ilinamorato

@ilinamorato@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨You'll never see it coming⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Also true!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨You'll never see it coming⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t believe it’s unfalsifiable, its just fundamentally true. You cant observe yourself in any reality where you are incapable of onserving yourself.

  As you note, it’s the only logically-consistent framework through which to view the world we live in. But are there other ways in which the universe could’ve formed that we might be able to falsify it?

  Imagine two universes, A and B. They’re entirely disconnected and independent from one another; no matter or energy can flow in either direction, except that through some exotic process, a small window exists in universe A through which universe B can be observed without affecting it in any way (Heisenbergs HATE this!). Universe A is just as our own is, including our existence, with the single exception of this window. In universe B, however, the laws of physics do not permit carbon atoms to form in stars, so no sentient life has ever formed.

  In those universes, then, the Anthropic Principle would be falsified; as the residents of Universe A could observe a universe in which they could not have arisen.

  Or consider a Boltzmann Brain (or a simulated universe). Were we to discover that our existence was of either nature, that too would falsify the Anthropic Principle, as we are not actually observing a universe.

  Anyway. It’s not falsifiable in our reality, as far as we can tell. But we can imagine ways in which it could be falsifiable.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨You'll never see it coming⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve never heard of that name for it, though the “observation selection” principle might be what you’re thinking of. They’re synonyms.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨You'll never see it coming⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s a principle, I can’t remember the name of it, but basically it goes that the universe exists in such a way as to support life, because if it didn’t, there would be no one around to discuss the ways in which the universe might have formed.

  The Anthropic Principle. It’s a mind-bender, especially because it’s fundamentally unfalsifiable.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨You'll never see it coming⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  We don’t really know what consciousness is, so we can’t really be sure that it is subject to entropy.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨There is a fee to close my HSA account⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  “You are not the customer, you are the product” is true so often, but in many cases (like this one) it doesn’t really apply.

  First off, “not the customer but the product” is an inherently antagonistic relationship. Your goals are opposed to Facebook’s, for instance, because you want to spend less time on the platform and you want to interact with friends and not brands, but Facebook wants the opposite of both. But with HSA administration, your goals and your employer’s goals are aligned: you both want someone who will quickly and painlessly manage your account without being a pain.

  Second, “not the customer but the product” implies an undisclosed, extractive payment occurring behind the scenes. TikTok is harvesting a great deal of data from you and selling it to other companies. You are the product in that your data has value. But with HSA administration, the product is just the management of your HSA money; there’s no under-the-table dealing going on here (or there shouldn’t be); they’re getting paid by your company for their services.

  Third, “not the customer but the product” relationships are entirely one-way; you have no way to impact the providing company beyond just not using their services. They do not, will not, and at some level can never care about your experience beyond making it as minimally useful to you to keep you on the platform. But that HSA provider desperately needs your company’s business, so if enough of your coworkers raise a stink and get your company to complain, they will make a change.

  In actuality, “not the customer but the product” ignores the unfortunate reality of most HR/payroll service companies in this case: they’re just the lowest bidder, contracted at the bottom dollar to provide the cheapest services possible, because your employers don’t have to use their services and don’t care about your experience.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨There is a fee to close my HSA account⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  At the very least, the USPS is getting money out of them. More than the 2¢, even.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Grirrrll....⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  College bros would compete to swallow the roughest and sharpest ones. There would be a Silicon Valley startup trying to “disrupt” gastroliths with a “smart stomach stone” that gathered data about what you’re eating and sold it to McDonald’s and Kroger. Couples who were really serious would prove it by regurgitating and swapping stones. The “raw gut” movement would be trying to convince people that they didn’t need gastroliths, they just needed to eat softer foods.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Grirrrll....⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  People will make a health conspiracy out of every innocuous thing, though.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨25 Years Ago, A One-of-a-Kind Movie Captured the Hearts of Star Trek Fans Everywhere⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s been on Trek fandom lists of best movies because the fans noticed.

  Trek fans prior to 2010-ish tended to not take themselves too seriously. They took the show seriously, sure (maybe too seriously) but not themselves.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do spam calls "I wanna buy your house" ever work? Has anyone ever sold their house like that?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The “I want to buy your house” things are a little bit different, because they’re usually not technically scams (though they are definitely predatory). If you work with them, you will probably receive money in exchange for your house. It’s just that your sale price is likely to be far, far below what you could’ve received by listing it yourself on the open market.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do spam calls "I wanna buy your house" ever work? Has anyone ever sold their house like that?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  They’re exclusively targeting people who don’t know how much their property is worth. Usually people in transitioning neighborhoods who bought their home 40 years ago for $10k, who don’t know that their property alone is worth $200k today and will happily take $80k cash from some rando on the phone because they think the 800% return is a great deal.

  I’ve lived in neighborhoods like that for a while. The phone calls we receive are insane; in our old house, which we knew was worth $300k because we had just had it appraised to put it on the market, the guy on the phone offered us $65k sight unseen. I was like, “if you even took the twelve seconds to look at this property on Street View you’d know why that is a laughable idea.”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Rumors Of End to Xbox-Only Exclusives Swirl As More Game Studios Embrace Simultaneous Launch Strategy⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, well, losing two console generations in a row will do that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m a parent, and I don’t want special treatment. Some consideration would be nice, but honestly I just want every employee to be treated like adults.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Will Republicans try another Federal Right to Work attempt?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s not your right to (do) work. It’s the employer’s right to (have) work (provided to them at low cost). So you’re absolutely right about the FFPUWW.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Will Republicans try another Federal Right to Work attempt?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s not your right to (do) work. It’s the employer’s right to (have) work (provided to them at low cost).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YEET⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Most of this is going to be “eh, agree to disagree” because we just don’t have enough data. But I do want to call out a couple of things:

  No, both heat up. The air cushion transfers its heat to the object next to it.

  Over time, yes. But we don’t have very much of it. Heat transfer is not instantaneous; would it be long enough for the air to transfer its heat to the object, before the object reaches the Karman Line? Radiation is pretty quick (like, speed-of-light quick), but conduction is much slower; particularly when one of the bodies (the air) is an insulator. And with iron being an excellent conductor, any heat transferred will be spread throughout the body more quickly than it can be absorbed.

  If it disintegrated in the lower atmosphere it wouldn’t matter that the air got thinner in the upper atmosphere.

  True, but it’s not like there’s a line. Atmospheric density is a decreasing gradient from the ground to the Karman Line. So as it approaches its mechanical and physical limits, the amount of energy acting upon it decreases millisecond by millisecond. Is that enough to save it? Shrug. Not enough data. But it’s possible.

  Is a metre the original size, or the final size? [of the meteorite chunk]

  Actually it’s almost three meters, and as far as we can guess that was about its original size. Though in fairness, it was entering the atmosphere at a steeper angle and may even have come down entirely in “dark flight.” Still, there are other large meteorites which have impacted at a size greater than 1 meter across, though obviously we have no way to confirm exactly how big they were before they landed.

  Rather than getting slowed down initially by the thin upper atmosphere and then only hitting the thick atmosphere once they’re slower, they start out in the thickest atmosphere. […] Something in a thicker medium is going to experience more stress. Try pushing a cracker through the air vs. through water vs. through gelatin. Which medium will cause the cracker to crack first? Obviously it’s the thicker medium.

  True! But remember, the “reverse meteor” (great phrase, btw) is not hitting the stationary atmosphere at full speed like a regular meteor (or space capsule) does. The iron plug accelerated (incredibly quickly, but it did accelerate) while already in contact with the air above it. This means that the air accelerated at the same rate the iron did, reducing the fracture forces that would seek to crack it. Imagine the difference between swishing your hand in a swimming pool vs. slapping the surface of a swimming pool; it may require more force, but it won’t hurt as badly.

  OTOH, a meteor is a random collection of rock and metal formed by gravity in space. A pure metal plug cast on Earth is probably going to be a lot less prone to breaking apart.

  Oh, great point, and one I hadn’t thought about. Something that’s an aggregate of 80% iron and 20% “other stuff” isn’t going to have nearly as much tensile strength as a homogeneous plate of iron.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Am I a bad person if (as left as they come) I invest in American Private Prison contractors on the assumption that Trump will go through with his deportation scheme at least to some extent?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  So first, you need to know that the definition of “genocide” is larger than you probably think.

  The 1948 Genocide Convention defines genocide as any of five “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”. The acts in question include killing members of the group, causing them serious bodily or mental harm, imposing living conditions intended to destroy the group, preventing births, and forcibly transferring children out of the group.

  Emphasis mine.

  Second, hastily-built private prisons constructed for the purpose of keeping a group that has committed no crime in one place long enough to “dispose of” them? They also have a technical term: a concentration camp. If they’re also performing work, they’re a labor camp.

  So what Trump wants to do with Latiné folks is a form of genocide.

  Third, there are multiple levels of supporting a genocide, from being a member of the society that created the out-group, all the way up through pulling people from that out-group from their homes. Somewhere in the middle of that list is “voluntarily providing aid to those committing the genocide.”

  Fourth, each level of support bears a different culpability, and each individual within the levels bears a different culpability based on their knowledge and understanding of what’s happening, their intentional decision to participate or not, and the amount of protest they raise at the treatment of the out-group.

  So, knowing all of this, where would you put such a decision?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YEET⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  For one thing, the Apollo shield started in the very thin upper atmosphere, and they came in at an angle that meant they bled off as much speed/energy as possible in that thin upper atmosphere before going into the thicker atmosphere.

  I don’t know that that makes a huge difference to the physics involved, though it certainly may have.

  In fact, one of the engineers said that if they came in too steep they’d generate too much heat and probably not survive the re-entry.

  But in that case we’re talking about human survivability, and a chunk of solid iron is going to survive a whole lot longer than humans or delicate instrumentation. It might look a little worse for the wear, but it’s much more likely to be recognizable after the whole experience than anything designed for people.

  The layer of air you’re talking about at the front of the spacecraft was what heated up the heat shield. Instead of causing heating via friction, the heat was the result of compressing the air.

  But after initial heating, the air cushion begins heating itself up instead of the object, reducing the amount of heat the object receives.

  The amount of compression you’re talking about would be orders of magnitude higher for something starting at 40 km/s in the thick lower atmosphere.

  But it would also tail off as the bore cap heated, reducing stresses on it as it went higher.

  Also, the Apollo heat shield did heat up to 5000F or 2800C but was designed to be ablative, so that the hot layers burned off and flew off to the sides leaving new material to be heated up and burned off.

  True, but on the other hand the a Apollo heat shield wasn’t designed to convect heat to other parts of itself. And again, it had a much harder job (keep the Apollo command module at human-survivable temperatures) than the bore cap (not reach the boiling point of iron).

  This concrete and metal plug wouldn’t have been designed the same way. Concrete apparently melts at 1200C, and steel is approximately the same, so it’s very likely some of it melted or vaporized, the question is how much.

  All the stuff I read only mentioned the iron, but keep in mind that it has to not only reach the melting point but also undergo phase change, which requires a lot more energy.

  I don’t know where you’re getting the maximum of 22MJ of energy.

  11 kJ per m² per second was the peak amount of energy that the Apollo heat shield encountered. Double that for the approximately two seconds it would’ve been in atmosphere, and it’s a pretty handy approximation since the bore cap was about a meter itself.

  The whole point of Apollo not going directly into the atmosphere was to take as long as possible to slow down, going through the thinnest part of the atmosphere for as long as possible. […] One reasonable first approximation of the energy would be to integrate the entire energy per second / power for Apollo’s re-entry over the entire 7 minutes (or however long it took until parachutes deployed) and then divide that energy by 2 for the 2 seconds the plug was in the atmosphere.

  You’re right, the total amount would’ve been a way better approximation than the peak. Worth looking into.

  My guess is that that would have been temperatures well in excess of 1200C which would have made the outer surface start to melt, and most likely a temperature where it just turns to plasma.

  I don’t have any argument with that. I think the outer surface would definitely have begun to melt.

  Would it all have melted / vaporized / plasmafied away? I don’t know, it’s a huge plug.

  Yep. Even just considering the amount of time it would take for the heat to excite all the molecules in the massive chunk of iron, and then for them all to undergo phase change, I just don’t think it could’ve made it.

  Since it was launched vertically, anything remaining would probably have come right back down. But, that’s assuming it stayed in one piece. I’m guessing it broke apart due to the stresses on it, and breaking apart would have meant more surface area, which would have meant more areas exposed to massive heating, which would have meant more breaking apart.

  That’s something I couldn’t find information on: is iron’s tensile strength high enough to prevent the thing shattering apart on contact with air? I’m inclined to think it is—chunks of meteorites bigger than a meter have made it through the atmosphere, for instance. The Hoba meteorite is estimated to only be slightly bigger than it is now before its atmospheric entry, and it’s way bigger than the bore cap. Similar composition, too.

  TL;DR: I doubt it made it out of the atmosphere.

  Either way, I like researching it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YEET⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m not so sure.

  Let’s compare with the Apollo Command Module heat shield, a remarkably close analogue for the bore cap. They’re a similar weight (3,000 lb for the heat shield, 2,000 lb for the bore cap) and have melting points within an order of magnitude of each other (5,000°F for the AVCOAT heat shield and about 2,800°F for the iron bore cap). They’re even both of a similar shape and aerodynamic profile (disc-shaped and blunt). Both had to travel 62 miles (the distance from sea level to the Karman Line, where atmosphere becomes negligible).

  The Apollo CM made that distance in about seven minutes; at 130,000mph, the Pascal B bore cap took at most 1.72 seconds to make the trip.

  What was discovered during the development of the Apollo heat shield is that the blunt shape caused a layer of air to build up in front of the spacecraft, which reduced the amount of heating that convected into the heat shield directly. This reduced the amount of heat load that the heat shield needed to bear up under.

  Further, it’s also worth noting that the Apollo command modules weren’t tumbling, which the bore cap likely would have been, allowing brief instants during its ascent for the metal to cool before being subjected again to the heat of the ascent.

  But probably most critical at all is the remarkably brief amount of time that the bore cap spent in atmosphere. This person did the math on how much power it would take to vaporize a cubic meter of iron, and the answer is 25,895,319 kJ. Now, the bore cap isn’t quite a cubic meter, but we can use all of his calculations and just swap in 907kg (2000lbs):

  • To heat the bore cap to iron’s melting point: 0.46 kJ/kg * 907 kg * (1808K-298K) = 630,002 kJ

  • To phase change the iron from solid to liquid: 69.1 KJ/kg * 907 kg = 62,674 kJ

  • To heat the bore cap to iron’s boiling point: 0.82 kJ/kg * 907 kg * (3023K-1808K) = 903,644 kJ

  • To phase change the iron from liquid to gas: 1520 kJ/kg * 907 kg = 1,378,649 kJ

  So, in total, 2,974,969 kJ. The Apollo heat shield encountered a peak of 11,000 kJ/m^2/s. Since the Pascal B bore cap was about a meter in diameter and was traveling through the atmosphere for about two seconds, we can very neatly estimate that it absorbed a maximum of 22,000 kJ due to atmospheric compression–not even close to enough to get it to melting temperature.

  Interestingly, early missiles actually did use solid metal heat shields; not iron, but titanium, beryllium, and copper. They were effective, but abandoned due to their weight.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Shape of the Heart⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  🎵 And no one’s gonna bend or break me 🎵

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How am I supposed to obtain income?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Like reading? OP has employable skills.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If Trump wins the election thru fraud how can the democrats refute it and prove they won? Or will it just be like another Jan 6 and four years of whining like Trump?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Votes are anonymous. You can tell who voted, but not what they voted for. It’s crucial for the fairness of elections that a vote cannot be definitively connected to the individual who cast it; if you could, you could coerce or retaliate.

  And all of the things you mention are the trust OP is talking about. You were a trusted person in that situation. The process increases and validates trust.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why don't we just gather up all the ocean's trash and all the nonrecyclables, put them in a rocket, and launch it into the sun?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Both can be true: it is too expensive, and there’s no money to be made. $840B wouldn’t put a dent in the launch costs for the tens of thousands of rockets we’d need to put into space over the next several decades in order to just get rid of the Pacific Garbage Patch, to say nothing of the rest of the trash on this planet.

  And actually, there’s a third true thing: it wouldn’t help much. Having it on Earth isn’t the problem; it’s having it in the oceans that’s the problem. Partially because of the environmental impact, partially because of the biological impact, and partially because we don’t have access to it to reuse it, so we have to keep making more. Once we had it out of the oceans, we could recycle it or even just sequester it away.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why don't we just gather up all the ocean's trash and all the nonrecyclables, put them in a rocket, and launch it into the sun?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  1. To get into the sun, we’d probably want to fuel the rockets in space using reaction material mined in space (from the moon or an asteroid). That would more or less eliminate the problem you’re talking about, which is why I kind of skipped over that in my comment. But you’re right; this is one of a million things that makes space travel hard and expensive.

  2. We can get up to any speed with enough time and fuel. The trash rockets would just need to get into a solar orbit, and then burn retrograde for a fairly long while. Or if you add a gravity assist in, this is doable today; the Parker Solar Probe got to (and indeed beyond) that speed, for instance. It’s easier and quicker when there aren’t squishy people aboard (we don’t tend to like acceleration much higher than 9.8m/s², for instance).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why don't we just gather up all the ocean's trash and all the nonrecyclables, put them in a rocket, and launch it into the sun?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Oh, also: I don’t think it’s a stupid question. It’s a fun question. It might not be a workable plan, but I love thinking about this stuff.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why don't we just gather up all the ocean's trash and all the nonrecyclables, put them in a rocket, and launch it into the sun?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  1. Just gathering all the trash would be tricky (and, rocket aside, if we could do it easily, we’d probably have done it already; and just put it in a big garbage dump or something). Think about a swimming pool with a bunch of fallen leaves in it; it’s moving around constantly, and if you swim toward one it’ll kind of move away from you or break up when you try to pull it out.

  2. Ok, let’s handwave getting the trash out of the ocean. It’s probably a solvable problem. First we need to sort it; all of the recyclables need to stay and be recycled, because we still need that material and because we need to reduce the weight. Compostable stuff can probably also just stay and be composted. Corrosive stuff probably shouldn’t go on a rocket. All of the wet trash (it came from the ocean, it’s all wet) needs to be dried out first; partially because we need the water, and partially because water is really heavy. And once we’ve done all of that…well, trying to figure out something productive to do with that big pile of dry trash is almost certainly going to be cheaper than launching it into space.

  3. Ok, let’s handwave that problem too; let’s imagine we’re just going to grab it out of the water, compress it, and get it onto a rocket. Except we’re going to need a whole lot more than one rocket; a decent guess says that we’ve launched 18,003,266 kg into space ever—over our entire history in space—but the Pacific Garbage Patch alone is estimated to be at least 45,000,000 kg, meaning we’d need to launch more than twice the number of rockets we’ve ever launched before. More than 60,000 rockets have been launched since 1957, so that’s substantial. It would take a while; even if we turned the entire space industry’s output toward the project, they’re “only” launching about 1,000 rockets a year nowadays, so it’d take at least 120 years of NASA, SpaceX, Blue Origin, Roscosmos, the ESA, the Chinese Space Agency, etc. doing nothing but trash full-time.

  4. Ok fine. Again, we’re handwaving; let’s imagine we have everything loaded up on rockets on the launch pad. Just getting it into orbit is tough for the simple reason that we have to take not just the payload (the trash) but also the fuel we need to get it there, and to get that fuel off the ground we need fuel, and to get that fuel off the ground, we need— you get the picture. The Tsiolkovsky equations govern how much, and thankfully the number isn’t exponential. But we will still need a lot of rocket fuel. Good thing we’re devoting the entire space industry’s output toward this for the next 120 years.

  5. Now it’s all in space. Great! That was actually the easy part. We could just leave it in orbit around Earth; that would be a really really bad idea for a lot of reasons (but it’s what we’re already doing with our space junk, so…), and you said “into the sun,” so let’s talk about getting it there. Believe it or not, getting it into the sun is actually way harder than getting it out of the solar system entirely. If you were on a rocket, and you pointed it toward the sun, and you burned and burned and burned and burned until you ran out of fuel, you would counterintuitively end up somewhere out past the Earth’s orbit on the other side of the sun. This is because you have to actually cancel out your (very fast) orbital rotation, which you inherited from the Earth when you launched, before you can get pulled into the sun; otherwise you just end up going around the sun in a very elliptical orbit. It takes a lot of fuel to cancel out Earth’s substantial orbital rotation. So we have to get that up there too.

  6. The good news is, once you get it to the sun, you’re good. It won’t cause any noticeable change to the sun (the entire Earth could fall into the sun and it wouldn’t care). And while the trash would initially melt and then burn due to all the heat, smoke is entirely a product of atmosphere and gravity; so no smoke would be generated and it would not make it back to Earth. But once all the ash made it to the sun, it wouldn’t continue burning per se; the sun doesn’t produce heat by burning, but by fusing lighter elements into heavier ones. The Garbage Patch is mostly plastic, so carbon polymers. But the sun isn’t big enough to fuse carbon into magnesium, which means all of those carbon atoms would just kinda…sink into the sun, hanging out under all the hydrogen and helium and lithium and beryllium and boron, but on top of the nitrogen and oxygen and such, for the next ten billion years until the sun turns into a red giant. At which point the sun will expand outward, potentially to engulf the Earth’s orbit; at which point it will reclaim all the atoms of the trash we didn’t send up there.

  7. Eventually, after a bunch of different cycles and drama, the constituent atoms of our trash and everything else would become part of the white dwarf that our sun will become; a small, slowly-cooling stellar remnant. After that…we don’t know! The time it takes for a white dwarf to cool completely is longer than the life of the universe so far, so we have to speculate. It’s possible that the remnants of our sun and our trash and everything else might end up becoming a black dwarf, which might look like a shiny spherical mirror the size of the Earth.

  All of that seems like a lot of work. I think we should try something else.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Where does a man get a proper shoe horn that will not break⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s a fairly common expression in English, too, with much the same meaning. I don’t know what sort of rock these people are living under.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What does this emoji mean? Is this a British thumbs up?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I remember using the second definition in elementary school in the early 90s, before cell phones were on common use, long before they flipped open, and even before they had extendable antennas. I suppose they might have been a cordless landline, but I always assumed it was a corded phone. The “call me” message, then, wasn’t about being able to see someone but not hear them except in very specific circumstances; instead, it was implied to mean “call me later.” It could be used as a way of flirting, or it could be more platonic. I suppose it could also be used in a business setting, though I wasn’t really old enough to know.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Indiana Bones!!⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Oh, that makes all the sense in the world. You’re probably right.

  Even if it’s a dozen companies making cases for every type of museum, zoo, and aquarium, it’s probably going to be a little bit like Chromebooks where the vast majority of different options are going to look the same unless you stare at them right next to one another or are in the industry. Most industrial design ends up pretty samey because that’s what people expect.