That’s a misunderstanding of the bernoulli effect. It does not say moving fluid has lower pressure as some universal law. It applies to when fluid is moving through the same exact route, as in, inside a pipe or around an object. It does not have anything to do with pressure inside the car vs outside., as it’s a massive, chaotic ball of turbulence where you get both inbound and outbound airflow at the same window or can do tricks to make one window inbound (rear windows) and one window outbound (front). If it were that simple, it’d still be hard to breathe on a motorcycle because your torso is somewhat shielded by the aerodynamics of the headlight/gauge area on a naked. Sport bikes often shield your torso as well, throwing air all at your head, which would cause the same “pressure differential” as the car example. But it doesn’t, because that’s not how it works.

The classic example of this misunderstanding is things like pump pressure/flow rate charts. Flow rate goes up, pressure goes down in the chart. Nothing to do with this principle, everything to do with the pump being a fixed-power device putting out a certain amount of work. It’s more of a power vs torque thing than a fluid principle.

And no, air does not move around a wing/airfoil, speed up on the longer side, and reunute its former molecular siblings at the tail of the airfoil. That’s a mythunderstanding, too. Nothing makes them meet up again.

That’s a great point. You and I didn’t just see how little they had, we saw how much they did with so little. Similar situation for me back home, parents were struggling working class. It re-lensed how little we did (do) with so much. So much more space, so much more money, so many more comforts, so much more entertainment, so much more healthcare, so many more protective regulations.

For what? What do we have to show for it?

It knocked me a tick towards nihilism or something for some time. It made me wonder how I can be so miserable when my life should be verifiably better than what I saw there. But I came back from that eventually, because having better baseline conditions doesn’t mean life isn’t a struggle. It scales to where you sit in the wealth rankings of your local society. The bottom is the bottom, no matter how you compare to other societies. But I’ve done better at appreciating what I have and maximizing what I do. I have the option to travel, to be entertained, to build, to create, to care, to relax, to be comfortable, to experience, to observe, to theorize. And that’s what I’ll continue doing because it’s a privilege wasted otherwise.

1. Take credit for when they sell gas cheaper
2. Blame someone else when it fails
3. Constituents beleive it (again)
   4.???
4. Profit

For a couple years, the ChatBOT reliance was isolated to people I didn’t trust for answers in the first place. But now I see it creeping into the circles I thought would never trust it. I just hope they’re vetting anything beyond trivial information (but I mean, why blindly trust trivial information from a chatbot in the first place? You wanted the correct answer, didn’t you?)

It’s not like trusting Wikipedia. It’s not like trusting an encyclopedia. It’s not like trusting a textbook. All of those take a plethora of sources to write their articles, cite their sources, then publish a single, public article that anyone can review. ChatBOTs take unspecified sources, summarizes them, and provides you a private response that undergoes no review. The only way to confirm accuracy is to already know the facts. If you did, you probably wouldn’t be asking.

That’s maybe a weird way to go about it, but I don’t see an issue with fact-checking in real time. I’m aware many other people don’t like it, but I don’t give a shit. If it’s wrong, it’s wrong. However, the source musslt be trustworthy and ChatBOT is not.

The article in your library/wikipedia/forum takes 10 contributors and publishes a single, public article for which all can see it. Chatbots take 10 contributions and summarizes them into a single, private article that undergoes no review whatsoever. If you don’t already know the answer, you have no inclination as to what’s true. It’s nowhere near the same.

I’ve wondered if the Ultras in the Revelation Space novel series were ever regretful of their modifications. They generally modified themselves to extremes to be better than any normal human, something of note in a universe where most humans have biological repairs to extend their lives hundreds of years as it is. I can’t remember if they tended to be all-white or if I’m just picturing their usual ships, the lighthuggers (near-lightspeed ships). I do remember they often have dreadlocks and grow a new lock for each reefer sleep (interstellar cryostasis), so that fuels my mental image that half of them look like The Twins of the Matrix

It’s a cool series. It sets you up with a ton of universe expo. It does not exactly pull it all together.

I’ve been fleshing out some naturalist motif of a skull on a pike wrapped in ivy growths. Or on a staff. Maybe with a snake, in homage to the Rod of Asclepius. Figure it’s a good forearm piece.

Or a bird. It always comes back to birds. There’s just a bird for every feeling. A peregrine in a dive, a phoenix taking its throne, a blackbird living life, a raven brooding, an owl observing, a hawk soaring, a seagull eating French fries, a vulture scavenging, a hummingbird hovering, a parrot shouldered, so many options.

Depends on how you define $250,000 in cash. Way more than the average American has on hand, not exactly a crazy amount to have if you don’t spend it on a bigger house and expensive car as soon as you can and save your kid’s college fund. It’s a hefty sum, but people comment like she’s a forgotten Rockefeller.

People whose only exposure to her music is the radio hits and people who were never a teenage girl are the ones complaining about her music. If you don’t get it, that’s fine. Its not for you. It’s not for me.

Lady Gaga has done the same thing yet gets a fraction of the hate. Radio bangers fund the real artist.

Biden derangement syndrome? He’s complaining a past president didn’t do anything for a current event

Well shit, I missed that update 7 months ago.

I don’t actually do trips for astro. I take advantage of darker skies where and when I can, as weather and the moon can spoil a night. But when travel takes me somewhere with darker skies, I go out of my way to see them if conditions permit.

No idea how to assess my experience as a stargazer. I like it. I keep doing it. Few things are as surreal as seeing the milky way band stretch from horizon to horizon. It feels tangible. The sky feels like a solid dome when the skies are clear. Nothing is moving, there’s no frame of reference, and your eyes have no depth perception as they’re focused and parallaxed to infinity. The uncertainty about whether that’s a tiny cloud or a distant nebula fades as it just stays there, unmoving, unchanging, with an astronomical conclusion sinking in: that cloud is shifting faster than any human-made object, is larger than the sphere of human influence, is far older than the human species, and is further than we can ever travel by a factor of 10,000. And then it’s possible to find the Andromeda galaxy by eye. A distinct, fuzzy ghost hanging in the sky, always at exactly the same reference to nearby stars.

Lightpollutionmap.info is the site I use to evaluate light pollution and travel options. I’ll travel over an hour at night to get to “blue” skies (bortle class 2) from a hotel home base. It’s hard to go further, as this is all at night when I should be sleeping. I usually spend 2 hours at the destination with good conditions.

Cleardarksky.com has been what I use for sky conditions. Your regular weather forecast icon tells you about thick clouds and the details give you predicted wind and humidity. This site gives block ratings by the hour to predict when the regular clouds, the hanging vapor, the humidity, the wind, and a bit of inference about convective heat flows will allow good “seeing”. The smoke map is broken, unfortunately. If you’ve seen bright stars, particularly Sirius in the winter, twinkling, flickering, changing color, or even blinking out for a moment, that’s part of what would be bad seeing. It doesn’t mean I’ll pass on the trip, but it can be the difference between the Andromeda Galaxy being naked eye or not.

I use a phone app Sky Safari. It’s been the best UI and representation I’ve tested across a few apps. Good indication of sunlight as well, with full darkness being an hour or two after sunset depending on season/latitude. It’s a good way to find objects.

I bring a camera to try to frame nightscapes. I bring 10x50 binoculars as they are relatively cheap (for astro), lightweight (enough), have minimals setup, and are bright. They don’t have the zoom of a telescope, but they make up for it in ease of use and two-eye viewing.

Is that indicative of my experience with stargazing? I clearly love it

I only see that the data was given to delivery robot developers. What’s this other use?

I’ve been to rural India. The culture shock is wild. The emotional toll of seeing some of that poverty is truly upsetting. It’s hard to gauge what’s distinct poverty, what’s just a culture norm, and what’s a norm due to the poverty. I know some people home that act like safety is for pussies, yet they’re still way safer day to day than the things I saw in India with traffic, crossings, vehicle repair, construction, farming, cooking, smoking, and just the air quality alone. Social media may have keyed me into expectations for Delhi, but the rural areas were well outside what I expected to see. Now I recognize it all the time in various manufacturing or tool hack videos on socials.

Anything involving a queue is downright infuriating. Apparently that’s a general Asian thing, or at least the places where western countries exploit low manufacturing cost. I don’t know the rules and don’t want to start a fight by accident so I just do my best to maintain progress through the “line”

The California Pacific Coast highway offers a ton of scenery. Half of it is the ocean, the other half is constantly changing terrain. I’ve gone south from San Francisco and would like to try north sometime. I’m a stargazer, so heading into Big Sur at night was a treat with such low light pollution, though winding cliffaide roads aren’t everyone’s cup of tea, especially at night. Still, it provides a wide array of cliffside features.

Acadia in Maine, USA is gorgeous, but hard to reach if having to fly there. Just something unique about the pines and topography.

If you have a day near Denver, Colorado, USA, then Pike’s Peak is an action-packed mountain experience. If you have a few days, I’d say Rocky Mountain National Park

Banff Canada is another wild mountainous area.

Influenced by Fairly Odd Parents, I saw no real reason to see the “big hole in the ground” called the Grand Canyon in Arizona, USA. I was quite wrong as it’s tremendous. I even tried hiking down. I compared our wall color to what I could see across the valleys and realized we didn’t even make a dent in the descent. Hours were spent. Remember to plan to spend twice as much time ascending. It’s also a dark sky certified park and offers great stargazing from near the visitor center. The park doesn’t close, which makes sense, as it takes 12-24 hours to cross.

I’d revisit any of these if I was in the area. I mostly seek out new places though. Edit: these are all free/“low cost” at under $100 per visit for entry. I mean, it’s not like resort pricing. Obviously travel to the nearest city and potentially renting a car adds to the cost, but that’s variable to the visitor.

I get the hype about traveling to and living on Mars/Luna/Space Stations, I think. It’s that most people are not dedicated to understanding it, they just see cool scifi/scifantasy settings. Star Trek finding neat planets everywhere and some hot women, Star Wars being full of cooperative lifeforms and beautiful high tech worlds, Guardians of the Galaxy slinging through another rainbow nebula with a killer Playlist, and Stargate bringing us to beautiful British Columbian pine forests every week. Even stellar dramas and tragedies all follow the one successful main character(s) that survives, thrives, and entertains us even in the worst of situations. Interstellar, The Martian, Ad Astra, Mission to Mars, The Red Planet, Space Cowboys, Total Recall, Project Hail Mary, and Gravity come to mind.

The key thing, to me, is that all of this feels like someone else already made the situation survivable and the person can always return home. Mars is “right there” in solar system terms. And so often, even when a dire earthly situation is what triggered the movie events in the first place, they tend to be solved by time the protagonist returns. There’s no ultimate feeling of loss. It all works out. And I think that’s the extent of thought by the gen pop when it comes to space travel. It’s survivable and earth is always fixable, because SomeoneElse^TM made it work.

I play a game called Elite: Dangerous. I’m currently 20,000 lightyears from home. It’s lonely and empty. For reference, I could make it to a large colony (Colonia, for the 3 ED players) in about 2 hours of game play and make it back to Earth in probably 8. But I don’t do that because I want to scan and search each system I jump to, looking for valuable plant life and valuable planets to scan. 90% of the time there’s nothing of value. Thats a lot of time looking into an empty bag. And even when I do find something, it’s often a long flight to the POI. I generally enjoy it for being a calm game out “in the black”, but I absolutely get space madness like Tommy Lee Jones’ character in Ad Astra. I keep looking and keep finding nothing. The irony there being one of the movie’s “extrasolar planets” was just a normal picture of enceladus, a local moon. The game has many planets that look similar. Nothing! Nothing here! Nothing there!

We are not representative of the common understanding of stellar travel. It looks cool, but you and I know nothing about it will be cool from a living experience. All that’s cool is knowing the first people out will provide a ton of feedback to improve the next trip. The next trip, performed by someone else, as the trips will be one-way death sentences for quite some time to come.

I’ve hit a point where I can do a lot of the things I passed on previously because I was always busy or didn’t feel like I had the money. It doesn’t slow anything down. I can’t actually remember all the things I’ve done. I don’t regret doing all these things because I get reminded about them over time, but it’s still just a fuller life, not a slower life. Things I “recently” put on hold have been waiting for years. Projects that were deemed critical at the time have gone unfinished, mostly proving nothing was critical.

And that’s not to say to have a full life, you have you be bouncing off the walls from airports to other continents to concerts to festivals to soup walks to ski resorts to motorcycle rides to beaches to parties to home improvement projects to artistic endeavors. That’s just my flavor, slotting things into the schedule as they fit.

I, too, believed I would never be interesting enough to focus any attention on. I no longer beleive that because the effort to map me out is now trivial, as we now see how deep and wide the sea of surveillance “targeted advertising” goes. But, to be honest, I’ve probably dropped enough hints over time to place me on a map as precisely as your actual map.

The government would like to know knows your location