Accurate except for the “instead” part. Road maintenance comes from local taxes, whereas military aid comes from federal taxes.

3 nanometer

That’s a silicon lattice just six atoms thick. What a time to be alive!

Are you certain it’s actually safe? There was a recent attack in which multiple Steam publisher accounts were hijacked to spread malware.

As someone who has designed and used telemetry systems, I’ll never quite understand the strong aversion some people have to them. Telemetry is what lets me tell my boss “yes people really do use our software this way and we can’t break it” or “90% of crashes happen right after the player uses a grenade”. And despite what some conspiracy theorists would have you believe, telemetry data for software from reputable companies does not get sold or used for marketing purposes. Our lawyers make sure of it, and also make us go through privacy reviews to make sure that data isn’t leaking PII.

Metric is 100% better in every single way, bar none.

Imperial unit ratios tend to have a greater number of smaller factors, which makes fractions nicer. 1yd/3 = 1ft. 1ft/3 = 4in.

Yeah but the main issue is that I don’t want there to be a Downloads directory in my home.

Even worse, many components will ignore the XDG_DOWNLOAD_DIR var so even if you manually change it to $HOME/downloads (lower-case) it will often break things.

Is chocolate milk really that much less healthy than regular 2% milk? AFAICT they are basically the same, with the former having an extra 5g or so of added sugar per 8oz glass. It’s much better for you than, say, apple juice which is almost entirely just sugar.

I wouldn’t be worried. Nuclear waste is fairly easy to detect and carries a unique signature from the reactor that it came from. If an operator starts dumping waste, they’re going to be caught very quickly.

a game I made in 1995

a game someone else made in 1995 which was later hostilely acquired by EA only to see it immediately fire all staff and shutter the studio

FTFY

This is a joke: Fun thing: players don’t trust a smooth loading bar. The stutters and pauses show you that the load is ‘biting’. I’ve worked on games where we artificially faked it.

Article: the above is not a joke

While it’s true that atoms emit light in specific wavelengths when excited electrons drop energy levels, this isn’t the phenomenon most children would associate with something “having a color”. If you shine a white light at a yellow piece of paper, the paper would appear yellow and be described as yellow. If you shine a green light at yellow paper, it appears green, but most children would still say the paper is “yellow paper” that just looks green because of the light.

Similarly, if you ask what the natural color of a TV screen is, I think most people would say “black” even though depending on the state of the components inside it can produce different colors.

By extension, hydrogen atoms’ color would be naturally black, but if you energize it properly it can emit reddish light. That still doesn’t mean the atoms themselves have a reddish color.

No, they are transparent. “Color” as would be defined by a child is a phenomenon resulting from white light having some of its spectrum absorbed by a surface, and the resulting visible light diffusely reflected and absorbed by their retinal cells. Even ignoring absorption of narrow frequency bands, individual atoms reflect far less than 1% of the light that encounters them. Color is a phenomenon that relies on the bulk effect of lots of atoms working together. In the same way, a drop of water looks transparent, but get enough of it together and it becomes shades of blue or green, and eventually almost black.

Maybe we should fix the insanity that is US copyright law.

notification LED

but why?

I would argue the minimum number of ingredients is two.

Veritasium has really gone down hill. I honestly think it started when he did the video on “clickbait” and actually realized how much more lucrative it was to make shittier clickbaity content than make straightforward science content.

It went from “here’s why magnetism is just electric field + relativity” to “I buried myself in cement - you won’t believe what happens!”

it made overpriced monitors look discounted

Although sleazy, what about this is illegal? This happens all the time in retail. If you watch the price history on Amazon or other retailers leading up to Prime Day or Black Friday, you’ll often see the list price adjusted upwards in the days leading up to the event, only for them to be published as “discounted” during it. For example, most of the year a coffee maker will be listed as $30. A few days before Prime Day, they’ll update the listing to be $60. Then on Prime Day they’ll list it for a “flash deal” costing $30 (“50% off!”). After Prime Day, they’ll change the price back to $30 base. Is what Dell did fundamentally different, or were they just unlucky enough to get sued for it?

When SETI decides to stop blasting your videos into deep space.

Figure 1: Human discovers that hosting a web service for hundreds of thousands of users is expensive.