ernest314

unfortunately, it's a disturbingly common belief that if you split your ticket like that it means you're being "reasonable"/"moderate"/"centrist".

wait until you hear about the number of people who don't turn over their ballot in elections where the choices don't fit on one side...

Or why not just use (big) mirrors?

I mean, this is a thing with solar concentrators already, haha

and for those the heat is a feature :p

You can shape them that no matter how the light falls on it, it will align to the center. Kind of like how satellite dishes work but in reverse.

how do you do this, actually? I'm curious about the details because I just watched a video on compound parabolic reflectors, haha

a regular (ideal) convex lens with a single focal point will have the image move around as the light source moves across the sky. AFAIK satellite dishes tend to be paraboloids, which focus parallel rays onto the focal point, and if you change the angle of the light source, you'll start losing focus. Stuff like the DSN and radio telescopes absolutely do have to aim and track their targets (or are forced to follow the rotation of the earth).

satellite dishes that are aimed towards geostationary satellites don't have to move (because their targets are stationary in the sky), while stuff like starlink tracks targets with a phased array.

well, adding lenses kinda requires motorizing the panels to track the sun, right? otherwise the "hot spot" is going to move around across the day/year

is there a way to shape the lens to mitigate this?

action is the antidote to fear.

just wanted to add another answer to the wonderful ones you've gotten already.

During the darkest days of the AIDS crisis, we buried our friends in the morning, we protested in the afternoon, and we danced all night, and it was the dance that kept us in the fight because it was the dance we were fighting for.

I don't really have a good answer on how to find joy despite the bleak violence of reality, but I know that we must still try to find it, because hope and joy is exactly that which they are trying to snuff out.

Square cube law? What's that?

maybe his body is mostly air sacs

reading their scathing dissents is one of the things that helps me stay sane; god bless the work they do--I don't know how I'd put up with going to work having to deal with blatant gaslighting for the rest of my life

and like, one of the options would be for live service games to say "we are planning to operate for {number} of years" and people would know to spend their money accordingly

it would be transparent and informative and people would be empowered to make their own decisions

My read on this is that he's an idiot who wanted to air a contrarian opinion ('cause that's how tech CEOs be), and focused in on a very literal/pedantic view of the issue without taking into account the context (which is that the Trump regime is facist and also just... lies, like, all the time).

Whether or not being a pedantic idiot is better or worse than being a Trumpist (or if it's even a meaningful difference) is up to you, of course.

straights will literally watch a movie about "doc oc" getting beat up by spider boy but no, heavens forfend a trans girl get called the right name

(am unfortunately a straight, afaict)

it's a shame commonmark stalled and then markdown variants proliferated again because of that :/