Basically, every few hundred years the earth is hit by a solar flare powerful enough to pretty much destroy all modern tech, and probably give anyone flying in a plane at the time cancer.
These are much bigger than the Carrington Event, which was the last really big solar flare recorded.
One day, without warning, the sun will just wipe out tech slate clean.
And there is apparently nothing we can do about it.
@andrewducker as I understand it, there are kinda sorta some things we can do, if we’re able to anticipate it, which is why there are a bunch of researchers working on #heliophysics (aka #SolarWeather) to better understand these phenomena. I think the best defense we have is to shut down electrical grids if we anticipate impacts. Also, I think only the side facing the sun gets hit, so it’s not everywhere that’s impacted at once, for better or worse.
A thing I was recently wondering. For most of the world's population, what is the largest island they can get to, other than the one they are currently on, using only fixed links (ie bridges, tunnels etc. No boats or aircraft).
And I think the answer is very straightforwardly, "Great Britain".
But if you start on Great Britain, then what is it? (I am not counting the land mass of Asia/Africa/Europe as an "island")
Watched a video about that fateful Air France Concorde flight. It took 121 seconds from the point they lit the afterburners to start rolling to the point everyone died. For most of that it was probably profoundly obvious to the flight crew that they were going to die: the plane had two engines out, their wing was on fire, they were on the verge of a stall, their landing gear was fucked, they could not gain speed or height, and the aircraft was becoming uncontrollable.
They HAD to know they were going to die, and yet right to the point their short flight ended impacting a hotel at 200 knots, inverted, with the plane yelling, “pull up, pull up, pull up”, they acted utterly professionally.
@alastair One of my favourite facts about the Shuttle is the Return to Launch Site abort mode. Literally “spin ‘er around and blast back to base”.
The Shuttle would spin around, with the external tank still attached, and execute a burn until it has nullified its down range velocity and can start to head back to Kennedy Space Center. It would then jettison the ET and try to land.
@alastair There was once a plan to test this abort scenario for real, but the astronaut office vetoed it. They thought it was so dangerous it wasn’t worth testing even once.
This is how the Shuttle stack ended up being tested, “in production”, on STS-1.
The astronauts would rather fly an untested stack than try the ridiculously risky abort mode.
@alastair (I know they did the launch tests with the Enterprise orbiter, so it wasn’t completely untested, but it was still one of the most risky flights ever flown)
@alastair Yeah, it’s not as difficult as it sounds to spin it around when you’re above the dense atmosphere, but part of me would love to see 1970s technology, with a human being at the controls, slam it into reverse.
I have no idea if it's justified or not but I feel instinctively more confident in the system they had for ejecting the Saturn V command module, then it would parachute back down. I don't think that was ever deployed in an emergency though. In fact the Saturn V is among a minority of rockets that never exploded during launch or testing.
@alastair Apollo 12 was also struck by lightning, which wiped out the guidance and the telemetry. A single flight controller was able to figure out what had happened, and instructed the crew to flip a single switch that saved the mission.
If they hadn’t have fixed it, they would’ve had to abort.
I've tended to rank Apollo 13 as NASA's most impressive crewed mission, even more so than the ones that landed on the Moon, because so much of it was improvised.
Pilot dies after plane crashes during gender reveal party in Mexico
Alan Francisco Rangel of the Sinaloa Red Cross told CNN that paramedics treated the pilot at the crash site in San Pedro, Navolato and then took him to a local hospital, where he died.
Gotta love how several people (including the one shooting the movie) see the plane breaking apart but don’t even react to it, let alone give a shit, because they’re too busy with IT’S A GIRL!!!
I am in the showers at the marina (yes, TERFs, the women’s showers. Go fuck yourselves). They have the radio on. They are talking to a “psychotherapist” who explains how, because of the iron in your blood, you can get rid of “negative energy” by touching a radiator to “ground yourself” for 20 minutes a day.
Did the Enlightenment actually happen, or did I imagine it?
Was that the person who wrote an article in a HiFi magazine that I read some years ago?
The writer advised connecting your speaker cables to a battery from time to time to move tired electrons along the wire and out, allowing the battery to refresh them with new ones.
It scares me that I’m above average intelligence and how easily I can say that. Because I’m not very smart per se, I’ve met actually smart people and boy am I a drooling idiot in comparison.
The things you can convince people of really scares me, because it’s almost always extremely stupid stuff. Some might seem harmless (in this case the idiot looses 20 mins a day), but a lot of it is very dangerous:(
Completely besides the point of the post, I had to look up about and learnt about TERF... Interesting how we are identifying groups of people into smaller groups with acronyms.
Dear Vodafone. That you managed to make registration for your site not work with the built in password manager for iPhones, one of the most popular mobile phones, is deeply unfortunate. It’s also an impressive achievement, because iCloud Keychain works nearly everywhere. You actually have to go out of your way to bugger it up.
But you, a mobile phone company, have managed to make your mobile site not work with this most common of mobile phones. I am impressed with the amount of effort it must have taken to be this incompetent.
Why do you think "techbros" are a homogenous amorphous mass with a single will? Do you even have a working definition of what a "techbro" is? This sounds like classical prejudice to me - invent a group, then ascribe all opinions by one member to the group as a whole.
With enough people solving captchas constantly we'll be able to use them to help cars solve ethical problems on the fly like should I swerve to avoid the small child and hit the old lady
You can tell your covid requirements are pseudoscience tickybox woo when they emphasise “hand gel”, which is completely fucking useless against covid, over “face masks”, which are not.
And also when your activity is outdoors in the countryside.
Seems there's a reasonable consensus that contact transmission is a pretty small risk, and certainly a *much* lower risk than airborne transmission, but divided opinions on whether it's completely negligible or merely small
@Sarah Brown I assumed all that stuff was a holdover from before we understood Covid. I don’t plan to pack hand gel anyway. Except the sort that comes with oestrogen in.
I fully agree re covid but I do like hand gel provision for protection against _other_ varieties of crud which are spread on surfaces - colds, flu, norovirus, and so on.
@Adam With the caveat that a lot of the orthodoxy around those viruses also originates from the same utterly wrong assumptions that made the WHO state that covid couldn’t possibly be airborne until they evidence that it was became overwhelming.
I’m not saying personal hygiene with regard to hand cleanliness isn’t important: it is. It’s much more an issue for gastrointestinal stuff though, and is unhelpful to focus on with diseases (including the ones you mention), that the vast majority of people catch through inhalation.
Discussing the time @Zoë O'Connell and I were talking our boat, Scarlet, into Shoreham harbour when I saw light glint through a thin nylon thread in the air in front of me.
“Fishing line!” I yelled, more out of instinct as it posed no threat to us, surrounded, as we were, by the stainless steel rigging lines of our boat.
The line made contact with the starboard shroud. This did … very little to our 8000 kilogram metres per second of momentum. The line turned into a delicate gossamer spiral in front of us as it instantly broke.
The fisherman on the harbour wall high above us started jumping up and down, yelling.
Like, you cast your line across the entrance to a working harbour…
…in front of an approaching boat…
…which can’t see your line…
…and even if it did, cannot manoeuvre out of the way or stop in time even if it wanted to.
So, congratulations, I gu
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Discussing the time @Zoë O'Connell and I were talking our boat, Scarlet, into Shoreham harbour when I saw light glint through a thin nylon thread in the air in front of me.
“Fishing line!” I yelled, more out of instinct as it posed no threat to us, surrounded, as we were, by the stainless steel rigging lines of our boat.
The line made contact with the starboard shroud. This did … very little to our 8000 kilogram metres per second of momentum. The line turned into a delicate gossamer spiral in front of us as it instantly broke.
The fisherman on the harbour wall high above us started jumping up and down, yelling.
Like, you cast your line across the entrance to a working harbour…
…in front of an approaching boat…
…which can’t see your line…
…and even if it did, cannot manoeuvre out of the way or stop in time even if it wanted to.
So, congratulations, I guess. You “caught” a whopper: 4 tonnes! Shame you couldn’t reel it in. Go tell your friends about the one that got away.
Just had the whole “pharmacist looks on in pity while you stand there, clammy and sweating, as they prescribe UTI antibiotics” experience. Such fun and joy.
@Conor Mc Bride in theory you can drive the length and breadth of the country in a car with no brakes, no airbags, no seatbelt, and a spike in the middle of the steering wheel and arrive perfectly safely. The car can still provide the essential function of getting from A to B, just as C can provide the essential function of implementing software algorithms.
And, in my case, no driving licence (or indeed, ability)! But driving is the right analogy, because people lie to themselves routinely about how well they do it. I miss the old (I have race memory) times when you had all day to regret last night's botched program run and really think hard about tonight's. I think that might be another driving analogue: the car is remarkably good at protecting the driver from their incompetence.
not a software person, but isn't lead piping easy to put in but bad for everyone using and touching it ever after, while software in C is devilish for the original programmer but quite fine once running?
The biggest problem with C is that pretty much nothing gets checked, and even that it’s not actually possible to check it. If you code perfectly and defend yourself against all possible rogue input, you MIGHT be OK. If something goes wrong, chances are it won’t even be caught until several billion CPU cycles later when the damage it’s done has crashed around in memory like an alpha particle in DNA.
It is common, for example, to write functions which handle multiple types of data. In C, since it doesn’t really have a type system to speak of, you pass the package and then tell it what sort of data you have passed.
It doesn’t check. It can’t check. The only validation that you’ve passed a Spong and not a Wibble is you saying, “this is a Spong, scout’s honour”.
So then you execute Spong handling code and, oops, you actually passed a Wibble, and it goes and corr
The biggest problem with C is that pretty much nothing gets checked, and even that it’s not actually possible to check it. If you code perfectly and defend yourself against all possible rogue input, you MIGHT be OK. If something goes wrong, chances are it won’t even be caught until several billion CPU cycles later when the damage it’s done has crashed around in memory like an alpha particle in DNA.
It is common, for example, to write functions which handle multiple types of data. In C, since it doesn’t really have a type system to speak of, you pass the package and then tell it what sort of data you have passed.
It doesn’t check. It can’t check. The only validation that you’ve passed a Spong and not a Wibble is you saying, “this is a Spong, scout’s honour”.
So then you execute Spong handling code and, oops, you actually passed a Wibble, and it goes and corrupts something.
But the something it corrupts isn’t even necessarily just the stuff you passed it. It essentially starts randomly firing a machine gun into the crowd. And the crowd is the rest of your program’s data.
If you’re lucky, it fires a bullet somewhere the operating system cares about enough to use the memory management unit to protect and the operating system immediately kills the process. If not, something randomly gets corrupted, and you find out … later by … some means.
I hate posting $#!t like this, but people keep buying it when these same people say they 'just have concerns.'
"Ellis said that we should 'have the moral conversation' about whether trans adults 'should be permissible in the United States...'"
On Salem Media, Jenna Ellis and Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey push states to ban health care for trans people | Media Matters for America mediamatters.org/salem-media-g…
Translation State by Ann Leckie is batshit insanity Sci Fi at its finest. Seriously, it's a profoundly good book. If you liked the Ancillary Justice trilogy, you will adore this!
And presently they came to Tillingham, where, if Wells had done his research properly, he would have known it is basically a mudflat and far too shallow to float a torpedo ram, which had a draft of 6 metres.
Provided to YouTube by Universal Music GroupMaggie May · Rod StewartEvery Picture Tells A Story℗ 1971 UMG Recordings, Inc.Released on: 1971-05-18Producer, As...
Seeing someone on Reddit saying that they never used the maths (specifically, “pi”) they learned at school, and that it was pointless learning it.
I have used trigonometry and calculus in my everyday life to make short work of problems, mostly relating to DIY. If you reach middle age without m any this stuff, then I can almost guarantee that you have done several things the hard way when you didn’t need to.
@alisonkiddle To be honest your Lego problems have been reminding me how much I always enjoyed that sort of looking at patterns and things, without necessarily having a purpose or even direction of thought.
making a cake this weekend, I calculated its circumference from the diameter to determine how long a strip of marcipan to make for the edge. Also regularly use volume calculations to roughly determine “Will the remains in this (cylindrical) pot fit in this (rectangular cuboid) container?”
@alisonkiddle @lnr also how maths is taught, wrongly, as being almost entirely abstract. I'm sure there are many ways to use algebra on a day-to-day basis, but I was never taught any real life applications and so I don't use it, but I wish I could. I paid close attention when my teacher was talking about recognising misleading graphs because I recognised the relevance, whereas the rest of maths didn't seem relevant to me when I was 16 😞
@alisonkiddle @lnr I had to seek AI information on how to use this stuff IRL. If my teacher had said "you can use algebra to help you work out portions when you're cooking", I might have paid more attention in school.
I’ve used very little of the math they tried to teach me and forgotten an awful lot of it:(
But my opinion wasn’t that it was a pointless thing to be taught, but that school did one hell of a bad job at doing it:( At one point I was good at maths (at least compared to my peers) and slowly they sucked every bit of fun and wonder out of it:(
Apologies for the vagueposting, but when someone repeatedly makes a longstanding offer of helping with something, and you repeatedly ignore them for a couple of years, and then tell them that their position is, "I'm alright Jack, screw you", then don't be surprised if that actually becomes their position.
TERFs are the ultimate useful idiots for the right wing. After damaging LGBT and women’s equality in the UK, they are now helping dismantle the climate movement. bylinetimes.com/2023/08/29/gre…
@EveOfTheFuture (just here to be pedantic and point out that there's no UK Green Party. Ali is taking action against the Green Party of England and Wales. The Scottish Green Party - separate for over 30 years now - got rid of the vocal transphobes a while ago and has suspended formal relations with the GPEW on account of the latter's continual inability to deal with persistent transphobia. I don't know enough about the GP Northern Ireland to say if they're any good on transphobia)
@John Chivall @Eve (?), she/her (?) My apologies. I shall issue a correction immediately: the UK Green Parties about about as useful as chocolate fireguards.
@EveOfTheFuture Sharar Ali and his terf pals are egomaniacs on a holy crusade to force every organisation to be as institutionally bigoted as they are personally. This "protected belief" shit is being tried on everywhere.
Suing a political party for excluding you because of your opposition to their policies… That’s some serious absurdity. How about communists start joining conservative parties, then sue them for being excluded from leadership because of their beliefs. 🤦
the very first letter to my newly built flat was a death threat from TVL. Stating they had written multiple times. Which was odd as a) the roof went on a month before and b) it didn't exist on the post office list until a few days prior...
As an American, it boggles that anyone pays a direct tax (let's call it what it is) on public television. Here it's funded by donations and recurring support from various sources with maybe a smidge of tax dollars and to be blunt a good portion of it is BBC content, which I imagine the BBC is being paid for. And maybe that sounds horrifying and unstable, but it's really not. People pay into it and if they have a pledge drive every once in a while, they back it up with special content. It's basically the truest form of socialism we have here.
I once lived in a flat in a weird corner of two roads - two addresses were used for it interchangeably. We had a TV License for one address but got constant grief about the other. We decided to ignore it and they told us "we're freezing your bank accounts!!!" When nothing happened we realised they were liars and thought no more about it.
@Effie Yeah. They are full of shit. The problem is that they terrify vulnerable people with their toothless "we are the gestapo and we are coming for you and your little dog" crap.
It broke, everywhere, badly. Ended up reinstalling from scratch, even on a different machine, but it Would Not Work. Kept throwing internal NPM errors.
Is it currently broken? I've resorted to a manual nginx config for now. but it's not ideal. Anyone else seeing flakiness from nginx proxy manager?
I had a similar problem - the auto-renew didn't work.
My setup had nginx proxy manager running on an unRaid box using macvlan network, and connected to unifi switching. What the problem was for me was the NPM box wasn't able to get external network connectivity so like you I ended up reinstalling it all over again.
Problem kept happening, so in the end I just ditched it all & went CaddyV2 and (touch wood) so far no problems.
Heh, mine's not so different, multiple subnets - plus Wireguard 😀
I don't exactly know why but in the end it was definitely a inter-vlan connectivity problem I kept hitting. The pain was trying to prove it out as the official Nginx Proxy Manager container for unraid didn't include anything like ping / traceroute etc.
I was trying to renew my cert running version 2.2.1 and the following error popped up: [5/4/2020] [10:01:54 PM] [SSL ] › ℹ info Renewing Let'sEncrypt certificates for Cert #1: mywebite.com, [5/4/20...
I had an issue like this, I actually shelled into the docker container and found that the process to upgrade was running but had stalled. So I killed it and then made a new request and it worked.
they’re horrific. If they simply put dials on, that would make them completely visble for me. There are some with dials, but very few. It bewilders me people accept the touch control ones. Perhaps I odd.
Last year, @Zoë O'Connell and I went to the Southampton International Boat Show, only to find that it had been turned, by the organisers, into a “family day out to buy tat” show. Many exhibitors stayed away. Lots of stuff I wanted to see simply wasn’t there. Instead, you were made to walk through endless displays of crap patio furniture and other such tat, in slowly moving queues.
There used to be a boat show in London, and they killed it by turning it into a tat show too. Southampton was, until Covid, left alone to be a boat show, until last year. Even the RYA (Royal Yachting Association, the closest thing sailing has to a governing body in the UK) didn’t turn up.
Since then, the organisers have been bombarding us with email. After last year, I think a lot of people have decided to bot bother, and if we want to go to a boat show, go to Boot at Düsseldorf, the largest in Europe and an actual boat show.
The tone of the
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Last year, @Zoë O'Connell and I went to the Southampton International Boat Show, only to find that it had been turned, by the organisers, into a “family day out to buy tat” show. Many exhibitors stayed away. Lots of stuff I wanted to see simply wasn’t there. Instead, you were made to walk through endless displays of crap patio furniture and other such tat, in slowly moving queues.
There used to be a boat show in London, and they killed it by turning it into a tat show too. Southampton was, until Covid, left alone to be a boat show, until last year. Even the RYA (Royal Yachting Association, the closest thing sailing has to a governing body in the UK) didn’t turn up.
Since then, the organisers have been bombarding us with email. After last year, I think a lot of people have decided to bot bother, and if we want to go to a boat show, go to Boot at Düsseldorf, the largest in Europe and an actual boat show.
The tone of the emails has been increasingly, “we get what we did wrong, we’re sorry! Look! We persuaded the RYA to come back.”
It was almost working … almost.
Then yesterday they sent me an email about the new highlight of the show: their live music stage.
You have no idea what you did wrong, do you?
RIP Southampton International Boat Show. Something sharing your name may continue for a while, but you are gone and missed.
Strip the copper out the walls and fucking run, I guess
The ideology is more complex - they're cutting the police and army too, so god help us all they're apparently true believers - but the results are the same
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