__x0x__

In grad school I called mine "snot on a doorknob" - it was that "slick" / fast. The internal HD felt almost magic after slamming so many floppies.

Tools like Exact Audio Copy and cdparanoia have made it possible to do bit perfect DAE since the last millenuium.

To add to the anecdata: My most recent SSD failure happened when I did the firmware upgrade. It worked before the upgrade, the upgrade binary said 'upgrade failed' and the disk vanished and never returned after the 'upgrade'.

I can sort of see the point in the down payment thing but PMI can eat a bag of d*cks.

I sold my first house FSBO in a hot market and the appraisal came in below what the buyer had agreed to. I had to lower the price since banks were involved. That sucked.

As far as I can tell the solution he offers is merely to put the Discussion section of the paper first, and go logically from there. I don't see how this really helps. I write lots of scientific papers. You don't read scientific papers to understand how the science was conducted as a first goal, usually - you want the results that make the paper worth writing in the first place. You read the abstract and conclusions first, and then decide whether the rest of the paper is worth reading.

You have it backwards; the cirriform clouds are mostly transparent to visible but absorb and re-emit IR effectively (cloud greenhouse effect). Low clouds tend to have a very high albedo, hence effectively reflect incoming solar radiation, like ice/snow.

GOES 16 and 17 are identical.

Looks like a crap article in a crap journal. In the abstract they refer to cannabis as a stimulant, which seems quite incorrect. Also the results are unsurprising and not very exciting.

<chimes in> Same here. I still have all my physical CDs from the past 25-odd years but they are in sitting in boxes after being ripped. 99% my "TV watching" is time-shifted using the Shield, with a combination of streaming and downloaded stuff. I have weaned myself off of all physical media except for vinyl records (don't ask - it's a hobby). I wired my house with Cat5e and everything lives on a fat XFS formatted RAID array.

Now that I have a streaming subscription to Tidal (CD quality) I find very little reason to look to alternative music sources. With Amazon Prime the same goes for a lot of TV and movies. But for niche stuff there will always be torrent sites.

Speaking only for myself, blocking commercials is probably the biggest motivator for myself in seeking DVD sets and/or series of TV shows. Once you have stopped watching "live TV" you'd be surprised how sensitive you become commercials blasting every 10 minutes. Kind of like turning off your ad blocker (I honestly don't know how people survive the web without those things). I'm willing to pay for the "privilege" of not being yelled at every 10 minutes...

And let's not forget the battery of the month club! Oh yes RS was Wonkaland for me when I was a kid. I also lusted after the CB radios they sold.

From a Reuters article: "In 2013, Foxconn said it would invest $30 million and hire 500 workers for a new factory in Pennsylvania, but that facility was never completed." So I wouldn't hold my breath.

That is tremendous, thanks for sharing. Congratulations to all the New Horizons folks! I look forward to our upcoming fly-by of the object that caused the occultation. With five different observations of the occultation I would imagine that they will be able to get some decent information on the size/shape of the object.

I'm a self-described audioweenie who has a dedicated listening room with a decent setup. It does make me sad that much new music is mastered so loud because information is lost when you "brickwall master". For older music, a lot of audiophiles will seek out original non-remastered releases of music made before the "Loudness Wars" (early 90s and before) where, as I understand it, it was generally considered taboo to have a "digital over" in a mastering. However some "Loud" masterings still sound quite good. It depends a lot on the type of music and how the compression was applied. I mean, someone overdriving a tube guitar amp into soft clipping is essentially compressing the sound in the analogue domain - that's what makes guitars sound so awesome.

I wish to make one main observation about the vinyl resurgence. Vinyl (which I enjoy, mostly for nostalgia because I'm old enough to remember when it was the main format) is on the rise for the wrong reasons. One reason is that it has become trendy - and I have no problem with this, but it's a real thing. Another more frustrating reason is the perception that vinyl masters cannot have the same amount of compression as digital masters, hence the perception is that vinyl version of a modern master will less compressed. Many, many audiophiles believe this. However I can tell you that the vast majority of modern vinyl releases are the same exact mastering as the digital version. The digital tracks have already been "squashed" and that mastering is fed to the cutting head after applying the RIAA curve.

However, the "dynamic range database" (results from a piece of free software that applies an algorithm to digital music and assigns a number related to the ratio between peak and RMS energy in the music) will regularly indicate vinyl versions of music (recorded and digitized by someone on their home setup) with more dynamic range. The problem is that this "extra" dynamic range arises from the inability to reproduce square waves (those flat-topped 0 dBFS regions in the article) in the analogue domain... there are overshoots that "add" peak energy that didn't exist on the squashed digital master. So you have people who think squashed music that has gone through all of the processing that is required to make a vinyl record magically comes out on the other end with more dynamic range, sounding better, when it's added a bunch of additional distortion. It's part of what makes the audio hobby so much.... fun.

I've been both a "toiling in relative obscurity" and "rockstar" scientist. I really didn't mind being the first one, and I don't think my earlier research was necessarily bad, but I was at an undergraduate-focused university where teaching dominated my time, and I did not have the resources to conduct world class research. I am now a soft funded researcher at an R1 and love my new position.

What the author seems to be advocating is some sort of normalization process for the peer review process... it's not entirely clear what she is calling for. I've always advocated for double blind reviews, but it's very difficult for these to work because in small fields such as my own, it's pretty trivial to figure out who wrote the proposal. So it one sense, the rich get richer, but so long as the science that comes out of it is good, so be it! You aren't going to get R1 research done when you have a 3/3 teaching load with no graduate support, that's just life.

I have been on both sides of the review process and I have yet to feel like I was snubbed in my earlier "toiling" days, nor have I, when reviewing, felt compelled to award someone just because they were a "star" - if anything, I might even be more critical when reviewing proposals and papers from "stars". For me, though, I just basically follow the guidelines for evaluating proposals and let the chips fall where they may.

This is a good thing. Vaporizing/eating cannabis appears to provide little to no long-term harm to users, whereas alcoholism and alcohol related accidents cause terrible harm.

And I know it's just an anecdote, but I'm a successful scientist with a PhD who vaporizes daily. I prefer it to an alcohol buzz. No hangover, no blackouts, no stupidity.

I will be sure to shed a tiny tear for the macrobrew industry, those poor, poor shareholders.