lajoswinkler

Amount of text here is spiralling out of control so I'll be brief. I am not extrapolating to whole population on Earth because the generation Z does not apply to everyone. The division to these generations is primarily an American thing, and as years go by, through globalization and domination of US popular culture, it went on to be Western thing, as well. Now it's bleeding outwards, but it is still not majority of population of the planet. "Baby boomers", for example, do not apply to many countries outside USA. For example Germany, France, United Kingdom, they simply don't apply. These countries had great economical and population losses after World war two, and it took a long time to repair themselves. USA, on the other hand, reaped the benefits of engorged military-industrial complex, boosted its economy through developments made by captured German scientists, engineers and technitians, and all that yielded an expansion of the population, a baby boom. Crashing in the following decades was to be expected because infinite growth is not sustainable. Millenials (generation Y) already applied to youth of most of Eastern bloc and European nonaligned countries. Generation Z applied to even more, but again, not the whole planet. Inside this Western-influenced world, there are clear signs of trouble. Lack of empathy and turning towards right authoritarianism, all fueled by artificial rage induced by Google (Youtube) and Meta (Facebook, Instagram) and Twitter (X), and other companies, is a fact of life. Environment has changed. Dopamine delivered by machine learning tuned to greed is the main drug and it affects humans in their formative years. Grave changes do exist. (Let me just clarify that just because there are these problems, does not mean I am promoting ideas of "original, uncorrupted and better" ideals coming from the Kremlinland and its associates.)

They are defined as humans who don't remember the world before broadband Internet. There is a chasm because broadband Internet has turned the world upside down. It tore down the distinction between offline and online world. This is a huge thing compared to introduction of television. We are talking about children who were raised with machines which could deliver them any information they wanted, nearly instantly. Before that, decades of generations were, if left alone in front of TV, exposed to at least somewhat curated content. Zoomers were raised in environment exposing them to the most horrific things imaginable. When did we ever have whole generations involved in sharing videos of brutal murders and violent, sickest forms of pornography? When did we have generations of children in constant danger of getting their life ruined by online abuse on social networks? They say the wrong thing, they wear something wrong? Before you had classmates laughing at them, now you have danger of becoming the laughing stock of the planet. I do not envy them. It's an insane amount of stress and peer pressure that has led them into unprecedented conformity. Mythical PC illiteracy? Oh, you clearly work with talented ones. Teachers from all over the world are noticing a decline in students' attention span, empathy and motoric skills. This is not made up stuff. This already started to be noticed in the 90s, but grew to serious proportions in the next decades. The generation X are parents of younger generation Y and Z. Millenials (generation Y) are making a much worse thing with alphas. And why did this happen? I don't know, but it is a recognized problem. I've got friends who work in education in EU and they are experiencing increasing work related stress because of how violent and entitled children are rising in numbers. Some have even quit jobs they loved and thought were their calling. Same story around EU countries, same story in USA, Canada, ... Computer literacy is VITAL in today's world. I am not going to defend this statement. It is basically axiomatic. Current state of affairs is already creating problems at workplaces and it's just laughable. I repeat, these are averages. I am not generalizing. Behaviours and properties of average people have changed for the worse. Regarding drugs, drug problem is not the same as before. For many generations we had drunkards as a fairly constant variable. Things have changed. Cannabis used to be a rebelious thing. Huge amounts of alcohol and ethanol poisoning have been a norm for quite some time, they are not even seen as rebelious anymore. What cannabis used to be, now are cocaine and synthetic drugs. For the past decade or so, serious hard drugs which have viciously bad consequences on neuroplastic brains became a normal party property. Proof? One of the most horrific proofs are increasing concentrations of cocaine's, metamphetamine's and metabolites of other hard drugs in sewage waters of average towns/cities. We can't hide urine and feces and they speak a story of increasingly poisoned population. Things are changing. This practice is not sustainable because we will have so many problems with psychotic individuals in the future. What will this do to the public health? What will it do to democracies which depend on the majority being sufficiently rational?

Oh yes, that. I did video conferencing over ICQ over two decades ago, used live geolocation on maps over cellphones with graphical interface, understand a great deal about digital devices, but because I refuse to put my personal life out there for trolls and AI to do data mining, I'm a luddite. And these are the thoughts of kids who refuse to believe their lives, their anthropometric data, ways of moving are nothing but a product. Thoughts of kids who don't know what a file extension is or what a byte is. It's going to get so much worse when they start to accept mushing of AI into every pore of their lives. And the disinformation in this rising posttruth society... omg. More and more I have to explain to them that it's a bad thing. It's like living in an increasingly kafkian world.

There is an unprecedented, huge social chasm between generation Z and millenials and it will get even worse with generation α. I am honestly afraid humans will never learn from their mistakes and it might even be a normal (usual) thing for highly intelligent species to crash back to mud after reaching certain level of development. Millenials are truly digital natives and represent the peak of computer and Internet literacy because they rose to adulthood through developing, accessible-to-all computer technology. Average zoomers, the worse the younger they are, show debilitated behaviour seen with average old senior citizens around computers. It's because no effort is required anymore. Smartphones turned new people dumber. It is really ironic to see highschool graduates not being able to type, not understanding what a website is, experiencing Internet through a keyhole viewport of their smartphones with applications which tailor their experience online. I watch them and they are mostly inept just like my grandparents were inept. And it scares me. I always imagined people younger than me will be smarter, more savvy around advanced technology and that I will feel like my parents and grandparents felt when they would see me fiddle with computer cables. Instead, I see a decay being bred for the future and think: "These vaping, hating imbeciles casually abusing synthetic drugs will one day have to take care of me when I'm old and weak." It scares me so much. When I see generation α with their unprecedented loss of motoric skills, empathy and basic knowledge, I weep for the future of humanity. We will experience a lot of problems. This might seem like "old man yells at cloud", but the changes truly are unprecedented. Our species has never encountered something like this. Sagan's fears are coming true.

That is not accurate. Colors don't depend on element alone, but on the energy transitions involved, which is a subject to input energy and its distribution/dissipation among molecules. That is why oxygen in auroras glows red in high energy events (high vacuum at high atmosphere, intense Solar activity) and green (lower vacuum at lower atmosphere). Nitrogen does violet and blue, depending on energy and hardness of vacuum. This table shows colors of typical low energy plasma excitation by high frequency electric field oscillation, or atmospheric flames (in case of alkali metals). Information about fluorine is also incorrect because it would appear violet-blue, similar to radon. Many elements as plasmas emit ultraviolet radiation, especially mercury, but if we speak of colors, we speak of light, the stuff we see. Therefore it can not be used as a source of color information for reentry which is a lot more complex event. This is one of the rare things out there that actually are memes and it's hilarious. Image appeared in 2015, right before world and Internet turned to hell. One of the last nonhateful, funny things to which Internet has given birth. I wonder if Mudasir found a new friend.

There are some things I hope to see polished in the future. I see how the bow shock is made - it's a copy of the first surface encountering the atmosphere. That is not only unrealistic, but inefficient because it renders the whole thing again, no matter how complicated it is. When you try that with a Kerbal, and you are up close to it, its many surfaces drop the framerate of beefier computers, too. If there is a hemisphere with textured or small collision details on it, bow shock will have those details. So it would be easier for the system, and more realistic, to render just a hemisphere. Bow shocks are like simplified surfaces in real life. I saw no brightness setting and reentries are very bright events. We all saw how cameras with automatic exposures fared during Starship reentries - background, daylit Earth turns into black as the camera tries to correctly expose the plasma. Just setting the plasma brightness higher at peak heating (which is different from peak temperature!), would be nice. All in all, I'm keeping this mod. Bye, bye, Reentry Particle Effect (Renewed), hello, Firefly.

This looks amazing. Great work. But it's bittersweet. It took over a decade and a modder for KSP to get proper effects for reentry. So many of us have asked game authors for this and were ignored all these years.

This is like Ablate in PlanetFactory. Nice work.

Richard Simmons, age 76 Shannen Doherty, age 53

Thanks! Because we can be very near or very far away, Mars has very large angular diameter differences. At Solar conjunction, when it's behind Sun, most recently during middle of November 2023, it was 3.7'' wide. During Solar opposition, soonest one being around middle of January 2025, it will be almost 15''. Difference can be even larger because Earth's and Mars' orbit are eliptical and oppositions and conjunctions don't always coincide with us being at same places in orbit around Sun. In October of 2020, it was almost 23'' wide. In September of 2035, it'll be almost 26'' wide. The closer it is to us, the more we can see, but sometimes opposition happens when we're tilted in such manner target doesn't reach high in the sky when it passes through highest point (crossing the celestial meridian), so our atmosphere ruins resolving by smearing the image (pricey dispersion corrector helps). Or sometimes it happens during the rainy season. Or the jet stream won't stop flowing and the image just jumps like trying to look into seafloor through choppy waters. All in all, planetary astrophotography is a very dynamic hobby that can't get better with pouring money into it. Skill and chance play a large role. Surface features of Mars are loads of fun. Planet can be seen rotating through the night. Clouds move, too.

I see you've obtained some equipment. Enjoy it! Mars is inconvenient to image right now, especially in northern temperate zone, so here's two pictures I made at the end of 2022. To this day they remain my best images of this planet. Second one is a bit artificially enlarged for comfortable viewing of details. Obviously, yielded magnification increase is clearly empty. Some clouds are visible. Terrain details are visible in the right images taken in ultraviolet radiation, especially during the end of December 2022, which is probably related to so called blue/violet clearing happening on rare occasions.

One hour until launch. I hope the front doesn't fall off.

more radioactivity = less time being radioactive There is a good reason why uranium is the last stable element found in nature in bulk amounts allowing for geochemistry to do its thing.

The problem is - how exactly would it charge? Charging is electrolysis, which means there is a large, macroscopic, monolithic anode and a cathode and an electrolyte. We charge ourselves by stuffing our meatbags with matter full of compounds that are willing to give off electrons, and oxygen which will accept those electrons. Energy comes to us coupled with molecules ready to react. Those reactions go over enzymes which transfer energy into synthesis of ATP by ion flow and molecular configuration changes. Even if we could somehow deliver energy by electrons alone, we continuously shed matter. We have to, that's also what powers us. Small decrease of system entropy exchanged for massive increase in environmental entropy.

Peter Higgs died yesterday. https://www.ed.ac.uk/news/2024/statement-on-the-death-of-professor-peter-higgs