windy.com with a VPN in a private browser window. They can’t track you if they don’t know where you are!

Yeah, I concede that small caps are more likely to be carried away by rainwater than whole bottles :D. What I meant was that for every loose cap on the ground there is a bottle lying around somewhere, and also there are bottles with caps on. No one is tossing their cap into the bushes and then taking the bottle to the recycling center.

Can you explain please, where I made a mistake?

Your mistake is thinking Earth is 6km in radius! :D 6km is how far you walk in an hour. Either you think Earth 1000 times too small or kilometer 1000 times too big.

For an object heavier than the Earth, 1g radius will be greater than the radius of Earth. For 56 Earth masses that’s sqrt(56) times bigger = 48000km.

A 56 Earth mass black hole will take 5.5e55 years to evaporate according to this calculator. A 100kg black hole (more close to what Richard used to be) is much smaller than the nucleus of an atom and will evaporate in 0.05 nanoseconds.

Curiously there was a paper recently that calculated that even if there was a small black hole in the center of the Sun, it would take millions of years for it to grow, because the aperture is so small not much can fit through, and the infalling gas heats up so much as to repel the rest, creating an internal hot bubble.

I pick up street litter, and having picked up thousands of pounds, I have never felt that loose caps are a problem, let alone one that requires such a solution. The number of littered bottles, with or without a cap, is greater than the number of loose caps, and the amount of plastic in every bottle dwarfs the plastic in a cap. Fixing the cap to the bottle will do nothing to improve the recycling rate of plastic if entire bottles are already tossed anyway.

I consider the idea of cap tethers as adversarial memetic warfare thrust upon us for some unknown ulterior purpose, possibly to make us hate the very idea of environmental consciousness. Same as paper straws. I like plastic bag bans though.

As far as picking litter is concerned, I personally prefer finding bottles without a cap. At least those are empty, all liquid having evaporated after the bottle has spent several months in the bushes. The capped bottles are often half-full and are just nasty. (Who even pays for a bottle of drink and not drinks half of it anyway?)

It is important to remember that, unless accompanied by convincing evidence for selective advantage, any single inheritable trait is more likely to have arisen from genetic drift, not from natural selection! There is, in my opinion, too much focus on conversation about superficial phenotypic traits like “shape of the nose” this and “angle of the eye” that, all the arguments about how one is better than another. Could the asiatic epicanthic fold give advantage against icy winds? Maaaybe… But it doesn’t even have to. What about the asiatic dry earwax gene? You’d struggle to even come up with a story of how dry earwax or wet earwax is actually better under certain conditions, or you could just say “it’s a single nucleotide polymorphism that could have spread by genetic drift” and be done.

Very few human traits have definitely been naturally selected for: light skin in non-sunny climates for better vitamin D production, sickle cell gene for malaria resistance, lactase persistence for animal milk consumption. Even there, the estimated selective advantage is actually much smaller than you’d expect: lactose tolerance confers only something like 1% advantage! There are many more possible neutral mutations than advantageous ones, and each one has a chance to be fixed in the entire population by genetic drift, meaning that any widespread human trait that is less clearly advantageous than lactose tolerance is more likely to be neutral than advantageous at all.

Even mildly disadvantageous mutations can be fixed by genetic drift, especially in humans since we have had many bottlenecks and founder effects. There was an area in Appalachia populated by blue-skinned people due to founder effect. No one is going to try to argue how having blue skin was actually advantageous for them to blend into their environment! There is an area in Dominican Republic with a very high rate of children born intersex, again due to a founder effect mutation. They are not considered exceptional and live normal lives as their culture has adapted to treat them as routine, as a kind of third gender. But they are not some kind of new level of human evolution, an adaptation for an intersectional era!

The only mutations that definitely cannot spread by genetic drift are those that definitely kill you.

I knew that motion sickness is triggered by frequent starts and stops and frequent turns, but even I was not aware of how big a contribution the engine vibration makes until I got to experience a ride without it.

I was apprehensive about EVs but the first time I rode in one I immediately fell in love with it. I get carsick easily, and the super-smooth ride without the chug-chug-chug of an internal combustion engine made the experience surprisingly much more pleasant for me. I do not use a car, but if I had to buy one, I don’t think I could ever stomach an ICE again knowing that this alternative is available.

This is a great gotcha! I just recently learned that 700C, the “29er”, and (some) “28 inch” are all the same wheel.

To be fair, when I was little I too was guessing that “C” stands for centimeters or something metric. Now I know that “C” in “700C”, the most popular road/hybrid wheel size, stands for the third size in the French “ABCD” notation, where sizes “700A”, “700B”, and “700D” are obsolete and are no longer manufactured.

I’d love to use ISO sizes, but even if I know that I need a 40-622 wheel, there is no way to search for it on the storefront if every single seller made gross mistakes in labeling their product! I have to ignore the specs shown entirely and make educated guesses based on title alone. For example “WHEEL AL 700 FRONT ALEX AP18 QR Silver UCP” in the picture is almost certainly a 700C wheel and NOT an 18-inch wheel. The “18” in the title probably stands for 18mm rim width, which means that this wheel will fit my bike and tire, but is a bit more narrow than ideal 23mm. The sellers must be copying the title verbatim from the manufacturer, and then haphazardly filling out the specifications without knowing or understanding the actual numbers. The ISO size is not mentioned at all.

Given a radiative forcing coefficient of ln(new ppm/old ppm)/ln(2)*3.7 W/m**2 I have previously calculated that for every 1kWh of electricity generated from natural gas, an additional 2.2 kWh of heat is dumped into the atmosphere due to greenhouse effect in every year thereafter (for at least 1000 years that the resulting carbon dioxide remains in the air). So while the initial numbers are similar, you have to remember that the heat you generate is a one-time release (that dissipates into space as infrared radiation), but the greenhouse effect remains around in perpetuity, accumulating from year to year. If you are consuming 1kW of fossil electricity on average, after 100 years you are still only generating 1.67kW of heat (1kW from your devices and .67kW from 60% efficient power plant), but you also get an extra 220kW of heat from accumulated greenhouse gas.

I have wondered this question myself, and it does appear that the heat from the fossil/nuclear power itself is negligible over long term compared to the greenhouse effect. At least until you reach a Kardashev type I civilization level and have so many nuclear/fusion reactors that they noticeably raise the global temperature and necessitate special radiators.

I wanted to go with this, but had to go even bigger. The largest mine truck according to the wiki is BelAZ 75710 (as seen in the picture) which has “59/80R63” tires that are merely 402.7cm big.

Can’t access the article, but wasn’t China the one most vulnerable from the Malacca Strait being a chokepoint? As in, their trade towards Europe and fuel from the Middle East being potentially threatened? How does Thailand pitching to the US make sense then? How would a Thai bypass even increase security, since both routes are in the same area and can be equally blockaded? There aren’t any problems with throughput capacity at Malacca, unlike say at the Panama Canal. Maybe it will make the travel distance slightly shorter, but is there really any way it could ever be cost-effective to offload and reload ships for a few hundred kilometers savings?

Thank you for your detailed input!

It’s not even a platonic ideal - it’s drawing a supply/demand curve and thinking you understand how prices work in a market economy.

You got me 😁. I love drawing supply-and-demand curves. Seems pretty hopeless then if to even begin to understand how to vote “correctly” you need 5 years of game theory PhD. Hearing someone say “just trust me bro, the optimal strategy is that one” is not good enough. Voting was supposed to be for the masses…

drop everything to just start suing states and protesting for voting rights

I could get onboard with ranked-choice voting. My city used IRV for our latest mayoral primary election, and even though none of my ranked candidates won, I felt extremely satisfied that at least my voice was finally being heard. When a literal police-mayor got elected (winning primary by only 7000 votes), I had the comfort of full knowledge that this was not due to any spoiler effect on my part, but solely simply due to more people voting for him. If we’d campaign for ranked-choice voting in federal elections - presidential primaries and general - we can eliminate all the above hand-wringing. The Democratic party should be totally on board with this since they could finally get the Green protest vote.

So I am proposing that the Democratic party is acting irrationally and suboptimally, but you claim that the Democrats are acting most optimally, and it is the fringe left that is acting irrationally instead by refusing to accept a unfair split against all game theory guidance, causing all of us to eat shit (despite them making up only low single digits). Yet if the Democrats are so rational, how come they keep losing? Shouldn’t they have found an optimal strategy to get around the irrational ultimatum of the left? Yet here we are.

I want people to be able to report bugs without any trouble.

Thank you for being aware! I’ve experienced this on github.com. I’ve tried to submit issues several times to open source projects, complete with proposed code to solve a bug, but github shadowbans my account 6 hours after creating it (because I use a VPN? a third-party email provider? do not provide a phone number? who knows). I can see the issue and pull request when logged in, but they only see a 404 on their project page even if I give them a direct link. I ended up sending them a screenshot of the issue page just to convince them this was even possible. Sad to hear gitlab does it even worse now by making phone mandatory.

the most a third party is going to do is shave off a few percentage points, resulting in the main party losing

If the third party can force the main party to lose, then it holds ultimatum power and game theory rules apply. The main party irrationally keeps rejecting the ultimatum and as a result keeps losing. To execute the threat of the ultimatum even after the unfair split has already been offered is the paradox of game theory. You have to appear credible enough to carry out such a threat, but the only reliable way to appear credible is to actually follow through on such threats every time.

The Democratic party keeps losing and shifting right because it acts irrationally and fails to execute optimal game theory strategy. It could have offered the left a fair split and we could have all had guaranteed single-payer medical care, food, and housing, but instead none of us will have women’s rights, and the immigrants and gays among us will be herded into cages.

Am I the only one for whom "open"subtitles.org hasn’t worked in years? I literally cannot find the download button, like in those okboomer memes. Never used the API. Switched to subscene.com and haven’t had problems since.

more evidence we need Civics back in our schools

Maybe we need more math as well - have you heard of the Ultimatum Game? Sometimes the rational strategy is to reject unfair split offers, even if that makes it a guarantee that you both get nothing.