There is a pretty clear influence from ancient Greek and Roman religion on Abrahamic religions (especially neo-platonism), but you don’t even have to go that obscure to make the argument you’re making.

They descend directly from the ancient Babylonian religion, which was polytheistic. It was converted from a polytheistic to a monotheistic religion first by moving to monolatry (the other gods are real, but its only valid to worship one of them), by conflating various gods with each other (saying that they are simply different names for the same god), and finally by creating a false history where the favored god was always the only one and the other ones were always considered false/idolatrous/demonic.

I see

In your opinion is there anything useful we can do with that part of the radio spectrum as those stations switch off, or are those frequencies going to be silent in the future? Will they be turned over to hobbyists maybe? (or would the power requirements be too high at those frequencies?)

Since the portable radio doesn’t have much power, you may need to use digital modes to get through.

I don’t know much about radio stuff, but ever since I learned about LoRA I’ve wondered what kind of range a station could get if the longwave or AM bands were repurposed for use with a spread spectrum digital protocol. And what kind of bandwidth something like that would have.

I think being able to do datacasting over really long ranges would be useful, so, for example, you could send emergency alerts to people even if the local cell infrastructure was down. But with the way things are headed I guess that role will be taken up by satellites.

If anything happened it would just be mechanical damage, yeah.

But like the other guy said, I think they would probably just sit there and groan as they tried to compress each other’s frames.

Same thing that would happen if you tried to lift your friend while they tried to lift you.

Or, to remove the layer of indirection: grab your own feet and lift up. Same thing as that.

Chemicals like sodium lauryl sulfate and other fatty acids with organosulfate head groups, which are much more powerful surfactants than the fatty acid sodium salts you get by reacting lye with a fat (like vegetable oil). “Traditional” soaps like that also contain glycerol (formed when the lye cleaves the glycerol backbone off of a triglyceride), which acts as a humectant moisturizer.

Technically, at least in the US, chemicals like SLS aren’t legally classified as soap, and must be called a detergent. Which is why so many products are called things like “body wash” and “body bar”, and you wont find the word “soap” on their packaging.

If you wouldn’t interrupt a stranger at a party to announce that America is doomed, don’t do it here.

Apparently the microblogging format has made people so socially dysfunctional that they’ve forgotten what a conversation is.

My mom has trust issues with computing so deep she doesn’t even do any fucking software update.

IMO software vendors have created this attitude. Don’t get me wrong, in an ideal world users would be much more technically literate, but given the behavior of the software industry this really should be the expected outcome.

Its similar to how popups on the web trained users to instantly close dialog boxes without reading them. Its not the fault of the individual person writing the CRUD app that uses a dialog box, but it is the fault of the system that collectively produced all of the things you see on the computer’s screen.

Modern ICE cars aren’t really any different in that regard.

Alchemists (correctly) observed that everything in the world was subject to disorder and decay as time progressed, but noted that gold seemed to be immune to this effect (since it is highly resistant to oxidation). Add into that the belief system that they were working with:

• That everything in the world exists on a chain of being from the most corrupt at the bottom to the most noble on top (with god being most high).

• That everything is really the same thing, and through physical processes changes its form, including up and down the chain.

And they belived that if they could figure out how to transmute a lesser metal into a more noble one then they could probably move other things up the chain of being as well. Which is why the Philospher’s Stone was supposed to make people unaging and immortal, and cure all disease, in addition to transmuting lesser metals into gold. Alchemists like John of Rupescissa probably belived that creating the Stone would also bring the world closer to the divine in some way, and it was god’s wish for mortals to do this.

I’ve heard that doing this can condition you to be anxious when you hear a song.

The microcode in integrated CPUs took care of routing your inputs and outputs to where they need to be, and triggering the various arithmetic operations as desired.

In the transition from plugboards to programmed sequence control the thing that took over the task of routing values between registers, through the ALU, and to/from IO ports was the control unit. Microcode being one way to implement functionality in the control unit.

One other approach was to use what was basically a finite state machine, implemented physically in-circuit. The output of that FSM was fed into a series of logic gates along with the current instruction value, with the output of that combination being connected to the control lines of the various CPU elements. Thus the desired switching/routing behavior occured.

Modern chips are really complicated hybrids of microcode and a ton of interacting finite state machines. Especially in x86 complex or less commonly used instructions will be implemented in microcode, whereas simple/common instructions will be implemented by being “hardwired”, somewhat similar to the FSM technique described above (although probably more complicated).

I thought this was some sort of tier list of drugs at first. Like “which ones are most important for a hospital to have”, and I was trying to work out the logic behind the colors.

it’s not hard to earn in-game money and buy ships with that

If you can skip that process by paying real money, and the things you unlock are gameplay-effecting upgrades, then that’s pay-to-win. That’s what the phrase originally meant before being diluted. Non pay-to-win microtransactions are purely cosmetic.

Not that people should be playing any game that’s infested with a microtransaction funding model. Let alone one with a base price of $45, let alone one with absolutely absurd “micro”-transactions meant to prey on mentally ill people, let alone one that’s already taken people’s free money only to implement all of the above.

At one point in time horse armor was enough cause controversy. How did it all go so wrong?

I didn’t bother to read the paper, but the article says the system produced “10s of nanoamps at 10s of microvolts”. I’ll just assume each of those values are “100”, since that’s the highest value you could describe as “10s” of something.

That works out to 0.01 nanowatts. For comparison the tiny solar panel on a solar powered calculator might produce 0.0075 watts, or 750 million times that amount of power.

In reality, since wattage is a multiple of volts and amps, lowering both of those figures from my highball estimate would massively decrease the wattage. The solar calculator probably produces billions of times more power than this 1 foot long cylinder.

So, i think its neat that they were able to measure an effect, but the article really should not even be mentioning power generation.

People have been saying that AAA games suck since at least 2007, with the brown and bloom era, the rise of modern military shooters, and gameplay becoming increasingly trivial with quicktime events and so forth.

In my opinion they weren’t wrong then and they aren’t wrong now; indie games, then and now, are where innovation comes from. Though from an aesthetic perspective I think if anything AAA games are actually a little bit better now, since at least they’re using more colors than “gunmetal grey” and “piss yellow”.

For yuri authors that choose to list a gender the vast majority of them, 80%+, are women. While it varies by distributor the audience for yuri works is made up of close to 50/50% men and women.

Furthermore, if you look at the tag numbers on sites like MAL or mangagao you will find that yaoi manga outnumbers yuri manga by more than 5x:

Also, while its male audience has grown in the intervening years, yaoi originated as a genre primarily by and for women who were attracted to men. Bara is generally more written by gay men for gay men.

Am I allowed to complain about software bloat if I don’t have that?

Philips Ultra Efficient bulbs use only 4 watts, and they have a glass bulb and metal base, so they might feel cool to the touch anyway. Or at least feel plausibly the same temperature as the room, depending on how hot it is in there.