For anyone who is wondering the alloy metal that is radioactive is Technetium #43. It is weird it has no stable isotopes, and is only one of two radioactive elements that proceed non radioactive elements. As far as I am concerned it exists only to be different.
Promethium #61 it is so rare that it really has no practical uses outside the lab. There is most likely less than a kilogram of the stuff in the entire planet.
Why not redefine lightyears to include a leap year every four years. Except when the number ends on 00, but only if it is not divisible by 400. Physics would be so much easier!
To make it easier to visualize we’ll start with year 400. From year 400 to year 799 you’ve got a leap year every 4 years except for years 500, 600, 700 and including year 400, so that’s 25 leap years for the first century and 24 for the others.
So you’ve got 25 + (3x24) = 97 leap years
And 75 + (3 x 76) = 303 non leap years
(97 x 366) + (303 x 365) = 146097 days every 400 years which means a year is 365.2425 days long on average.
365.2425 x 24 = 8765.82 hours on average
8765.82 x 60 x 60 = 31 556 952 seconds per year on average
31 556 952 x 299 792 458 (speed of light per second) = a light year is 9460536207068016 meters long or 9460536207068.016 km long when adjusted to take leap years into consideration.
Okay, but now whenever you state one light year, it’s just a normal year. When you state four, it is three normal ones and one leap year. So four times one light year would not equal four light years.
You asked for a lightyear adjusted based on leap years, I provided the number. It’s a bit more than 365 light days and a bit less than 366 light days, it’s closer to the real distance covered by light during the time the earth goes around the sun.
Edit: Don’t know why anyone would downvote me for providing what OP asked for in the first place, especially when their reply didn’t really make sense in the context…
This happens to me every other day. Ffs please don't be polite, just drive by the rules. I hate it when cars stop in the middle of the road and you have to wait for them to start driving again because you often can't know i f they are being polite of if they are just adjusting google maps and continue to drive.
I face away or even walk away from crosswalks as needed. Entirely abates intentions to give pedestrians the right of way when there’s apparently no intention to cross in the first place.
Go so far as to time my approaches to intersections accordingly. Can’t say the strategy has ever failed - even the Mother Teresa of driving isn’t going to wave somebody who pretty much isn’t there. (YMMV, somewhat density & volume dependent.)
I work in habitat restoration. I spend a lot of time outdoors, but most of my notes are just from my normal meetings. If I’m on my phone taking notes, I have to stare down at my phone and it takes me out of the meeting. I have ADHD and find my phone very distracting. But I can write quick notes on paper without having my head down.
I also just prefer physical notes. I have tried everything under the sun with digital note-taking, but nothing beats the flexibility and reliability of pen and paper. I have a great binder-based note-organization system.
I am honestly shocked that so many people NEVER use pen and paper notes? It is very normal in my field.
You just prefer it, a notebook won’t survive a 50ft fall into water, an iPad with an OtterBox might, even if it didn’t my notes will, I just grab another iPad.
I promise you I’ve used both, pretty sure I had to write in pencil for mine and I’m sure you can argue the minutia back and forth all day, however objectively, the iPad is a more versatile writing tool than a notebook.
I disagree with your “objective” opinion lol. The iPad you have to keep charged, can break, they overheat in sunlight especially when you put an OtterBox on them, they might get laggy with big documents. And with paper you can write with any pen/highlighter you like, you can take it anywhere. Tablets are not always the best tool.
What large documents are you keeping in that binder? Your notebook can break, if one iPad isn’t charged I grab another one, we’ve been over this, okay the battery fails; again, it’s backed up. Maybe it can overheat in the sunlight (110°f haven’t had it happen), maybe you want to keep something extra private. I don’t really see the difference between changing writing tools in an app and in person tbh, but I’m pretty sure I can take an iPad almost anywhere. A tablet can do almost anything a notebook/binder can, the same is not true in reverse.
I don’t really have infinite money for new/multiple iPads lol, neither has any habitat restoration job I’ve worked in.
I don’t need to keep large documents on hand in my notes binder. I do sometimes print them and file them in an organized filing cabinet though. It’s super fast to find whatever I’m looking for, add post-its, notes, whatever I want to them. And I can read them outside without glare.
I have had my phones overheat in sunlight regularly, just listening to podcasts. Not even that hot, like coastal California sunlight. Multiple devices, over years, it’s just something I’ve accepted that can happen when you’re working outdoors.
I already described all the advantages of paper notes. They don’t break. You don’t need to carry extra batteries around. No glare. I would not take an iPad into thick brush on a hot day, I wouldn’t even be able to see the damn screen half the time. But you do you!
Your tone is condescending as fuck, so I don’t know why I’m bothering to reply because you’ll undoubtedly just shoot insults at me too, but… I live in 2024. I work in tech, too. I almost exclusively use paper as a note taking, problem solving, and brainstorming tool. Digital tools simply don’t compare in my eye. There is an inherent freedom of immediate expression and a special mental retention value that comes with pen on paper that I have tried and failed to sufficiently replicate on a computer despite attempts of great effort. I’d definitely prefer if I could instantly backup and organize and search and sync without a scan+tag process, but it’s all inferior to me. The most capable people I work with also have a shockingly common tendency (>65%) to share this preference, too. I envy the others’ ability to work purely digitally, but do notice how they spend substantially more time and effort in “administrative overhead” with their digital knowledgebases in comparison to my analog squishy world, to just end up producing similar overall output.
I have a colleague that insists on using pen and paper. He has draws and draws full of random scraps of paper which apparently have important things on them.
He’s even gone out and got expensive paper which is apparently made from stones? and is there for waterproof, It does appear to be waterproof but I’m not convinced it’s made out of stone. He has a phone and a Laptop, and an iPad Pro with a stylus, and he refuses to use any of them.
Yeah because he can never find anything. He knows he wrote it down, but he doesn’t know where it is or what it said, and because it’s not on a computer you can’t just search for it. He’s a pain.
Even if he just scanned in the results of his spider scroll at least we’d have something. Although it still wouldn’t be searchable because it would just be a picture but I bet OCR could probably do something about that.
You can totally be disorganized on a computer too. My paper notes are organized in a binder by context.
Idk sounds like the guy just has untreated ADHD or something. Life’s too short to be mad at someone for being kinda bad at their job. You’re all just workers together.
Speaking for myself, my handwriting is far from elegant. In university (40+ years ago) I developed a sort of mashup of cursive and printing, since speed of transcription was fairly typical.
I adore the look of top tier handwriting. I even got into calligraphy when I was in HS.
Since my career has taken me deep into the world of tech, I’ve become twitchy at the possibility of a single point of failure, ie, one copy of something is equivalent to no copies of something, 2 copies of something is equivalent to 1 copy, etc.
As such, I’ll take casual note (eg, my to do list for my ADHD) using Google Keep, so that I can access it and update it from my phone or one of my laptops. For the grocery list, it’s Alexa. For professional notes, it’s a combination of Obsidian and Syncthing.
Speaking of Obsidian, I first learned of it while watching a video of anPhD student describing her massive manual note taking system, following a particular system manually, and then discovering Obsidian.
In your case, yeah, I see no reason to change. It works for you.
Yeah, paper note-taking does mean scanning right away when you’re back in the office. But the reality of field work is that you might lose the data if you took them on a tablet, too. I’ve worked jobs where there was no service until we get into the office, so the data just lives on the device until it is uploaded.
I am using Obsidian for a particular project, I’m using it to organize a history research project I’m working on! I think it’s a cool tool, I would just go crazy if I had everything organized on my computer. I end up hyperfocusing more on the organizing system itself, or get distracted on the computer/phone… and the physical notes I can make cute and aesthetic much more easily which makes me feel warmly about my to-dos. I tried to do a digital PDF notebook with hyperlinks and everything, but I just felt like I was spending too much time fiddling around with on my note-taking and organization.
Paper stationary is a lot more popular in Germany and Japan, oddly enough. A lot of jetpens products come from those countries … the most sought after notebooks are Japanese and Germans have great pens.
I’m not sure I would use a nation’s strong preference/popularity for a particular tech to be the gold standard. Fax machines are, or at least used to be, in high usage over there. Also, they have a quirky preference for doing everything in spreadsheets; deviating from that to use a more appropriate tool is frowned upon. One of the best examples I’ve seen of this is someone drawing up an office floor plan, very detailed, including the cubicles. It was a gorgeous piece, but I had to wonder about the baffling inefficiency of that approach.
That said, I don’t disagree with the notion of avoiding any tool that creates huge overhead of just using the tool itself. Screw that. I love tech, but screw that.
Even where I work now, we try to reduce duplication. And in spite of that, I find myself using a hodgepodge of GitHub, Jira, Confluence, Google Docs, and Google Sheets. Jira and Confluence are slow and bloated, but that’s where we’re meant to put a lot of our effort. Even so, a table in either of those is slower and more limited than just using Sheets.
I’ve tried various ways of taking notes over the years. So many times I’ve had that “finally, this is the one” moments, only to eventually move on to something else. For a short while there, I was simply editing Markdown in Visual Studio Code (with Preview mode) and committing to GitHub, which was both lightweight and made for quick backups. Then I discovered Obsidian, and around the time worked out how to get SyncThing working.
I’m not a fan of my handwriting. And I’ve been burnt too many times in university courses, writing something down, only to realise I needed to add another paragraph up where there was barely any room to add a few words. And drawing arrows here and there only works for so long. So yeah, call me embittered =)
Handwriting in university was really the only option at the time, as it would be decades more before the first smartphone would come along. Plus, taking courses in linguistics, Chinese, and Japanese, you needed to be able to capture things that a conventional keyboard just couldn’t manage.
Use the right tool for the job. Which it sounds like you’re doing. Likewise for myself, I think.
I was just saying there are a lot of Japanese/German-made stationary options because they use stationary. It's kind of a bummer because you have to pay extra for them to be imported, and they might not be in English or show important American dates. I wish there were more high quality English-language options available. Even the paper itself is usually shit 😩
Totally understandable that as a tech worker you would prefer digital note-taking tools!
And just as an aside, sometimes I think engineers focus too much on "efficiency". There are a ton of things that can be optimized for! Maybe having a beautiful office layout diagram makes the experience of looking at and working with the diagram more enjoyable, more memorable, maybe it instills pride in the office workers.
I never recovered, and I don’t really know how to write print. So i either write cursive at the speed of around one letter per second, produce unreadable chicken scratching, or write very ugly all caps print because that’s simple enough and actually readable and faster than trying to produce legible cursive.
I also don’t think I handwrite more than 100 words a year though so it’s ok
You may want to look into dyspraxia. (Especially so if you have ((or suspect you have)) ADHD or autism, etc.) I think it’s way more common than it’s diagnosed. I’m the same way, and it helped explain a lot for me, so I thought I’d throw it out there just in case! 'Cause I’m getting those vibes haha!
Yep, I think i even got diagnosed with something similar (tho all i have is a memory of my mom mentioning “fine motor skill development disorder” once, which my brain couldve just made up), I do have autism and probably adhd which I’m still trying to get diagnosed. I looked into dyspraxia a while ago and a lot of it fit pretty well, I still tie my shoe laces in a very scuffed way for example and it took me until I was 12 or so to learn it. And there’s nothing I hate more than fiddly stuff with my hands, so I’ve pretty much assumed I have some form of dyspraxia ever since. Though I had little issues learning to type and can do that pretty fast, and never had any general learning disability, which made me a bit doubtful. If it has high comorbidity with autism/adhd I probably do have it after all.
In any case I am glad I don’t have to handwrite a lot anymore lol
omg is dyspraxia the reason there’s such an internet boner for hating cursive??? I never thought about that. It always seemed weird to me because it was such a short and forgettable part of my educational experience, but I could understand being upset about it if it was painful or difficult to learn and other people seemed to learn more easily.
What helped me get back to block print after six years of being required to write cursive is a shop/engineering drawing class that required us to use block print for our plates.
Our teacher in that subject taught us how to do block print, paying attention to each and every stroke and in what order we write them. I remember one of our first handful of plates just being the alphabet and some of the often used symbols. That helped us with our penmanship, without shaming anyone who might have had developed bad habits from previous years. Everyone is required to do it, so there’s no shame in sucking at it.
I’m 37 and can barely read cursive, I hate it. I learned it in primary school, never used it, and here I am.
I play DnD and one of our campaigns got so confusing so our DM made a huuuuge flow chart explaining the story, consequences of our actions, where we can go next, etc. It’s all in fucking cursive and I couldn’t read any of it so I continue to be confused :)
It’s definitely not neater for lefties like me who smear our script as we write.
However, OCR input tech on phones and tablets are better at reading cursive than block print. Curiously, my grandson’s curriculum in the Solano County School District dropped cursive writing and then picked it up again.
I know like, four or five people who use them! Depends on your circle. They’re an affordable and eco-friendly alternative to disposable pens, although admittedly inconvenient if you haven’t got a good setup.
I don’t think I’ve ever owned a fountain pen that hasn’t eventually leaked on everything. It’s not broken either, it just leaks during the process of normal operations, so no matter how careful you are with it it will still leak.
Modern foundation pens with universal ink cartridges/refillable ones are pretty reliable. The only time one has leaked on me was when I dropped it and broke the pen in half. I had topen body fixed and it still works well.
It is neater and faster but people cannot read it nor reciprocate. It used to be more or less universal. I like it and use it, but won't if what's being written is for the public.
When I was young my teacher said "If you want to be taken seriously you must use cursive!" She also said I'd never have a calculator in my pocket when I needed it, so there's that.
motorcycles should 100% be in the zone of practicality, especially with modern sleek electric ones.
skateboards should be the bridge between practical and recreational, provided you have sensible infrastructure and short distances they have distinct benefits.
it annoys me to no end how motorcycles and mopeds are viewed as dangerous, when every single time you hear about people being hurt on them it's because they're fucking idiots who tried to do a backflip infront of a semitruck
Horses are technically more dangerous to ride than motorcycles. It’s just that motorcycles attract a kind of people who like doing backflips in front of a semi truck.
I'm here to say that if there's snow, skis win on practicality. Almost every winter, there's at least one day when you will have some people skiing to work in Oslo, a city of 700 000 inhabitants, with a metro system. Because when there's 10 cm of snow in the streets, skis are the quickest and easiest way to get anywhere.
Another thing that enrages me is people who think driving slowly is safer for whatever reason.
Getting on the highway? Let's SLOWLY merge at 60% the speed of oncoming traffic.
Changing lanes from stationary traffic into a full speed lane? I won't wait for the lane to clear, I'll just turn signal and move into the lane REAL SLOW because that's safe.
Turning right? Let's slow down to a complete stop and force traffic to a halt so I can turn right.
As a delivery truck driver I can't tell you how many people think that everyone else can just stop on a dime for them and they're being safe because they move over at a snail's Pace.
fucking hate getting stuck behind some slow driver when trying to get on a highway. like fucker we are supposed to be reaching highway speed on this ramp not when we reach the highway🤬
There is an on-ramp for the highway near me that's pretty long. It's long because it's a very straight fast-moving section of highway. In other words, the on-ramp is designed to give you adequate space to get up to highway speed. The number of people who immediately merge into the first lane without getting up to speed is too damn high.
I used to have a job where I drove a box truck. It was slow empty and painfully slow full. It was also speed limited to 75mph. So I would tend to hang out with the semis on the hwy. One time I was driving down the hwy and this guy in a pretty new Volvo( so the fast ones) was coming down the on ramp. I could see he was going to merge right in front of me so I slowed down to give him some space. I figured he would want to be in front of the slow box truck. As he got close to the merge he slowed down so he was even with me. I gave him a little more space to merge in front of me and slowed down again. He had plenty of room left in the on merge lane if just used the skinny pedal. Instead he waited until was almost out of room then started honking at me. I did my best to speed up my painfully slow box truck but I am sure he has to slow down to the point he was merging at 45mph as everyone was doing 75-80mph. I am sure he was cursing me too because he wasn't willing to get up to hwy speed before merging.
I was taught it was the responsibility of the car getting on the highway to match the speed of the cars on the highway. If you’re already on the highway, keep a constant speed so the people getting on can match you. So he kept having to slow down because you were also slowing down. Just like the assassin pretending to be nice in the diagram, I think you were technically in the wrong here.
Right, but its not your responsibility to slow down at all. Its kind of you to do so when the merging vehicle picks up on your intention, but when they don't, it makes a miscommunication like you describe.
Basically, i'd just describe it as being predictable. And bending the rules (even to be kind) is not predictable, usually.
I have a question on this. Let's assume everyone is a perfect driver and must have at least a 2 second following distance at all times. If there's a free flowing queue of traffic on the highway with 2-4 second gaps between, merging in is impossible without someone slowing down and letting you in. Every time I merge this situation stresses me out.
Merge into the gap, then slow down slightly to extend the space in front of you, and let the guy behind you slow down to extend the space in front of him. It’s not complicated
At 100 km/h (low-end highway spreed), or 1,666 m/minute, or 27.7 m per second, a 2 second gap leaves approximately 56.6 m (185.6 feet) between cars. With the average car length being ~4.9 m (~16 feet), even the absolute worst driver can merge in a space ten times the size of the average car, assuming they're matching highway speed.
Most people have no actual concept of how long 2 seconds actually is or how much space it would leave in reality.
Yeah, obviously you "can" merge, but in doing so you insert yourself into the middle of a 2 second gap creating 2 × less than 1 second gaps. Like I said, in this hypothetical everyone is a perfect driver that always follows the rules, so that's not an option.
For that matter, the driver behind should see that you are about to merge into a gap that's too small and slow down to leave a space that's at least 4 seconds big.
I'd also like to point out that your attitude to driving is terrible, the size in meters of anything on a highway is irrelevant, 2 seconds is not a lot of time to react and slow down a car at 100, and that just because you "can" do something doesn't mean you should.
Instead he waited until was almost out of room then started honking at me.
People who haven't learned the physics of large trucks spend a surprising portion of their driving time competing for Darwin awards.
I want to will this not to be a problem anymore, but still see it all the time. I'm thankful that I've seen a lot of truckers react in surprisingly aware ways that save lives.
But every time I see it, I can't help but think that driver's luck isn't too likely to hold through too many more times making that move.
Getting into the fast moving lane from slow traffic is difficult no matter how you do it. The best way I found is to actually go slightly slower than the person in front of you to get a gap, then use that gap to accelerate.
Yeah, that's because you know how to drive. I can't tell you how many people just turn in front of a truck and expect it to slow down for them. Playing with their lives.
I already listened to/read a few books by jumping between the audiobook and the actual book. An app that would make both match both so you can resume in any form you want would be nice.
I just finished listening to Duma Key by Stephen King. For some reason, the narrator thought it was a good idea to lower the volume of their voice and nearly whisper the really dramatic parts. It’d be like “**Her father was a **^smdfprhfjs”
I had to rewind so many times that I was ready to quit. Fantastic book otherwise, but having an option to jump to text real quick would’ve been a life saver.
And while you’re at it, you could add some pictures. Maybe something like a grid of 6-8 pictures on each page. The dialogue could be in a bubble close to the speaker’s head.
At this point I’m just grasping for straws but imagine such an audiobook where the pictures are shown alongside with the audio. Perhaps even using 24 individual drawings per second to mimic motion. Or 30 for Americans.
If it were synced to the narrators pace I could dig it. I like reading but my ADHD is terrible and it’s hard to keep my attention on books for very long. I have an easier time with audiobooks but sometimes things are hard to hear or my mind wanders for a second and rewinding doesn’t always do the trick. My brain will drift right at the moment I missed several times in a row, so having something on the screen that can grab my attention would come in handy
I've heard from multiple sources (all dubious) that Ringo was the adhesive that held the band together during contentious times. Usually that role is appointed to the heart but in this case it was appointed to the Ringo. The drummer.
“Hyperbolic” this, “logarithmic” that, I’m here to propose a radical new theory: all spheres are tasty, your mouth just isn’t big enough to have the right tastebuds for the larger ones
Alt text: Subway refuses to answer my questions about whether it’s an International Footlong or a US Survey Footlong. A milligram of sandwich is at stake!
Huh. “Elected twice”, not “served two terms”… So, even if the insurrectionist ban doesn’t pan out, Trump still has to concede that he lost the 2020 election to run again.
So hear me out here. He can only be elected twice. But the text of Article 2 says in the event of a tie, no one reaching a majority, or fuckery, Congress “chooses” the president.
I’ll be over here ordering more whiskey. I’m pretty sure I’m going to need it.
Oh and while there has to be an election every 4 years, Congress decides when to choose and call the electors. Yup definitely getting the good stuff.
Oh yeah, that line of reasoning you’re proposing has been done to death in the media etc. Hasn’t changed shit. Because reason hasn’t held any water in this particular case for a while now…
Hotter take: Dismissing a warning because it’s annoying is a tacit admission that they are right and you just don’t give a shit. People are lazy creatures. We have to make fire alarms the most obnoxious and loud sound in the world because otherwise people wouldn’t leave the flaming building.
Yes! It could be like Assassin's Creed where most of the story takes place in Civilization, but then there are interludes that take place in the modern world.
xkcd
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