Words to live by

The big sci fi win in stargate is how highly they rated internal consistency and having a scientific basis where possible. Apparently that was mostly because the actress playing Carter absolutely refused to tell bullshit gobbledegook and forced the writers to do it properly.

It’s subtle, and not always perfectly followed, but if you take the episode where they gate to the black hole, they have significant screen time justifying why the time dilation is so strong when the gravitational effects are so weak. It shouldn’t work that way and they acknowledge that explicitly, but obviously they wanted a fun time dilation story so they call it out and explain it as an unexpected side effect of the gate wormhole. So sure, they sometimes make science do what they need it to do for the story, but they try hard to justify it.

Star Trek meanwhile barely follows its own rules most of the time, let alone actually acknowledging real physics

Plus they cleverly evolved ahead of time to be camouflaged against all our plastic pollution, so their few predators keep choking on plastic bags instesd

Hey now, we have an unfair disadvantage, all the nutters are lumped in with us and bringing the side down.

I’m disturbed by the generic anti-war reference, it will depend how they clarify their position going forward. I’m ok with distancing from the ongoing Israel mess ofc, but I don’t see a low-military solution to Russia, at least any time soon. and I’m not sure I can vote for anyone advocating a reduction in military capability whilst Russia is building towards being a threat to Europe and therefore us.

Don’t get me wrong, I want a peaceful solution. I just can’t see one that doesn’t involve having a big stick to disincentivise Russia. I’d rather throw more money on a military that does nothing than hope that nonmilitary encouragements will work (ofc happy to have those too, but they didn’t work on the Nazis, and we don’t want another Neville Chamberlain-style appeasement scenario).

Of course, detailed opinions on complex issues weren’t going to make it into a statement this short, so I’ll wait and see, but I’ll be disappointed if I find I can’t support them just because they’re not taking Russian aggression seriously.

The company did many things wrong, it’s an almost idealised example of total failure to take software seriously.

Most importantly they decided they didn’t need to test the software on their new machines because they’d already shipped previous machines running the software, so they “knew it worked”. The previous machines had hardware interlocks that made it impossible for the software to cause a massive dosing errors, the new machine was entirely software controlled.

Also they had exactly 1 “very smart” engineer build the software, who obviously wrote it for a hardware-safe machine. To be fair, I’m sure he was very smart, but safety critical and solo projects are not a great combo.

Also they had no mechanisms to ensure failures would be communicated to their engineers for investigation (failures were reported to them and then dropped into a black hole and forgotten about).

Also they didn’t even have any capability to test their machines after failures started popping up, because they knew the code worked perfectly so they didn’t need to waste any time or money on qa capability, massively slowing down their ability to fix things once people started dying

Is this actual terrorism or just supporting a group that blew up a parked military plane again?

I guess the original claim works if you imagine it along a specific axis only (1 dimensionally) in that perspective you either fall quickly then leave slowly or fall slowly and leave quickly, matching up to a change in velocity along that axis.

But yeah, I wouldn’t have explained it that way.

Yes, that’s the in-universe story. I more meant he based the idea of evil militarist/industrialist orks burning the entire world on the Nazis, so I jokingly suggested the orks were self selecting the same way the Nazis did, but in-universe they are of course just born evil.

In the end I think Tolkien’s orcs are just Nazis right?

The weirdness that a political/military movement got turned into a species somewhat explains the weird monoculture feel, all the orcs that weren’t fascist presumably ran away to neutral countries to avoid being conscripted or something.

You mentioned “from the perspective of the planet” before, and I think perhaps that’s the key, from the planet’s perspective you fall and rise with equal velocities and equal accelerations, but crucially the planet is moving relative to other things and curves your orbit, so whilst you might might have the same falling and rising speeds relative to it, they’re not in the same direction, so your velocity has changed, and from an external perspective you’ve gained velocity from it.

Imagine you start stationary relative to the sun, with Jupiter barrelling towards you (not on a collision course!). From Jupiter’s perspective you fall towards it, and so from the suns perspective you gain velocity opposite jupiters orbit, but you’re not directly head on so it twists your course (let’s say 90 degrees to keep things simple) then as you leave Jupiter it indeed decelerates you relative, but crucially you’re in a different direction now, (from jupiters perspective) you’re pointed right towards the sun, so as you pull away Jupiter is decelerating you in the sun direction (aka accelerates you away from the sun). So you were both accelerated in the anti-Jupiter-orbit direction and then again in the anti-sun direction. Added together those give you a vector which is non-zero, so you’ve gained speed from Jupiter.

If your orbit didn’t curve (eg if you could pass straight through the middle of Jupiter without colliding) I think perhaps it’d cancel out its own effects on your velocity, though I’d need to check to be certain…

I think that was a post-Rome change that later got changed back again.

Before the 5th century/fall of Rome it was January, and we had a 1200 year long flight of fancy with March new years before finally returning to the January start the Romans picked for us.

So you’re saying the romans didn’t change the name of the 10th month to October, but instead changed the 8th month named October to be the 10th month?

Fun fact!

You’ve just made an enemy for life!

Damned software devs, they ruined software!

Stealing human remains is illegal, but selling (correctly sourced) human remains is legal.

I think their point is that it’s very hard to prove bones are illegally sourced, meaning they can only prosecute if they’re able to prove the bones were sourced illegally.

If instead it was always illegal to sell human remains (presumably with exceptions for medical/educational purposes), that might make policing them somewhat easier.

An alternate strategy might be to require strict tracking for human remains - you can sell a skull but it must have a certificate listing the full chain back to its original owner (presumably deceased). Failure to retain that chain of custody gets you in legal hot water regardless of how you obtained it. Possibly with a little extra security to prevent duplicate use of legitimate certification. (eg each sale is logged with a trusted 3rd party so you can’t keep claiming that every skull you sell is the same guy until one of them gets inspected, forcing you to find a new legitimate doner to act as cover).

I believe no blind spot, which is the place where all the nerves bundle together and pass through the sensing layer, leaving a hole in our vision (the brain works hard to hide this hole from our perception, but it’s still there and can cause accidents) Also maybe better vision in general?

Technically it’s nothing to do with Palestine itself, you can protest that fine.

The issue is the group Palestine action, which the gov declared a terror group because they wrecked some military planes, and we have a law forbidding the support for declared terror groups.

An overreaching dumb law applied badly as a way to overreach even further. I admit this is not much better than arresting Palestine protestors directly, it’s a pretty thin cover…

For context: jk Rowling

Fair point, after some googling I see I was significantly overestimating ais impact despite your comment previous comment, my bad.