I got a big fat BLOCKED screen today trying to post a comment. It had no links, no profanity, and I didn't even use the b!zx word or the Naz! word. Pack your shit, folks

Continued on from here.

I agree it may not be by much depending on mass.

No disagreement here. I was discounting it due to the low acceleration in this case (e.g. 1e-8) being essentially immaterial to the calculations. But in this case, yes, it does accelerate. We could at the moment the filament is pinched also fire up a 1N rocket motor to counter the force, killing the tiny acceleration. We could also make the mass arbitrarily large, but then it would have non negligible gravity and the calculations for how far the mass moves in any given time and it's energy become somewhat trickier.

Yea sure will.

OK, so we have our 20,000,000 J each second.

Let's swap it round. The filament is fixed to the very large mass, and you (a tiny you of negligible mass) are riding on the 1Kg mass as it accelerates. The you pinch your fingers to exert 1N of drag and you and the mass's acceleration stops (or close enough!) as the 1N of rocket engine is countered by the 1N of drag.

As before, the 20,000,000J each second is going into your fingers.

Agreed?

The comment entry box proclaims that

"blockquote" Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.

, and

are accepted, but according to my regular HTML references "quote" has been deprecated (since 3.2?) for "q" Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.. So, how does Slash mangle them?

I've never used the ecode formatting before either. How does that look?

<b>"ecode"</b> Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.

.

How does that look?

So, "blockquote" indents and left-side bar ; greyed text ; "quote" indents more, left side bar, regular text colour ; "q" is ignored ; "ecode" indents, side-bars, greys, and monospaces. I'll just stick with "blockquote".

You can tell this place has really gone to shit because the people trolling me keep coming up with dumber and dumber arguments.

It's slow as fuck and it doesn't work worth one.

Normally I'd post an article like this to my own blog, but since I've not bothered to bring it back up since my web host died this is, sadly, the most reasonable place for me to post. In the past I've done detailed howtos and this will not be that, because all I really need it to be is just a record of more or less what I did. To wit, I got Ubuntu installed and working correctly on my antique potatoe, an FX-8350, 990FX-based system with nvidia graphics, NVMe storage, and UEFI with BIOS compat.

I installed from vmware on Windows. Created my VM with 3 out of my 8 cores and 8GB RAM. I added the physical NVMe disk to the VM config as an NVMe disk specifically. Install went off smoothly. But after updating my Firefox snap was already broken, so I decided to blow away snap and install normal firefox. I also installed kde-plasma-desktop and kde-full in order to get away from Unity, and because gnome is in a snap too. I could have just installed kubuntu, but I wanted to see what the process would be like with the normal Ubuntu CD.

Unfortunately, after the install, the USB3 doesn't work. This turns out to be a problem with IOMMU settings. It also causes the boot to be extended while things fail. Short form, in /etc/default/grub: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash amd_iommu=on iommu=pt"

On boot I was using Nouveau and needed to install nvidia drivers (sudo ubuntu-drivers autoinstall). Sadly these driver versions only support "Mosaic" "SLI", which is where your display spans monitors. I may try an older driver to get SLI working again. Getting nvidia-settings working required running nvidia-xconfig (as root) in order to produce a working xorg.conf, and also fixing a polkit permissions issue (sudo chmod u+x /usr/share/screen-resolution-extra/nvidia-polkit). Even worse, the screen stays dark after resume from suspend. This is of course because of systemd.

sudo systemctl stop nvidia-suspend.service
sudo systemctl stop nvidia-hibernate.service
sudo systemctl stop nvidia-resume.service
sudo systemctl disable nvidia-suspend.service
sudo systemctl disable nvidia-hibernate.service
sudo systemctl disable nvidia-resume.service
sudo rm /lib/systemd/system-sleep/nvidia

Finally, part of the use case is being able to boot Windows from Linux and Linux from Windows, both in vmware player. The Windows stuff is trivial, clicky clicky. The Linux stuff isn't because vmware doesn't bother to keep their vmnet and vmmon modules updated for modern kernels. After installing vmware but before launching vmplayer, install the right version from the above repo for your vmware and kernel versions. You have to be root in order to use physical devices on Linux (or maybe you can solve it with group perms? Haven't tried this yet.) Windows is on SATA on my system so I added the SATA full disk as a SATA disk and it works fine.

Who can't handle "Apple-ish" funny quotes, without for one second considering the more difficult question of non-Latin characters and other HTML entities.

For clarity, the problem seems to be (not an Apple-eater myself) that Apple, with some level of automation, substitute a typographical double- (or single-) quote pair where the text file has (had) an ASCII double- or single-quote pair in it. SlashCode has more problems with HTML and Unicode entities, but this particular bug is particularly common. And annoying.

And msmash is one of the guilty parties.

How many editors are there?

In order to install a modern Linux on my PC I have to write out TWO pieces of installer media because neither latest Ubuntu or Pop! OS will successfully boot the installer otherwise. Once installed, Pop! OS can't resume from suspend on my desktop, not even a laptop. Had to install a bunch of patch crap to get vmware player to run on a modern kernel. As long as all these basic things are gotchas, Linux can never reasonably even have a year of the desktop. Not enough time and effort are spent on actually making things work, it's always the new and shiny that gets the attention. I've been using Linux for decades now and the quality has decreased even as the functionality has increased. What a shit show. Just a couple years ago I could write out an installer from Windows and expect it to work, things are actually going backwards. WTF?

As Lithium-Ion batteries, isolated "islands" of lithium form in the battery, inhibiting its ability to carry a charge, and decreasing its capacity. Researchers have discovered a means of restoring that lost capacity (paper) by rapidly discharging batteries after fully charging them. This causes migration of the isolated Lithium, and in experiments with cells designed with such islands they saw increases in voltage as the cells were rapidly discharged.

Another potential one from Arxiv.

Anoxic Atmospheres on Mars Driven by Volcanism: Implications for Past
Environments and Life

The current atmosphere of Mars is low pressure, but oxidising (largely because water gets split by UV high in the atmosphere, the hydrogen is lost to space but the oxygen (hydroxyl molecules) is heavy enough (has a short enough mean free path) to be retained in the atmosphere ; the iron in the surface rocks turns red (goes to +3 oxidation state). Which is well and good, and well understood. But ... oxygen does horrible things to biochemistry. Ask any SCUBA diver who has read up on the biochemistry of oxygen toxicity. While biological systems can learn how to handle having the poisonous stuff around, it needs a fair amount of biochemical machinery to contain and manage the poison. After a few hundred million years to a billion years, life on Earth managed to learn how to handle it and survived the "Great Oxidation Event". But all serious models for the origin of life on Earth depend on having initially a reducing atmosphere, unlike that of today's planet (and Mars). Mars today has no observed volcanism, but relatively fresh volcanic landforms suggests there is some volcanism from time to time. Impacts can also inject surface material into the atmosphere without active volcanism.

This study describes a model of the influence of volcanism on the oxidation state of the Martian atmosphere. A modest (more than ~0.14cu.km per year, around 1% of Earth's rate) amount of basaltic volcanism would be able to make the current atmosphere reducing, and volcanism was likely to be more common in the past, so the atmosphere of early Mars was probably often reducing, which is generally expected to be a good thing for a local origin of life. Also, an atmosphere which changed between reducing (after a large impact or volcanism) and oxidising (under the continuing influence of solar radiation) might actually stimulate the development of interesting chemistry (a.k.a "life").

Chemical signatures of previous reducing atmospheres which could be measured with current and future Mars rovers are discussed.

Arxiv 2103.13304 "Automatic planetary defense : Deflecting NEOs by missiles shot from L1 and L3 (Earth-Moon)" proposes that

• -1- hitting a PHA at 90deg to it's orbit is most likely to produce a large course change. I think that's pretty obvious once you look at it.
• -2- this can be achieved at more manageable cost from L1/ L3, which are always in sight of Earth (radio communications). An elliptical orbit CONFOCAL (having the same focal points as) to the PHA's hyperbolic orbit will intersect the PHA at 90deg. I'm not entirely sure what the L1/ L3 brings to it other than relative stability and line-of-sight.
• -3- there remains the problem of determining the PHA's orbit sufficiently accurately sufficiently soon. Time-of-flight from L1/ L3 to half-way across the Earth-Moon system remains significant, O(1day).
• -4- Launching a salvo of missiles would produce lower risk-of-miss.
• -5- Wouldn't a missed missile return to (close to) L1/ L3, potentially for re-use or re-fuelling?
• -6- If so, why not produce a stream of orbiting missiles needing relatively small course adjustments to reach a PHA, so approximating a permanent defence system?
• -7- doesn't the L1 Sun-Earth point present the same benefits ... no, we're looking at PHAs which may impact the central body, and we don't care about rocks hitting the Sun.
• -8- You'd need two streams of missiles in clockwise/ counter-clockwise orbits to reach most orbits efficiently. Would you need some at moderate inclinations to cover out-of-Fundamental Plane objects? Or ... the contra-rotating missile streams being at 45deg to the Fundamental Plane to cover both options.
• -9- Somewhat related, what would be the benefits of Earth-Sun L4/ L5 points for positioning earth-scanning telescopes to scan for PHAs.
• -n-

The detailed paper (Acta.Astro 50 185 (2002) is hidden and SciHub blocked now. Asked author for a copy (ore re-post yo Arxiv?). Need a VPN.

I need a new webhost because my old hosting service deleted my database for being over quota. I have backups, of course, but they're slightly old, so this is irritating. The quota was very small.

MARTIN ESPINOZA
2277 GLENROSE AVE
ALTADENA , CA , 91001
(480) 516-7385

This person has given my email address to Jiffy Lube so that I would get spammed. Obviously it would be inappropriate to call them and tell them they're an ass. "Please" "don't" DO THAT.

When "you" (or your OS) upgrade[s] Firefox it opens a new welcome screen. This one says "Your privacy respected, automatically". Yeah, no. I configured my home page to be my most visited sites, not some page you decided I should visit so that you could collect statistics. Gaslighting much?

This thing on?