That was quite funny. I think my point is that terms are not always as precise as people think they are.
As others have stated, there appears to be some kind of spectrum. Some of the inner planets have more in common with the moons of Jupiter and Saturn in some regards, than they do with Jupiter and Saturn themselves. For a start they have a surface that can be landed on. (Maybe not so much in the case of Venus or Io!!!)
Pluto's most obvious problem is that it is too similar in size to a large number of other objects. But it does have some resemblances to planets and larger moons. I'm not keen on the phrase "dwarf planet" because it makes me think of objects that are much smaller than Pluto is.
[Edited for clarity.]
My issue with the IAU's definition is that the body must "orbit the Sun". I would prefer they said "star" instead, and excluded other stars (so a binary star means neither star is a planet).
You remind me of Episode 2 of the Apothecary Diaries: several Chinese troops were poisoned after eating local food. The food was fine, the wood used for fire and eating utensils was the source. I wonder if something like that ever actually happened?
I would think any poisonous campfire would be quickly noticeable (who the hell likes to breathe campfire smoke?) and you would have to actually ingest the toxin like the guys who drank poisoned coffee.
> ... so why would a community living on the edge of subsistence, whose primary concerns were finding food, keeping that fire going, protecting children from predators, allow someone to spend so much time away from those tasks?
One possibility that occurs to me is the carving was done by the elderly, the injured, or possibility the young, who would not have such duties. A carving by a shaman is another possibility.
I think it doesn’t really need much explaining anyway. Just from their example, 2/3 of those tasks (keeping the fire going and protecting from predators) required just… being awake and reasonably alert. I mean you could spend the time sitting around the fire making arrows (or spears or whatever, not sure what they had in year 40k BC), but maybe they ran out of nice stones to sharpen.
Probably most of us would not want to trade places with a substance hunter/gatherer, but their lives had downtime, right? I would expect their lives to be punctuated by good downtime (got enough food to eat and a good supply of tools, time to relax) as well as bad downtime (wasn’t successful at hunting or gathering, ran out of resources to process).
You are deceived by the propaganda that was largely pushed to promote and rationalize industrial age interests and exploit industrial labor camp factory inmates. Even above people have said things like “no one would want to trade with a subsistence life”, which is based on the assumption that their life of being a wage and/or debt slave or slaver of the system is a superior state of being. Merely historical artifacts we have found and what we can plausibly piece together tell us that at least people’s lives had meaning and were authentic, which most people today in the West simply cannot say with any sincerity.
Are you better off because you can play video games and doom scroll while stuffing yourself with people shop chemicals and then take lizard toxin to control your diabetes and lose weight without doing anything while you have approaching zero authentic human connection, let alone culture not astroturfed by some corporate profit maximizing creative studio?
At least if you’re doing light farming and harvesting and’s spending all your day with your people practicing your cultural traditions passed down through the eons, you’re actually human, not whatever this is in the west today that is having its humanity destroyed by a parasite with every passing day.
The idea that our hunter-gatherer ancestors were running around 16 hours a day with no downtime is a fantasy to begin with. They had more leisure time than early farmers and many Americans[1]
I agree. In my experience, ORMs are more complex and harder to learn to an expert level than SQL. Knowing Java (but not SQL) doesn't help much with learning Java ORMs (Again, to an expert level). Besides not supporting all the SQL features of some DB, ORMs also covers other things such as caching.
Learning ORMs is likely just as difficult as learning SQL. It is likely harder to learn how to optimize performance with ORMs.
SQL as opposed to code has the advantage that it can be kept in a separate file, and thus modified by experts in databases without changing the code. The article claims the author found migrations harder with SQL than with his framework. I would think it would depend a great deal on the database one is migrating.
I'm not convinced that LLMs make things easier, you still need an expert to verify the generated code, and to tune it, as often the database is business critical with serious consequences if wrong, slow, or turns out to be infringement of someone's copyright.
Just because the cave is sealed now, does not mean it has been sealed for millions of years. Even for geology, 5.5M years is a long time. I don't understand how they can claim it never had connections to the outside, just because it doesn't have connections now.
Geology is most probably largely how the sealed claim has been made .. it was open to the world when the limestone was forming, formed (Speleogenesis) by sky water (rain) permeating down and eating out a limestone void, and "sealed" by thick and impermeable layers of clays and loess (windborne sediment) some 2.5 million years ago during the Quaternary.
There are also genetic drift estimates, which put the "last" outside species to enter at about that time (
One of the most recent animals recorded is the cave's only species of snail, Heleobia dobrogica, which has inhabited the cave for slightly more than 2 million years.
Looking for Chernobyl signature in cave during the late 1980s / early 1990s does seem daft - far more likely for them to be looking for residual "trace" from the atmospheric tests that doused the planet in "unnatural" residuals and odd isotopes.
You should look up how many live armed nuclear bombs have been accidentally dropped on mainland US soil.
More significantly, there's been a lot of above ground and atmospheric tests that have draped residuals across the planet, and a bunch of dirty Russian / former USSR sites that drift trace across Europe.
Indeed. That's one of the reasons why the "Before Present" time scale (that uses 1/1/1950 as the epoch) is sometimes called "Before Physics" (another one being that 1950 is less and less "present", of course)!
But also, finding something from within the last hundred years doesn’t say an awful lot about something claimed to have been a closed system for millions of years.
"Combined with the geology and the peculiar chemistry of the cave’s water and air, the evidence pointed to a system that had been closed off since roughly five and a half million years ago."
That quote, from the AI generated article, simply asserts the cave was sealed, it doesn't explain how the cave came to be sealed, nor how it is that modern humans infer the cave has been sealed and for how long.
> He thinks everyone needs manpages. I told him I never look at any local man page ever; I only look online for help...
Everyone's workflow is different. Your's obviously works for you and many others.
But I like local man pages. They get updated at the same time as the software is updated. Sometimes I have an older version of software and the online version is for a newer version, or vice-versa. Local man pages are always available and generally quicker than accessing them online.
If the machines in question are mult user, you should always install local documentation regardless of your personal preferences.
In 1982 I purchased a GE analog alarm clock which plugs into an electric socket, has a gentle backlight and a snooze button. It cost 4-5 dollars.
This clock still sits on my nightstand. The backlight stopped working years ago, the cheap plastic case is cracked, the numbers on the dial from 12 to 5 have crumbled away. But it keeps perfect time! It is also silent (no ticking at all, no quartz crystal) and has no battery to charge or worry about leaking
I'd pay quite a bit for a replacement, but such clocks haven't been made in over 30 years. An "atomic" clock is cool, but the signal doesn't reach where I live.
I use it when the daylight saving time switch occurs as not all of my clocks will get the time every night. But this isn't so useful if you never can receive the signal.
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