Not to mention that the vote was boycotted by Armenia, Estonia, Georgia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Moldova.

They were sooooo keen to return to the Russian embrace (/s).

Is it was so great, why did most of the conquered nations run west as fast as they could as soon as they could? Must have been because the USSR was so ‘progressive’.

Sorry, I don’t.

I saw some documentary that suggested that they used to chip straight through fossilized feathers and skin to get to the bones because they didn’t realise what they were.

The bible apparently.

Look up biblical cosmology on Wikipedia.

This seems like the digital equivalent of burning books. Rather than controlling what people can read, shouldn’t we be doing more about the underlying reasons that mental health has taken a dive, such as the cost of living, climate change, the cost of further education and, you know, giving people a reason to feel optimistic about the future?

I’ve had hosted email from a service provider for years and never had a problem. I’m not talking anyone big here.

This is what web 1.0 was.

TIL that if we wanted to, we could sample prehistoric beetle farts.

To take my previous comment to the next level, have you ever put your finger over the end of an old-school bicycle pump and tried to push it in? If you have, you’ll know that the pump gets hot. The reason is that you are not only compressing air, you are compressing the heat that the air has. This raises the temperature and we can use this phenomenon to move heat around.

Imagine you were outside where it was cool and you extended the bicycle pump and blocked the end permanently.

Then you went inside hour house and compressed the pump. The air (and heat) in the pump would be compressed into a smaller space, so it the air temperature of the air in the pump would increase. If you compressed it a bit, the air in the pump might go up to be the same temperature as the air inside your house. If you compressed it even more, it would get hotter than the air inside the house. If you then held it there, over time, the heat inside the pump would transfer through the wall of the pump to the air in your house. This would cause the air inside your house to warm up and the air inside the pump to cool down until they are the same temperature. In doing this you have taken the heat in the air outside, and released it inside.

If you then went back outside and allowed the pump to extend again, then the air would decompress and, because the heat previously left the air in the pump (when it was inside), it would get quite cold. Colder than the air outside. If you then waited again, the air in the pump would gradually warm up, drawing heat from the air from outside of your house. This happens because even though the air outside is cool, it’s still warmer than the air in the pump.

Rinse and repeat. An air conditioner on heating mode, or a heat pump basically work in the same way. However, rather than using a bicycle pump, they have fluid running in a loop from inside to outside and back inside. The evaporator (outside the house) collects heat by allowing the fluid to ‘expand’ and cool below the ambient temperature outside. The condensor (inside the house) releases the heat by allowing the fluid to ‘contract’ and heat above the ambient temperature inside.

In this way, no heat is directly created from electricity. It is just moved from outside to inside. Believe it or not, this takes less energy than converting electricity into heat directly.

I’ve deliberately not talked about phase change here to keep it simple, that doesn’t change the basic idea behind it.

It’s basically because they don’t directly convert electricity into heat, they just pull it in from outside. It still takes energy to ‘push the heat uphill’ from a cold place to a hot place, but less than directly heating.

I spent many years trying to be as FOSS as I could. I tried many different Linux distros, hunted for open source operating systems for my phone (at the time, none did even the basic things I needed it to do) until one day I decided I was sick to death of having to spend hours researching and trying multiple arcane cli commands to get even simple things to work (like WiFi). I realised that I was wasting an enormous amount of time being all-things-open-source.

My next purchase as a macbook as it was based on a *nix and I’ve come to realise that while Apple is a walled garden and in some ways is ‘evil’, it’s less evil than Google is now, or Microsoft was back in the day.

I also like the way that the various Apple devices work really well together. But I hate the fact that it’s harder to hack things to be the way that I want. Don’t get me wrong, I still love open source software, but I have too few years left to waste them on modifying config.org files, or whatever they do now, so I’m much more selective with what I use. I tend to use FOSS applications on MacOS where the software works well enough.

Not trying to bash FOSS, just my 2 cents.