Strictly speaking, "ultimate" means "last", not "best". It's often figuratively employed in the latter sense to suggest that the thing so described is the final word on the subject, after which nothing more need be said, but if we're being real technical, describing a game or movie that was so bad it killed its entire franchise as the "ultimate" is in fact correct.
Now I'm thinking about the prefix "pen," which as far as I can think I may have only ever seen in "penultimate"
It's Latin for "nearly" or "almost", and it does pop up in a few other English words. "Penultimate", "penumbra" and "peninsula" are the only ones I can think of that you'd even remotely expect to encounter in everyday speech, though; the rest are all medical or mathematical jargon.
updated the character limit on the blinkie maker! previously 15 characters, you can now attempt to cram a whopping 25 characters on your blinkies!! certain fonts and font sizes WILL cut off. use your best judgement ok?
fantastic. i love it. i posted this after my wife said it yesterday and as i was doing it i was like "this can't be an original thought. as soon as i hit post someone's going to say 'you stole this from a tweet from 2014' and i'll say 'no, i stole it from my beautiful wife.'"
I work outside and the air quality this morning was "people can voluntarily go home if they don't feel comfortable but we're not gonna make you leave"
So I told everyone at the morning meeting that I'm not judging anyone who leaves and that you should always prioritize your health over a job and ended up accidentally convincing my entire crew to leave
My definitive ranking of my least favorite bodies of water! These are ranked from least to most scary (1/10 is okay, 10/10 gives me nightmares). I’m sorry this post is long, I have a lot of thoughts and feelings about this.
The Great Blue Hole, Belize
I’ve been here! I have snorkeled over this thing! It is terrifying! The water around the hole is so shallow you can’t even swim over the coral without bumping it, and then there’s a little slope down, and then it just fucking drops off into the abyss! When you’re over the hole the water temperature drops like 10 degrees and it’s midnight blue even when you’re right by the surface. Anyway. The Great Blue Hole is a massive underwater cave, and its roughly 410 feet deep. Overall, it’s a relatively safe area to swim. It’s a popular tourist attraction and recreational divers can even go down and explore some of the caves. People do die at the Blue Hole, but it is generally from a lack of diving experience rather than anything sinister going on down in the depths. My rating for this one is 1/10 because I’ve been here and although it’s kinda freaky it’s really not that bad.
Lake Baikal, Russia
When I want to give myself a scare I look at the depth diagram of this lake. It’s so deep because it’s not a regular lake, it’s a Rift Valley, A massive crack in the earth’s crust where the continental plates are pulling apart. It’s over 5,000 feet deep and contains one-fifth of all freshwater on Earth. Luckily, its not any more deadly than a normal lake. It just happens to be very, very, freakishly deep. My rating for this lake is a 2/10 because I really hate looking at the depth charts but just looking at the lake itself isn’t that scary.
Jacob’s Well, Texas
This “well” is actually the opening to an underwater cave system. It’s roughly 120 feet deep, surrounded by very shallow water. This area is safe to swim in, but diving into the well can be deadly. The cave system below has false exits and narrow passages, resulting in multiple divers getting trapped and dying. My rating is a 3/10, because although I hate seeing that drop into the abyss it’s a pretty safe place to swim as long as you don’t go down into the cave (which I sure as shit won’t).
The Devil’s Kettle, Minnesota
This is an area in the Brule River where half the river just disappears. It literally falls into a hole and is never seen again. Scientists have dropped in dye, ping pong balls, and other things to try and figure out where it goes, and the things they drop in never resurface. Rating is 4/10 because Sometimes I worry I’m going to fall into it.
Flathead Lake, Montana
Everyone has probably seen this picture accompanied by a description about how this lake is actually hundreds of feet deep but just looks shallow because the water is so clear. If that were the case, this would definitely rank higher, but that claim is mostly bull. Look at the shadow of the raft. If it were hundreds of feet deep, the shadow would look like a tiny speck. Flathead lake does get very deep, but the spot the picture was taken in is fairly shallow. You can’t see the bottom in the deep parts. However, having freakishly clear water means you can see exactly where the sandy bottom drops off into blackness, so this still ranks a 5/10.
The Lower Congo River, multiple countries
Most of the Congo is a pretty normal, if large, River. In the lower section of it, however, lurks a disturbing surprise: massive underwater canyons that plunge down to 720 feet. The fish that live down there resemble cave fish, having no color, no eyes, and special sensory organs to find their way in the dark. These canyons are so sheer that they create massive rapids, wild currents and vortexes that can very easily kill you if you fall in. A solid 6/10, would not go there.
Little Crater Lake, Oregon
On first glance this lake doesn’t look too scary. It ranks this high because I really don’t like the sheer drop off and how clear it is (because it shows you exactly how deep it goes). This lake is about 100 feet across and 45 feet deep, and I strongly feel that this is too deep for such a small lake. Also, the water is freezing, and if you fall into the lake your muscles will seize up and you’ll sink and drown. I don’t like that either. 7/10.
Grand Turk 7,000 ft drop off
No. 8/10. I hate it.
Gulf of Corryvreckan, Scotland
Due to a quirk in the sea floor, there is a permanent whirlpool here. This isn’t one of those things that looks scary but actually won’t hurt you, either. It absolutely will suck you down if you get too close. Scientists threw a mannequin with a depth gauge into it and when it was recovered the gauge showed it went down to over 600 feet. If you fall into this whirlpool you will die. 9/10 because this seems like something that should only be in movies.
The Bolton Strid, England
This looks like an adorable little creek in the English countryside but it’s not. Its really not. Statistically speaking, this is the most deadly body of water in the world. It has a 100% mortality rate. There is no recorded case of anyone falling into this river and coming out alive. This is because, a little ways upstream, this isn’t a cute little creek. It’s the River Wharfe, a river approximately 30 feet wide. This river is forced through a tiny crack in the earth, essentially turning it on its side. Now, instead of being 30 feet wide and 6 feet deep, it’s 6 feet wide and 30 feet deep (estimated, because no one actually knows how deep the Strid is). The currents are deadly fast. The banks are extremely undercut and the river has created caves, tunnels and holes for things (like bodies) to get trapped in. The innocent appearance of the Strid makes this place a death trap, because people assume it’s only knee-deep and step in to never be seen again. I hate this river. I have nightmares about it. I will never go to England just because I don’t want to be in the same country as this people-swallowing stream. 10/10, I live in constant fear of this place.
Honorable mention: The Quarry, Pennsylvania
I don’t know if that’s it’s actual name. This lake gets an honorable mention not because it’s particularly deep or dangerous, but it’s where I almost drowned during a scuba diving accident.
Edit: I’ve looked up the name of the quarry, it’s called Crusty’s Quarry and is privately owned and only used for training purposes, not recreational diving.
I really feel like the places where you technically can swim safely are getting underrated here. Like, yeah, the Bolton Strid is scary, but most people, when they know about it, would not step in it. Because scary. But the Great Blue Hole haunts me because people treat it like it's safe, and that's why people without sufficient experience (and actually some people who should know better) Keep Dying There.
There's also the fact that the water is so clear that the long tunnel people keep dying in looks *much* shorter than it is. So people go in thinking they have enough air when they don't. And it's past the depth where pressure can do funny things to your blood and make you make stupid decisions, regardless of how experienced you are.
Also, there is video footage of one guy dying down there. Because he took a camera with him and it was recovered. And it shows him making decisions that don't make sense, because of the pressure sickness. That is fucking creepy.
The word I'm looking for is Attractive Nuissance. It looks pretty. It *can* be used safely, if you're not diving. But that just makes people think of diving there as an exciting challenge, when really it's fucking dangerous and even experienced drivers shouldn't be diving there.
any time i see anything about the Blue Hole mentioned, i have to go and reread this comment made by r/_Neoshade_ on reddit several years ago, because it’s just that chilling.
Not necessarily. Many certified scuba divers think they are capable of just going a little deeper, but they don’t know that there are special gas mixtures, buoyancy equipment and training required for just another few meters of depth.Imagine this: you take your PADI open water diving course and you learn your dive charts, buy all your own gear and become familiar with it. Compared to the average person on the street, you’re an expert now. You go diving on coral reefs, a few shipwrecks and even catch lobster in New England. You go to visit a deep spot like this and you’re having a great time. You see something just in front of you - this beautiful cave with sunlight streaming through - and you decide to swim just a little closer. You’re not going to go inside it, you know better than that, but you just want a closer look. If your dive computer starts beeping, you’ll head back up.So you swim a little closer and it’s breathtaking. You are enjoying the view and just floating there taking it all in. You hear a clanging sound - it’s your dive master rapping the butt of his knife on his tank to get someone’s attention. You look up to see what he wants, but after staring into the darkness for the last minute, the sunlight streaming down is blinding. You turn away and reach to check your dive computer, but it’s a little awkward for some reason, and you twist your shoulder and pull it towards you. It’s beeping and the screen is flashing GO UP. You stare at it for a few seconds, trying to make out the depth and tank level between the flashing words. The numbers won’t stay still. It’s really annoying, and your brain isn’t getting the info you want at a glance. So you let it fall back to your left shoulder, turn towards the light and head up.
The problem is that the blue hole is bigger than anything you’ve ever dove before, and the crystal clear water provides a visibility that is 10x what you’re used to in the dark waters of the St Lawrence where you usually dive. What you don’t realize is that when you swam down a little farther to get a closer look, thinking it was just 30 or 40 feet more, you actually swam almost twice that because the vast scale of things messed up your sense of distance. And while you were looking at the archway you didn’t have any nearby reference point in your vision. More depth = more pressure, and your BCD, the air-filled jacket that you use to control your buoyancy, was compressed a little. You were slowly sinking and had no idea. That’s when the dive master began banging his tank and you looked up. This only served to blind you for a moment and distract your sense of motion and position even more. Your dive computer wasn’t sticking out on your chest below your shoulder when you reached for it because your BCD was shrinking. You turned your body sideways while twisting and reaching for it. The ten seconds spent fumbling for it and staring at the screen brought you deeper and you began to accelerate with your jacket continuing to shrink. The reason that you didn’t hear the beeping at first and that it took so long to make out the depth between the flashing words was the nitrogen narcosis. You have been getting depth drunk. And the numbers wouldn’t stay still because you are still sinking*.*
You swim towards the light but the current is pulling you sideways. Your brain is hurting, straining for no reason, and the blue hole seems like it’s gotten narrower, and the light rays above you are going at a funny angle. You kick harder just keep going up, toward the light, despite this damn current that wants to push you into the wall. Your computer is beeping incessantly and it feels like you’re swimming through mud. Fuck this, you grab the fill button on your jacket and squeeze it. You’re not supposed to use your jacket to ascend, as you know that it will expand as the pressure drops and you will need to carefully bleed off air to avoid shooting up to the surface, but you don’t care about that anymore. Shooting up to the surface is exactly what you want right now, and you’ll deal with bleeding air off and making depth stops when you’re back up with the rest of your group.The sound of air rushing into your BCD fills your ears, but nothing’s happening. Something doesn’t sound right, like the air isn’t filling fast enough. You look down at your jacket, searching for whatever the trouble might be when FWUNK you bump right into the side of the giant sinkhole. What the hell?? Why is the current pulling me sideways? Why is there even a current in an empty hole in the middle of the ocean??You keep holding the button. INFLATE! GODDAM IT INFLATE!!
Your computer is now making a frantic screeching sound that you’ve never heard before. You notice that you’ve been breathing heavily - it’s a sign of stress - and the sound of air rushing into your jacket is getting weaker.
Every 10m of water adds another 1 atmosphere of pressure. Your tank has enough air for you to spend an hour at 10m (2atm) and to refill your BCD more than a hundred times. Each additional 20m of depth cuts this time in half. This assumes that you are calm, controlling your breathing, and using your muscles slowly with intention. If you panic, begin breathing quickly and move rapidly, this cuts your time in half again. You’re certified to 20m, and you’ve gone briefly down to 30m on some shipwrecks before. So you were comfortable swimming to 25m to look at the arch. While you were looking at it, you sank to 40m, and while you messed around looking for your dive master and then the computer, you sank to 60m. 6 atmospheres of pressure. You have only 10 minutes of air at this depth. When you swam for the surface, you had become disoriented from twisting around and then looking at your gear and you were now right in front of the archway. You swam into the archway thinking it was the surface, that’s why the Blue Hole looked smaller now. There is no current pulling you sideways, you are continuing to sink to to bottom of the arch. When you hit the bottom and started to inflate your BCD, you were now over 90m. You will go through a full tank of air in only a couple of minutes at this depth. Panicking like this, you’re down to seconds. There’s enough air to inflate your BCD, but it will take over a minute to fill, and it doesn’t matter, because that would only pull you into to the top of the arch, and you will drown before you get there.
Holding the inflate button you kick as hard as you can for the light. Your muscles are screaming, your brain is screaming, and it’s getting harder and harder to suck each panicked breath out of your regulator. In a final fit of rage and frustration you scream into your useless reg, darkness squeezing into the corners of your vision.
4 minutes. That’s how long your dive lasted. You died in clear water on a sunny day in only 4 minutes.
Cookie Monster is a charismatic speaker and his well-known history credits him, but his inability to compromise and obsession with turning every event into part of the om-nom-nomicause has made most of his recent contributions crumble
Credit where credit's due, though, people showed him the arguments that his long-standing policy had major side-effects and he switched up his entire catchphrase to reflect that. And managed to keep his base alongside. "Cookies are a sometimes food", indeed
I don't really do foraging but I see posts related to it sometimes and I want you to know: if you describe something as 'edible'--with no other description or information--I consider it damning with faint praise.
Tell me it's delicious. Tell me it's high in vitamin FU. Tell me your favorite recipe. Tell me you look forward to it being in-season.
If this part of the plant meets only the low bar of 'doesn't kill you to eat' I'm filing it under 'Starvation Food' and hopefully never needing to think about it again.
Okay I have also soured on a lot of Prediction Market shit but I do thing we should at least try the most basic regulations, like "If you can affect the market yourself and you bet on it, you go to jail" and "If you try and manipulate the independent observations, you go to jail" and "If you are a government worker or contractor of any kind and you bet on a government-related bet, you go to jail"
Just, like, I feel now might not be the best of times to say whether regulation is impossible for an industry. Might be some confounders in this natural experiment.
Yeah this is true - in particular, everything today is confounded by the fact that the Trump administration just loves crime and so is actively pursuing crime promotion as a policy. There isn't a single industry under the sun that is robust to that, right? Half the reason they use betting markets, alongside crypto, is because their newness means that congressional regulations are pretty weak and the executive can change the rules on a whim, making open rigging easier than say having the Treasury write you checks. We should actually try regulating them first before jumping to conclusions.
(Though I will say the current experience has been pretty down on their upside - the hypothesis of intelligent, hard-nosed actors building socially-valuable prediction estimates has given way to an endless sea of gambling addicts, meme lords, and grifters. We can make it much less harmful - I am much more doubtful that it will ever be all that useful. But of course, human freedom and marginal benefits justify the existence of millions of current things, this is no different)
I actually think that science fiction has done everyone a disservice by presenting escaping to another planet as a remotely feasible near-term solution to problems on Earth.
(I mean, this last bit isn’t actually a great argument, because a lot of techniques proposed for terraforming involve such things as smashing asteroids into planets, blocking out their view of the sun for decades at a time, or seeding the entire planet’s surface with novel extremophile bacteria, which would be unthinkable on Earth; but the point still stands! It would be vastly easier to restore Earth to a healthy climate than to make Mars even as habitable as the peak of Mount Everest)
As Mars is fuck-off far away, it’s really expensive to send even a robot the size of a compact car there, half of all uncrewed missions there fail, and we don’t even know how to land a crewed one yet.
They’re talking about a city on Mars. We don’t even have a city on Antartica! And Antartica is 10000x more hospitable, because it at least has breathable air and readily available water. And Antartica can have an actual supply chain feeding the necessary stuff to it rather than needing to plan rockets. But no one ever suggests colonising Antartica to solve overpopulation, because its so obviously inhospitable and it would cost so much to set up a city there. Still so much better than Mars.
Or cities floating on the ocean! Or cities in the sahara desert! Or cities in orbit! These are all terrible, terrible ideas, but each one is far more feasible and practical than a colony on Mars is.
Did you see anything about how china returned Przwalskis horses to it’s steppe and effectively halted desertification bc keystone species can do stuff like that? Technically terra forming, perfectly doable to engineer/ restore all sorts of earth ecosystems, and SO MUCH MORE FEASIBLE than anything that can be done on Mars.
Christian splurging on a little treat: Just as God generously feeds the birds of the air and clothes the flowers of the field, he provides me with extra money for a little treat.
Atheist splurging on a little treat: Thanks to my personal skill and hard work, my employer values my labour enough to pay me a large salary, so I in turn can afford to pay others for creating little treats.
Agnostic splurging on a little treat: Nobody knows how much money is in my bank account, but that’s no reason I can’t buy a little treat.
Games don't often deal with a sense of scale, because travel is boring and not engaging, but I do think there's something of the experience of moving through a vast place that games end up missing out on. We're certainly capable of making games with vast worlds where it takes hours to get from one place to another, and I don't know, it might be nice to have a game where taking a train ride takes a half hour where you pass through different towns and villages, where a country feels like an actual country that's filled with people and farmlands instead of just a city with twenty guys in it, and a single farm that's apparently keeping those twenty guys fed.
I was thinking about this because I was playing Minecraft with my son, and while Minecraft has "mountains" I kept thinking about how tiny everything is when compared to the real world, and whether there might be something to a game that had actual mountains, where you used carts on tracks and automation because to not do so would waste literal hours of your life.
It would be of very limited appeal, there's a reason that people don't make games like this, but I think I'd appreciate it as a one-time thing.
I talk a lot about politics, a field in which I am, at best, an amateur, but this one is actually almost completely in my expert wheelhouse. Ready for a LONG RANT (TM) about datacenters in space?
INTRODUCTION
Look, Elon Musk just launched SpaceX as a public company. If its valuation were based on its actual business of launching things into orbit and providing satellite communications, it would be a company of middling value, probably in the tens of billions of dollars, maybe approaching $100 billion. Instead, Musk merged it with his AI company, xAI, and declared that its valuation should be based on his new idea: putting AI datacenters in space.
This is a terrible idea for lots and lots of reasons, but I want to specifically address what I think is the biggest one and the one I see people get horribly wrong most often: putting AI datacenters in space doesn't solve the problem of dissipating heat, it makes it worse.
Let's dive in starting with the general case.
HEAT TRANSFER TYPES
I want to start off by looking at different ways to move heat. In classical physics, there are basically three ways: conduction, convection, and radiation and you can find the relevant math here.
Conduction is when two solid objects are touching. Different objects transfer heat differently and a lot depends on the quality of surface contact, but the basic idea is that if you get your object to touch an object at a different temperature that is good at transferring heat, this is a very efficient way to change the temperature of your object. Obviously, though, we don't have that option in space because, well, your spacecraft isn't generally touching other objects and, if it does, they're usually not large enough to absorb all of the heat transfer and will quickly become saturated.
Convection is when a fluid flows over a solid object. Again, this varies depending on the fluid and the quality of contact, but we usually use air or water and both can be very effecient at transferring fairly large amounts of heat if they can contact a significant surface area. Again, this isn't really an option for a spacecraft because they're in a vacuum and, thus, not in contact with any fluids except those inside the spacecraft itself which, while they are useful for moving heat around the spacecraft, don't help with heat going into or out of it.
That only leaves radiation, the least efficient method of transferring heat. Which isn't great! Honestly, making sure that you can get rid of enough heat to prevent your spacecraft from overheating is a major problem in spacecraft design and that's before you add a whole bunch of hardware whose main function generates a metric crap-ton of heat!
HOW MUCH WOULD IT TAKE?
Okay, so let's start breaking down the problem. First off, how much heat are we going to need to radiate away? I found a source that indicates that a leading data center can contain 45 million chips, which seems like a decent place to start. Looking a bit more, it seems like the newest chips generate about 1 kW of heat. Putting these together, it looks like, just for the chips, we're going to need to be dissipating about 45 GW of heat for our space-based datacenter.
Secondly, let's look at our heat equation. Taking the net radiation loss rate equation from this site, we've got most of the variables, but we still need the temperatures. For simplicity I'm going to assume that we need to keep the temperature of the chips below 80 C (353 K) which seems like a high estimate for max temperature, but it should mean we're being conservative in our assumptions, so I'm okay with it. As far as the outside temperature, the environment in earth orbit, either LEO (Low Earth Orbit) or MEO (Middle Earth Orbit) is extremely variable depending whether you're in direct sunlight or not. I'm using this temperature profile and taking the average outside temperature of about -32.5 C or 241 K.
Calculating with those numbers, what I'm getting is that you'd need a radiator area of over 65 million cubic meters to cool all of this. For reference, that's over 9,000 football fields.
Now, according to this presentation from two years ago (shout-out to CalPoly, my alma mater!), current radiator technology generally comes in at a density of about 19 kg/m^2 but there is a stated goal to get that down to 6 kg/m^2 for long-range missions. Running both numbers, I come up with a weight of over 1.2 billion kg for the current density and almost 391 million kg for the lower goal density. A Falcon 9 has a payload capacity of 22,800 kg to low earth orbit, so it would take over 54,000 launches just for the radiators needed to cool the datacenter chips at current densities, though that drops to a little over 17,000 launches if we can get down to the goal density. A Falcon 9 launch costs about $45,000 per kg to LEO, so that puts your cost of launch somewhere between $55.7 trillion and $17.5 trillion.
Also, how long would that take? Well, I found a timeline of SpaceX launch missions each year (https://spacexnow.com/stats) and it looks like, starting in 2021, the trend line is pretty linear. If the number of launches keeps increasing at that rate and if all launches were dedicated just to launching radiator panels for datacenters, they could launch enough of the current radiator panels to cool the chips of one datacenter by 2065, though it could be done by 2046 with the lower density panels they're working on.
Keep in mind, that's just the radiators to cool the chips, that doesn't include the rest of the spacecraft or the datacenter itself. I'd also note that I didn't even really consider solar heating or the reflected heat from Earth or any other heat generated by the spacecraft (including the heat generated by generating the power for the chips in the first place!), I only considered the heat generated by the chips themselves, so this is probably way smaller than what would actually be needed.
THAT'S CRAZY!
Right? Look, I don't doubt that we'll have orbital infrastructure at some point in the future, probably including computational datacenters, but the amount of problems that need to be overcome before that is a possibility are immense. I've only detailed out one of them and it's already completely prohibitive with current technology and even with reasonably projected technology.
For comparison, if you were to try to cool all of that here on Earth with water, as they're often doing, you'd need a surface area of about 49 million square meters (about 6,800 football fields) assuming water at 10 degrees C and you'd need to run absolutely epic amounts of that water through it to maintain the temperature. But that's something that you can do on Earth! Don't get me wrong, there are all kinds of negative externalities in terms of the way that excess heat affects the environment, but even if all of those were priced in it doesn't approach nearly the multi-trillion dollar price tag of cooling a space-based datacenter.
Also, caveats again, keep in mind that I only looked at the amount of radiative capacity that would be necessary to cool the chips themselves. I didn't consider the cost of launching the datacenter or all of the heat that would be generated by all of the other components necessary to run it or issues with maintenance and longevity, all of which are much worse in space than on the ground. I'd also note that I tried to make every assumption in a way that would reduce the size of the radiative capacity necessary, so even just my estimate for this one thing is probably too low.
Long story short, I don't think that datacenters in space are a near-term possibility and they're definitely iffy in the medium term as well. Long-term? Sure, I think it'll probably happen, but I think that space-based datacenters are unlikely to happen anywhere near in time to justify SpaceX's current sky-high stock valuations.
CONCLUSION
Look, I'm a big space guy and I absolutely think that, in the future, there will be lots of things in space, even datacenters. That said, the economics and just the pure physics of what it looks like today are so monumentally, over-the-top bonkers that anyone trying to sell you something premised on the idea that it's just around the corner, say, SpaceX shares at today's valuation of $132 which would make the whole company worth $1.786 trillion when it generated only $4.7 billion in revenue last quarter for a net loss of $4.3 billion, is probably selling you the modern equivalent of seaside property in Nebraska.
I know, crazy to think that Elon Musk might be trying to scam people, but there it is. Anyways, let me know if you think I missed something and I hope you enjoyed this or at least found it interesting.
