SunlitZelkova

If an animate being exists forever, that is, does not die, can it be said to be alive? Because being alive implies you will eventually die. Just as being dead implies you once lived. Likewise, if something is created, would not that imply it will eventually end? And if it doesn’t end, how in the world did it come about? Because something can’t begin without having an ending. I’m puzzled. It’s hypothesized another universe might be born out of the death of this one. From a philosophical POV, doesn’t that imply our universe might have come from the death of another one? And the one before that came from another one? And so on. So (again, from a philosophical POV) is it even correct to think about the universe in terms of “birth” and “death?” How are we even supposed to contemplate such a concept, when literally all existence is dominated by the question of whether something is or isn’t? (Do I have a Big Mac in my hand or am I waiting for it? Does the squirrel have a nut in its mouth or does it not? Is there sunlight shining or is there not?) Can one deny concepts simply because they can’t comprehend them? I would say no. A squirrel can’t comprehend quantum physics but it still exists. So what if there are things we can’t comprehend that we will never know about- are physically incapable of understanding- but go on affecting our lives? Thought experiment: things need to add up for them to be “confirmed.” Extreme example- Lysenko’s theories didn’t add up, Mendel’s did. Police find evidence, if it adds up the criminal goes to prison, if it doesn’t they are freed. Everything in the world is premised on having a beginning and an end. Nothing comes from nowhere, to come from nowhere is nonsensical. It could be said one of the foundations of existence is having a starting point and an ending point. But if the universe itself lacks a starting point and ending point- hypothetically of course- doesn’t that not add up? And if it doesn’t add up, what then? Is the universe’s existence nonsensical, illogical? Note that arguments about the universe actually having had a “creator” entity don’t solve the problem, because then you have to ask the question of what created the creator, what created the creators’ creator, and so forth. I’ve pondered what a future intelligent species, existing in the far future near the end of the universe’s habitability, might attempt to do to survive. The only thing I can come up with is attempting to leave for a parallel universe at an earlier point in time, *somehow*. But there’s a lot of things in physics and what not that might render that an impossibility. Now I encounter this hypothetical: We have all these rules/laws governing us within the universe, but what if the universe’s existence itself is “lawless” in a sense, in that it violates the laws within itself? Does that not possibly imply there is something beyond the laws of physics et al? Or that the laws of physics themselves are bogus? At the time I was first introduced to the concept of metaphysics btw (in 6th grade) I took 30 minute long showers, and yet I never had thoughts like this lol. Bonus thought: the future does exist, there is only the upcoming present.

Curious, I was unaware of any other dual tracked-wheeled vehicles besides BTs.

What I found interesting is that when we boarded in Portland we went on to the tarmac and boarded by staircase, but when we got to Spokane we docked with the transfer hallway arm or whatever it is. I think when I went to San Francisco (via actual Alaskan Air, not Horizon) it was a 737-800. As much as I think the 737, particularly the early models, are neat little airliners, I don’t find that plane particularly exciting to fly on. When I flew to Spokane two years ago it was a Horizon Dash 8, and that was a lot of fun (although my mom took the window seat because she said she feels claustrophobic on planes if she can’t look out) so I didn’t get to see much even though we had a good view of the propeller from our row). On another note, I prefer the 787 over the 777 (sorry @AlamoVampire (I think I remember that’s your favorite plane)) when I visit Japan, even though I only flew on it once. I’m not too familiar with Alaskan geography but looking at the map I’m surprised they’d have flights between those two (Wrangell and Petersburg), they seem pretty close. Also just looking at the map, the distance seems to be comparable to that between Port Townsend and Seattle (checking just now it’s actually shorter- PT-Seattle by air roughly 65 km, Wrangell-Petersburg by air 52 km). Port Townsend is principally reached by ferry, although there are probably seaplane flights available too, but those are low capacity and more touristy than truly commercial. I imagine weather might be a factor preventing water transport though. Okay, doing more research I’m seeing another factor- the waters between Wrangell and Petersburg are apparently a navigational nightmare. Contrast this with the easy peasy Puget Sound and it’s obvious why airlines between the two towns might be more profitable than a ferry service compared to Washington, even though they have smaller populations than Seattle (obviously) and Port Townsend (the latter is 10k people) which in my mind would mean less travel and thus less income to justify maintaining frequent service between the two.

For my birthday I went to the Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum with my dad. I rode on the back of his motorcycle for the first time. I wasn't expecting anything necessarily exciting, I've been there quite a few times. Due to financial troubles in the 2010s, some of the museums exhibits are a bit dated, such as a giant mural depicting the plan for the Constellation program, proudly claiming it will take America back to the Moon by 2020. But lo and behold, they had a (unrestored) F-117!!!!!! Together with the F-15A, A-10C, and RQ-4 mockup, they have a good sized collection of relatively modern American aircraft now. There's also an F-14, but its kept outside and is in pretty ratty condition. Reading about it just now, it seems a number of museums across the country have received F-117s for the first time in the past few years. The one at Evergreen was the first Nighthawk to drop a bomb during Desert Storm.

This is nowhere near the size of a proper developed world modern train, so it could be counted as a model train. At the same time, it is about the size of some British narrow gauge engines- proper engines which once transported passengers and freight. Nowadays some are operated by tourist railways. It's possible that the definition of "model train" depends on regulatory technicalities rather than size or design. Narrow gauge engines are presumably properly registered with the UK's railway regulatory bodies. That Thomas replica might be homebuilt, operating on homebuilt rails too.

On Monday I returned from Spokane, flying Alaska operated by Horizon Air. I found out the Embraer E175 is a neat little jet. It seems like the capacity can’t be more than an Amtrak Viewliner I coach car lol. Being a rather small 22 year old (I was still several hours away from turning 23) it wasn’t a problem, didn’t feel cramped at all. On the flight there we climbed and cruised for 10 minutes before descending (left from PDX). On the way back though it was weird. We never got an announcement the climb phase was over, although the seatbelt light did go off. And we seemed to fly quite a bit lower, perhaps no more than 5000 meters (just eyeballing it, but in any case, it was definitely below 10k). Note that at the time the inland NW was going through a heatwave. Do flights ever get rerouted lower than ideal cruising altitude (from a fuel economy POV) to avoid turbulence? This is probably a question for you, @AlamoVampire

Today is my b-day (July 22nd Pacific Time). It’s 2:00 AM or so as I’m posting this Last year I reported I was buying some Lego Indy stuff in honor of it. They discontinued the theme sadly, but I’ve begun building a model railway so I’m planning to do stuff for that and a couple Lego Star Wars things.

Politics aside there is a real upside to going indigenous and making it policy to move away from reliance on foreign systems. China is the only country I’m aware of doing this on a mass scale, although India is also aiming for it (in theory, at least). I say I am aware of. This is simply because I’m not super familiar with the domestic policies of other nations besides the US, China, and to a somewhat lesser extent, Japan. Not because I’ve read and claim to state that no other country is doing this.

For those that don’t know, this is a reference to the Apple TV+ drama For All Mankind, in which the characters in S1 are left with only tapes of The Bob Newhart Show to watch when a Saturn V explodes and they get stranded on the Moon for a couple months longer than anticipated. They have a rule where they all have to say “Hi Bob!” whenever one person says it.

Looks like I’m the first to break the news on this forum. So there’s been a massive outage of Microsoft computers. Those in the tech industry are calling it “blue screen of death.” It’s taken out emergency services, airports, railroads, businesses, banks, and the giant ball in Los Angeles. UPDATE: That was fake. Apparently this has brought trauma wards to a stand still as their imaging equipment is down. People are going to die because of this if it isn’t fixed soon. I am supposed to fly to Spokane to see my grandparents in a few hours. I’m hoping it isn’t delayed. I called just now (it’s 3:17 AM here) because I anticipated that their lines might go down in the morning when people start flooding the line for information, but they said the flight was still due to depart on time. PDX is open 24 hours, so if it was cancelled there would be an update. ATC is still operating because apparently LAX is filling up with grounded American, Delta, and United planes and it’s looking like they’re running out of parking space (or at least it’s really tight). I guess Alaska via HorizonAir are Linux or Mac users. Way to go!

Isn't this the guy who said the AFU would be on the shores of Crimea in *checks notes* August 2023 and then *checks notes again* in March 2024? On another note, I know this is the thread to discuss things negatively, but I'm actually not that worried. Both sides seem to be condemning it really hard. Maybe someone on the fringe might try to retaliate, but I doubt this will become a normalized weapon in American politics. The thing about assassinations is that if you start assassinating one side's people, that gives them the moral all clear to assassinate your people. And no one wants their people assassinated. Having recently read a Time article indicating the US is less divided that it is portrayed as helps my mindset too. All IMO of course. I hope the thread doesn't get locked, the discussion has been pretty civil.

It's wild. Several years ago my Mom basically had to have me wait outside while she chewed out my regular physician in order to get a referral for an MRI. Now, last year I went to a specialist for an ingrown toe nail. It was removed and they basically said there's nothing I can do to prevent it. It returned a year later, and was I talking to my trainer at the gym and she tells me about this tape you can put in the crease of the nail so it doesn't get worse. Alarm bells! I go in a second time to have it removed (it was too late to cut it. Mine run deep) and now this different doctor (same provider though) is telling me to go to a nail salon every few months to have it clipped. Putting cotton under it can also help if it starts to poke. I heard none of these suggestions from the first guy, and wound up paying like $500 to have it removed the second time. Another notable thing is it seems the first guy took off way more of the nail than was necessary. The second person just needed to take off a thin sliver and I felt better.

Nice! If they made simulators with Stratocruisers I’d love to do Pan Am San Francisco to Tokyo via Anchorage. Perhaps I’ll get around to flight sims someday.

TIL that even in the midst of rising Cold War tensions in the late 1940s, ZIS received a license to build GM's Old Look bus and their engines. It was designated ZIS-154 and had reliability issues.

Animation tends to get a much more free pass, probably for the following reasons. 1. It's target audience is kids, which probably don't require the same level of subliminal stuff/"fine tuning" (read: interference from suits) as live action shows for adults do, so the creators get more freedom. 2. Animation is a much more drawn out process, you have the script and some storyboards and that's it. You have your voice actors record and... it's done. From then on you're animating around the audio they produced. There's no room to make last minute changes or meddle in the middle of production, which is what tends to kill shows. It's also harder for them to meddle during editing. Another reason The Bad Batch probably did well is because it was handicapped by a heavy merch presence. If it was as marketable in that way as The Mandalorian, you'd see a lot more interference from suits in order to put in scenes to help sell merchandise. Mando S3 was basically a giant advert for Grogu plushies. I'd like to believe that if the show's creators had their way, S2 would have been the end and we wouldn't see Grogu again until the Mandoverse movie that's rumored to show how Palpatine returned. Or S3 would have focused on Mando by himself and dug more into what the post-Empire world is like without him being handicapped by the kid.

I’ve realized I don’t enjoy my project of researching modern orders of battle of militaries anymore. I’ve been this a lot lately. Examining hobbies, subjects I’m interested in, entities I follow on social media, etc., and realizing I’m either super interested in it or it doesn’t bring me joy. And in the case of the latter I then stop. It feels really good! As someone in their 20s, I think it’s important to take a look at yourself every several years and think about who you are and what you love. Make sure you truly enjoy it in the moment, and are not just carrying on a routine. At least for me, routines might as well be chores. Chores just create stress. I’m taking what I do in my leisure time very seriously because I’ll be heading to university later this year. In the past I spent a lot of time doing random stuff and then getting bored, being left with a feeling of deep unsatisfaction. I don’t want to feel that there if I’m entering into an intense regime of studying and will only have maybe several hours to relax on the weekend.

Stuff going through hyperspace can still collide with other objects. It’s why special courses have to be plotted for traveling to different star systems (“calculate the jump”), instead of just going in a straight line there. It’s kinda unclear how long it takes to get there. In The Clone Wars show Anakin’s fleet jumped from the Outer Rim to Coruscant in “under an hour” while Luke & Co apparently took long enough from Tatooine to Alderaan that he become nominally able to use the force.

Part of the reason I'm interested in Soviet history is because I see a lot of parallels between then and present day society. The way you guys talk about it, "profit" sounds like the present day's equivalent to "quota" in the Soviet economic system. Whether maximizing profit or meeting/exceeding the production quota, both are achieved with the sacrifice of quality and ethics.

I've had nuclear anxiety for almost half my life. It's on and off. I sometimes find myself having otherwise gone about my day just fine, only to frown because something triggered me and I realize the world is careening towards a disaster that will kill billions. I look at people on the street and (living in a well off part of the US) marvel at how happy and oblivious they are, and then am overcome by thoughts of the suffering they may have in store for them in the future. It makes me so upset at the people in charge and the wider population who don't speak up over the direction the world is taking. Sometimes I have a thought that it would be better not to think about it if I can't have an impact anyways, but that's the kind of thing that lets the problem drag on. So instead I end up... embracing it? One coping mechanism is to read Fallout lore and listen to a little playlist of 40s and 50s music I have on my phone. I just drop concern for the individual livelihoods of other human beings (which really isn't my business anyways. I'd hate to have someone telling me how to "live long and prosper") and instead treat it like a... historical research project? Living in a movie? Living in some sort of Fallout game set in the pre-war era? I don't go crying and fretting over every homeless person in the city so why would I do so in the event of nuclear catastrophe? I see Fallout and all the hubris that destroyed that world, and see it here too. There's even the enthusiasm for science and tech without limits too. I guess my subconscious thinking then goes like this: Fallout = kinda like real life*, Fallout = cool, so real life = cool? And then I just listen to that music and enjoy reading news about political developments or new advances in science, awaiting for it to all (possibly) end in some pretty explosions. Yes, pretty. Because if people find storms beautiful in art, and tsunamis and typhoons inspire awe and respect for nature, I don't see why nuclear war wouldn't inspire awe and respect for the power of humankind. Even if it is destructive towards people, just as storms are destructive towards other living things. *IMO of course. Idk. Sometimes the way to deal with a feeling of nigh-divine, near-natural-disaster-like doom is to embrace what causes it. Granted, I am spiritual and probably don't worry as much about ensuring my own physical existence than the average person. So from a certain point of view, I can joke and trivialize disaster without feeling like I'm allowing myself to fall into danger, because I feel I never truly am in danger. And as for other people? That's their problem, and rightly so. I for one would not want someone constantly instructing me on how I "need" to ensure my own safety and happiness, at least when it comes to big, abstract concepts of security ("world peace", etc.) that don't pertain to immediate physical safety. I could go on but I'd be rambling more than I already have. I hope this isn't political, I didn't think it was after reading it over.

In their defence, the question of why someone didn't build an unmanned or droid piloted X-Wing sized hyperdrive missile always existed in Star Wars, even without that scene. It just took this movie to bring the matter up in popular discussion.

I wasn’t interested enough to watch at all, and the first episode wasn’t too interesting but after I got to two a couple days later I watched all the way to the latest episode (5) in one sitting. It’s not astoundingly great but it’s good, IMO. Much better than the sequels anyhow. The reaction to it on r/prequelmemes is pretty funny. For a long time those guys were pretty loud in asking for High Republic content and the moment it hit it turned into a poopstorm over the tiniest things. Then there were people complaining about the complainers, and complainers about the complainers about the complainers. Star Wars has always been political. Empire vs. Rebellion was an allegory for the Vietnam War (or what George thought about it anyway). The prequels opened the door to a little more “greyness” in the way the franchise approached politics, because you have the Republic fighting against the tyrannical Confederacy, but in the end it just results in it becoming the Empire. The Clone Wars animated series wasn’t really able to touch on this because it was limited by the good guy vs. bad guy Saturday morning cartoon format, but Andor has kind of touched on it. But even then, Luke believing there was good in his father and him turning on the Emperor in the end is (a very tiny) degree of greyness in the OT, rather than black and white evil. (Although that probably wasn’t what George intended originally, but that’s a topic for another time) I agree it often seems like they don’t care about the story. I think part of why there a lot of prequel fans nowadays is because even though the dialogue wasn’t great, it had a coherent story crafted by one man. Contrast this with the sequels, which were basically written by playing the telephone game between JJ Abrams and Rian Johnson. And most of the D+ shows. Rumor has it those are often written by committee, which is never a recipe for success.

I wouldn't be surprised if this was a real thing they trained to do. I recall seeing a member of the Matrix Games forum with a quote from some US Army document consisting of interviews of German officers on what to expect when fighting the Soviets. This is a paraphrase, but some German officer basically said some Soviet unit had a hard time trying to cross a river during the day due to the weather. They tried again at night, and the German scouts observing it reported hearing marching music playing as the enemy attempted to ford the obstacle. It's not much, but I myself can attest to the power of a good march. During 2018 when I was going through a mental crisis, the marching renditions of "We need a victory" and "Upon a nameless hill" immensely helped me slog through the day. I still hum marches when the going gets tough fighting Leopard 1s in the T-62 in War Thunder lol. Only the Soviet stuff though. I never found American, British, or Japanese marches particularly inspiring on a human level, although they are still decent tunes. EDIT- Oh, and "Sluzhit' rossii", that's a good one too.

Another way is if you lower the context of "all knowing." For example, it would probably be pretty easy to make an AI that is "all knowing"... when it comes to folding clean clothes. I've struggled with the all-knowing being trope and concluded it isn't possible to express with the means available to our physical bodies. Because the only way we can write about it is as if it is a being loosely akin to animals on Earth; regardless of whether the being is immortal or omniscient it is basically just an Earth animal with superpowers. But being an Earth animal involves giving up a certain degree of knowledge. You accept you don't know things and thus interact with the world to gain them, whether it be talking to the mortal who discovers you or reaching into the temporal world and playing god. Thus if a truly all knowing being/life form exists, we could never know it. At least not in its all knowing form. Only in an illusory, lesser form adapted to basically mess with humans. A Cosmic Joker if you will.

It was Saturday, but I rode the train to Seattle and back to Portland on a day trip. And near the Tacoma Dome, I saw a very peculiar piece of graffiti on a distant railway bridge (one used for freight). RIP SERGEI PAVLOVICH FLY HIGH As expected of such an economically STEM focused region Even the delinquents know about space history. So as I’m typing this I had a thought. Is there ever an instance when one kid is exposed to a certain subject in childhood and goes into the exact opposite field as an adult, while another child goes vice versa? The three years I was in Bellevue were very formative, and it’s where I got interested in aviation. Yet I’m most certainly gonna end up in humanities. Although, my case doesn’t count probably, because life taking a bad turn and a mental disorder prevented me from ever being to study hard in math and science.

It would be very interesting to find out when this change took place, and why. I also wonder if it actually happened at all. The three things shown in that picture, Legos, what looks like a mobile suit type plastic model, and an action figure, are questionable as toys. Lego could pass as an artistic form of plastic model (indeed when I restarted buying Lego Star Wars, initially I justified it due to a “lack of plastic models about Star Wars” because I was still felt I needed to be publicly beholden to the popular complex that Legos are for kids), while plastic models are made by people of all ages and the action figures adults often buy are so detailed and expensive it’s questionable if they are toys or just premade models. In addition, even if the product is also played with by children, it doesn’t mean adults can’t do it too. No one talks about the NBA as “adults playing a schoolyard pastime and people cheering them like little kids at an afterschool match.” I’d also be interested if there is any parallel between the rise of toy purchases from adults and the “de-nerdification”/main-streamization of comic book stories. I first heard of that particular phenomena in regards to the popularity of the MCU but maybe it goes as far back as the Nolan Batman trilogy.