Another thing to think about is how much your motivation depends on presence and properties of company (does it help significantly if you have people trying to learn the same thing, or maybe people who will be at least somewhat interested in what you're trying to figure out and will ask nontrivial questions?).
@_thegeoff Fluid mechanics? How blood flow splits between vessels is somewhat nontrivial, and I'd expect that there are nice scaling rules to be had around determining whether blood flow in some area will be laminar.
Not physics per se, but maybe statistics in the area of measurements with inaccuracy? "How do we tell with few measurements whether this value increases over time" is something I haven't seen doctors and vets have an intuition around.
re: scary footage of a real train crash (zero fatalities, zero severe injuries)
@0xabad1dea I agree that it seems to have been applied all the time the train was visible. I wonder how much earlier it got applied: only when the crossing got into view, or significantly earlier at some sort of pre-crossing signal (not a block signal, but a crossing status signal -- I'm not sure if Netherlands has those though; for comparison, the signal in Poland looks like this: https://www.transportszynowy.pl/Kolej/sygnalizacjaprzejazdowe).
scary footage of a real train crash (zero fatalities, zero severe injuries)
Does this train seem to move at a speed typical for that line? I'm kinda surprised that it seems not to have been notified by the signal before the crossing that the crossing is not closed properly (it wasn't closed properly at any point, because the barriers got broken off -- which is usually sensed -- essentially immediately).
@_thegeoff I don't understand the comparison, because I think the units don't match. Do you mean sth like "if you were to fill a large volume with potassium chloride, you'd get 2x normal background dose in the middle of the volume"?
@mcc Many sites will sadly ignore that header though. I'd check (by using "copy as curl" in devtools and modifying the command) if the site in question is one of those.
IMO they aren't boring, but they're unpleasant, insofar they ~require one to consider how to ~manipulate people (c.f. Granny Weatherwax's description of sin).
FWIW Sam the alien in the webcomic Freefall claims that his original society is somewhat like that.
@GroupNebula563 @Heliograph @_who_up_instancing_they_host
And probably refuses to give out signed objects, so that boosts do not propagate versions for wrong instances.
Perhaps wardriving? Or using Shodan?
E.g. I recently received a document (https://www.oeffentlichkeitsgesetz.ch/downloads/befreite-dokumente/efd/2025-03-12_scan_2025-10-10-16-14-11.pdf) as a result of a FOIA-style Swiss federal law. As previously agreed upon, some attachments were omitted entirely (because they would most likely not have been releasable and I didn't care for them). Amusingly, the titles of those attachments (which we actually discussed earlier in person) were redacted from the attachment list.
I suspect that the reasoning was similar: there was very little chance of me complaining about that.
Also, underredacting is irreversible, while overredacting isn't. There like are more incentives to avoid underredacting (because there are people with potentially clear and demonstrable harm from such a mistake) than overredacting, too.
@islieb Soll das nicht lieber "letzer Tag" sein? :)
How do you get the liquid in and out of #31?
@luna Does anything weird happen if the instance receives a post with an eye via federation?
:)
On one hand, mirroring the numbers makes the whole thing appear "unnatural" as opposed to causing people to realize that there's nothing natural in the normal one.
On the other hand, if someone already realized that the normal one is just as natural as the other one, mirrored numbers make them notice that letters actually have orientation.
My university's association of student mathematicians had such a clock, and some people would bring it and replace the lecture hall clock before the linear algebra lecture that would introduce the concept of orientation.
I enjoy things around information theory (and data compression), complexity theory (and cryptography), read hard scifi, currently work on weird ML (we'll see how it goes), am somewhat literal minded and have approximate knowledge of random things. I like when statements have truth values, and when things can be described simply (which is not exactly the same as shortly) and yet have interesting properties.
I live in the largest city of Switzerland (and yet have cow and sheep pastures and a swimmable lake within a few hundred meters of my place :)). I speak Polish, English, German, and can understand simple Swiss German and French.
If in doubt, please err on the side of being direct with me. I very much appreciate when people tell me that I'm being inaccurate. I think that satisfying people's curiosity is the most important thing I could be doing (and usually enjoy doing it). I am normally terse in my writing and would appreciate requests to verbosify.
I appreciate it if my grammar or style is corrected (in any of the languages I use here).