Zonetrooper

If anything, Tahini - a separate spread common to the Middle East, made from sesame seeds - is vaguely closer to peanut butter.

You're already asking good questions, which means you're doing a lot better than many of the people who adopt without thinking. You're also looking for an adult cat, which means you aren't going to have to deal with a kitten's destructive exploratory phase (although, fair warning, adult cats can still be destructive if you don't prepare properly).

One thing I would say is that you should consider two versus one cats. Some cats don't handle being alone for a long time well and can become unhappy, while others prefer not having feline company and would be just fine alone for ~48 hours. A good shelter or adoption agency may be able to tell you whether a cat prefers company or solitary.

Like some other commenters, I would strongly suggest going to local shelters and discussing with them. They should entirely understand if you aren't able to adopt immediately and be able to discuss particulars with you.

• Breadboarding outside the case is still widely recommended, especially if you aren't bringing any components forward from an old machine.

• Pay close attention to the first-time startup processes for your system. Some have different startup procedures (e.g., AM5 memory training).

• Make sure you have adequate containers for all small components (screws of course, but also power harnesses, mounting plates, etc...). Anything you take out of the packaging or case will "walk away" if you just put it down "wherever".

• Have a flashlight. Maybe obvious, but even in a larger case it can be hard to see if something is properly seating, a cable is making a turn properly, and so on...

• Lastly, manage your cables. Tension on connections is bad, and it can help with airflow in a case as well.

I mean, you can argue some semantics about "peaceful".

What it is undeniable is that it prevented global powers from going directly to total war, resulting in a much diminished number of casualties (both soldiers and civilians) compared to the World Wars. Nothing since then, even if we summed up all the wars going on around the world at any given moment, rival the unthinkable numbers of dead who piled up those conflicts, nor - if I can speculate a bit - would they have rivaled another worldwide industrialized conflict.

But.

Does that actually mean the world is "more peaceful"?

One can argue that the undeniable reality that you are much less likely to be killed in a war between nations today means "Yes." One can also argue that peace should not be measured by cold mathematics: That the continued existence of smaller-scale conflicts around the world, internal conflicts within countries, or deaths from non-national conflicts such as the ongoing gun violence epidemic in the US or deaths caused by polluting megacorporations mean it has not gotten "more peaceful"; the risks have just changed.

I suppose it depends on how you are analyzing all of this, in the end.

• Echoing the other post, ASRock has had issues with X3D chips, so another manufacturer might be a good bet for now.

• My understanding is that unless you win the Silicon Lottery, the AM5 memory driver has issues with speeds faster than 6000 Mhz. Your "sweet spot" for AM5 chips is allegedly 6000Mhz CL30, which can be had for about the same price as the kit you already have.

• Also... it's not wrong, exactly, but since you're using it for gaming and not media creation, 128GB is a lot of memory. YMMV; I don't have experience at 4K. It may also depend on how long you expect to keep this machine going: If it's less than several years, you may want to buy less now and upgrade sooner.

• That case doesn't seem to come with any fans. Especially since you've got a smaller CPU cooler, airflow will be key. Recommend at least 3, maybe 4 or more.

Just one note: I don't know what the nature of your thesis is, but you might get more nuanced results by something like assigning each book in a pair a 1-5 score. Right now, an answer of "I like #1 better than #2" could mean a few things:

• #2 is just awful and I hate it.
• Both are really good, but #1 is just slightly better.
• #1 just slaps and nothing could compare to it.

Looks reasonable enough! A couple thoughts:

• I assume you need to fire the main thrusters as landing brakes in order to set the craft down softly. It might be necessary to have some kind of lighter-weight discardable heat shielding around the craft to protect against rebounding thruster gas as it sets down. This could be recovered and recycled into habitation material if it isn't too badly damaged.
• You may also wish to consider what goods could be stored in external pods anchored around the outside of the craft. These might be removed by crane once the whole thing has been set up.
• Once landed, which do you imagine having the better quarters - people living in buildings on the surface within the wall, or inside the actual lander itself?

Disclaimer, I am not a physicist, just a guy with interest in sci-fi, science, and too much free time.

is their any theory centered around our frame of reference having a past but not a future?

So, the answer is, yes, this is actually kind of a common theory on how time actually works. Maybe.

This has to do with physics, and the fact that no two observers have the same perfect frame of reference. For most of us humans, our frames of reference are close enough to be identical on a day-to-day basis. It's even close enough for (most) science. But it's not true on a perfect level. For instance, special relativity says that time passes differently for objects in motion; GPS satellites have to correct for the fact that their onboard clocks are experience "slower" time than us observers on Earth. Even astronauts "lose" about ~1/100th of a second for every year spent on the ISS.

What's this got to do with the future not existing, though?

So we know no two observers have a perfectly identical frame of reference - there is no objective "truth" of when something occurred. Cool. Now what? Well, what we can talk about is historic light cones. Because the speed of light in a vacuum is a universal constant, we can determine how far from you a photon departing your actions would travel. Places that photon would reach at any given point in time following your action are said to be within your historic light cone, and in common parlance, the past. The boundary of how far that photon is reaching at any given moment is, from your frame of reference, "the present". But since nothing can exceed the speed of light, it is impossible for an observer to view beyond the present, into the future.

The catch, of course, is reference frames. You used a plural - "our frame of reference", "we're blazing a trail forward" - but the reality is that each of us has a minutely different reference frame and is blazing a minutely different trail. Again, for almost any day-to-day purposes this is irrelevant... but there are certain scientific experiments which exploit or even rely on this absence of reference frame.

Cool, what about time travel again?

In my first comment above, I mentioned something called closed timelike curves. Those are an actual thing: By severely bending spacetime, you can theoretically cause a photon to "curve" around and end up at the same point in time it was produced, now in its subjective past, while mathematically not violating quantum physics.

This is where things get kind of freaky and headachy; if a photon can be sent into its subjective past, doesn't that imply a future now existing, in which that photon will be generated? The answer is, not in the frame of reference of that particular photon. A historic light cone of that photon being generated, now in that photon's future, still exists; but that photon is now generating a new, detached lightcone...

Like I said, headachy. I also have to emphasize that while the math holds up, there's ample reason to believe CTCs don't exist, chief among them that our mathematical understanding of quantum physics may still be imperfect.

tl;dr: Yes, absence of reference frames means that each distinct observer is blazing their own trail, which spreads into the "past" at the speed of light. The future, exceeding the speed of light, is unobservable. This framework does provide a mathematical concept of how you could send something into your subjective past, but such a means is still theoretical at best.

This is fundamentally a variation on the question of a Temporal Paradox, also known as a Grandfather Paradox ("You go back in time and kill your grandfather. What happens?"). Although no killing happens in this variation, the basic idea is the same: Information is transmitted to the past from the future, but results in a situation where it cannot be transmitted in the first place.

Accordingly, there are several hypotheses to cover this. This isn't even all of them:

• The closed loop theory: To maintain the loop, you will in the future build a time machine which will allow you to activate the machine in the past, maintaining the loop. Past you may even be unaware it was activated from the future.
• The Parallel Universe theory: When future-you sent information into the past, they did not send it into their own past but rather into a universe in which you do not send the information back in the first place.
• The Timelike Curve theory: Because there is no common reference frame for "time", each quanta of "you" is experiencing a different reference frame. The historic light cone of your future self sending the information back exists, and if you could follow those photons backwards you would find him doing this. But future you, in your frame of reference, will never see the machine activate.
• The Emergent Time theory: Time is not a linear path, but a function of entropy. By inverting entropy, you have caused a reconfiguration of the universe into a version in which the machine is inactive.

Right? I try to stay away from it so a few unread pages can build up and I can devour them all at once, but I never manage to stay away for long...

Been following Jay for a few years now - he used to lurk the Worldbuilding community over on Reddit, so I ran into him a few times back before I migrated to Lemmy. Runaway is some really fantastic stuff, and the sheer effort of depth put into minor details of the world make it stand out. (Seriously, check for the small details of how the characters emote - it's fascinating.)

At this point I only wish more of it would come out faster, but again given the sheer attention to detail and quality of art, I'm just delighted to have it at all!

Not to be that guy, but it’s tailstone.

Oooooh. Whoops. I totally misread that.

But, since the gesture is a rough equivalent to a dismissive wave of the hand, the word can be translated “handwavium”.

Hah! I do like that.