K‮ly‬e @khird@qoto.org

@mitch NASA does lots of stuff that isn't STEM, though. They have their own logistics guys (super guppy), their own detectives and auditors (inspector general's dep't), enough management/HR staff to sink a battleship, ...

@dgar There used to be a huge statue of Jesus nearby, made of some kind of foam moulded onto a steel frame. Its appearance led to the moniker “Big Butter Jesus” as well as a song of the same name. But it’s “used to be” because it turns out that flammable foam on a sixty-foot piece of metal doesn’t play well with thunderstorms.

The insurance company classified its demise as an “act of God.”

@mitch pretty much every other genre has humans as the first/only sapient species (or at best in fantasy they share the role with short-humans, or pointy-eared-humans, etc. that's a totally different race honest we swear). Let sci-fi go against the grain! ;)

@freemo in cooking, oils are generally triglycerides - we aren't really adapted to consume raw hydrocarbons. And even a low molecular weight species like triformin already has a boiling point over 250C.

@freemo If you're not set on a paint, you might try a wood dye. It sits in the sweet spot between fully opaque paints and natural-tone stains, in that it soaks into the wood and leaves the grain visible but comes in vivid colours. The wear resistance comes from the fact that in penetrates the wood to a certain depth, so you'd have to physically abrade the wood down by a millimetre or so before you start seeing the undyed part.

See rockler.com/transtint-dyes for an idea of the kind of colours you could get. Reminds me of shopping for fountain pen ink!

@freemo a bridge? I'm not sure I understand the description correctly but I'm picturing a bunch of "pilings" placed side by side and a "deck" that lies across the top of all of them.

@freemo use a fluid. Water has a remarkably high specific heat and conductivity doesn't matter so much in a fluid because you can use forced convection to transport heat to the sink.

@mitch your bank sends you a vague apology email tomorrow, but six months later a news story reveals that their online banking server retrieves account balances from the database over facebook messenger and today's outage cost the bank tens of millions in failed transactions

@freemo it's only laterally symmetric, but longitudinally it can still provide stability. Suppose the legs are enough ballast to keep it from rolling - the barrel shape just has to provide enough resistance to pitching to counteract the weight of the head and stop the animal from tipping forward.

Also airplane fuselages are just cylindrical because that's the easiest shape to design a pressure vessel in. It would certainly be convenient to have a rectangular cross section from the perspective of volumetric efficiency, but it'd have to be far stiffer and thus heavier. Planes that place a higher premium on aerodynamic efficiency - fighter jets, aerobatic planes, gliders - don't generally bear much as resemblance to a barrel.

@freemo stability while afloat is a function of shape. Being less dense than water is no good to the poor capybara if it has to spend tons of energy trying to avoid rolling to a nose-down position. Hippos are similarly barrel-shaped.

@mitch depends who's doing the expecting, I guess. When the local newspaper turned off its feeds, I just switched over to their competitor's. Having a feed is still my expectation, and their proposed alternative of "give us your email address and we'll push content to your inbox" wasn't really an acceptable substitute.

@mitch I have a bit over three dozen feeds I use these days. Friends' blogs, news sites, webcomics, some bug reports I'm affected by... overall a pretty wide mix.

I really don't understand people who have five different news apps on their phone in preference to five feeds in one reader. Pretty much anything you want to follow/subscribe to works in RSS without even needing an account. YouTube channel? Check. Substack page? Check. Mastodon user? Check.

@mitch I haven't seen that around in recent years. Miss it & sorry to hear of his passing.

@dragfyre

I hope things will work out, but I can't share your confidence - rarely does any instance revisit a block to remove it; defederation is usually a "life sentence". Sandwich.net already has us silenced, so outside of my followers nobody can even see my reply to you, much less engage and try to deescalate.

I hope to see you around in future, but in case not: so long and thanks for all the fish.

@dragfyre Hey! Speaking as member of QOTO's admin team, I think you (or your admin who took this decision) has got the wrong end of the stick. Speaking as one of your follows from QOTO, I'll be sad to lose contact but I won't attempt to evade your instance's block by making an alt, for reasons I'll describe below.

We've been on a few widely-circulated blocklists since Gab was on the fedi since we didn't defederate from them, in accordance with our general policy of only doing so when the instance in question defeats user-level tools. Every so often, one such block list resurfaces and people come crawling out of the woodwork to accuse us of being Nazis because somebody said back in 2019 that we were Nazis since we didn't block Gab. It happened again this week, and freemo's been trying to refute a fresh wave of accusations since then.

In fact, the reason we're extremely reluctant to block servers is for exactly what you bring up in this post: it disrupts the connections between uninvolved users. Even on Spinster there were level-headed people I enjoyed interacting with before we had to block them sitewide for reasons those individuals had nothing to do with.

However, if sandwich.net decides to follow through on this threat, it's going to be up to its users - not those on QOTO - to decide if it's worth making alts or otherwise working around the admin's restriction. For us to circumvent that and defeat your admin's clearly-expressed attempt to cut contact with us would be colourably harassment, and we're already taking rather more accusations of that than are justified.