This has got to be the funniest summary of A Wind in the Door

How does it taste? Is it very different to a chicken egg?

Candles often have blue at the base of the flame

While reducing his sources of income will hurt him a little bit, unfortunately Starlink is very appealing to militaries and emergency services. Being able to access the internet is great for morale in the navy, and mission critical for plenty of emergency services. This is particularly true in Australia where we have vast unpopulated areas with very patchy phone coverage, let alone bandwidth for data services. I know some services are installing starlink as emergency backups for stations and in forward command vehicles. They’ll be paying the big bucks for Starlink.

Orecchiette. It’s a very small cup (the name means little ear) which holds a little bit of sauce, but not so much that you get overzealous and try to fill it up.

All you’d have to do to make it much more readable is separate the time and the year with some kind of separator like a hyphen, slash or dot. Also “Z” is the time zone, denoting UTC (see also military time zones)

So virtually human unreadable and the letters make machine readability a pain in the ass?

I’m so glad I don’t work in an office and I dread the day I do

There’s two types of military SONAR: active and passive. Active SONAR is using pings and listening for the echo, but it’s not very commonly used by submarines. Passive sonar is just listening out for engine noise from ships and prop noise from other submarines. Warships use active SONAR more because they’re already noisy and so if they think an enemy submarine is in the area they’ll use it to try and locate, but in peacetime it’s mostly reserved for training exercises. It’s still terrible for wildlife, even if they don’t die it’s very distressing and disorientating but it’s not constantly scanning like a RADAR.

This time it isn’t (I think)

I highly recommend Science Vs, 99% Invisible, and Cautionary Tales. Pretty good if you’re into nerdy stuff. I also recommend Endless Thread if you’re interested in stories about the internet. What audiobooks have you enjoyed recently?

Fascinating! However, the fire department (or whoever is your local IDR unit) will almost certainly run coolant while cutting a ring off of anyone.

Yes! I should have clarified. Wedding rings getting stuck on old people’s fingers will be the main use case for those tools, meaning people will have to buy a lot of titanium cock rings before it’s cost effective for hospitals to have electric cutting tools as standard.

Hospitals will generally have ring cutters like this:

They are hand powered and very cost effective for gold and silver rings. Diamond tipped cutters usually need something like a Dremel to power them. They look something like this:

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They are much more expensive compared to hand powered ones, and pose a higher risk to a patient so they would require additional training to use it, which is another extra cost.

Nominative determinism: destiny based on names

I’m not surprised, I’m pretty sure they’re wetland birds too.

Australian white ibises. They’re kinda like the Australian equivalent to a raccoon in the US; they eat rubbish and their roosts stink because they tend to congregate in a single tree and then shit everywhere. But they are quite unique looking birds: long beaks, black heads and white plumage. So the tourists find them quite interesting and the locals call them bin chickens.

The prosecutor went on to have a pretty successful career and I think had a role in Obama’s administration. She basically said “I’m sorry your son killed himself” but never admitted to having a part in his death.

I’d argue that creativity shouldn’t be linked to technical skill. I’ve met people who have really creative ideas and solutions that they couldn’t carry out because they couldn’t weld, machine, do carpentry, paint, draw, or otherwise carry out their idea. Are they not creative? Sure, to be a great artist you need those skills, and using AI does not make you an artist as a result, but using AI to demonstrate your creativity shouldn’t be demonised. Creating AI using other people’s IP without their permission should be demonised.

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