Well done, its feels good making a graceful recovery like that. Grub is a bit underbaked as a recovery environment I think. I’ve always stuck to fairly vanilla distros like Mint since Linux is my main OS and performance is less important to me vs stability. I’ve also found having a bootable Linux USB in a drawer has saved me a few times when testing new things.

So another victim of the Glass Cliff then?

Not too serious a suggestion, but if migration worked once to escape the PRC why not do it again. Move all your industries offshore to an enclave or possibly several in friendly neighboring countries and then your population. I mean the population isnt so large that it’s not technically impossible to relocate. it’s not much more than some of the largest world cities. Then when invaded withdraw entirely. Anyone happy to live under Chinese rule can stay. Given climate change humanity is probably going to have to get used to massive migrations anyway. Horrible as that could be culturally being a semi independent part of another democracy would fix their declining population, plus being a massive economic stimulus all round. I suspect something like this may be happening informally anyway. Their main strength is economic and organizational so why not build on that.

Lots of nice second hand xeon workstations going cheap. Given the cost of memory they are often a bargain. The only catch with the Dells for example is the lame but also proprietary power supplies.

The furry paw of diplomacy. Now the nerd in me wants to see a graph of the Panda Index as a measure of Chinese opinion about other countries It’s the cuddly side of a relationship in contrast to darker clouds on the horizon.

Not a disease as such but a condition. Sepsis aka blood poisoning, is a significant one for older folk. A fast heartbeat with low blood pressure, rash etc. It can be rapidly deadly but is not so easy to identify. About Sepsis warning signs

Treatment early enough definitely saves lives so it’s worth knowing about

Open shell is a helpful solution that replaces some of the problems in the windows UI at least for the start menu.

OpenShell github

It’s pretty easy to customize most elements for the style you prefer and no adverts.

Open shell is a helpful solution that replaces some of the problems in the windows UI at least for the start menu.

OpenShell github

It’s pretty easy to customize most things.

You would think with all the money from data centers their support for enterprise GPU use would be great. But as someone who’s tried to install it, I can confirm it’s really basic and the documentation is sparse.

Yep that’s not how science is done, but the real story is more interesting I think. It wasn’t Einstein so much as Hubble and Lemaître, but he did acknowledge the error that caused him to miss the expanding universe in his equations.

"This circumstance of an expanding universe is irritating " – Albert Einstein, 1929.

In every direction in the sky, there is a background fizz of light. It is all that remains of the most intense flare of energy ever emitted. To explain it, we must look back to 1929. At that time Edwin Hubble, an astronomer at Caltech, proved that the universe was much larger than anyone had expected and expanding in all directions. From this discovery, two competing explanations developed. The Steady State Theory and the Big Bang. The first allows the universe to create new matter as it expands. Matter just appears from some hidden and rather ghostly source. That permits the universe to look more or less the same as it does today, at least as far as galaxies go. The second treats the universe as a closed system. One that begins with a vast and concentrated supply of energy, which decays into lesser forms. Spreading out as it does. The Big Bang universe is an expanding bubble of space-time, with a few wisps of hydrogen and helium that form the stars. The origins of the Big Bang theory began before Hubble’s discovery. A Russian physicist, A. A. Friedmann had used Einstein’s general relativity to model an expanding universe. At this time, it was a purely theoretical exercise. No one realized then that our universe was expanding.

The rate at which the universe expands is known as the Hubble-Lemaître constant. That naming honours Georges Lemaître. In some ways he was the co-discoverer of the Big Bang. He was among the first to model Einstein’s theories of space and time across an entire universe. As a physicist, Catholic priest and astronomer, he had a clear perspective on this question. He had no problem with the idea of the universe having a unique origin for example. Both Einstein and others had learned that Relativity predicted an expanding universe. But at the time, there was no physical evidence of that. Einstein’s solution was to introduce an extra value to the equations. That balanced the universe’s expansion with an opposing force. For the moment, a stable universe seemed possible.

In the 1920s, astronomers were unsure whether our galaxy was the only structure in the universe. There was no astronomical distance scale. That might explain why most astronomers assumed a static universe. Lemaître was willing to explore a different option. He had seen the evidence from Erwin Hubble’s early observations at Mount Wilson Observatory in California. He published his theory in 1927. He estimated the speed of the expansion using those measurements. They proved that Spacetime was rapidly expanding, carrying along the rest of the physical universe.

Wherever astronomers pointed their telescopes every distant object was part of this rapid expansion. Lemaître understood that an expanding universe must have a tiny beginning. He called this origin point the cosmic atom, from which all matter emerged. Einstein rejected the significance of the new astronomical discoveries for some time. He maintained his belief in a static, unchanging cosmos until 1930, when he traveled halfway across the world from Berlin to Pasadena to see Hubble’s evidence in person. He examined Hubble’s photographs, looked through his telescopes, and declared himself fully persuaded.

He called the stabilizing term Lamda also known as the Cosmic Constant his “worst blunder” but actually it forms the foundation for our present understanding the effects of dark energy, the mysterious force driving the observed accelerated expansion of the universe.

So he’s talking about the Christian version of God but what specific variant. There’s lots to select from you know. Do other Abrehamic religions get a pass or just his present kind of evangelical nuttery.

Maybe they have some recent Kessler syndrome modelling that makes it more urgent. Given the build up in low Earth orbit it’s a reasonable backup idea.Also the global south is pretty underserved

I think your right to be cautious about the timing, cats are very territorial and can take a couple of months to trust that a new place really belongs to them. I guess the breed and personality of the kitten would be the key to harmony because your present cat is already mature. If they can coexist then they will eventually accept one another but seperate feeding areas help. They will try very hard to invade the others space on day one so it can be job to keep them separate.

But the workaround is complex and only temporary. Well Firefox has easier profiles now so really thats the last straw as far as chrome goes. It’s easy enough to migrate.

Our boy won’t talk to humans. He has appointed the girl as his spokescat and will headbutt her till she gets human attention. If she is sleeping elsewhere he gets quite confused how to ask for food. Why can’t they just read my ears then??!

Ah that what happens when you Google an article which explanes some historical connection to Plato etc but it then uses that to make a completely unrelated point ie woke is bad. I should have read the whole thing before linking it. Looking at the other articles on the site it is indeed mostly right wing propaganda. A better point is Dawnkin’s post about Platonic forms here https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25366 in response to the question what scientific idea should be retired in 2014? He points out essentialism is a problem for accepting evolution, and for so many other things.

And Plato would have gotten away with it too, if not for those meddling kids and their cladistics. Essentialism has been hugely damaging and is the foundation of most types of Creationism. https://newdiscourses.com/2021/02/essentialism-logical-fallacy-plaguing-us-since-plato/

Indeed, and in addition if your religion is not supported by the facts it’s time to revise its assumptions. Religion can deal with new evidence, it’s just rather slow compared to say human lifetimes. I suspect thats because the basis of many faiths reasoning is built on philosophy, Christianity in particular. Which is a kind of precursor to experimental science where progress is slow or even circular.

Its a nice bit of tech. 73M in construction costs. The focal plane instrumentation alone weighs 10 tonnes. It includes 5,000 small computer controlled fiber positioners. The entire focal plane can be reconfigured for the next exposure in less than two minutes while the telescope slews to the next field. The DESI instrument is capable of taking 5,000 simultaneous spectra of different Galaxies

These are the massive black holes that lurk at the core of most galaxies. Like the one at the center of our own milkyway galaxy. The question remains do they form at the center of baby galaxies or are they the seed which triggers a galaxy to develop and they just grow even larger over time. If early galaxies had massive black holes for their galaxy size, that suggests the last option. Primordial black holes that is ones that were formed in the big bang have been a possibility for a long time. They have been talked about by astronomers since the 1970s. It great that so much is being discovered now. Lots of surprises still coming I suspect. More info on primeval black holes here. https://physicsworld.com/a/concerning-primordial-black-holes/