My answer will likely always be World of Warcraft. I played in my 20s and I played a lot. At some point when I typed /played, the number I got back exceed 1 year of in game time. I vowed never to look again out of shame. I this day I do not know what my total play time is.

It only needs to fly once. Honestly, it’d probably work.

But hey, I’m sure it’s all irrelevant, I mean who would ever want to vindictively drone strike Seattle…

I just want to chime in here, I’m a bit disappointed to see the number of downvotes on this comment. Nomad isn’t missing the point here, they’re not saying anything insensitive or unreasonable. They’re just saying that they do expect schools to be in touch with parents.

Personally I don’t know what I’d do if my child’s school wasn’t as communicative and supportive as they are, because my child certainly isn’t. I truly rely on the school to know what’s up with my kid.

That said, I did read KryptonianCodeMonkey’s excellent post as well, and it does clarify some important points and address additional nuance on the schools actual role. But if you read it, you’ll notice that it also doesn’t actually contradict anything Nomad said, it’s just expanding on ideas, providing context and pointing out limitations and exceptions. All of that is great and super valuable, but it’s crazy to upvote that and downvote Nomad’s post.

To sum up, this is bothering me because the negative score suggests there’s something wrong with that post, but there’s really nothing wrong with that post.

It’s hard to decide which simple machine system to invest in. DeWalt makes a great lever and inclined plane, but I hear Milwaukee’s wheel-and-axles are really good.

I think Randall really gets my life.

Amazing

That’s fair. Nearly everything at that scale is up for interpretation. I find that nothing in physics works the way it intuitively seems like it should.

Get it just right, and yeah, lower latency. It’s not likely to change the bandwidth though. 😉

"refractive index”

Not to split hairs here, but that’s also kind of the same thing.

Like what does “refractive” mean? Does it mean moving slower or bouncing around?

Exactly, at least that’s my understanding!

Many fossils are remarkably affordable, if that’s your thing. I’ve seriously considered buying a megalodon tooth.

You still need to be the kind of person who can spend a few thousand on something largely decorative or of novelty value. But hey, some people buy custom forged battle-ready swords, and some buy designer purses, so you know, whatever.

That is not the speed of light through fiber. That is the speed of light bouncing at diagonal angles as it travels through fiber.

It appears to travel slower because it’s not traveling in a straight line. But I promise, every individual photon is traveling at exactly c. Photons emmited simultaneously will not all arrive at a destination at the same time, but this isn’t because they’re traveling at different speeds, it’s because they’re taking different paths, reflecting and refracting slightly differently.

It’s an awesome comment, it totally could have been the hover text.

It’s crazy, I haven’t bought a console in a while, so I’ve actually never spent more than $50 on a single controller. That said, I already think I’m going to buy this.

I was really impressed when I used a steam controller at pax years ago, but didn’t end up pulling the trigger, my usb Xbox controller was good enough. But that controller has some significant stick drift now, and I have had situations where I really wished it was wireless.

Honestly, I just have a good feeling about this device. I don’t know if it’ll be as reliable as items like my Logitech mouse for instance, but I’m hoping it lives up to that.

I’m really glad this story ends with a silver lining. I’d say that it’s a near certainty that they’ve successfully collected the data they needed. Over time our tools for analysis only get better. Sometimes we sit on data for years before we develop the ability to properly analyze it, but we get there.

Our moon is definitely the most important body in the solar system after the sun and earth. There’s a good chance life is only possible on earth because of the moon.

The thing is, here on earth, we have this wealth of life and diversity, but we only have this diversity because we have a diversity of elements to work with. On most planets, we don’t see this diversity of elements, the same proportion of heavy elements have to be there somewhere, but we don’t see them on the surface. We’re pretty sure that this is because on other planets we don’t see plate tectonics. The process of plate tectonics churns and mixes the earth, it brings heavier elements that would normally be trapped underground back up to the surface.

The crazy part, is that we’re not 100% sure why we have plate tectonics, and why all the other planets in our solar system don’t. But a leading theory is that plate tectonics are sustained by the tidal forces of a very large moon.

If this interpretation is accurate, we really owe so much to the moon. Its continued gravitational force on the earth is what has made everything (life, intelligence, society, technology) possible.

Also, in a Drake equation/Fermi Paradox context, the perfect moon may very well be the extremely rare event that makes the earth truly special.

Well sure, we haven’t classified all bacteria, and that is part of why new strains catch us by surprise, but to be fair, that is an impossible task.

Bacteria just mutate too quickly to ever completely catalogue them. For instance, infectious bacteria can go through hundreds of generations in a single host, over the course of a single infection. Which means that every infection presents a decent chance for them to turn into a new species.

But the majority of bacteria is not infectious, they simply don’t interact with humans much. Like, lots of bacteria are just little blobs that eat smaller bacteria. So we don’t tend to really study them extensively unless they have some other important macro effect on the world.

That feels like a pretty clear statement.

The EU isn’t just distancing itself from Russia, ESA is literally taking down the Russian launch infrastructure. They’re done. And it’s meaningful, That French Guiana site is simply the most geographically perfect launch site in the world.

Yeah, we’ve only actual given a names and classifications to the majority of land vertebrates. For invertebrates and sea creatures the unclassified far outnumber the classified. For bacteria, we barely even bother, they’re like 99% unclassified.

Apparently those are young Atlantic Salmon?

Yeah, this is the right interpretation. Don’t think too deeply about the political motivation behind these scams, there isn’t one. The motivation is that these tankers and container ships are really really big, and they have proportionally sized wallets, and the scammers don’t want to miss the opportunity. The motivation is money and the opportunity is the legitimately confusing environment.

As humans, we look for patterns in everything, we naturally look for greater meaning in events. And sometimes things are simple and have no greater meaning.