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Cake day: 2023年6月17日

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  • It could have been a single intersection. The article has no useful info. Somehow, the car entered a space where people were standing/laying still stargazing, so, presumably, not the middle of the road. I have definitely seen some more rural areas use both a stop sign and a flashing red light overhead. Sometimes an all-way stop, sometimes one road has a flashing yellow to take the right of way. A leg of a tee would almost definitely get the red/stop while the crossroad could get either, if any sense was used in traffic planning. Leaving the tee via the nonexistent leg could certainly risk a car entering a people space.

    Regardless, they are still 3+ separate items that should not have been missed, as you stated. A stop sign, a flashing red light, and leaving the road should all be condemnable as each is a normal circumstance. I’d agree, the speed limit likely did not allow 70mph, either




  • Ah, I see where our misunderstandings are. Exterior blinds are pretty rare in the US, despite being flush with exterior shutter adornments. So in the US, any talk of blinds is going to be about interior things, which was my assumption. I have heard functioning exterior blinds/shutters are more common in parts of Europe. Meanwhile, the US does also use “curtain” and “blinds” to mean separate things: blinds are the adjustable slats (or accordion cellular styles) while curtains are the more decorative textiles usually pushed to the sides. So it still sounds like we were talking about the same thing, using curtains to cover the gaps in the blinds, while talking about entirely different blinds.

    How do you operate the exterior blinds? Are there controls going through the wall or do you reach out the window?

    Also of note, American homes tend to have pretty bad wall insulation. Wood frames, plywood+siding outside, sheet rock inside, and probably slouching thin insulation. A wall can exchange as much heat as a curtainless window



  • A sports stadium is different in the sense that customers are screened for weapons before entering and escape routes are very limited. It’s a confined and defined space. Having a trash can bomb is scary, but it’s gonna be hard to stop people from going outside their homes. On the other hand, being in a specific place where drones were able to circumvent security measures? That scares people from events themselves.



  • Interior blinds create a convection current around them. They catch the sunlight that makes it through the window, get hotter, cause the air between the blinds and glass to rise, and pull in cooler room air from underneath.

    Most modern windows have infrared-reflecting coatings, but it works both ways. If it reflects 90% of the infrared away, 10% gets in. Say you have polished aluminum blinds for 95% reflection, it’s reflecting 9.5% of the original light back to the window. But then the window reflects 90% back again, or 8.5%. Then the blinds reflect again… All the while, it’s finding any gap and heating the materials and air. So yes, blinds help, but it’s best if you can keep the heat outside entirely.

    I watch outside air temp closely and do open windows once ambient swings past what I want inside. Problem is, outside hasn’t dropped below 75f/24c in about 5 weeks here. Most of the inhabited world has this issue in the summer unless it’s a desert. Hell, that range is about what I saw in India during winter.










  • I’m in manufacturing/engineering. There’s no political definition for who takes the jobs, but I do believe their political leanings very closely align with their office personalities. There’s the type that complains when someone takes some _liber_ties in the process, and then there’s the type that sits for a minute trying to understand that alternate thought process (although usually met with the initial disapproval). There’s the type that writes processes the way they think it should work, then there’s the type that will convene with and cooperate with the actual affected workers before and after writing it. But at the same time, despite being rooted in science and hard evidence, compartmentalization is widely available. My household PhD is the most religious person in the office. The person is nice, smart, and competent to the point we filter our profanity around the PhD. Potentially the most creative engineer in the office (or most cocky with expenditure risk) is also one of the most obvious conservatives. Sort of like everyone must follow the social rules except for his design ideas.

    The redneck engineers you’re talking about are probably people who didn’t get the formal education or don’t have the corporate bankroll to take their work further

    “Nobody wants to work anymore” is a fast track to identifying their news/political commentary sources. As if Janet in accounting dreamt of sending “month end inventory call” emails when she was a girl.

    For music, I’d venture that the conservative stars are generally making their version of pop. It’s not a rule itself, but a core of conservatism is following a set of existing rules because deviation is ostracized


  • Empathy. Understanding what causes emotional reactions and building on that rather than doing your own routine and being mad others won’t agree with you.

    Conservative comedians continually get “canceled” because their act only punches down and makes fun of other people, so their content only resonates with their own demographic. They lose audience because their content goes stale. There’s a difference between the punchline being that the target is gay vs the punchline being what a gay person does and capturing that nuance. Adam Corolla had the same boring complaints about society, about economy cars, about not seeing enough tits, about sucking dick, over and over. Robin Williams was the full spectrum of range from Good Will Hunting to his stand up to his Genie and Doubtfire and Birdcage (separating from acting because of his amount of successful adlib).

    Conservative actors only know one role: their idealized selves. I bet you they’re a tough guy with no emotional range, shadowing John Wayne pretending to be a cowboy. Joe Pesci is a real NYC tough guy. That’s his act, condescending tough guy. Even with his peak of comedic performance, Vinny, he was just the same character but brought hilarity by being woefully out of place for the plot. Robert De Niro was a theater kid. He makes bank as a mobster but imagine trying to watch Pesci play Captain Shakespeare in Stardust.

    Conservative painters/physical media artists… I can’t think of any. Maybe I’m just uninformed. Closest I can think of are some photographers that produce images I call “informational” rather than artistic. Capturing a moment in time as if the street view car just drove by, not capturing a mood or feeling.

    Anyway, I wonder if the handedness is actually rooted in which kids were tormented in a strict Christian school vs who had a more explorative and welcoming upbringing. Not that people don’t come out as lefties alter, but that’s gotta hamper their skill-honing years for art.


  • I’ve never read the book. Never heard of it actually. The early claim of “stars being infected except one” paired with comments in this thread made it clear there was an alien encounter. Nothing really seems spoiled to me. It maintains a comedic element throughout.

    If anything, I’m somewhat more interested in it for not being like the trilo/quadrilogy (1) I was going to jokingly put it in: the unofficial Warhammer origin movies. Event Horizon (1997), Sunshine (2007), and Pandorum (2009). Namely, a remake of Sunshine. These 3 movies introduce demonic beings brought on by space travel which is more or less accomplished by traveling through/near hell. A flaw, to me, is their late-plot reliance on downright supernatural abilities. I enjoyed the relatively solid scifi aspect (2) a lot until things used a godly deus ex machina to wrap it up. Maybe that’s my fault for not actually being into 40K.

    (1) the 4th reference movie is Black Hole (1979), the Disney Star Wars before Disney Star Warred. As far as I’m concerned, Event Horizon is a remake.

    (2) the solar shield on the 2nd ship in Pandorum should have absolutely roasted the back of the first ship upon rendezvous. The movie established reflections could slice metal. The convex shape of the shield would diminish the strength, but the much larger size should have done the trick. I know it was hot before and Mark Strong was naked, but I don’t think he would’ve been strong enough. Complete the nuke mission. God plot closed.

    Edit: sorry to put yall through weird superscript formatting. It didn’t isolate the 1/2 like it did in reddit. Paranthesized instead