Skua

Oh, that is quite interesting. I’d hazard a guess it’s somewhere east of the mountains, so probably somewhere around Perth?

Yeah, I totally agree on the food situation unfortunately. There’s a Ghanaian lady that shows up at a farmer’s market near-ish me once a month and I love getting her jollof rice. I mostly just accept that if I want something out of the ordinary for this place, I need to make it myself

That’s totally fair! I am Scottish myself and don’t know a lot about Canada’s geography beyond “big”, “often cold”, and “lots of forest”, so I have no idea if those Scottish place names are concentrated in specific areas, not to mention what the chances of both versions being interesting to visit. Banff is probably the first example that comes to mind, but the Canadian one isn’t in BC and the Scottish one is just a pretty little seaside town in Aberdeenshire so not exactly a destination in its own right unless you’re already nearby

Though, every time I go to the Highlands I’m struck by just how very much it looks like BC…just a wee bit more wee…

You may already know this, but the Scottish highlands actually were formed when Canada and Britain collided! The wrong side of Canada, but still

Regardless, I hope you’re enjoying being here

Seeing as Scotland and Canada share a lot of place names, what’s your favourite place that you’ve been to both the Scottish and Canadian versions of? (Nova Scotia does not count)

The actual paper the number comes from (Fate of Empires by John Glubb) is complete bullshit, though. Even the cherry-picked examples it uses, which are limited strictly to the surroundings of the Mediterranean, don’t use any kind of consistent criteria for when an empire starts or ends. He tries to count “Alexander (and his successors)” as one coherent entity and then picks an end year in which all of them had either already collapsed long ago or would not do so for many decades to come. He cuts centuries off of the Roman Empire’s lifespan by just saying that the empire was unstable and getting invaded a lot (and ignoring the Eastern Empire entirely). HIs reckoning of the “Arab Empire” includes three separate caliphates, and the end date isn’t even the actual end of any of them

Other than that, no, it does not attempt to find an average in the sense of a mean lifespan. It actually does argue that 250 years for an empire can be compared to a human living 70 years.

The transition happens at the exact moment that my fingers first touch the popcorn

JDAM is supposed to have a circular error probable of 5m and it’s an upgrade kit from 25 years ago. I can definitely believe that a much newer purpose-built weapon can do better than that. The idea of hitting the same spot with multiple bombs might not actually be that unlikely

That’s fair enough. While I’ve seen a lot more of the insides of self checkouts than the average person, I definitely don’t know the ins and outs of every model out there, not even close

Oddly enough I’ve worked as both a cashier sometimes watching over self-checkouts and also as an engineer in a company that manufactures self-checkouts (although I worked in a different department and only occasionally helped out with the checkouts). They can log that stuff no trouble. They cancel it as far as the customer sees, but that doesn’t mean anything for what it keeps behind the scenes. At least on the ones I worked with, there was the option for cashiers to retrieve the most recent state and print it out as a receipt either for the customer or to scan it to transfer to another checkout

All of the self checkouts I’ve seen clear the transaction automatically if you don’t touch them for a couple of minutes. There’s a prompt asking if you want to continue, and if that times out it just resets

I’ve been a cashier before, and while it is a deeply dull job honestly the people screwing things up are not the problem. You help them, they leave, you forget about them. The ones that made me hate it there are the angry ones and the management

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Presumably because it’s Amazon doing it. It is quite reasonable to have a general level of distaste and suspicion for tha company

On the one hand, the quantity probably isn’t significantly dangerous. On the other, OPs mindset seems to be. If they cannot control their drinking then that’s a problem, regardless of how much they actually end up drinking

That doesn’t really answer the question. Once you have bought it, why do you then wait a month before playing them? That doesn’t affect the price at all

To be honest most of the basic physics behind rocketry actually isn’t too difficult. The matter of engineering it into reality definitely is very difficult, finding fuels that burn hard enough and figuring out how to contain them while they burn and the like. The nature of going so far and so fast also means that tiny errors add up to very big problems.

All rockets function on the fact that if you push something in one direction, you also go in the opposite direction by a proportionate amount. Lighting fuel on fire while it’s in a tube that only has one way out just happens to be a great way to push the burning fuel really, really hard and therefore get a really hard push back. The forces involved always have to cancel out the total momentum of everything involved; you chuck X kilograms of burning fuel out of the back at Y metres per second, you accelerate forward by however much you need to to make your momentum match that in the opposite direction. This is Newton’s third law of motion, the “for each action there is an equal and opposite reaction” one

Nozzles and the like can adjust which direction the way out is pointing. If the way out points left a bit, the momentum of the fuel is also going left a bit, so the reaction momentum you get goes a bit to the right, and now you have steering

I think the biggest conceptual block people usually have about orbits is that they’re not about going up fast, they’re about going around the Earth fast. If you point your rocket straight up and just keep going straight up, you won’t go into orbit around the Earth. Either you’ll crash straight back down when you run out of fuel, or you have a rocket with enough power and fuel to reach Earth’s escape velocity, in which case you’ll just continue travelling away from Earth forever until you find something else’s gravity. You know the kind of arc that a ball has when you throw it? Imagine that you’re superhumanly strong and can throw a ball literally however hard you want. You could throw it beyond the horizon without breaking a sweat. Once you’re throwing it that hard, the curvature of the Earth starts to become relevant, right? The ground is effectively dropping away underneath the ball as it travels forward, letting it fly farther before it hits the ground. Eventually if you throw hard enough, the curvature of the Earth turns away from the ball at the same rate as the ball is falling. The ball is now in orbit. The ISS (and anything else that wants to orbit at the same altitude) goes around the Earth so fast that it does 15 entire laps around the planet every day

Unfortunately for our rockets, the Earth’s atmosphere is very bad to actually move through that fast, so they go up first to get out of the thickest part of the atmosphere and then gradually turn sideways to achieve orbit

Once you start getting into things like how to get from Earth to other planets you’ve got to worry about some other stuff, but this comment is probably getting long enough by now and not many of our rockets do that yet

I totally get what you mean about planes not looking like they should work. The size of them and the fact that we’ve got basically nothing to reference them against for scale and motion when they’re in the air is really confusing

Do you want explanations for the jets and rockets, and if so what is your current understanding?

It’s about as close to a random person as you can get while still being recorded. They were royalty, but the two real ones get literally a sentence each at max

• Eithne ingen Bresail Bregh married the king of Tara and is described as “having deserved reward from God for her good works, and for her intense penance for her sins” in one source and “deserved to obtain the heavenly kingdom, having done penance” in the other
• Eithne ingen Cinadhon was the daughter of a Pictish king and is literally only recorded as having died
• The legendary Eithne is the daughter of a king of Scotland (mostly Pictish at the time) and crossed the sea to Ireland, where she gave birth to the hero Túathal Techtmar. This is the entirety of her role in the story; a couple of paragraphs in a collection that, in the translation I’m looking at, has 600 pages just for part five

Not sure if I can call this knowledge since I don’t know if it’s true, but I think I identified a couple of women from the 8th century CE who are mentioned in some Irish annals as actually being the same person. As far as I know there’s next to no discussion of these women on the internet and there are basically no historical records of them, at least. So I guess if I’m right it’s very obscure?

The women in question are Eithne ingen Bresail Bregh and Eithne ingen Cinadhon (and possibly also the legendary Eithne mother of Tuathal Techtmar)

I’m not normally keen on mentioning people’s spelling and grammar mistakes, but if they’re going to be dickheads about the language everyone is speaking while writing “your a dumbass”, “has major issue”, and “germen” then it’s another matter

The part about the UI is probably substantially down to what you’re used to. I used Inkscape for a long time and recently-ish had to start on Affinity for work, and holy shit Affinity’s UI deserves to be made into a person solely so that we can execute it for its crimes. Because I’m used to Inkscape.