Have you ever heard of the expression “When you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail”?

Sure, ok, right, of course.

I’m saying that that description of Heaven is basically like being high 24/7 so nothing matters and nothing can make you sad.

If you go to heaven, you’d probably want your grandmother to be the kindly old lady you remember. Her own grandmother might want her to be the little kid she remembered bouncing on her knee. She, herself, might want to be the 20 year old who was full of energy and beautiful. Is 20-year-old you going to curl up on 20-year-old grandma’s lap while she reads you a story?

The only way to really solve that is that heaven is basically being extremely high, so your “brain” is sending out happy chemicals and you don’t care at all about anything else.

But, “I can’t wait to get to heaven so I can be high as balls 24/7” doesn’t sound as wholesome as “I can’t wait to get to heaven so I can see grandma again”.

Sweet!

So, it’s like drugs. There’s no “you” left, just a pile of goo that’s eternally drugged out on happiness.

Yeah, exactly. Say a your best friend is Muslim. Obviously, no Muslims are allowed in heaven. If you’re incapable of sadness in heaven, then you must no longer care about your best friend. But, if you no longer care about your best friend, do you actually care about anybody?

So, heroin. Gotcha.

More like dodges the question.

It was ideas like this that convinced me heaven wasn’t real when I was young.

Like, some woman’s first husband dies. She eventually remarries and is happy. Later she dies and goes to heaven. Who is she with there? Husband 1 or 2? Both? Neither? The only way it makes sense to me is if people are essentially high 24/7 so nothing bothers them. But, is that really so heavenly?

I love that article. There are also ones about dates and times. The more you deal with dates and times, the more you realize how messed up they are.

It was Internet Explorer. But, what was probably confusing about it was that anything that required Internet access would start up the program that dialed the modem and connected to the Internet. So, clicking on the icon would eventually launch the browser, but first it would launch the dial-up program, which would take about 30s to connect.

As an aside, it really grates to see how Microsoft called their browser “The Internet”. And that’s the least dastardly thing they did that let them use their monopoly on operating systems to destroy Netscape.

Was it Jen? She was entrusted to take care of the Internet by Roy and Moss, and she did a piss-poor job of it.

My favourite story about aircraft design about some of the design mistakes on the F-16 fighter.

The F-16 was the first fly-by-wire fighter. They didn’t have much experience with it, and tried out some new things. One was that instead of having a stick between the legs of the pilot they used a side stick. And, since everything was fly-by-wire they didn’t need the stick to mechanically move. They decided they’d just use a solid stick with pressure transducers, since it was simpler and more reliable than a stick that moved.

The trouble was that the pilots couldn’t estimate how much pressure they were using. This led to the pilots over-rotating on take-off (pulling back too hard). Even funnier was that at early airshows, when the pilots were doing a high-speed roll, you could see the control surfaces twitching with the heartbeat of the pilots as they shoved the stick as hard as they could to get maximum roll.

That led to them adding a small amount of give to the stick, essentially giving the pilots feedback on how hard they were pushing the control surfaces.

Another more subtle issue with the design was that originally the stick was set up for forward, back, left and right aligned with the axes of the plane itself. But, they discovered that when pilots pulled back on the stick, they were pulling slightly towards themselves, causing the plane to also roll. So, they realigned it so that “pulling back” is slightly pulling towards the pilot’s body, rather than directly along the forward / backward axis of the plane.

There was a listener question on a science podcast recently that asked about how the temperature changed on the moon during the recent solar eclipse.

They almost got what a solar eclipse was, but not quite. During a solar eclipse, the moon gets between the sun and the earth, blocking the light getting to the earth and casting a shadow on the earth. The side of the moon facing the earth is completely dark because the thing that normally lights it up (the sun) is completely behind it. But, the back side of the moon is getting full sun and just as hot as normal.

I think part of the problem with understanding all this is that the sun is just so insanely bright. Like, it’s a bit hard to believe that the full moon is so bright just because it’s reflecting sunlight. It’s also amazing that the “wandering stars” (planets) look like stars when they’re just blobs of rocks or gases that are reflecting the insanely bright light of the sun.

It’s amazing if you think about it. Light comes out of the sun in every possible direction. A tiny fraction of it hits the surface of Mercury, and only some of that light is reflected back out. The light reflected from Mercury goes in almost every direction. A tiny fraction of it hits the earth. But, even with that indirect bounce, it’s bright enough to see with the naked eye.

https://mastodon.social/@RikerGoogling@botsin.space

Take “Hi”, 2 letters, which means exactly the same as “How are you doing?”, 14 letters.

It’s similar, but not exactly the same by any stretch. But, yeah, it’s not a perfect method. But, there probably isn’t a perfect method. How would you decide what “1 unit of information” is?

Nah, Loki at least has a plan. He’s more like Pierce Hawthorne from Community. A guy who can’t seem to get along with anybody, who desperately wants to be cool, failing constantly, but who uses his money to make up for that.

How do you know? Apparently you’re not capable of reading the label!

So, despite the ingredients being listed, you’re still confused? Do you have a brain injury?