ENERGY AND GREEN SOLUTIONS IN YOUR COUNTRY TOO!

beautiful_boater, 8 months ago

Sorry to nerd out, but this reminds me of a senior grad student when I was a first year physics grad student. He was talking about the “order of magnitude” class that some professor was able to set up as a fun class for fulfilling his teaching requirements. It involved calculating or estimating order of magnitude values and putting them in units of something you can relate to (e.g. distance in terms of football fields, or your height, energy in an hour of air conditioning, etc.). In the spirit of this class, this guy used his dick for length and then came up with some other size unit to convert to for homework he had to hand in. The diameter of the Milky Way galaxy is 5 * 10^19 of this guy’s “dick units”, apparently.

beautiful_boater, 8 months ago

https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/43a5a911-e761-49ac-b879-b6746ab9924b.jpeg

beautiful_boater, 8 months ago

elmofire

beautiful_boater, 9 months ago

Even the wikipedia article on LGBT rights in Germany, despite being very slanted and anti-communist, admit that West Germany had no national progress in gay rights until after the cold war. Saying the West/West Germany was more progressive and tolerant is just straight up false.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_Germany

beautiful_boater, 9 months ago

Oh no, evil see see pee authoritarian social credit score tactics. Surely all the anti-China libs have to leave Reddit now.

beautiful_boater, 9 months ago

Gotta show off that calf striation.