Love Brad Dourif. Watch this YouTube video if you want to learn more about his career from a brilliant storyteller.

So if I just pour enough water on my salad it becomes a broth? Awesome!

Just get Maxwell’s demon to separate the plasma into positive and negative charges, effectively creating a capacitor, then discharge it directly over some HVDC lines!

Think of it like singing. Sing in a big enough group and it doesn’t matter what you sing anymore, the voices of the choir will drown you out.

But that’s a specific optimization where you can no longer read the numbers left to right, the original intent of RPN.

Actually:

2 <enter> 5 <enter> 8 <enter> 5 - x +

10 keystrokes

I use RPN on my phone calculator for fun but it can also be annoying sometimes.

On my CASIO FX-260 Solar II calculator (super cheap, really nice and simple but also powerful) that would be:

2 + 5 ( 8 - 5 ) =

9 keystrokes

I really should just put a full block on lemmy.ml. Thanks for the reminder!

If you can eat well for $1 then it is definitely a poor country relative to the US. Differences in purchasing power are a direct result of differences in wealth.

All models are wrong. Some are useful.

— George Box

Yes and no. There was a period of time where they were particularly bad. If you go back to some earlier eras (like the 1970s and even earlier) you can find many capacitors that are still good.

It also depends on the materials. Electrolytic capacitors naturally dry out and then fail. Many kinds of ceramic capacitors should last an extremely long time if they’re kept within a reasonable temperature range.

She was an asshole to Jeri Ryan throughout the Seven of Nine half of the series. She took all her rage at the show’s reversal of ratings fortune out on an actress who was just doing her best.

Damn. Avoid brown rice? That sucks!

That article makes me want to avoid rice altogether, despite loving it so much.

It doesn’t say anything about soaking rice in cold water for a while and then washing it before cooking in fresh water. Does cold water not have any ability to absorb the arsenic? I wonder if distilled water could help….

No. The comic is talking about airspeed: speed relative to the wind.

It records an air speed of 0. Isn’t that working exactly as intended?

Sure you can. Just need a pitot tube!

Even the lighting on Voyager is dimmer to save power!

Ahhh okay. I live in Canada and I frequently see spiders roaming my house when it’s well below freezing outside. I’m pretty confident they will not survive out in the snow.

House-dwelling spiders are usually adapted to life inside the house (likely cave-dwelling species). Their survival rate outside is not very good.

Conservatives like Star Trek because it promotes the values of meritocracy, hierarchy, authority, and military discipline. None of these are commonly held by people in the American left (especially not the academic left, which tend to be pretty anti-hierarchical, anti-authoritarian).

The people usually referred to as Republicans these days are right-wing populists. They have very little in common with the types of conservatives who loved the franchise in the 20th century. Those older conservatives are almost extinct in the Republican Party today.

I don’t think we actually disagree all that much. Our main point of disagreement is on the degrees of stuff. It seems I think the 90s was way less extreme (on the bad side) than you do, and that Star Trek was also way less extreme than you do (on the progressive side).

To be honest, you’ve made it sound like the 90s America was pretty much like Saudi Arabia and that Star Trek as depicted was the full realization of Gene Roddenberry’s post-race free love communist utopia. The reality of both was far more moderate. I’d even argue that there’s a lot more anti-gay sentiment and hostility around now than there was in the 90s.