Is that 3 times more deadly per mile traveled, or for a given amount of time spent using stairs, or just total, for every one person killed by a car (as a pedestrian), 3 are slain by stairs?

I dislike systemd less than I dislike sysvinit, so it has that going for it.

Owls don’t weigh 16 pounds (except for fat owls). 300 kilowatts is a rate of energy, not a total quantity of energy. 300 kilowatt hours (which is possibly what they meant?) Is only around 260,000 kilocalories (which is called “calories” on food labels because units of measure were made up by humans). According to an extremely naive google search, that would only take an owl 5 years to consume, rather than 10. If the original number were correct, that would mean this owl eats 8,000 calories per day. Which is not typical.

Onto the broader point, the efficiency of birds in flight is not as simple as this image suggests. There is no (useful) formula that takes the weight of a bird and the distance it will fly and tells you how many calories that takes. Birds can fly at different elevations, at different speeds. They can fly with or against the wind. They can change many things about how they fly to be more efficient or less efficient.

If you really want to know how many calories it takes for an owl to cross the ocean, first get the owl to the point of starvation, then bring it on a boat to the middle of the ocean. Feed it a fixed number of Tootsie pops, then sink the boat. With nowhere else to land, the owl will be forced to fly to shore. Based on how far the owl makes it, you can determine how far each tootsie pop allowed it to fly, and derive calories per mile from that.

They would hit the mountains at that height, and the FAA requires them to be up above airplane traffic anyways. After that, it gets crowded right above the launch pads, and sometimes there’s shooting stars and stuff, so some satellites are forced to go even higher.

Two sets with infinitely many things are the same size when you can describe a one to one mapping from one set to the other.

For example, the counting numbers are the same size as the counting numbers except for 7. To go from the former set to the latter set, we can map 1-6 to themselves, and then for every counting number 7 or larger, add one. To reverse, just do the opposite.

Likewise, we can map the counting numbers to only the even counting numbers by doubling the value or each one as our mapping. There is a first even number, and a 73rd even number, and a 123,456,789,012th even number.

By contrast, imagine I claim to have a map from the counting numbers to all the real numbers between 0 and 1 (including 0 but not 1). You can find a number that isn’t in my mapping. Line all the numbers in my mapping up in the order they map from the counting numbers, so there’s a first real number, a second, a third, and so on. To find a number that doesn’t appear in my mapping anywhere, take the first digit to the right of the decimal from the first number, the second digit from the second number, the third digit from the third number, and so on. Once you have assembled this new (infinitely long) number, change every single digit to something different. You could add 1 to each digit, or change them at random, or anything else.

This new number can’t be the first number in my mapping because the first digit won’t match anymore. Nor can it be the second number, because the second digit doesn’t match the second number. It can’t be the third or the fourth, or any of them, because it is always different somewhere. You may also notice that this isn’t just one number you’ve constructed that isn’t anywhere in the mapping - in fact it’s a whole infinite family of numbers that are still missing, no matter what order I put any of the numbers in, and no matter how clever my mapping seems.

The set of real numbers between 0 and 1 truly is bigger than the set of counting numbers, and it isn’t close, despite both being infinitely large.

The “leadership” of the Democrat party sits to the right of several disparate further left factions. Because they don’t embrace any specific leftward direction, they are juggling half baked compromises instead of leading anywhere. Bold policies that would be approved of by one further left group are opposed by others, so they can’t go left without losing support somewhere. Staying where they are makes them moderately disagreeable for every one of the factions that can support and vote for them, so they are unpopular across the board. They are all but trapped not far enough to the right to contend for Republican votes, and not far enough left to propose anything truly different.

I see the candidacy of further left individuals (mostly at the local level for now, but this will move fast if the “leadership” collapses further) as the first serious mechanism to break this stalemate. Popular figures from city or state government aim for national positions frequently, so expect anyone standing out with how well they run things at the local level to make that pivot.

A similar thing is at play on the right. Christian fundamentalists, war hawk neoconservatives, the alt right, the would-be fascists, select business interests, nationalists, libertarians, and others are constantly battling over policy. At this moment about 70% of them are trying to ride Trump’s popularity and apparent effectiveness at making changes to get whatever is most important to them done before it’s too late. If the Republicans gain seats in 2026, that surface level unity will become even more significant, but once Trump is out of the picture, infighting is all but certain to resume on the right, and we’ll see weaker, “keep everyone happy” politicians take center stage again.

If both those processes play out with the right timing, we may get a true leftist running against a Jeb tier Republican in 2028 or 2032.

In order to meet a rising global demand for cheese, farmers must produce more cheese than they have in previous years. As a society, we have done fairly well at using the best/easiest land to raise cows on for raising cows. Additional cows to produce more milk require either working the same lands harder, which requires bringing in feed, water, and minerals, as well as increasing the risk of diseases, and thereby increases the price of the milk for making cheese, or else raising cows on new, typically less favorable lands.

Some industries can offset this rising cost with improvements to technology, or finding areas of the world with lower labor costs, and some governments support agriculture through tax policy, or subsidies to help keep prices low. From 1949 until 2014, the US government ran a program to buy cheese when the price fell too low, and sell cheese when the price ran too high, in an effort to stabilize prices.

I got 17/28… I do not use javascript. This is not the first time I have taken this quiz (but it has been a while).

It’s a cycle I can describe, but cannot understand. A business has some minor decline in sales, or profits, or whatever. Private equity firms convince one group of people this is the biggest disaster, and the company is ruined forever, hardly worth anything. Simultaneously, they convince a second group of people that the company has a strong business model, and will recover soon.

The second group lends the company a ton of money to buy itself from the first group of people, for the private equity firm. Now, the private equity firm tries to make a temporary spike in value, pay themselves large dividends, and sell the (now actually, fundamentally broken) company for as much as they can.

The original shareholders lose. The employees of the business lose. The banks (or their insurance company) lose. Private equity wins.

My lack of understanding is, if I were a bank, I would spot this scam either the first, or second time it happens. Next time Mitt Romney came to ask me for ten billion dollars, I would tell him to pound sand. How has it taken actual professional bankers hundreds of times to (still not) see the cycle?

Likewise, the insurance companies backing some of these loans must know they’ve lost billions on this. Why haven’t they done anything?

It’s not just about slavery. There was also state’s rights (to slavery), and the economic disparity (turns out free men work harder than slaves?!), and a clash of religious ideals (people that interpret the Bible as pro-slavery vs people that believe benevolence requires abolition). There were even one or two spots where water usage rights and federal funding were in controversy.

I only buy generic brand medications, so my kids are at risk of generic brand autism. Is this going to be a signifier of a low income upbringing when they reach adulthood?

Should I switch to name brand Tylenol for their future?

Are you perhaps thinking of someone else? As far as I’m aware, Schrödinger is only well known for work in particle physics, quantum mechanics, and related physics fields.

A keep

I suspect it started with self censorship (“as f”) rather than abbreviation.

I flew to an industry event on a Southwest flight full of many people roughly my age, who worked my job, or related jobs. Deplaning was extremely fast once the door opened.

Maybe part of that is everyone being able bodied, and traveling without children, but I also didn’t see anyone that waited to get their items in order until the last minute, anyone that had to travel towards the back of the plane to get their carry on, or anyone who halfway entered the aisle, blocking it just enough that people couldn’t move past - which are all things I have seen on most other flights I’ve taken.

That’s Anthony Daniels, playing the role of the god of the Ewoks.

It’s already been made perfect once. What updates would you make it divinely inspired code?

As with most news stories, you are still welcome to guess the Simpsons episode that predicted these events.

I distro hopped about every 4 months from ~12-22, never really feeling like I’d found the right platform. Sometimes I would dual boot (or just run) Windows, and for a while I had Windows XP in a state I could tolerate.

For several years after 22, I ran Windows at home, and kept Linux for work. I basically just wanted to game, and Windows was good enough for that. Finally, something came up that I needed a home server for, and I chose Arch, based largely on my experiences from several years ago. Arch had been more stable for me, and when it did break, it always felt like the tools to fix it existed. Ubuntu and derivatives broke for me mostly in “Oops, system is dead. Maybe reinstall?” ways, which I didn’t want on my server. Other distros gave me an assortment of problems, from updates taking too long, to lacking support for a WM I enjoyed, to driver issues.

Once I was regularly SSHing from Windows to Arch, I missed the things I could do on Linux (more than just games), and steam had made Linux support from a lot of games better, so I reinstalled my gaming PC as Arch too.

I added a lot of things to my server, and had more problems with some third party tools every time e.g. elasticsearch, mongodb, or postgres updated, so I added a kubernetes cluster with an immutable OS. I tried 3 before settling on Talos, and now when a workload on the server breaks, I move it to kubernetes. That pace has worked out for me, but now the server does no heavy lifting, so I’m experimenting with local LLM on it.

I was going to take it in a 1987 Toyota Camry, manual transmission, but the clutch burned up (not my fault… Maybe), and my parents didn’t want to get it fixed. I took the test in the driving school’s only manual transmission car, which was… A gray sedan, with a second brake pedal for the passenger.