That’s 2376 barleycorns, or a small bag of grain if you will.

Or a barleycorn that’s one barleycorn long? Or a really large foot that’s a foot long. Or a chain that’s a chain long?

Completely agree.

People are tribal - they tend to conform to what the group thinks and does. We’re also primed with strong us vs. them tendencies, that is you want your team to win whatever happens.

As you say, if you believe that (for example) your friends and neighbours think democrats are radical socialists out to destroy American life, it would be highly dangerous to vote democrat let alone be on team democrat.

Well, he had met King Charles and Camilla earlier that week, so he is giving audiences - at least to people he respects.

the crust … starts crumbling somewhere else creating new mountains or islands

Exactly. The oceanic crust will (in geologic time) crack in front of the bolts and be dragged down parallel to the bit that was bolted, stacking the oceanic crust with the newer bit under the older one.

The cracking and stacking happens naturally and this creates stacks of many oceanic crust sections moving to the left of the picture.

It might well be, but I’m a member of this community, not that one, and have no interest in learning its rules. Sorry to be negative, but I’m happy discussing things here

The explanation is not actually correct, and misses a key mechanism in genetics.

A major observation about evolution is that it’s completely improbable that a new gene for something could appear in the genome by random mutation (this is the famous watchmaker argument, or the hurricane in a scrapyard making a 747). So how do new genes come about?

One mechanism is by gene duplication - this occurs by accident during DNA replication for example by an error in recombination. Basically a chunk of DNA that may include one or more genes ends up duplicated in an offspring so the offspring has 2 copies of one or more genes.

Because this duplicate gene creates a protein that already exists in the genetic plan, it probably won’t be too bad for the child, and so the offspring survive and may produce offspring of its own, ‘fixing’ this duplication in the population

Now mutation and selection can go to work and push one copy of the gene one way and the other in a different way, creating two different genes. Offspring carrying this new gene gain a selective benefit and so the gene becomes positively selected for and animals without the gene disappear from the gene pool.

This process occurs a lot, which is why we have families of hormones such as the steroids which handle both stress (eg adrenalin) and muscle growth (anabolic steroids) and immune system suppression (corticosteroids like prednisone) and sex steroids (estrogen, testosterone) - very different things but very similar chemically and genetically. It also explains why steroids in one family often have side effects such as weight gain, mood alteration and affecting sex drive.

Another example is the colour receptor in the retina of the eye. Fish, lizards and birds all have 4 colour receptors leading to fantastic colour definition from near infrared to low ultra-violet. Mammals lost two genes and in general can only see in 2 colours, red and blue.

Apes however duplicated the red receptor gene and the copy has gone through a few million years of mutation and selection that has drifted it up to detect green - humans see in red, green and blue. Our colour vision is possible only because of a gene duplication.

Here’s one that I enjoyed and covers a critical period of modern East Asian history: “The Gate” by François Bizot.

It’s him recounting how he travelled to Cambodia and was captured by the Khmer Rouge. He survived … just … By forming a relationship with Comrade Duch who

as the Chairman of Tuol Sleng (S-21) prison camp, and head of the Santebal, Kang Kek Iew was responsible for the interrogation and torture of thousands of individuals, and was convicted for the execution of at least 12,272 individuals, including women and children [Wikipedia]

While he covers the history of the Khmer Rouge period, his writing is highly empathic and discusses the suffering of himself and hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens at the hands of other ordinary citizens and how could this possibly happen. It’s a highly emotional book.

Best of luck with your reading!

Their pride.

That was fantastic and a must-view for this topic.

And don’t forget the napple!

I think this is the primary reason, but I’ll add a couple of thoughts.

1. His people. The core of his actions right now is ‘project 2025’ which was written by an extreme right wing think tank in Washington called ‘The Heritage Foundation’. They’ve been around since Reagan and have been thought leaders in the GOP all this time. In other words, they know the system extremely well and they are well organised.

2. His supporters. A large number of his supporters are poor, Christian folk, often from red states. They are poor because the structure of the American economy has been designed to extract money from the non-rich and channel it to big business and rich individuals. Think Walmart and Musk. For 40 years GOP have been telling the lie that billionaires as job creators, that taxes, regulations and unions are bad, that trickle-down economics works. This has led to staggering amounts of money taken from the middle and working classes and piled into bank accounts of the real elites (here meaning billionaires and biggest companies). Trump’s supporters know the economy is rigged and they want to change it. Unfortunately they believe their church leaders (who have unabashedly instructed their flocks on politics and single issues like abortion) and the mainstream media (meaning Fox) who push these lies incessantly. The Democrats have not attacked (let alone resolved) these issues under Obama and Biden. But Trump claims he’ll shake up Washington as an outsider and tackle these issues. His supporters somehow do not equate a nepo baby, ivy-league educated billionaire ex-president as one of the elite. They think of him as ‘their man’.

In short, the propaganda from Fox, the Internet, their churches and their neighbours has persuaded them to vote against their interests and elect a group of elite political insiders and businessmen who have taken 4 years to plan the hostile takeover of the government in order to channel even more money to themselves.

It’s in the middle of a Russian winter so the central heating must have been belting out so much heat for the poor Colonel to open said window.

Umm, it’s your immune system that detects the vaccine and responds to it by developing antibodies specific to the vaccine (and by extension to the actual disease). Just as it would when challenged in real life by the pathogen.

Vaccination basically gives your immune system a several day head start on producing antibodies.

Depending on the location, but

1. Often rain comes along for the ride on a warm front as it moves over the property (although cold fronts also carry rain)
2. In winter, the rainclouds act as insulation and so rainy days are warmer than blue-sky days

This is the right answer. I had the job of planning a schema update to fix this shitty design.

Saying that, unicode and character formats are incredibly complex things that are not easily implemented. For example two strings in utf-8 can contain the same number of characters but be hugely different in size (up to 3-4x different!). It’s well worth reading through some articles to get a feel of the important points.

Many years ago, my mother used the electric lawn mower without unspooling all the wire. When it finally shorted, all the plastic wire insulation was in the process of turning into a melty plastic soup. A Lesson Was Learned.

The reason isn’t resistance - it’s that the coiled wire makes an electromagnet that stores energy in the magnetic field. The alternating current in the mains switches 50 or 60 times a second. In each cycle the magnetic field is created, destroyed then recreated in the opposite direction, then destroyed. This dumps a lot of energy (and therefore heat) into the coil.

Even better - it’s using ESPHome, which is part of the Home Assistant stack.

ESPHome works from a YAML config file, which ESPHome uses to build firmware images which can be installed OTA (or USB of you must)

There’s a word for not being able to handle this: misophonia

It seems that for some people (myself included) it generates a primal urge.

Or stepping off an escalator and just stopping right there to get their bearings.