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Im watching an episode of Mr. Rogers Neighborhood, filmed in black and white. In this scene a guest is showing glass making. What is going on with the film to make these black areas by the flame?
  • It's called conservation of energy. The flame is hot and represents a local concentration of thermal energy. In order to concentrate this heat, thermal energy must be drawn from the outside air, greatly cooling it. This causes the air around the flame to appear black on film, as it is giving off much less light than the flame.

    /s

  • 'Moral Crisis for This Nation': Trump Sued Over Access to Gitmo Prisoners Held 'Illegally' Offshore
  • It's just common sense. There's no shortage of federal land in mainland US to build camps to hold migrants in. It's a hell of a lot more expensive to fly people to Cuba than to hold them in some place on the mainland. This means they're actually deporting fewer people than they otherwise could by directing those resources to more immigration enforcement stateside. The only benefit of holding people in a secretive military base in Cuba is that it becomes very very difficult for the press and human rights groups to gain access to them.

    I was a bit flippant about the Neuralink trials. But whatever they're doing to these people, it can't be anything good. Even just using them for cheap slave labor wouldn't require this level of secrecy. We do that to regular prisoners in the US all the time.

    This should be obvious. You don't gather thousands of people, people with effectively no rights, in facilities that are deliberately difficult to keep tabs on them...unless you are planning on doing something horrible to them. If it's not unlicensed Neuralink trials, it's going to be something equally bad or worse. Why would you be surprised if a Nazi like Musk does Nazi shit? Once you decide a group of human beings doesn't count as human, there are few limits to the depravity you will sink to. Unlicensed Neuralink trials? Secret organ harvesting operations? Drug development and medical experimentation? Target practice for military drone development? Large scale forced sexual slavery and pornography?

    When you stop seeing people as human beings, then there is precious little you cannot justify doing to them.

  • any striminals here?
  • They don't even respect the integrity films and shows themselves anymore. Now in later releases they'll remove the music that was selected by the director to best pair with a scene, simply because they don't want to keep paying royalties for releases of old movies. And that's if they don't just stop selling them all together.

  • Luigi Update
  • Simple. If ever questioned after by a judge:

    "When asked if I knew about jury nullification, you must understand. I personally believe the only way to know something is to experience it firsthand. And so before, I did not know about jury nullification. Now, NOW your honor. NOW I know about jury nullification."

  • Resist.
  • Exactly.

    Start building community or start building bombs. Bring people together or blow them apart.

    Those are your choices now. Either that or crawl in a hole and die.

    Doomerism will doom us all. Fatalism is fatal.

    You want to give up and die? Fine. Rope is cheap. Go do it and spare us your sniveling.

  • What's the most peculiar unexpected visitor (or "pest") that wound up in your home?
  • Definitely that time the Secret Service showed up to my childhood home.

    This happened when I had already moved out to go to college. I grew up in Iowa, home to the Iowa caucus. Part of living in Iowa is every four years you get bombarded by political messages, polls, people wanting you to donate and attend rallies, etc. I know this occurs to some degree everywhere, but it's a different beast in Iowa.

    The 2008 Iowa Caucus season was in full swing. Ads were everywhere. Phone calls were numerous. One day my 13 year old youngest brother, with poor impulse control and developing mental health issues, happened to pick up the phone.

    It's the Hillary Clinton campaign. They give the spiel, asking for a vote, maybe conducting a poll. He humors them and listens, frustrated though he is with politics. Finally, at the end, they say something like, "oh, and she's having a rally tonight. Will you be able to attend?"

    He replies, "yes, and I'll bring my gun." And then hangs up the phone.

    And that is how my poor mother, the nicest woman you ever meet, mother of 6 children, with 4 still living at home, ended having to answer the door to two Secret Service agents standing on her stoop.

    My youngest brother didn't face any criminal consequences for that day. It probably helped that he had no criminal record then, was just a kid, and there were no firearms in the house. He got the sternest talking to of his life, and I'm sure there's still a record of him somewhere in the Secret Service archives.

    I suppose it was an early sign of things to come. His life didn't get easier after that. He struggled through the rest of his schooling, never made a serious attempt at college. Was diagnosed with bipolar and used a lot of substances to self medicate. Stole a lot from friends and family, lived on the street for awhile. Served several years in prison for a completely pointless robbery of a liquor store. Drifted from job to job and never really got any traction in life. OD'd at 27, just another victim of the opioid crisis.

    Miss you little brother, despite everything you did. Hope you're in a better place. At least you never had to see the world as it is now.

  • You are a stranded time traveler on a mission to retreive 100 Terabytes of important historical information to save the future; How would you get this data intact into 100 years in the future?
  • Release the data on the public internet in an encrypted form. With the data, include a message openly admitting you're a time traveler. Include predictions of events that are relatively resistant to the butterfly effect and will have little effect on the time stream. For example, I would include a long list of future supernovae and other astrophysical phenomena. Such data would accelerate the field of astronomy a bit, but it wouldn't really affect life on Earth much. And it would prove that you're either a time traveler or someone with access to FTL travel technology. In your message, tell people the data is of vital importance to the future of humanity and that it will be needed in a crucial hour.

    There will be enough people who preserve a copy of the data and pass it along to their children and grandchildren. Forget relying on technical solutions. This is one you can rely on people for. Unless there's some complete collapse of technological society, the data will be preserved.

  • The problem with two party systems
  • Sure, in a one-party system like China, the one ruling party is always responsible for everything that happens. The fatal flaw in the system though is - how do you actually hold that one party accountable? If the Chinese Communist Party fails, the only way to actually hold them accountable is to start building bombs and killing people. There's no way to vote them out of office. The only way to hold them accountable is a total revolution.

  • InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)WO
    WoodScientist @sh.itjust.works
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