We made steampunk a reality by developing the technology to transfer steam power efficiently over long distances through metal wires.

That’s not even a government thing. It’s a finance/banking thing, as most major banks are still using mainframes and legacy COBOL code for most of their business logic.

For gases, volume is inversely proportional to pressure, which means as pressure approaches zero, very slight changes in pressure will make a big difference to the behavior of the gases.

But for solids and liquids, the absence of pressure doesn’t make that big of a difference. Yes, vapor pressure means that water will boil at lower temperatures in a vacuum, but the way the actual liquids stay together, especially when enclosed in in a way that limits vapor pressure, remains the same in low pressure environments as they are in medium pressure environments.

So when you go scuba diving, the doubling of pressure when you hit a depth of 10 meters is simply accommodated by you breathing denser air out of your tank. But nothing else about your body feels any different under that pressure. Go even deeper, and some things might start getting affected by the dissolved gases in your blood and other bodily fluids, but we’re talking about huge pressure differences from the surface, basically 1 atmosphere of pressure for each 10 meters you descend.

In contrast, the difference between sea level atmospheric pressure and the vacuum of space is only one atmosphere of pressure. The liquid and solid parts of your body will be fine. Your reliance on breathing might not fare so well, but see how militaries deal with it: pressurizing the cabin to some degree but making sure that the actual breathing mask is delivering the right amount of oxygen even when the cabin pressure is the equivalent of a high altitude.

So when that blobfish gets yanked out from 900 meters deep up to the surface, that’s a sudden loss of pressure from 91 atms to 1 atm, a 90 atm swing. But for a human going from 1 to 0 atms, that’s just a 1-atm difference. If you open your mouth and exhale while it’s happening, maybe relax your eustachian tubes if you know how to do that, you probably won’t have any issues from the decompression, until you start to try to breathe.

Abe Froman? The sausage king of Chicago?

One big advantage is that we can run while breathing out of sync with our steps. Four legged running pretty much requires each inhale and exhale to sync with the compression and expansion of the torso with each stride. Humans, on the other hand, can run full speed while taking multiple steps per breath, depending on terrain and fatigue, which gives more options for pacing.

Ok it makes a lot more sense that they’re actually professional storm chasers who chase storms together.

Controversy and debate about whether the condition exists for literal hostages in a violent/deadly situation is a step removed from talking about whether people become irrationally attached to manipulative romantic/sexual partners, and stay despite all rationality pointing towards leaving.

I don’t know if Stockholm Syndrome exists for hostages held at gunpoint. But I do know that plenty of people have behaved irrationally about attachment to abusive people in their lives. And we don’t have to call that particular condition Stockholm Syndrome, but your argument doesn’t really disprove the topic of this discussion.

Power is what matters, and power (in watts) = current (in amps) times voltage (in volts). US residential power outlets are 110V and typically cap at 15A, for a power output max of 1650W. But it’s also pretty common to have 20A outlets in kitchens, which would max out at 2200W. Still, there aren’t a lot of 2000W kettles in the US, and it’s pretty standard for the ones you’d buy in a store to only draw about 1500W.

Meanwhile, in the UK, the standard outlet is 230V, rated for up to 13A, for about 3000W. And culturally, in terms of consumer expectations in the UK, the kettles are generally designed to max that out to use the full capacity of that outlet.

So on average, the typical US kettle is only about half as powerful as the typical UK kettle. It’s a combination of the US electrical norms and the cultural/consumer expectations, because it is entirely possible to have a 2200W kettle on a pretty standard kitchen circuit in the US.

It’s convenient for a lot of things. Curly quotes, specialized dashes, mathematical symbols or Greek letters used in math/science, foreign currencies, things like paragraph symbols (¶) or section symbols (§), etc.

Em dashes often replace parentheses:

The company has a policy of having any newly hired employee (like Steve) introduce themselves at the monthly all hands meeting.

The company has a policy of having any newly hired employee—like Steve—introduce themselves at the monthly all hands meeting.

Em dashes also often replace colons:

I’m going to bring my signature dish: bacon-wrapped dates.

I’m going to bring my signature dish—bacon-wrapped dates.

Em dashes are commonly used to denote interrupted speech:

He started to explain, “I was hungry and you weren’t home yet so I—”

“You’re not a diabetic, you can handle waiting a few extra minutes to eat”

Replacing commas is unusual and probably incorrect according to most style guides.

This is also highly localized. Style guides tend to apply only to one particular country, not all English-speaking countries. The AP guide is used by most American newspapers and magazines, and the Chicago Guide is used by most American book publishers. Each have their own rules on dashes.

Long pressing the hyphen on the Google keyboard on Android also gives the option of selecting an en dash or em dash.

On Linux, if you have the compose key enabled, Compose key + three hyphens in a row will generate an em dash (en dash is two hyphens).

The “circle of life” is a song about a sex position

Some fungi found to be thriving in Chernobyl, and seemingly growing towards radiation sources, are hypothesized to be able to capture and use the radiation energy to support biological processes. If it turns out that some fungi can synthesize compounds that convert ionizing radiation into chemical bonds that can be metabolized by biological organisms, one could theoretically imagine some kind of symbiotic relationship between organisms that comes out of that.

Can’t find another source for this tweet from either Twitter or Reddit, but here’s a screenshot of this tweet by Twitter user @hiimbobbi:

Personally, Belle was not fooling me or anyone. When the Beast changed into a human, I saw that look on her face. That was DISAPPOINTMENT.

As this thread shows, back pain isn’t caused by just one thing, so each specific person’s back pain won’t be cured by the same one size fits all approach.

If your back pain is caused by poor posture exacerbated by a weak posterior chain, lifting weights at the gym or doing other strengthening exercises/physical therapy can be helpful. As plenty in this thread can attest, gym time to offset laptop time can go a long way.

If your back pain is caused by repetitive stress from physical labor, adhering to proper form/technique and rest/recovery cycles to the best of your ability can help.

If your back pain is exacerbated by the weight you carry, losing weight (or in certain circumstances, breast reduction surgery) can help.

We’re all just trying to get through life. Sometimes other people’s tips can help, so it’s worth sharing, but we also shouldn’t get too tied to a particular solution that worked for us, as a the solution for everyone else.

From what I remember, the taunt predates women overtaking men in college completion (which happened in approximately 1995). It’s pretty old at this point.

Here’s a newspaper article mentioning it from 1993:

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1993-01-31-tm-825-story.html

It’s not uncommon for space images to be color-enhanced. On the one hand, it may feel less authentic. On the other hand, the visible light levels in space may be insufficient for our expectations and uses anyway.

Another thing to consider is that human perception of color in celestial objects is often just wrong, so enhancing the color of certain objects is more true than what we often see ourselves.

The sun is the same color all the time: white, consisting of a broad spectrum of all the wavelengths in the visible light range. But our atmosphere scatters the different wavelengths differently, so we see a blue sky and we see yellow, orange, and red sunsets. The atmospheric effects are happening all the time, with all the other light that happens to hit our planet, like the moon seeming to change color while reflecting the same white sunlight.

The stars in the sky are all sorts of different colors, but appear white to us, because our color-blind rods are much more sensitive than our color-sensitive cones, and the dimness of starlight just all looks like faint white lights regardless of whether the star happens to be red, yellow, blue, or white.

Meanwhile, relativistic effects might actually shift wavelengths and resolution, too, whether we’re talking about redshift or gravitational lensing, and asking what the “true” image is supposed to be.

So when we take a long exposure of something in space, that itself may represent something that the human eye can’t see. Using colors to represent the different wavelengths actually present may also require adjustment of what physical filters are used on the capture, and how the actual sensor is configured to account for different wavelengths (including potentially wavelengths not within the visible spectrum), and to account for literal noise captured by the sensor.

Astrophotography needs to make choices about how to translate sensor data to an actual human-visible image displayed on a screen with its own limited color space of what its pixels can display, or printed on paper with its own limited color space of what inks are available for printing.

mostly, sweet potato is the odd one out

And the onion rings.

it’s now frowned upon to be hit on?

It’s frowned upon to hit on someone who doesn’t have an exit from the situation: a customer talking to a retail/hospitality worker whose job includes not pissing off customers, colleagues who need to continue working with each other (or worse, a superior-subordinate relationship), etc.

I don’t know what 20-somethings are doing these days, but navigating that transition from school to young independent adulthood was something difficult every generation had to do. It’s just that this generation may have had their social skills development stilted during COVID or the smartphone era so that they’re less equipped to make that jump, and that gap is leaving a greater proportion of that population behind.

It doesn’t have to be structured. It just has to give opportunities for repeat interactions, and maybe a promise of future interaction with the same person, in that low pressure environment.

Dog parks have a bunch of dogs mingling, so their owners will often have the opportunity to get to know each other.

Neighbors who see each other often have an opportunity to get to know each other. That goes for work neighbors, too, even if they work for another employer entirely (but in the same building or something.

Regulars at a coffee shop, restaurant, bar, or gym might learn to recognize each other and go from exchanging pleasantries to actually getting to know each other (and the staff).

Church isn’t as big a thing as it was a few generations ago, but any kind of social meetings, from support groups to volunteer associations, give the opportunity to work together for a common goal.

This is where hobbies and free time come in. And I’m not going to knock video games and other hobbies where you might interact with people online, but there is something fundamentally different about repeated in-person interactions. So it’s worth making sure that your routine includes regular interaction with people in low-stakes settings.