NielsBohron

As someone who lives in this same town, black bears are more like overweight raccoons.

Fun fact, our “city hall” is at the tiny community airport, which also had a restaurant with the best chicken wings in town (salt and vinegar wings FTW). The restaurant was still going when this happened in 2019, so my guess is the bear smelled the food and went looking for the kitchen, only to get sidetracked by the city council meeting.

“No Skyrim until you finish your homework and finish your chores” is a fantastic motivator for my 10yo. When I can model that I can’t play Rocket League with him until after I finish the dishes, it drives the point home that IRL responsibilities need to come before video games.

It’s more like a mutual friend. There’s a connection to both reactants (aka “binding affinity”), but not as strong as the bond that is formed between the two substrates (if the reaction is forming a covalent bond between the two substrates, anyway)

Edit: I’m actually saving this meme to show my coworkers that teach biochem, because it’s a pretty decent analogy. You can even extend it to other reaction classes, like a phosphorylase being like a friend who connects your buddy who is selling a guitar with your other buddy who wants to buy a guitar, or a isomerase being that friend who gives you a make-over so that another friend can set you up on a date.

So, one observer will see those oscillations happen faster than the other?

Not quite. In each observer’s frame of reference, time appears to pass the same; it’s only when you try to reconcile the between two objects that are not at rest with respect to each other does relativity show up.

Basically, when you bring someone back to Earth, the observers will find that their watches don’t match up even though both observers experience time passing the same way as normal (because the oberserver is by definition at rest with respect to their own frame of reference).

TL; DR: Relativity is a pain in the ass and makes no sense in everyday terms.

edit: disclaimer - I am not a physicist and have not taken physics classes in a decade plus, but I do teach science at a college. I’m going mostly on half-remembered lectures and some random one-off discussions I’ve had with my buddy in the physics department over the past few years.

I mean, this is the real answer here, but you can’t just put them on UTC because of the relativity like we were discussing elsewhere, so it would still have to be a separate time zone for programming and timekeeping purposes, even if humans won’t be able to tell the difference

FOR REAL, THOUGH, I DON’T UNDERSTAND THE WHOLE BLAHAJ MEME AND WHY ITS ASSOCIATED WITH THE TRANS COMMUNITY. CAN ANYBODY EXPLAIN TO AN IGNORANT CIS-HET, PACK MEMBER ALLY WHAT IS GOING ON WITH THESE MF’N SHARKS???

It’s been a long time since I took modern physics, so I’m not positive, but I think you’re right that the moon would have time moving slower, and if your 50ms/day is right (edit: I based this on the moon traveling faster than the earth, but I don’t know anything about gravitational relativity, so that’s probably wrong) then you’d need to do something like skip a second every 20th day on the moon to keep pace with Earth. We could call it an “anti-leap-second”

Programmers, that seems pretty simple; what’s the big deal? ^/s

No, the moon’s rotation isn’t on a 24-hour cycle. I’m not an astronomer, but I pretty sure since it’s tidally locked to earth and on a 28-day cycle around the earth, a lunar day is actually 28 Earth days, but I’m not actually sure how that would factor into the number of time zones (I’m pretty sure it would be more complicated than just 24 time zones to match 24 time zones on earth, though).

Plus, I think the speed of the moon relative to the sun is different enough from Earth that you need to take relativity into effect, which is the real headache here.

DID YOU SAY HEALTHCARE??? I DON’T NEED PRIVATIZED HEALTHCARE!!! WHEN YOU LIVE FOR THE PACK, THE PACK LIVES FOR YOU!!!

THAT’S WHY ALL MY MALE, FEMALE, AND NON-BINARY BROTHERS KNOW THAT “FROM EACH ACCORDING TO HIS ABILITY, TO EACH ACCORDING TO HIS NEEDS” IS THE WAY TO GO!!

AROOOO!!! SOCIALIZED HEALTHCARE FOR ALL, BROTHER!!

SPEAK UP, FRIEND! I CAN’T HEAR YOU OVER THE SOUND OF MY HOG BEING CRANKED TO ELEVEN!!!

Long cat is long

Interesting, thanks for the info

No problem! Obviously, I like talking about this stuff. And if you’re interested, I’d also recommend reading the whole book. It’s pretty fascinating, although in his reminiscing and pontificating, Asimov does get a little “get off my lawn” for my taste at times.

great name! I found a first edition of his in a basement bookstore in Switzerland as a teen. Totally random, I know.

Thanks! And it’s not too random, I’d say; we’re in a sci-fi forum talking about historical sci-fi writers, many of whom were also trained as scientists, after all.

In his memoir I, Asimov, Isaac Asimov wrote chapters about his contemporaries and apparently Heinlein was notorious for changing his political convictions based on who he was married to/sleeping with at the time. Hence, free-love hippie in Stranger in a Strange World and boot-licking war-hawk in Starship Troopers.

I think there are some editions of the second book done by Ken Liu, aren’t there? I haven’t read it yet, but I got a copy from a used book shop, and remember thinking that it was the same translator. At least, I thought I thought it was…now I’ve gotta go home and check

It’s a common problem with lots of classic sci-fi authors. Heinlein, Asimov, Philip K Dick, Larry Niven etc. are all terrible at writing believable dialogue and compelling characters. There are some exceptions, but most of their characters are cardboard cutouts so they have a way to move along a story or give exposition about the ideas.

The Expanse did a pretty good job with characterization (in the books), and Kim Stanley Robinson is decent (but is still pretty “hit or miss,” IMHO), but in general, the weakest part of sci-fi writing is almost universally characterization and dialogue.

If he wasn’t alone what would shooting him accomplish? You still haven’t actually presented a compelling reason he needed to be kept under a gun.

Once Bushnell was on fire and had stopped moving toward the gate/fence, you are correct, he didn’t need to be kept under a gun. However, if he had started to move in a threatening way or if he had been working with a larger group, having the guns drawn could have saved crucial seconds if someone else began to act in a threatening way. The security forces simply didn’t know what the fuck was happening, and in that situation, it is better to have the guns drawn and to be ready for the worst case scenario.

I think it’s understandable that people untrained for a situation like this would fall back on the default, I know I wouldn’t know what to do, but calling that “reasonable” as if it really makes sense in hindsight is a stretch.

That’s fair. I can get behind calling it “understandable” instead of “reasonable”

Considering the security forces had no idea whether he was working alone or what was happening, they obviously didn’t think they could rely on the metal fence.

Look, I’m all for a free Palestine and I agree that what is happening in Gaza is a genocide. I also think that voluntary membership in any American or Israeli law enforcement makes them complicit in the heinous acts perpetrated by American cops and the IDF, respectively. I don’t know you, but I’d guess that you and I agree a lot more than we disagree on these issues. I’m just saying, from the PoV of the security forces at the Israeli embassy, this was a potential threat to the embassy and their job is literally to prevent threats from harming the embassy. Without any further information to go on, their decision to draw guns first and get the extinguisher second is reasonable.

Stop him before he got any closer to the embassy. Obviously a gun won’t stop him from commiting suicide, but it could easily be the difference between one person dying and a much larger act of terrorism

The idea that humans need the diverse micro ecology of earth in order to not become ill over the course of generations is pretty interesting.

Really pretty well-supported by current science, too. I teach chemistry at a community college, so maybe I’m an outlier, but I read a ton of current research about the importance of diversity in “gut biomes” and the damaging effects of monoculture on global ecology, etc.

It seems pretty clear that even if engineers could solve the physical and chemical issues with a generation ship, the limiting constraints are almost certainly going to be biological and ecological, and KS Robinson’s estimates for the upper limits seem pretty reasonable based on current knowledge

GOG.com had it for pretty cheap last year and it worked as well on Win10 as I remember it working on Win95 (or was it XP? I forget). Point is, yes, you can get it for cheap on modern OS’s and it’s just as fun as it was in 2000