TIL Dankelflaute, a time when it is too dark with too little wind for either solar or wind energy generation. Thank you for this amazing word.

It has to be scoped by area. A Dankelflaute that covers the European continent has never been observed. OTOH, a Dankelflaute that covers only Germany is a regular occurrence.

So, you're telling me there is daylight in Spain when we have night in Germany?

Also, have you ever done some research on how winds work? They're usually blowing (or not blowing) across the whole continent.

So, yeah, Dunkelflauten usually cover the whole continent.

I'm saying there is always wind blowing somewhere on the continent. For the time period where we have had widespread measurement of wind speeds continent wide, there has never been an hour without enough wind to turn a generator in some location.

https://communities.springernature.com/posts/quantifying-the...

Quadrillions?

This is not really the same thing. When people are discussing the dB output of things like data centers, it's a constant volume. While your kids may be loud, they are not outputting this volume 24/7 without rest. (If they are, consider enrolling them in Opera singing lessons.)

And furthermore, the actual acoustical impact is very different from what is measurable or what might cause physical harm.

I've spent enough time on city council noise ordnance boards and understand enough about acoustics to say that the professional sound system I own would certainly be audible and annoying to my neighbors half a kilometer away even if it were not appreciably above the noise floor of the surrounding environment.

Folks are great a signal detection and it's very annoying to them to be able to detect an unwanted bass drum or similar, which they can do at pretty long distances. Even distributed noise is still often noticeable to people.

For instance, I live in the literal middle of nowhere and I still encounter real noise pollution from gas well heads and gas processing plants that are several kilometers from my home.

Yea, and if you go beyond people, animals are much more receptive. It's one thing to have a big building nearby that's sort of annoying, it's another thing when that building means all your local wildlife leaves. No birds singing, deer, raccoons, opossums gone, etc.

Speaking as a bucket who, within, holds many crabs, I think the crabs inside me could make me (the bucket) MUCH nicer than any of these other, more desolate, buckets nearby. Instead of investing untold wealth into navigating towards these far off buckets that currently are full of holes, and cannot house crabs, it would be much cheaper to make me (the bucket the crabs are in) very nice for all of the crabs.

It's silly to me that some crabs are working on trying to leave the nice bucket (me, where all the crabs are) for some shoddy bucket far far away. All because they don't want to fix the bucket they have at hand.

A lot of us black pilled crabs want to fix the bucket but feel that the hole punchers are winning.

Crab bucket, but it's us forcing people to invest in making earth nicer instead of destroying it for momentary profit. We could call this movement 'Human Earth'.

Yea, from a UX perspective, being able to send your friend a URL and know that they're seeing exactly what you see is awesome. It makes support/debugging/etc nicer too, if you're trying to walk somebody through something.

Yep, it's awful. I'm not sure if it's confirmation bias, but I've noticed the worst offenders have been Boomers. I'm gonna chalk it up to an aging population, and a specific generation that likes to think of themselves much too highly.

If you're at the top of the screen, at least in Chrome 153.0.8010.37, it has a little interactive bit. You have to scroll through the images in order to be dropped at the actual web page, at which point the images go back to being a regular part of the page.

I agree that it's sort of stupid, not a fan.

It's less than OpenAI did for Astra, but that was my first encounter opening it and my first thought was that they decided they liked Astra's hero/scrolling animation. I'm pleased to see they didn't make the entire page that like OpenAI did, but I'm expecting to encounter this pattern more often on these announcements now.

Only sheep call other people sheep.

Sheep often like to think themselves the wolf or coyote, it would seem.

All this time, I've been considering myself the warlock. When, in fact, I've simply been the Imp. Dastardly news.

It's goblins all the way down.

The book in question aside,

> Environmental Determinism is the ultimate racism.

I don't see how this is true, even somewhat? Saying that the environment you're in shapes your culture, progress, and overall development as a society, makes perfect sense. Saying that the environment does not play a huge factor in this leaves open only the option of that development being genetic/hereditary, doesn't it? You'd be blaming the failure or shortcomings of civilizations, current and previous, on the genetic predisposition of their peoples. That feels far more racist to me than saying, "This area did not have X resources in available and sufficient quantities to allow them to develop Y improvement".

I understand that this was often used to justify colonialism, which I want it to be very clear I strongly disagree with. But, it would feel deeply wrong to say that all things are possible to progress in all areas. For example, we could NOT expect some hypothetical area with very poor soil health and little water to become a great improver of early agriculture. Likewise, areas with no easy access to copper, tin, iron, etc, would be unlikely to begin using those resources for farming implements. An area with all of this in abundance would have a much EASIER time developing these things.