English spelling sucks by being detached from pronounciation episode 978

It stopped being useful ever since they stopped using it just to visualize how quickly a nuke war could end things. Climate change is serious as shit, but it’s not going to lock in total devestation within the next two minutes. Same goes for many other slow-burn threats they try to cram in there. Many of them are already here, pretty much none have a discreet threshold to count towards.

Cycling to work. I happen to have a nice and scenic route largely within parks and nature, so starting to use it improved my life quite a lot. It’s a bit faster and more reliable than public transit, cheaper and a good exersice (30km there and back). And the scenery is way better than looking out of the window of a bus on an arterial highway.

The US military budget is inflated as hell, but lasers are neat for this kind of stuff precisely because shooting something down costs only the electricity needed to power the laser, instead of a missile or some fancy airburst shells.

And here I actually thought that this shitty idea would stay in the realm of Black Mirror…

Huh, I wonder how it compares to that other country to the west there.

I hope it’s radioactive as well

Certainly, although it appears to depict the elusive 3rd order rainbow.

Interesting choice, including the 3rd order rainbow in the middle picture there…

That’s the angle at which light is reflected by water droplets. The drawing is incorrect in that the cone is horizontal while the light appears to come from a higher angle. The cone is always directly opposite to the direction of the light source. Here’s a better drawing, with more reading about what exactly is going on.

So that’s what the huge budgets and the surveillance is for…

Are long exposures bad as well? Almost every picture of the northern lights looks better in a camera than how they look to the naked eye, because cameras can perform better in low light with the right settings.

I used to be quite puritanical about not editing the pictures I take, but over time I realized that there’s no way to capture perfectly realistic photos, because there is no perfect baseline for that. Every sensation of sight is already subjective, because the brain is doing a lot of image processing and each brain and eyes are a bit different. Colours don’t exist outside the brain. Dark scenes aren’t actually desaturated, our retinas just suck at colour vision in low light.

Photography tries to emulate a very subjective impression of a scene. If the photographer makes tweaks to some settings of the RAW in order to make the final image closer to the impression they were trying to capture, then that’s quite fine in my opinion. Just the same as changing the settings of the camera beforehand. If they want to include multiple exposures with different settings, then that’s fine by me as well, because your eyes change aperture and focus each time they flick to a different part of the scene.

Not yet

Sure, that’s what they want you to think.

Yeah then we can use that to go back in time and save Harambe, and then we won’t need another planet!

Yeah that too. Could work for the niche applications mentioned, like low power satellites…

The waste heat generated by a person is one of the main concerns with designing space suits. If the tech can be scaled to accommodate that, it could change things. Unfortunately it’s less useful down here.

Your grandchild full of PFAS

Your great grandchild full of PFAS

Your great great grandchild…

Oh definitely. I just don’t like it when conclusions are drawn that as such, all germans are nazi sympathisers due to their blood (something intrinsic that can’t be changed), rather than just most of them and due to the societal circumstances that actually caused the widespread fervor. The former stance reeks of essentialism.

Are you joking now? Because you seem to be contradicting yourself. You say that you feel for the germans who stood up, but then you say that you have a hard time having that sympathy for germans (including the ones in the previous sentence?).

The reason I took issue with this is that I’m scared. Fascism is capitalism in decay. A systemic symptom of a flawed and unsustainable system eating itself. That leaves only people and their capacity for good to have hope in. That hope is in short supply. Things will continue to get a lot worse before they get better again.