grozzle

Fun fact - Lenin, yes that Lenin, spoke English with a distinctly Irish accent, as he learned it in Dublin.

I agree wholeheartedly with the above sentiments that the idea of "a correct pronunciation" is a toxic colonialist hangover. It's bad enough that we're losing diversity of languages around the world, let's not stamp down on diversity within the de facto world language that is replacing so many of them. Unique spins on world Englishes are the remaining traces of what was lost.

I asked a geologist this, once, although specifically only about precious metals like gold and silver. He said the natural churn of everything moving around the Earth tends to concentrate similar things together over time. For example a river bend separates more dense silt on one side and less sense silt on the other. This, but also on a grand scale throughout the whole Earth.

It's a start, but I still have questions.

yt-dlp is a very healthy project with a friendly community, and featurewise is just a better drop-in replacement for youtube-dl. obviously it's building on years of work that went before, but seems to me like the torch has been passed.

yes. add 40% on top of that for the UK price.

I recommend the Song Exploder podcast for fans of this post. It goes deep on each component of a song, the influences, and often has interviews with the creators.

this plus the username, i'm thinking here's a taichung fella

the two prong ones are resistive, and the exposed metal does indeed corrode quite quickly when in use.

there's also a single-prong capacitive type, only very marginally more expensive, with all metal parts covered in plastic film, which can sit in the soil indefinitely.

Google making Reader very good, and it becoming the most popular method of using RSS (for reading articles, at least - not for podcasts), and then suddenly killing it, can be seen as pretty much an "embrace, extend, extinguish" move.

Absolutely. I've been having a nightmare with PayPal for the past couple of weeks, to the point that they made me believe I maybe wasn't complying with local laws. I checked with Stripe to make sure my parallel use with them is all above board and properly legal. Got a very quick and comprehensive reply that it is. So of course PayPal are using "local law" as a scapegoat for their own bananas unnecessary rules.

in East Asia, it's entirely normal for one side of the the escalator to be full of people standing, and there's a long queue at the bottom to join the standing side, while the walking side is almost empty, often entirely empty if it's a long escalator. "just in case" someone wants to walk, and it would be a terrible social faux pas to be standing in someone's way, on the walking side.

Saitama Prefecture is trying to change this behaviour, get people to stand on both sides, and the reaction from the rest of the country has been very mixed, a lot of people are making fun of Saitama people as having nowhere to go in a hurry. It's very inefficient, and the culture will take a lot of time to change.

I meant that 21 megatons is big enough to be among what the USA and USSR would have called their biggest H-bombs.

(megaton, to be clear, is not a measure of mass when talking about bombs, it's a measure of energy released - a 1 megaton bomb is equivalent to the energy released by a million tons of TNT, if such a volume could be detonated)

(can't edit first comment, sorry)

1kg of mass to energy (assuming every single particle met a corresponding antiparticle) would release a little over half the energy of the Krakatoa volcano eruption, similar to a 21 megaton bomb, so around the upper end of fusion bombs. Helium is about 99.5% the mass of the hydrogen that goes into it, so I guess those big fusion bombs must produce about 200kg of helium?

200000 hydrogen atoms has a mass of 201600 atomic mass units (about three haemoglobin molecules), which by e=mc² is about 188 TeV (tera electron volts), which is about 30 microJoules, or about 2% of the energy needed to register a key press on a mechanical keyboard.

I love pedants, don't apologise! Happy to be corrected and keep learning. It's been quite a few years since I was in physics classes, so I went and looked this up, and I think my memory was right, as for example, descriptions of the Coulomb force (electrostatic repulsion and attraction as in my foot example) all seem to be phrased in terms of virtual boson exchange.

I agree the forces holding things together is "ordinary EM", but virtual particles as force carriers seems to be ordinary, not rare.

Larger objects, such as the rogue (not members of a solar system) rocks you mention, are classed as MACHOs (massive compact halo objects) in possible dark-matter explanations.

Recent studies [0][1] have pretty much ruled out MACHOs as an explanation, by looking for gravitational microlensing events by MACHOs between us and the Magellanic Clouds and Andromeda Galaxy. They found about 1/1000 of the events predicted by a quantity of MACHOs necessary to explain dark matter's effect on our galaxy's gravity. For very small MACHOs that wouldn't produce enough lensing to be detectable, then you need so many that they'd darken the light, like a gas/dust nebula. This is also not observed.

I don't work in the field, but I studied astrophysics, and I have one or two astronomer friends - it seems these results are regarded as a pretty definitive nail in the MACHO theory's coffin. Current research is mostly looking for WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles), a novel class of fundamental (atomic/subatomic?) particle, expected to be present throughout all of space, which doesn't interact with the electromagnetic force, so doesn't interact with light, including virtual photons of attraction and repulsion, (such as those holding the particles of your feet together and also repulsing your feet from the ground right now,) that mediate the forces we interpret as "solidity" and "pressure", but has mass.

[0] https://sites.astro.caltech.edu/~george/ay20/eaa-wimps-macho... [1] https://www.nao.ac.jp/en/news/science/2019/20190402-subaru.h...

Limmy's humour is wilfully niche even among Scots and the Scots-adjacent. He has no intention of appealing to a wide audience. He's a great example of Twitch being good at finding an audience for the long tail of creators.

It is. There are casks for things like Google Chrome (as opposed to Chromium).

It isn't. Anthropogenic heat is about 1% as strong as the greenhouse effect, according to this article in Nature.

https://www.nature.com/articles/sdata2017116

>only in the sense of attaining better wages or holding a job >nothing to do with medical need >defining mental health as employability

I reject this entirely. The same meds give patients the ability to pursue their hobbies, self-care, and lifelong learning effectively, which can be vital for self-esteem, quality of life, and avoiding depression.

Nobody in Taiwan (except maybe a few very elderly KMT party members) calls it the ROC. In practice, of course Taiwan has no interest in claiming all of China. The claim, which dates back to the days of dictator Chiang Kai Shek, stays on the law books because the government of Taiwan is literally threatened with war by China every time they move towards updating it to a more realistic position. Everyone on both sides knows the claim is just a relic from the past. Leading with saying "The ROC claims all of China" does not help anyone understand the situation. Further, I wouldn't say the current party "wants to" separate. The current party wants to get a clear international legal/formal recognition that they are separate, and have been since beyond living memory. You can live your whole life, birth to death, in Taiwan, and your taxes, driving licence, passport, etc etc, will always be arranged in Taipei, not Beijing. China is a foreign country to Taiwan.

Good point. The podcasts I support via Patreon mostly provide a premium feed with with the sponsor-spots edited out. This seems like a good idea for YouTube Premium to get creators to do; it'd make me much more likely to actually pay for Premium.

As it is, it youtube-dl everything to my Pi and play it through Kodi on my TV, so the regular ads never reach me anyway.

The radiodroid app mentioned elsewhere in comments uses this list as a source.

I'm quite certain everyone else knows we're talking about personal lives, not colleagues.

I can imagine using TTS to catch up on news articles, magazine articles, reviewing a textbook, maybe even listening to opinion columns while out on the go or multitasking with my Photoshop time, but I can't imagine it doing anything except ruining a novel, or anything else involving drama or comedy.

You'd still have to compress the nitrogen going one way to zoom, and pull the nitrogen against air pressure going the other way. Focus motors powerful enough to do that, plus including movable airtight seals to keep the nitrogen inside, would make the lens a serious chunk bigger, heavier and more expensive.

The dust that gets inside from breathing while zooming rarely affects image quality to any meaningful degree. Excessive humidity can lead to fungus growing on the glass though, which really can ruin your contrast. It's normally good enough to keep your lenses in a box with some silica desiccant during summer to prevent that.

Ireland is still in.

As few as possible is sometimes still more than one, though.

There's one practically derelict building of capsule apartments, it was a failed experiment. Capsule hotels are a thing, but not apartments.