Can we skip to the part of the movie when the US gets its kneecaps broken in an alley while the mob boss stands over it and screams “WHERE’S MY MONEY?!”

There’s too much pointless filler in this plot.

Incidentally, I must also be paid to use Windows.

I’ll gladly wait for the Node.js start menu to render on company time 👍

OK, time to read another mainstream science article with a vague unscientific term like “strongest” in the title. Maybe it’s just the title that’s bad and the article will clear it up?

Now the snails have upped their tough-guy street cred

Oh jeez…

snails’ teeth are made of the strongest natural material out there

You want to define what strongest means in this context up front? You know, like scientists tend to do for their terms?

No?

Spider silk, often compared to kevlar, has wowed with its tough yet flexible powers.

Spider silk is not a superhero. It doesn’t have “powers.” You probably meant properties but that doesn’t sound as cool does it?

And “compared to” kevlar in what ways? You can compare tons of things but not all comparisons are helpful.

But when tested, the tooth material was, on average, about five times stronger than most spider silk, reports BBC News.

What tests did they do that it was five times stronger in? They gave it a math test and measured its emotional resolve?

“Most spider silk” which ones? Did the paper not say? Not even “the top 10 strongest spider silks” or something, just “most” of them?

Jesus fucking Christ.

This makes it the strongest natural material on Earth.

Can you motivate this conclusion at least a little? Because from what I’ve read so far I don’t have enough information to believe you or call bullshit.

Tests in the lab revealed that it can withstand pressure that would turn carbon into diamond.

Gee whiz! Sure would have been nice to have some numbers and units with that because most people don’t know how much pressure it takes to turn carbon into diamond.

Also, you can’t turn carbon “into” diamond because diamond is a form of carbon. It’d be like me saying I turned a pidgeon into a bird. Did you mean graphite into diamond maybe?

Thats’s comparable to a single strand of spaghetti holding up about 3,300 one-pound bags of sugar

Yeah but how many one-pound bags of feathers could the spaghetti hold up?

Also, didn’t know the cross sectional area of spaghetti was so standardised it can replace actual measurements.

This is a comparison you’d read in the Pokédex, of a C-tier Pokémon no one gives a shit about.

Also you were talking about pressure a second ago but now you’re talking about tension? Those aren’t the same for a given material.

And there are also two rare, natural materials that can withstand more stress than diamond

Now you’re talking about stress???

wurtzite boron nitrate—has a diamond-like arrangement at the atomic level.

[…]

lonsdaleite—is all carbon but has a hexagonal structure. (Diamond’s cubic.)

So you think we’re stupid enough to need spaghetti as a unit but we’re supposed to just know what arrangement diamond has at the atomic level?

Why is this article so inconsistent with the background knowledge it assumes we have?

Hard and strong-yet-flexible materials offer attractive properties for engineers looking to build the next generation of materials

Ah yes, they need materials to build… materials.

I kind of get what they’re saying but it’s worded so awkwardly and doesn’t inspire confidence in the article.

the terminology in this story could cause confusion for some readers. There are many different scientific terms used to describe an object’s capacity to resist bending or breaking apart, each of which has subtle differences. In this article, we use the terms toughness and strength to refer to the object’s tensile strength—the capacity of an object to resist pulling apart. This differs from compressive strength, which describes the amount of squeezing an object could withstand. The above discussion of wurtzite boron nitrate refers to not to tensile strength but the hardness of the material, which is its capacity to resist scratching or cutting.

Love that they went to the effort of saying that but didn’t see fit to actually rework the article.

It’s science “journalists” like these that help perpetuate science denialism among the public by making science seem like just a bunch of morons screwing around drawing whatever conclusion they feel like, instead of the rigorous, disciplined process it actually is.

Not like they were smart enough to actually make up a story out of the blue.

“Participation”

Yeah how dare they not participate after getting fired.

I mean, unless they’re directly cutting up old buildings into the final block shape for this (which would be a nightmare to actually do), it doesn’t actually help that much. You can’t practically un-make concrete and turn it back into that slurry that comes out of the mixer truck, AFAIK all “recycled” concrete means is old concrete gets crushed into fragments and used in place of gravel. But the gravel is not the truly problemic part, you still need more cement to bind those fragments into your desired shape, which releases carbon and consumes water.

(Reposted from another reply in the same thread)

deleted by creator

Outdoor cats mainly kill the things that kill mosquitoes, just saying.

Funny enough, that’s a leading theory of why attraction to and the desire to roll around in catnip by felines was selected for.

At least it’s an enclosed building this time and not a freestanding stack of blocks with wind sensitive construction cranes on top.

I mean, unless they’re directly cutting up old buildings into the final block shape for this (which would be a nightmare to actually do), it doesn’t actually help that much. You can’t practically un-make concrete and turn it back into that slurry that comes out of the mixer truck, AFAIK all “recycled” concrete means is old concrete gets crushed into fragments and used in place of gravel. But the gravel is not the truly problemic part, you still need more cement to bind those fragments into your desired shape, which releases carbon and consumes water.

Concrete has a very high carbon footprint. The manufacturing of cement liberates a lot of CO2 that had previously been in the ground as minerals. Different reaction from burning fossil fuels but indistinguishable as far as the atmosphere is concerned. Not to mention cement plant furnaces are usually fossil fuel powered.

Since the blocks are not (as) structural, less cement and more gravel/old concrete fragments can be used which would mitigate this to some extent, but I’d still imagine this is pretty similar to electric cars where it takes a significant portion of its service life to even reach net zero from the carbon released from building the thing.

Concrete is quite possibly the worst material ecologically speaking for this application. Presumably it was chosen for its physical properties, but still. I do wonder if just using straight stone quarried directly into the final block shapes could mitigate some of this, since concrete is basically just stone whose shape and composition we can control, and either way the same mass of material needs to be mined out of the ground so I imagine they’d break even on mining ecological footprint. In fact, if you just need something heavy to store gravitational potential energy, and water is not viable for whatever reason, why not use crushed cars or something?

I get why China wants to explore this, they’re just putting some chips into all emerging technologies just in case, but I’m still of the “just use the excess energy instead of trying to store it” camp. Storing energy at grid scale is just not practical with our current technology, 100MWh is basically nothing at the level of entire countries’ electricity demands, a single city goes through that in a very short amount of time. For example, data centres could be required to only use excess renewable energy for non-real-time computation like training AI, or scientific computation, since they’re a load that can ramp up or down almost instantly. Or you can make hydrogen from water or even hydrocarbons from the air with the excess energy, for things like airplanes and rockets that don’t yet have a viable path out of burning stuff to work. Or, since the majority of the world’s electricity is still fossil fuel based, just build infrastructure to send that energy to where it’s needed because there will always be somewhere that could ramp down a fossil fuel plant and use renewable instead. I think only after all electricity is renewable can storage really become viable, and technology will have long advanced by then and all the primitive storage schemes we come up with now will be obsolete anyway, so while I do support experimenting with storage methods (which this seems to be), actually committing to building out a ton of storage right now seems premature and a poor investment of our limited effort and resources.

Two layers of “based on” in your OS is indeed a bit much.

Before reading: probably because someone randomly chose it for the template and it’s really hard to change it because old crotchety government institution

After reading:

The agency said elevator inspection certificates are all system-generated. Whatever is causing the font to change is happening on the technological backend, which means the city’s central IT department has the answer.

It appears the quirky font choice happened when the city migrated old software to different servers, according to Grant Ulrich, managing deputy commissioner at the Department of Buildings.

“If the font is not installed with this really old software, it picks the font with the next alphabetical name in the list of whatever fonts are available on that server,” Ulrich said. “So this was not a choice. It was a ‘find the next best option’ decision made by a computer.”

Somehow even worse. Also, love the not giving a shit of whoever printed them, I’d probably ignore it too depending on how little they paid me.

Basically “because the most powerful countries in the world tried their absolute hardest to kill it for decades and they finally succeeded in its slow death.” Pretty much everything other than de-linking from the world economy was brought on by the West.

AKA “socialism doesn’t work because it’s our mandate to ensure it doesn’t work”

Infantino just sounds like a nickname for Trump lol

GOOD

/*

Or the (probably, IDK) more common way to do it accidentally, cd into /, think you’re somewhere else or type into the wrong shell, and then rm -rf *

Basically because we as individuals can’t compete with corporations, so when there are large corporate clients they will drive the price up for individuals. It’s not guaranteed to happen, but these types of business to business contracts are usually not a good sign for us.