After explaining the destructive force of a single raindrop over a kilometer in diameter:

Fear reigns supreme as the world fears rain supreme

Poetry. True poetry.

I second weawow. It’s got everything I want in a weather app: clean UI, customizable homescreen widget, and you can pick which provider it uses for the weather data.

Nice 'course there’s an Emacs command for that.

You might be interested in the pop-sci book Soonish: ten emerging technologies that’ll improve and/or ruin everything. I haven’t read it myself, but I’ve read the authors’ other book about space colonization, and it was excellent so I would expect this one to be as well.

I mean, this is definitely going to be a disaster but I think the title and article here are a little misleading. The author implies that Warner Brothers is spearheading (and paying for) this venture, but I just read through the buzzword salad of a press release and it barely mentions them. The project is driven by an independent company that licensed the ready player one IP from WB. The whole thing very carefully avoids any details about money changing hands, but my guess is either that WB is getting paid, or they’ve negotiated a cut of any theoretical future profits. Of course, the chances of there ever being profits are slim to none, but I’d say at worst they’re net $0 on the deal, and at best they actually made some money by getting paid up front. They might suffer some reputation damage if it becomes a real catastrophe, but as the author of the article mentioned they are billions in debt, so its probably a risk they’re happy to take.

Relevant XKCD

This is the one I came here to say. For anyone living in or visiting Chicago, the Garfield Park Conservatory is a lovely place to spend a few hours on a cold winter day.

Youtube in has done a remarkably good job carrying the torch of high quality documentaries and educational content beyond the realm of traditional media. Science, art, technology, history. It’s all there, and much of it meets or exceeds the quality of anything the old guard of cable TV channels ever managed to produce.

I’m actually only now realizing that some of the most established channels have been reaching a wide audience with consistent and high quality content for the better part of a decade, and yet I can’t think of any who have successfully broken into more “traditional” media such as television or or even streaming services. That seems exceptionally strange to me. I mean, last month there were headlines about Netflix giving $55 million to an unproven director who proceeded to blow it all on expensive cars instead of filming the show he was hired to make. Who decides to hire that guy over any number of youtube creators who have spent the last ten years cranking out a short video a week along with occasional longer form projects, all with a small crew on a shoestring budget. I can imagine three possible reasons for this. No idea which one(s) could be the real reason, or if there’s something else entirely going on.

1. Hollywood¹ is so insular that they don’t even realize these people exist.
2. Hollywood is so stuck in its ways that they refuse to believe these people could be successful running a larger production.
3. Offers have been made, but those offers have been so restrictive that any number of youtubers have turned them down despite, one would assume, a large amount of money being on the table if they go along with it.

That last one in particular seems unlikely, but I do recall that the popular Primitive Technology channel went quiet for a year or more before abruptly coming back to life. Rumors swirled that he had been hired to turn the concept into a TV show, but the production company kept trying to change things and he eventually gave up and went back to doing it his way on youtube.

¹ used here as shorthand for the more corporate and structured entertainment industry at large.

I read something a while ago that really put all these “ancient mysteries” into perspective: Modern humans with modern brains have existed in our current form for at least tens of thousands of years. During that time we’ve seen huge advancement as a society thanks to the accumulation and sharing of scientific knowledge, but any individual human today has no more brainpower than one living 10,000 years ago.

In other words, if we can sit around today and brainstorm a dozen different ways to build a pyramid with nothing but ramps and levers, there’s absolutely no reason to think that the smartest builders in ancient egypt couldn’t have come up withl the same ideas or better.

Attributing these achievements to aliens, or divine intervention, or anything other than raw human ingenuity is a disservice to our ancestors.

I wish more people would subscribe to their VPN service. I know that there’s a lot of controversy about whether commercial VPNs actually provide any value, but I subscribe as a way to basically donate $60 a year to a good cause with the service as a nice bonus. It’s not the best VPN option, or the cheapest, but it’s pretty good and pretty cheap, and I’m happy to know the money is going to support a free and open web.

I seem to recall that this has to be accounted for when designing the support towers on particularly long bridges. According to a quick Google search, the most extreme example is the Akashi-Kaikyō bridge in Japan. The support towers are almost 3.5 inches farther apart at the top than they are at the bottom.

Also FYI, the word “level” generally refers to things laying perfectly flat. The word “plumb” refers to thing standing perfectly upright, which is why some jokers in the comments are giving you a hard time, despite what you meant being fairly obvious.

The SCP wiki is always a fun place to lose a couple of hours. Here’s how they describe themselves:

The SCP Wiki is a collaborative speculative fiction website about the SCP Foundation, a secretive organization that contains anomalous or supernatural items and entities away from the eyes of the public.

And here’s an example page about a moth with mind control powers