mikhailfranco

How many are available on Safari? ($43/month)

and the Earth's orbital diameter is 10^3 light seconds

so the Earth's orbital velocity is 10^-4 c

Windows 11 seems to feign forgetting your PIN password to force a restart.

A long-form critique of Suno by a musician/producer:

Suno, AI Music, and the Bad Future | Adam Neely

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8dcFhF0Dlk

A detailed philosophical discussion of his point=of-view:

AI Music is Not Music - Adam Neely | Alex O'Connor

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sbv0iX_EyLM

Consumption taxes and sin taxes.

Consumption tax is sales/VAT tax excluding some necessities and capital goods. Yes, there are some awkward edge cases: in the UK the exclusions were food and children's clothes, which leads to battles over prepared cold food (e.g. sandwich), takeaway and restaurant dining.

Sin taxes are obviously things society might want to discourage, mainly for health reasons, like alcohol and smoking, but also gambling and externalities, like pollution. Some might stretch that to all carbon emissions to moderate climate change.

Don't tax things you want: working / income and investment / capital gains.

Inheritance tax is doubly wrong because the wealth is already taxed, and death is unavoidable (but emigration is possible, which might help in some countries).

Also The Shock of the New with Robert Hughes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_galaxy

Obituary at The Telegraph:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/obituaries/2026/03/23/sir-tony-h...

Typo?

I like the idea of a noun collider. Then we could smash apples and oranges.

Maybe they're original, found buried in some obscure monastery in the mountains of Umbria.

Perhaps Leonardo invented the LHC!

Here is the BBC's own commentary on their much respected Indian correspondent:

Sir Mark Tully, the BBC's 'voice of India', dies aged 90

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4nnp4d064do

Yes - notice, observe, focus, consider, judge, refine ... repeat ...

- Photography, not to take better photos, but to see the world more continuously and deeply.

- Architecture, not to build anything, but to be more aware of urban context, visual design, practical use and emotional response in the built environment.

- Music, not to read a score or play an instrument, but to really hear the structure of music, appreciate melody, pattern, balance, pace, production, individual virtuosity and harmonious combination.

It's not too difficult to know or calculate inches in a mile:

    12 * 3 * 1760 = 12 * 5280 = 63,360

    231 

    63360^3 / 231 = 1,101,117,147,428.571

Live out of a suitcase, travel the world, hang out with a wide selection of excellent mathematicians, write joint papers with many of them, when you get bored or stuck, pack the suitcase and keep moving - for your whole life.

Presumably this reduces the beam footprint on the ground, hence increases the bandwidth available to individual users in dense urban environments (reduced sharing).

China is the world's second largest producer of silver, after Mexico and ahead of Peru.

It is introducing licensing for export of silver starting on 1 January 2026.

There is speculation that the new regulations will favor a few large companies, slow the flow of exports, and provide a mechanism for the government to impose explicit 'critical mineral' export controls on silver in the future.

Geoneutrino surveys show the Tibetan plateau and western China are full of uranium and thorium:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoneutrino

Economic recoverable reserves are another matter, but there's plenty there.

For peat's sake!

The lowest value coin still in use is the Uzbek Tiyin (0.01 UZS).

So 1,200,000 Tiyins to the USD.

Khara Khoto appears to be on or near the extension of the 'Gobi Wall' into present day China, presumably as part of the same system.

https://cms.interestingengineering.com/wp-content/uploads/20...

The name 'Gobi Wall' seems to refer to the section of the wall within Mongolia. Its garrisons and forts are numbered from G01 at the western end of the section, where the wall crosses the border.

https://cdn.grid.id/crop/0x0:0x0/700x0/photo/2025/05/31/land...

Khara Khoto is about 100 km WSW of G01.

Note Abu Musa, Greater & Lesser Tunb islands are attributed to the Emirates. These were occupied by Iran at the formation of the UAE and remain contested.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seizure_of_Abu_Musa_and_the_Gr...

Turkey claims sectors of the field all around the island of Cyprus.

Egypt has some small hope of reversing its economic decline.

A direct pipeline from the field to Europe, via Greece and Italy is contentious.

Israel invades Gaza to claim offshore resources.

"moved from Germany to write here "

So missing the good German bread.

Doesn't say where 'here' is.

The usual handwaving for entropy v. information/complexity is to observe that our universe goes from simple low entropy state (Big Bang) to a simple maximum entropy state (Heat Death).

Both have low information. The complexity rises and falls, peaking somewhere in the middle, as energy from the gravitational field is turned into structure.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weyl_curvature_hypothesis

Penrose likes zero initial Weyl curvature because it provides low entropy, but also conformal flatness, thus enabling his CCC theories.

Another consequence is that the Big Bang is not a reversed black hole (white hole). Black holes have high Weyl curvature. The Big Bang is the lowest entropy configuration, but a Black Hole is the maximum entropy configuration (just mass, spin and charges).

Westland-Augusta-Leonardo helicopter company in Yeovil.

RNAS (Royal Naval Air Station) Yeovilton in nearby Ilchester, which has also a fascinating museum of British naval aviation and an old Concorde.

[Fun fact - Yeovilton and Westlands are connected by an old Roman road: A37 Ilchester Road, Vagg Lane, Vagg Hill, Larkhill Road... ]

In an episode of the The Ascent of Man, Jacob Bronowski narrates the seasonal migration (transhumance) of the Bakhtiari tribe of SW Iran. When they get to the raging river, an old man can't make it, so is left on the bank to die.

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1ztord river crossing at 14-17 mins

This is the same epic migration recorded in the classic Grass

1925 ETHNOGRAPHIC DOCUMENTARY FILM " GRASS " MIGRATION OF BAKHTIARI TRIBE OF PERSIA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fVftguHwFc

And the tribe moves on .....

But Lex interviewed Terry!

Maybe a voice-recognizing silence-skipping adaptive rate.

https://www.axiomofjoy.com/2019/02/19/genome_part_i.html

Some people exercise to get fit.

I exercise to work up a thirst.

There is a podcast from Sean Carroll about cocktails, if you like your mixology from a physics & philosophy guy:

Mindscape 307 | Kevin Peterson on the Theory of Cocktails

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCSmrdzistc