IMHO if you don’t have a globally-reachable address or forwarded port, you are not really a participant of the internet, you are just a receptacle xD

One service I never see mentioned is OVPN. They have a 1-to-1 feature parity with mullvad and were an easy drop-in replacement when mullvad closed their ports:

• wireguard
• port forwarding
• no usernames/emails/registration, only account numbers
• crypto payments/cash in the mail
• same price as mullvad
• multiple device keys
• multihop
• no bandwidth limits
• setup guides
• status dashboard

I used mullvad for years, sad to see them go, and all my scripts basically worked without any change other than the server addresses/public keys. Only downside is they don’t have as many users so not as many servers. I wish more people would join up so I get more IPs to choose from :D

I know you are just nitpicking on whether the current dictatorship has an official policy to deport American citizens, but I want to clarify, for the benefit of anyone else who might not be aware of this, that the American government has in fact already deported multiple American citizens by mistake. This GAO investation found that while ICE doesn’t keep track of such stats, based on the data that is available it must report that indeed “ICE and CBP took enforcement actions against some U.S. citizens.” The numbers are in the hundreds-arrests-per-year range, and dozens-per-year deportations. There are many interviews in the press with American citizens who say they were illegally detained or deported. Some Americans had to sneak back across the border after being illegally deported. Many Americans sued and won settlements for their illegal deportations, so now it is official court record that such events happened.

This is not just a matter of ambiguity, cases of “who can really know whether that person was a citizen or not”. These are cases where CBP has been clearly negligent, where the victims had been able to procure for display real birth certificates, real passports, and the agents wouldn’t look at them. The court-appointed lawyers would “lose” the documents and claim none were received in front of the judge, or there would not even be court hearings at all, just deportations. When sued later, no one would take responsibility, no one reprimanded, just settlements paid out. Sometimes the CBP would get sued, receive a court judgement affirming that the victim was a citizen who was unlawfully deported, then ignore the judgement and deport them again. This has all already happened… under past administrations. The implication is that the willful negligence under the current one will not get better.

I like to imagine the origin of life as some organic scum sloshing around in a tidal wavepool. The evaporation creates concentration, the soapy foam provides compartmentalization. The bubbles merge and break apart, hosting populations of spontaneously-polymerizing goo. With enough time and luck, you get some randomly-formed polymer that is able to catalyze more polymerization. From there natural selection takes over. Sometime later the polymers learn how to stabilize their own bubbles, so they are not at the mercy of the waves any longer. This keeps the other random polymers out, such that when the auto-catalytic polymers catalyze more polymerization, they create more copies of themselves rather than of random junk. This is hugely advantageous to their population numbers, so that if such bubble stabilization can happen at all, it will happen and then dominate.

In this fantasy it is difficult to point to any single bubble and say “This, this is the first cell.” It’s all just a bunch of foam seething, forming and reforming. The polymers keep mixing and separating. To draw a line at one is as arbitrary as to say “This, this is the first chicken, born of an egg, laid by a bird-like creature who is not a chicken” to solve the chicken-and-egg problem. There could be thousands of generations of chicken-like creatures, any one as good a pretender to be the first as another.

There are thousands of bubbles, no single moment of transition between non-life, proto-life, and cellular life, but I do believe they have to come from around the same time and the same wavepool. There isn’t some other wavepool from a hundred million years later that completely independently grew its own bubbles and resulted in a separate line of universal descent that later got merged into the tree of life. It happened on Earth once, so it could have happened again in a hundred million years… EXCEPT that now that it has happened, the existing life would colonize the entire planet and eat up all the organic goo molecules as quickly as they become available. Proto-life cannot outcompete full-life.

I like this cosmology calculator: https://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/CosmoCalc.html Enter redshift z=1100 (which is the observed redshift of the CMB) and hit the “general” button, which calculates the distances using the currently-accepted general model and Hubble parameter/dark matter/dark energy values. This gives the “comoving radial distance” of 45.5 Gly (giga light years). That means that if right now, at this very instant, you put down a meter stick in front of you, and the buddy next to you put down a meter stick, and the buddy next to them, and so on through the next galaxy, and every galaxy, all the way to the place where the CMB in that direction originally came from (the place is still there and there is probably a galaxy there now though there wasn’t one back then), there will be 45 billion light years worth of meter sticks.

The other values of note are the light travel time of 13.72 Gyr (travel time is how distances are usually reported in news articles, as opposed to scientific articles that only report the redshift z), and the age of the universe at the time the light was emitted: 0.37 My = 370000 years, which is the age when recombination happened. The total age of the universe (13.721 Gyr) is the sum of these two.

The value you probably want is the “angular size distance” in the calculator, which is the meter-stick method done in the moment when the light was emitted rather than at the moment right now. In this case the distance is 0.0413 Gly. Only 41 million light years, really close by! There was a lot of stuff packed together, but it has stretched out since. The relationship between the two distances is:

comoving distance = angular-size distance * (z + 1)

So redshift of 1100 means the spacing has been made 1101x times wider.

Of course if the universe were literally stationary then your question wouldn’t make sense because the universe would never cool down and CMB would not happen. If the universe expansion had stopped at the moment the CMB happened, then the distance to the CMB you want is the 13.72 Gly travel time distance, but it wouldn’t be our CMB anymore, it would be some other last scattering surface much farther out away.

I got a dozen eggs, will trade you for 6 big macs. Everybody wins. Capitalism!

Exactly right! The desire on display in this snow path is the desire for more space/safer lane width tolerances. The handlebars on my bike alone are more than 2 feet wide, I literally cannot fit in the quarter-lane as designated!

There’s been talk for several years of repurposing the mirror traffic lane on the other side of the bridge for exclusive pedestrian use, which would solve this. Both lanes were originally streetcar tracks when the bridge was first built, then converted into car lanes and remained so for decades. The car lane still in use on the opposite side is hardly even used because the un-expandable 8 feet is narrower than standard lane width. Trucks and larger cars can’t fit there, almost all motor vehicle traffic goes through the interior bridge lanes instead. Yet for years the city resisted the switch. Showing desire is important to win them over.

I do have good news to report for accuracy’s sake: after several more snowfalls during the winter, the many bridge paths did get salted every time afterwards, and this scene did not repeat. Must have been an aberration!

For something like a browser, you don’t even need to “install” at all. You only need to acquire the standalone/portable executable from the browser developer’s official website. For example you get Waterfox from https://www.waterfox.net/download/. If you read the PKGBUILD, even if you can’t see through all the potential malicious tricks you’ll at least find that that’s basically all it claims to do: download a binary from official website and put it somewhere. In this case “installing” means using root permissions to stick it in /usr/bin, so all users on the computer can run it. But since almost all home computers only have a single user, you can skip having to give it (temporary) root access by saving it in your home directory instead. I also run the binary inside its own Firejail so it doesn’t even have access to my personal files. You are always trusting someone, be it the Arch maintainers, the AUR contributors, or the independent browser developers, but this way the least number of parties get the least number of permissions.

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.

One example: on May 30, 2020 in Minneapolis, during the protests after George Floyd killing, some police were driving around the streets in an unmarked van, shooting at pedestrians at random without stopping. They later claimed they were shooting rubber bullets to “encourage” people to obey the curfew order. Of course, if you are the one being shot at in a drive by from a mystery van, you have no time to determine what kind of bullets are being fired… One pedestrian shot back! There is a video of it.

The guy was immediately arrested, miraculously without being shot to death in the process, and put on trial, but acquitted due to justifiable self-defense. The police did not drive around shooting randomly any more after that though. I see the guy even won a $1.5M lawsuit against the police now!

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.