Fondots @ Fondots @lemmy.world

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Aside from not needing to adjust the time, is there any particular reason it needs to be WiFi enabled?

Because that kind of feels like an overly complicated solution to a problem that was solved decades ago with "atomic" clock movements.

Which aren't actually atomic in any way on their own, but contain an antenna to pick up the signal from an NIST atomic clock to set the time (and I believe other countries and regions have their own equivalent if you're not in the US)

As far as finding a pendulum movement, I don't really know what is out there, but it may be another avenue for you to look into.

My thoughts are that episode 8 (and 9) is a collection of really cool scenes and ideas, they just don't quite add up to a good movie or part of a trilogy.

I think you can take almost any part of those movies and flesh them out into a really cool standalone movie, TV show, comic, novel, etc.

Casino heists are a tried and true formula. Not breaking any new ground there but that's something that can make for a fun movie. Han Solo or a similar sort of character could work well for that, gambling is kind of his thing after all.

The whole "military industrial complex selling arms to both sides" thing could work well in a grittier project like Andor where you're dealing with all kinds of morally grey stuff. Or again, with a Solo movie since Han is from Corellia where those rich assholes are building battleships and such and directly shitting on the little guys.

Broom Kid- I think we've all been clamoring to see more of the non-jedi/non-sith aligned force users.

Rey's training, feeling the pull of the dark side, the force dyad thing between her and Kylo, etc. had a lot of really cool moments, and they just didn't spend enough time going into any of that.

Maz felt kind of like a shoehorned-in plot device, but I think there could be a really cool sort of anthology series in there about her past, her customers, etc.

The crait battle was cool, kind of a rehash of Hoth, but also not. Luke's force projection facing down the whole first order from across the galaxy was pretty neat.

Onto RoS

Again, cool force dyad shit.

The Knights of Ren got done dirty, we probably should have had a whole movie of them.

Palpatine clone- look, cloning is an established technology in the universe, one of the first bits of star wars lore that got dropped on us back in '77 is that they had whole damned clone wars. Of-fucking-course Sheev would have a backup or two. The old EU had some Palpatine clone arcs (maybe not their best moments, but at least they executed better than "somehow Palpatine returned")

Running around the galaxy searching for wayfinders, or holocrons or sith daggers, whatever the MacGuffin du jour is- that's basically every star wars video game ever.

Killing Chewie and erasing Threepio's memory, there were some good opportunities for some real emotional gut punches there, they just couldn't commit to them.

Exogol could have been cool, kind of wish that they came up with something cooler than a fleet of star destroyers with big cannons strapped to them, but there's potentially a lot you could do a whole weird sith cult working in secret to do...??? I feel like maybe exactly what they're doing is maybe better left up to the imagination than outright stated.

Probably the best thing I ever did to get random people to talk to me was growing a big curly handlebar moustache, now complimented with a long bushy beard.

My fashion choices also tend to make me stand out a bit- brightly colored Hawaiian shirts in the warmer months (I have one with pictures of the dog breed I have on it, that gets a lot of people approaching me,) occasionally a kilt (people love to ask about the kilt) interesting sunglasses, hats (used to wear a bowler occasionally, I'm less of a fan of it these days, panama hat in the summer, etc.)

Clothing and style choices are a little tricky. There's kind of a fine line between wearing something interesting that makes people want to talk to you and coming across as a fedora-wearing neckbeard who's trying too hard. Those choices have to look good on you, you have to like them and give off a bit of confidence while wearing them, and it has to be something that will catch the attention of the kind of person you want to attract.

And most importantly, you need to be able to carry a conversation from there. That's the hard part.

Having some story or a joke at the ready is a pretty good crutch to kind of get yourself over that last part. For example my go-to when people come up to me to compliment my beard/moustache is to joke that "I grew it myself" which is usually good for a chuckle, and then the ice is broken, and you can kind of try to steer the conversation from there.

I've had a lot of fun conversations with strangers and made a few friends along the way. I never personally had much luck turning that into a romantic relationship, but that was also never something I actively pursued much in general, I just kind of let things go from there and through friends who I met that way I eventually met my wife.

I'd be pretty hard-pressed to name any of my friends who graduated "on time"

I'm well into my 30s now, a couple of my friends are still working on degrees or just graduated.

Changing majors, bullshit scheduling nonsense, life

Shit, there was a whole fucking pandemic that fucked up a year or two of your high school years, it's pretty damn amazing that anyone your age is graduating even roughly on-time as far as I'm concerned.

Maybe it'll throw a bit of a monkey wrench into your social life because you gotta skip out on a couple things because you have class. That's life as an adult, we all got scheduling conflicts all the time.

Otherwise, it's never gonna matter. You'll have a degree, that's the only "important" thing about graduating. Unless you're looking to get into some highly-specialized, super-competitive field, no one gives a shit how long it took you to graduate, how your gpa stacked up against the rest of your class, etc. It's like the old joke "What do you call the person who graduated at the bottom of their class in medical school? You call them 'Doctor.'"

As far as this particular incident goes, I'm kind of inclined to wave it off as "kids can be assholes"

That said, regardless of what sides of the conflict you support on this, I really have to question what the hell was going through these kids' parents' minds when they signed the permission slips for this trip.

"You want me to send my 13 year old to a country that is actively engaged in an armed conflict within/along its borders? Where missile attacks are a fairly regular occurrence? Etc. Yeah, that sounds like a good idea."

Even when tensions weren't quite so high, the idea of Israeli tourism always just sounded like a bad idea to me, because even when things are relatively good, every other news story out of the country is the kind of shit that should scare everyone the fuck away.

When I was that age, I had a hard time convincing my parents to let me go on a trip with my boy scout troop to Canada

The Shanty Swing Band

One drunken night in a tiki bar, a bunch of my friends cooked up this idea for a band that was entirely too crazy to ever work, especially with our musical and organizational skills.

The idea was for it to be sort of a folk-metal/jazz fusion thing that played sea shanties.

I feel like it's also worth mentioning that this idea came about well before COVID when sea shanties had a little moment.

I think by the time we all sobered up the next day we realized it wasn't going to work, but we sure as hell left the bar that night thinking we were onto something.

Part of the concept also involved a "gun player" who would fire off some blanks from a flintlock pistol, sort of like a budget-friendly 1812 overture because something something pirates.

Regardless of the actual feasibility of this project, I still really dig the name.

There's a small (and best of all free) museum in Philly called the Science History Institute.

Until a couple years ago, it went by the Chemical Heritage Foundation

Which I personally thought was a much cooler name.

Officially the name change was to reflect that their focus includes more than just chemistry,

But I have a sneaking suspicion that a big part of the reason for the change was that the old name just kind of creeped people out, and I'll admit it had a bit of a mad scientist ring to it.

Anyway, cool little museum for anyone who finds themselves in Philly, do recommend.

I think this is going to depend a lot on where in the world you are.

I'm from the mid Atlantic/northeast US, and was raised catholic, overall I wouldn't say that around me there was ever a separate "Catholic dating culture" it was just catholics dating other people who may or may not have also been Catholic. Not any more problematic than the rest of the general dating pool in any particular way

In other parts of the country or world I suspect that may be different

Ketchup has kind of an interesting history

The term ketchup/catsup (or various other spellings) first appeared in about the 1600s, but tomato ketchup didn't really catch on until about 200-300 years later. Before then it was used to refer to a variety of different sauces/condiments. Mushroom ketchup was a fairly popular one, some were based on fish sauces (you could maybe make an argument that Worcestershire sauce is a type of ketchup) etc.

The general consensus is that it was sort of the result Europeans attempting to recreate various Asian sauces without really knowing what was in them or having access to the right ingredients (for example trying to make something like soy sauce without soy beans)

Its definitely an old invention, but maybe not quite as old as you might imagine, we have evidence of a good handful of things from before then

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_historic_inventions

Two things on that list in particular kind of stand out to me as obvious precursors to bread

Control of fire and cooking (2.3 million years ago) hard to bake without that unless maybe you live in a very volcanicaly active area or something where you can burry food in the ground or something to cook

Mortar and pestle (37 thousand years ago) gotta have some way of grinding grains into flour

Which leads us up to bread (14.5 thousand years ago)

I think there's a lot of nuance that both sides of this are missing. There's a lot of middle ground between not talking to women out in the world at all, and going up to random girls and saying "nice shoes, wanna fuck?

You absolutely can approach people, strike up a conversation, maybe even hit it off and spin it into a friendship or romantic relationship.

I'm far from the guy to tell someone how to do that and try to pick apart the it's and outs of what makes some things ok and others not, but it is something that absolutely can be done.

To the best of my knowledge, the most common parallel universe theory that has any actual real traction in physics is the "many worlds interpretation"

Which is basically that any time some sort of quantum event is observed, the universe splits into multiple parallel universes where every possible outcome of that event is realized in its own universe.

Now people take that and run with it and make up all sorts of pseudoscience bullshit where those splits happen anytime someone makes a choice, or some pseudorandom event like a coin flip or die roll occurs. That's not really what it's about.

This is about wonky quantum physics, radioactive decay, collapsing wave function type stuff. I'll be honest this is high level physics shit, I only kind of understand some of it, which is more than probably 90+% of people out there can say, for most people it probably means about as much as if you came up to them and started talking to them in a foreign language.

So that means that all of those parallel universes are going to be following the same laws of physics since they all diverged from the same universe.

That means that flying reindeer and traveling around the world in a night delivering presents down chimney and such is probably a no-go.

As far as there being a universe where some weirdo named Santa Claus decided to live at the North Pole and build toys, maybe, but probably pretty unlikely. I have a pretty hard time imagining a version of the world where different quantum outcomes would lead to that. Would, for example, a single uranium atom decaying or not decaying make that happen? Probably not. Of course, untold millions of tiny events like that can eventually add up to some big difference, but I still have a hard time imagining a situation where that would be the outcome.

Like I think someone in this thread already said, there are an infinite amount of numbers between 0 and 1 (0.1, 0.2, 0.001234, etc,) but none of them are "2" some things are just impossible.

I just built a PC after not having a computer for about 5+ years.

Built it for games, did not feel like I was missing out on anything in particular except games by not having a computer. There's a lot of things I'd rather use a computer for but these days most of what I used to do on a computer can be done just fine from a phone or tablet.

During those 5 or so years, I maybe needed to use a computer about a dozen times, and if my wife didn't have a computer I could have just swung by a library for a bit to take care of it.

A little over a decade ago I was a pizza dude. I remember getting off work at about 11pm and craving pretty much anything but pizza, so every so often I'd stop through McDonald's on my way home since they were pretty much the only place open, fork over about 5 bucks from my night's tips, and get a couple McChicken and/or mcdoubles, fries, and a drink, and get change back.

That same order now costs over $10.

I think I remember back then that I averaged out to a bit over $10/hour after figuring in tips. I'm no longer a pizza dude and I'm making a bit over $30, so I've beaten the McDonald's inflation rate by a bit and can afford to spring for it if I find myself really craving it, but everything else has also gotten more expensive and $10 isn't as easy to justify for some junk food.

But your average pizza dude today probably hasn't beaten that rate. They're tipped employees so all the bullshit that comes with that means they're probably still only making around $10/hour. I think there's been a bit of a delivery boom since then so maybe they're doing a little better than that but I doubt many are making the over $20/hour they'd need to be able to afford a late night McDonald's snack with the same ease I used to be able to.

Also, at least around me, they're not even open late anymore since COVID. I still work a weird night shift so that's something else I'm up against. My only options when I get off work if I want a snack is gas station/convenience store food.

I used to be the shipping/receiving guy in a warehouse, it fell to me to arrange all of our freight pickups, which was annoying because I didn't really have direct access to any information about pricing, deadlines, etc. so I was constantly going back to the office to show someone quotes to see whether the rates and transit times were acceptable.

Most of our freight was LTL stuff (less than truckload, a couple pallets, not enough to fill a truck by itself) but a few times every month or two we'd get full truckload sized orders.

When it came to them, often "intermodal" shipping had much better rates. Intermodal meaning at least 2 different forms of transportation were going to be used. Truck, train, boat, cargo plane, etc.

As a US-based company with mostly US-based customers, that usually meant rail for us.

However, almost none of our shipments went intermodal because it was too slow for our customers.

It wasn't usually a drastic difference, we're talking maybe 1-3 extra days in most cases. Over the Road (OTR) there weren't many places in the US that we couldn't get freight to from our location in 5 days or less, and those 5 day locations were mostly real middle-of-nowhere customers on the other side of the country.

It always blew my mind that we didn't or couldn't push our customers to just place orders 2 or 3 days earlier to save some pretty significant money on shipping.

I don't claim to know much about the industry, i was just some kid who needed a job and ended up the shipping guy because I knew how to use a computer and spoke English. But we a textile company that made things like work clothes (chef coats, scrubs, industrial work wear, etc) and restaurant table linens, and we sold mostly to bigger wholesalers, business service companies, etc. who would resell it or provide it to their customers as part some sort of contracted laundry service or something, so not really something I'd think of as being particularly time-sensitive or wildly unpredictable that they couldn't anticipate their bigger orders a couple days ahead of time

Guess it probably says something about how much we all love instant gratification.

I remember my 4th grade teacher having one of these and showing it off around 2000, it may have been the first digital camera I ever saw.

Blew my mind back then.

He was one of my favorite teachers, really into science, loved gadgets. He was an older guy who retired a few years later and I heard he wasn't in the best of health, no idea if he's still around, but I hope he at least lived long enough to appreciate how far digital cameras have come since then.

It's amazing how often that's the solution.

Once upon a time well before I was born my dad was a pipefitter, he still had most of his tools and so growing up we were sort of the first-line troubleshooters for everyone in my family when they had a plumbing issue. He had a pretty impressive collection of absurdly-large screwdrivers that you'd look at and go "when the hell would you ever need this?"

Until you came across a giant screw like this, or you had the tank off a toilet and needed a 2ft long screwdriver to reach the tank bolts properly.

Something about Chabad-Lubavitch and Brooklyn rang some bells for me, which isn't normally the kind of thing that would catch my attention, so I figured I must have seen something particularly weird about them in the news in the not-too-distant past.

And only one weird story from New York about Orthodox Jews comes to mind for me personally, and sure enough it was Chabad-Lubavitch that was involved in the Synagogue tunnel incident

Not that I think there's any direct correlation between these two incidents, I'm mostly just bringing it up for anyone else who had the same "why does that name ring a bell" feeling.

For me, a lot of it has to do with how it's presented in schools

Pi, for example. One day my teachers just kind of dumped this magical 3.14... number on me without any real explanation. Just basically "use this number to do stuff with circles," no real explanation on what pi actually is on anything, just "remember this"

Years later I found a gif of a circle sort of unraveling that showed how the circumference is π × the diameter of the circle

And sure, mathematically, the formula tells you that, but actually seeing that animated out made a hell of a lot more sense to me.

Now I got most of my basic math education before those gifs were so readily available, and smart boards were just becoming a thing when I was in high school, so it would have been a little hard to show that to a bunch of elementary or middle school students without having us huddle around a desktop.

But that's something that could have been illustrated pretty well with a couple circles of different sizes (cardboard cut-outs, printed on paper, different jar lids, etc,) a piece of string, and a ruler.

And the same goes for a whole lot of different math things.

In the interest of battery life and redundancy, I think it might make sense to have 3 devices.

Ereader with an e ink display for reading, a lot of these can last days or weeks on a charge easily

An mp3 player for music. I don't know what the current state of mp3 players is, I suspect a lot of no-name imported garbage, but over a decade ago I know my iPod used to go days or weeks on a charge with pretty heavy usage. Probably look for whatever has the least bells and whistles you can find- no touch screen, physical controls, etc. if you're up for a bit of tinkering I'm pretty sure there's a pretty active scene for people modding old iPods with better batteries, more storage, etc. that would probably be a great option.

A tablet or smartphone for movies, or possibly a laptop (I'm not an apple guy, but I've heard MacBooks have pretty insane battery life these days.) Keep all the wifi/cellular/Bluetooth/gps, etc. turned off, keep it on power save mode, disable anything you can that you don't need to watch movies. Unfortunately if such a thing as a dedicated video-only tablet exists, I couldn't find it with a quick search. If such a thing can be found, I'd probably recommend that.

A dedicated device that does one job well will usually be more efficient at that thing than a multipurpose device like a tablet, smartphone, or computer that needs to be able to do it all. An mp3 player only needs to be able to play music, it doesn't need to be running a full-on OS that's capable of sending emails, making phone calls, playing games, etc.

Also that way if one of those things does die on you, you still have the other 2.

I saw in one of your other comments your concern about a tablet having a bigger screen would be a bigger drain on battery life. That's true to an extent, bigger screens draw more power, but since the whole device is bigger they can compensate with a bigger battery. I haven't exactly done an exhaustive survey of tablet battery life and don't care to look into it, but in my (fairly limited) experience, they usually pretty much at least break even or surpass phones in battery life. I have a cheap tablet that I really only use for reading it lives in my bag, usually in my car, often forgotten about for days or occasionally weeks at a time, and doesn't exactly get heavy usage, but it usually can go at least a few days without a change, even with WiFi and Bluetooth left on. If I'm not using it at all, it can sometimes go a couple weeks just sitting idle. It's usually good for at least a couple hours of streaming HD video, with WiFi turned off and 720p video on internal storage I imagine it's good for at least a couple movies.

WiFi and cellular data are pretty big power drains too. I know when I check my battery usage on my phone that probably accounts for about ⅓ or so of it. Having those turned off can go a long way. Jailbreaking/rooting your phone to disable unnecessary services probably wouldn't hurt, but that's probably a drop in the bucket compared to just keeping your device offline.