alpine_jim

per package, not per item.

when doing a training run, the speed bottleneck is computing power, not storage I/O speed.

you’d need several dozen, maybe a hundred uranium nuclei doing fission at once to knock over a coarse grain of sand.

Bananas always get the hype for being particularly rich in potassium-40, which is the unstable isotope, but Brazil nuts have far more, and potato and carrot are about as radioactive as banana.

common in France, in handwriting the down-tick part is often bigger than the vertical part.

This is a real Mercedes-Benz as they ran in magazines, showing you can check how far along a cow’s pregnancy is with their stock headlights.

“taking advantage of” something doesn’t necessarily have a negative connotation.

it often does when applied to people, but not things.

is that a brick roof?

words have meanings, and it sounds like you don’t know the meaning of that one.

It’s not a full circumnavigation, he started at the south tip of South America, there was no Atlantic crossing.

It’s also not a continuous walk/swim, he’s been home many times over the years, flying back to resume the journey where he left off.

yes we do think of two things (maybe three) when someone says “a couple of things”.

that’s a totally normal interpretation.

Alberta is landlocked, isn’t it? Places deep inside a continent are always much more variable in annual climate than coastal places, as the ocean has such vast thermal inertia.

the cold water returning to the tropics flows deep under the warmer surface waters and has much less effect on land temperatures.

https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2024/12/atlantic-circulation-collapse-new-clues-on-the-fate-of-a-crucial-conveyor-belt/

this is where i got the claim from, that NE USA and E Canada would also cool down with no AMOC. (the sea-level rise in that region would be an even bigger problem though)

No reverse. New England and eastern Canada are warmed by the same currents too, albeit not as much. The heat generally comes from the Caribbean. North Korea and Hokkaido have far colder winters and milder summers at similar latitude.

a few has a much wider range, and I’d never call only two a few.

Fabulous news. Zahn was the main pillar of the best of the Star Wars EU, and I liked what I read of his non-SW sci-fi too (Conquerors trilogy). His new Thrawn novels are much more mature, tense, and psychological than his 90s Thrawn novels. Bodes well for DS9.

pastel beans gang rise up

9.76N to 9.83N depending where you are, if you want to be super pedantic.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/1987831-gravity-map-reveals-earths-extremes/

“Mount Nevado Huascarán in Peru has the lowest gravitational acceleration, at 9.7639 m/s2, while the highest is at the surface of the Arctic Ocean, at 9.8337 m/s2.”

I’ve only ever encountered decaliters in Dune, where there’s the awkward phrase “38 million decaliters” instead of “380 million liters”. It’s probably because Frank Herbert was initially thinking in gallons, and it got changed later.