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earthbee

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I'm one paragraph in and the article has immediately contradicted itself saying animals first appear in the fossil record 574mya and their arrival appears as a sudden explosion 539 to 485mya, which 574mya is outside of. It then says people believe animals evolved before the Cambrian period but can't explain why they're missing from the fossil record. Except there are plenty of known fossils from the Ediacaran, the period directly preceding the Cambrian. That's a helluva lot of problems in one paragraph so I think I'm gonna stop reading there.

I've heard that all people with absolute pitch will lose it once they get older into their 40s or 50s, as their sense of pitch drifts away from reality and everything will sound slightly out of pitch to them from then on.

Chronophoto 3 years ago

I feel I'd be doing better at this game if I was a car person. The only time I've got the year spot on was with a photo of the toppling of a statue of Saddam Hussein. The worst I did was guess 1960 on a black and white photo taken almost directly above of some cars on a road, it was actually 1980.

Fun but tricky

Inside the 1040ST 3 years ago

"Some 3rd parties produced boards that could contain a Blitter chip, but I’m not aware of anyone directly adding one to the board."

My 520ST was upgraded with 2.5MB of RAM and an added blitter chip, so it did happen. I still have the computer and it was still working the last time I powered it up a few years ago.

My mother has COPD from being a life long smoker. Because her lungs aren't working 100% her blood oxygen is often lower than optimal, I'm starting to be able to notice when her blood oxygen is low because her sleep pattern gets weird and she starts making silly mistakes in the tasks she's doing.

So that's one way smoking can be a cause of lower cognitive function.

The idea I came up with when I first heard this question is that flowers are often markers of a healthy ecosystem and food web with lots of animals and plants which may be sources of food, even if the actual flowering plant itself isn't edible.

Of course the "why did this" evolve questions are usually impossible to answer, though it can be fun to think about possibilities.

My mother used to play Dropzone while I was at school, she got amazingly good at it. A very impressive game for the time, extremely smooth graphics on the Atari 8-bit. I was playing it just a few days ago on an emulator, great game. I've also played Whirlwind snooker as a kid, another impressive game, I didn't realise the same guy was behind both.

Rest in peace

I've been trying to quit twitter for years but there's some people I like who use it and despite dipping into Mastodon about every six months for the past five years, I've still struggled to find anyone I care about following there.

I'm not sure why they're delaying things by focusing on making it wireless "so it can be wearable". A few years ago I wore a portable heart monitor for a three days and it was very much wired and it was fine, you get used to it. If you have a useful medical device that can help people then release a wired version now and go for wireless later if you really want to.

Wow, that is very comprehensive. I looked up some obscure stuff from the 80s and it's there. Not just an unhelpful stub either, it has actual significant useful information.

I think every half way capable military on the planet is seeing the news and videos coming out of Ukraine and thinking, hmm, must invest in anti-drone technology.

A decade from now what's happening in Ukraine won't work against most major military powers. The drones we're seeing are very slow and very low but modern anti-aircraft systems aren't optimised to detect things this small and low so are getting away mostly untouched, but there's no significant technological hurdle against modifying existing systems or developing new ones that work against this type of threat.

Yes! I'm always having a quick game of Inertia, Pattern or Slant while waiting for things to download, compile or just because I felt like it. It's nice having so many tiny little fun games available.