troyunrau

troyunrau, 7 months ago

No. Commercial passenger Jets are pretty much the safest form of travel that exists by almost every metric. Comparing them against three seater Cessnas that Billybob from Oregon uses for sight-seeing expeditions is not fair. You don’t compare SUVs to bicycles when talking about safety because they both have tires.

Note that military aircraft are also not included. There were a lot of people who died in Jets this year in military contexts. But would you call that fair when putting together the safety metrics?

What about passengers that suffered heart attacks while flying in a commercial plane? Actually, that might be an interesting example, but not in the context of this article. (Tangent: there’s probably a metric here. If you have a heart attack in a vehicle, what are the odds you’re driving, and what are the odds your heart attack causes multiple fatalities as a result. But your travel time to hospital and survival rate might be higher as a passenger – it takes more time for a plane to make an emergency landing. I’d bet those numbers come in close, but it’ll depend on the metric used.)

You always need to pick a reasonable metric. In this case, commercial passenger jets is a good one, because it’s the largest group.

troyunrau, 7 months ago

In 2024 so far (to the best of my memory), we had one crash on a runway in Japan, but zero casualties (on the jet – several casualties on the other plane – not a jet). And a door fell off a plane in Alaska with zero casualties.

There are always a small number of bush plane or private small plane casualties every year, but they don’t count against jets either.

troyunrau, 7 months ago

You wouldn’t want a confrontation with a Canada Goose. They scary AF.

youtu.be/zkgwmPUak70?si=ChERpLuLL6gpTSAE

troyunrau, 7 months ago

Sort of. The triple point doesn’t really exist at standard atmospheric pressure. The true triple point is somewhere around 600Pa pressure – or a out 0.6% of atmospheric pressure. You can achieve this in the upper atmosphere, on Mars, or in a vacuum chamber where you pull the pressure down to that point.

There is such a thing as vapour pressure in our atmosphere which is different than the triple point. You see this as humidity. But this isn’t truly gaseous water – rather it is more akin to liquid water molecules held in a gaseous solution (the atmosphere being the solvent).

troyunrau, 7 months ago

Devil with hairy chest

troyunrau, 7 months ago

I have a distinct memory of driving past a house like that repeatedly as a kid, but that was decades ago now. Tried searching for it now and cannot find it. I suspect it suffered a similar fate. Can’t find any photos or references to it online though, so maybe I imagined it…

troyunrau, 7 months ago

Yes

troyunrau, 7 months ago

Outer Worlds 2 writing team here. You’re hired!

troyunrau, 7 months ago

This is a misapprehension. Springs are on hillsides, not hilltops. Basically, imagine there are two surfaces: the ground, and the water table. In some places, usually on hillsides, the water table will intersect the surface. Where that happens, a spring will exist.

But that water has to be under pressure for this to happen – this is known as the hydrological gradient. Water flows down hill on the surface, and down gradient under ground. In order for there to be pressure on the water, enough to force it out a hillside, the water table somewhere in the hill needs to be physically higher in altitude than the spring.

In other words, it rains on top of the hill, and the rain soaks into the ground. That water wants to flow downhill, so it flows out of the ground on the sides of the hills. But this means a spring will never flow from the top of a hill.

troyunrau, 7 months ago

Only in a 2D world with the directions being limited to “up” and “down”. Carrying it laterally around the circumference of the hill would be equally probable.

troyunrau, 8 months ago

Geoscientist here. I concur. The names are punny sometimes (this example in particular), but usually non-descriptive. Exceptions for the super common things (quartz, pyrite) when used in a discussion where the chemistry is irrelevant in that specific context. Conversely, we generally don’t care about the chemistry when talking about “clays” in geophysics, so defining them chemically would become noise to the reader.

troyunrau, 8 months ago

Well, the underpants glitch is going to get patched haha.

troyunrau, 8 months ago

I’m all about the leaded solder – but I also use it very infrequently and don’t worry about the motility of my swimmers ;)

troyunrau, 8 months ago

Poor Holly

troyunrau, 8 months ago

Yeah, they were mining chunks of it historically.

troyunrau, 8 months ago

This bus even has seatbelts. For the HSE committee members of the geo community.

troyunrau, 8 months ago

There’s a company in Winnipeg, Manitoba, called “Battery Man”. Which is funny on a lot of levels. They lean into batman symbols a lot. But also, Manitoba is often abbreviated as Man (historically it was our postal abbreviation and such).

troyunrau, 8 months ago

Ooh, I’ve met three of them on this list. Jean-Baptiste was the best though ;)

troyunrau, 8 months ago (edited 7 months ago)

I’m a spatial-visual person, so when presented with this problem as a teenager, I instead solved it spatially. If you stack squares like.

█.
██.
███.
…

To the hundredth row, you get a shape that is a half filled square that is 100x100. Except the diagonal is fully filled in, so you need to add another 50.

So the answer was 0.5x100x100 + 0.5x100. Easy to visualize, easy to solve. 5050.

There’s a similar problem in sports – I was a teaching assistant for our rural school’s gym class so this one also popped up for me as a teenager. If you have 100 teams and each team needs to play each other team once… You fill in a similar grid, with the teams on both the x and y axis. The diagonal gets removed in this scenario because a team cannot play itself. So the answer is 0.5x100x100 - 0.5x100. 4950. Anyone who has ever tried to plan any sort of tournament can probably solve this intuitively, but 25 years ago I though I was the smartest gym class teaching assistant ever ;)

troyunrau, 9 months ago

What if you’re running KDE stuff on *BSD. Or on Windows, for that matter…

(eg: I use Kate on windows as my primary text editor on my work computer…)

troyunrau, 9 months ago

Are they empty?

troyunrau, 9 months ago

You

troyunrau, 9 months ago

Some of this is correct, and some of it is myth. Source: I was there ;)

Qt way back in version 1 was merely “free for non-commercial use” and shipped with the source code. KDE was founded on that version. This was in like 1996, before KDE even had a stable release. Gnome was founded immediately in response, choosing GTK (the Gimp Toolkit) which wasn’t really ready for use as a full fledged desktop toolkit, but existed and the license was friendly. KDE and Trolltech formed a few agreements – the first was the creation of the QPL, an attempt to create an open-source compatible license for Qt, and the second was the creation of the KDE Free Qt Foundation (it said, effectively, if Qt were to become closed, the most recent version prior to that would be released under the BSD license).

However, the damage was done. Stallman and others would never forgive KDE for choosing a not-free-enough toolkit, and the Gnome devs were associated with redhat. That meant Redhat and Debian, the two biggest distros, defaulted to Gnome. Ubuntu just adopted Debian, ergo Gnome.

Qt would shortly thereafter be released under GPL, GPL3, and LGPL. There’s still a commercial license option, and that pisses a lot of people off for some reason. But it was never a risk to KDE or the community – not since before KDE 1.0.

troyunrau, 10 months ago

Try microwaved beets. Mmm.

troyunrau, 10 months ago

Depending on where you live, the cost of living and housing makes this the only viable option. Or moving :)