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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • mkwt@lemmy.worldtoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml[deleted]
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    5 days ago

    There was a book a while back called Guns, Germs, and Steel that delves into this topic.

    The root cause, as I understand it, is that Europe is on a continent oriented east-west instead of north-south. And Europe in particular is on the part of that continent that has a lot of easy access to the sea.

    East-west orientation allows you to transplant plants and animals long distances and keep them at roughly the same latitudes, which means roughly the same climate. That is a big boon for spreading “civilized” agriculture, which is what creates surplus of labor, which creates non food jobs that advance technology.

    Among the common 5-7 domesticated food animals people eat today, all but one or two were domesticated in Mesopotamia, but then spread all over Europe.

    Access to the sea is the other component that turns tech advantage into colonialism, because it gives the transportation. Even today, China and Russia are great powers, but they are forced to be continental powers instead of maritime powers, because nearly all of their coast lines are hemmed in by narrow seas that are easy to blockade.

    There are, of course, a bunch of other factors I’m not even thinking about and competing opinions. But I don’t for one second think that any of this has anything to do with European “innate intelligence” or skin color.


  • The deal with Utah is it’s actually only 40% Mormon. And when you have a bunch a kids growing up in the Mormon church, a decently large number of them will crash out. And when they crash out, they tend to crash out pretty hard.

    So Utah has large communities for various countercultures and alternative lifestyles. You can visit a random business, and often find both types working together side by side. And it is usually quite obvious which is which from external signs.



  • I gave you the downvote because I once attended a public lecture by Stephen Hawking, near the very end of his lifetime. It had to be one of the few, very last, public lectures that Dr. Hawking had in him. And the topic of that lecture was the nature of time, and how all of the equations of motion are fully reversible, etc, etc etc.

    Out of all of the topics Dr. Hawking could have discussed, that one is the one he chose. And to me, that means that the nature of time was interesting enough to him to spread around to the public. That there are live issues that are not well settled. And so on.

    Since that time, I’ve not seen any major developments in theoretical physics or philosophy to shift the status quo to an appreciable degree.

    This leads me to the final judgement on your comment: You are wrong. There are live issues to discuss here, and OP deserves to further explain, defend, and debate their philosophy.




  • I’m addition to removing the cartoon old man and barrel iconography, Cracker Barrel is reducing the amount of random junk on the walls, and painting the bare wooden walls white. (Select stores only, not everything gets remodeled all at once). Probably they’re trying to appeal more to a younger generation or something.


  • It matters a lot whether she is a US citizen or not.

    If she’s a citizen, then she can shut up / lawyer up. She has a fifth amendment right to not divulge a phone or computer password, code, pin, or whatever. CBP can detain her for up to several hours, but at the end they have to either charge her or release her into the country.

    If she’s not a citizen, then things are a lot tougher. She still has constitutional rights, including the fifth amendment. But CBP has a lot of leverage, because they can rule her inadmissable. Once that happens once, then it can become really hard to get readmitted later, because this “strike” is on your record.

    The main thing that is tripping up green cats holders at the border currently is old criminal records. That DUI or marijuana or shoplifting charge or conviction from 20 years ago is often not enough dirt to get an LPR deported, but it is enough dirt to deny readmission if they happen to leave voluntarily.


  • If I recall correctly, the photon sphere orbit is unstable, so there may not be a ton of photons there. “Unstable” in this sense means that photons in adjacent orbits tend to diverge away from the photon sphere orbit rather than toward it.

    For Schwarzchild holes, the lowest circular orbit for massive objects is at 3 event horizons, which is above the photon sphere. There are unstable circular orbits down to 2 horizons. Black hole rotation reduces this altitude for prograde orbits asymptotically down to 1 horizon.





  • Speaking for the United States, any document or other exhibit is only admitted into evidence when a witness gets on the stand and testifies under oath as to what the document is. So if someone wants a court to believe that, say, a computer log is authentic, they have to produce a witness to testify about the authenticity. This is where anti tampering measures can be discussed, if relevant.

    That witness is then subject to cross examination, which can reveal any holes or gaps. Cross examination can also be used to impeach the credibility of the witness themself.

    Once an exhibit is admitted into evidence, the trier of fact, either a judge or jury, will assign a credibility level to it based on the sum total of evidence presented and their own common sense.



  • As a more concrete example for people out there. C is an example of a “high level” programming language. In C you might write a statement like “int x = 3;”.

    “Assembly language” is a “human readable” representation of the instructions that are actually executed by your CPUs*. There is a different assembly language for each processor or processor family. Your desktop or laptop computer with an Intel or AMD chip, and in all likelihood execute the “x86_64” language. Meanwhile, your phone is probably on the “AArch64” language. An example of assembly language is “mov rax, #3”, which loads register rax with the value 3. Notice that we have dispensed with the niceties of variable names.

    Assembly language is “assembled” into the “machine language.”. To do this, the “human readable” mnemonics like “mov” are replaced with numbers called opcodes. The sequence of opcodes and arguments, like the number 3, are called the “machine code”, because the CPU silicon can read those numbers from memory and follow the instructions with no additional translation steps*.

    *Microcode throws a wrench here. Folks like Intel realized they could run things more efficiently if they translated each machine language instruction into simpler microcode instructions onboard the chip.



    1. Wait for the final report on Air India before taking any regulatory decisions.
    2. There’s no real technical limitation today on doing this to the safety-critical engineering standards that are demanded on the flight deck. The first CVRs were based on the old half inch tape technology, and they only recorded something like 20 minutes on a circular tape.
    3. Wait for the final report first; but exactly what additional information do you hope to get off the video feed that won’t be on the CVR + FDR? I am skeptical that this accident will not be “solvable” from the information that is available.
    4. If the regulators want to fight the pilot unions on this, they can. And they can probably win. Pilots don’t necessarily have a ton of leverage on this kind of issue.