I’m too lazy to verify my hunch, but I’m guessing Texas is largely oil (exploiting natural resources), whereas California is largely intellectual output (tech, with some Hollywood and other sundry stuff), though California certainly does exploit its natural resources too (good farming conditions, some oil…).

Yeah, though it looks like the cyan (which would be ~500nm) is actually false color UV image, judging by the same color scale as this https://www.nasa.gov/image-detail/5-3-2024_sdo_x1pt6_flare_131/

Some numbers are missing…[due to] out of memory error.

The S7+ seems to have 6 or 8GB RAM, but the iPhone 7 only has 2, yet it seems the iPhone ran the test and the S7+ didn’t. I wonder if the iOS implementation is that much better, or Android isn’t set up with any swap, or…?

Human gestation is 10 months

“Full term” pregnancy is ~40w from last menstrual period, or ~38w from conception. There are ~4.345 weeks/month, putting full term at ~8.75 to ~9.2 months. Note the 9.2 months includes ~2 weeks before fertilization.

(Not sure if I’m being whooshed or not…)

People praise the female reproductive system as miraculous because it can make a baby in only 9 months. Like that’s neat and all, but my reproductive system can make a baby in approximately 13 seconds, so I don’t see what all the fuss is about.

Yep, you’re right — I was just responding to parent’s comment about fiber being best because nothing is faster than light :)

That’s…not really a cogent argument.

Satellites connect to ground using radio/microwave (or even laser), all of which are electromagnetic radiation and travel at the speed of light (in vacuum).

Light in a fiber travels much more slowly than in vacuum — light in fiber travels at around 67% the speed of light in vacuum (depends on the fiber). In contrast, signals through cat7 twisted pair (Ethernet) can be north of 75%, and coaxial cable can be north of 80% (even higher for air dielectric). Note that these are all carrying electromagnetic waves, they’re just a) not in free space and b) generally not optical frequency, so we don’t call them light, but they are still governed by the same equations and limitations.

If you want to get signals from point A to point B fastest (lowest latency), you don’t use fiber, you probably use microwaves: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/11/private-microwave-networks-financial-hft/

Finally, the reason fiber is so good is complicated, but has to do with the fact that “physics bandwidth” tends to care about fractional bandwidth (“delta frequency divided by frequency”), whereas “information bandwidth” cares about absolute bandwidth (“delta frequency”), all else being equal (looking at you, SNR). Fiber uses optical frequencies, which can be hundreds of THz — so a tiny fractional bandwidth is a huge absolute bandwidth.

80% of the USA lives within urban areas (source). Urban “fiberization” is absolutely within reach.

Agree that running fiber out to very remote areas is tricky, but even then it’s probably not prohibitive for all but the most remote locations.

The CW folks would presumably be sending QTH instead — I wonder if this graph captures that/if it would make an appreciable difference?

So the irony is

I see what you did there…

Left pedal looks more like a dead pedal to me.

And as others have said, change in direction is still acceleration. That’s part of Newton’s (apocryphal?) apple story — he witnessed an apple falling, and wondered why the moon doesn’t also fall. His amazing insight is that it does fall (accelerate), it’s just that it falls in such a way that it orbits, rather than hits, the Earth (for timescales relevant to a human).

I think you mean more scrupulous, not less.

Hopefully you can publish in an open-access journal — if not it would be great if you could share an arXiv preprint :)

I’d say it gets a little different with command line utilities — maybe “utility” is the appropriate term here, but I’d call something like grep a program, not an application (again — “utility” also works).

To be sure, grep is extremely powerful, but its scope is limited.

Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that’s not why we do it.

— Richard P. Feynman

I think the same is true for a lot of folks and self hosting. Sure, having data in our own hands is great, and yes avoiding vendor lock-in is nice. But at the end of the day, it’s nice to have computers seem “fun” again.

At least, that’s my perspective.

Whatever you decide for your laptop, I’m a proponent of a barebones off-site setup if you’re trying for 3-2-1 backup or similar.

I use a raspberry pi 3 with a single HD (ZFS) retaining some number of daily/weekly/monthly snapshots. Daily rsync, everything over WireGuard+VPS (TailScale would work too).

From our experience in the US, the birth is nothing compared to the financial drain of the other expenses. And at this age, childcare dwarfs all the other child-related expenses.

We have great insurance and don’t rely on family for childcare though, so the math is very very different for someone with “free” familial childcare and no/lousy insurance…

Others mentioned virtualization — I have had issues with COW filesystems (btrfs), as COW does not always play nicely with VM drives (extreme fragmentation and very poor performance).

I don’t know how compensation works in academic administration, but if there’s any vesting going on then you could “take a pay cut” but end up making more due to previous compensation vesting.

Certainly possible for public companies, but again, unsure if that could be the case for a university president…

from stdlib.h import cout

Wait this looks wrong, shit…