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Two fun flag facts. The red dot on the flag of Japan was off center by 1/100 towards the pole before 1999. The naval flag of France is not of equal proportions. the proportion are; blue 30, white 33, and red 37

Reminds me of this quote: "The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way." -They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45[0] [0] https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.htm

Reminds me of the Ukraine war. The original intent was clearly a very short intense “operation” and then a quick annexation. Nobody planned to grind hundreds of thousands of bodies through a war machine, but “here we are” and now everyone is “forced” to go through the motions.

There is a really excellent podcast on the history of astronomy called The Song of Urania[0] that goes into a ton of depth about eclipses and how different cultures viewed and recorded the events of the sky. [0]https://songofurania.com/


This reminds me of the early days of Facebook. All silly click games.


Ah yes, the company that famously designed their headquarters with zero regard to the environment. The company that included a leaflet titled 'Why the brown box?' back in the 90's when they switched to unbleached cardboard shipping boxes for their computers. Nope they have never given a though about the environment. It's just not in their corporate dna.


Wow, they changed bleached with unbleached cardboard! They made some token environmental changes to their $1B headquarter glass, metal, and concrete behemoth.

I'm pretty sure they have switched to paper straws on their cafeteria too!


You're being sarcastic but they actually did design their new headquarters with zero regard for the environment. They built it in an area where there is not enough housing for their employees and public transportation is non-existent. The parking structure is larger than the office building. The building itself is like a giant greenhouse requiring cooling even in the winter.


Same company against right to repair, I wonder how many broken parts thrown away it took to offset some hundred carbon boxes.

Don't fall for the marketing.


I remember, long time ago in 1990, when apple switched to brown boxes for environmental reasons.


We used to get these big books delivered to our doorsteps that had your name, your address and your personal phone number. You could pay to opt out.


If I published a list of all name and addresses, that's still different than "here is harywikle's full name and address". I imagine you wouldn't be too pleased?


The link between online identity and offline identity is a sacred barrier. And I'm not sure that archive.org breached that particular barrier.


That's the issue I take with the "phonebook" defense. It justifies doxing people by collecting and connecting publicly available information online. All the information is out there, it's all on a phone book, your email was published online, and so on, but the end result is clearly bad so something in the process should be handled more carefully.


Read a very interesting book on the space race from the soviet side. One of the things that stood out was the lack of solid state transistor technology meant that they were using tube transistors in their space craft. This was one of the reasons they had problems doing spacewalks. They couldn't expose the interior of their capsules to space or the electronics would go pop. The Wrong Stuff How the Soviet Space Program Crashed and Burned by John strausbaugh https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/john-strausbaugh/th...


The title itself should tell you that the book is there to sensationalize and grind an axe, not to actually provide any historical accuracy.

And yep, the author didn't even bother to use primary sources: https://www.thespacereview.com/article/4851/1

It's like recommending a book about Apollo program written by Russians without reading any US documentation.

If there has to be a western author, James Harford's Korolev biography is a better put together look into Soviet space program and actually has some proper academic reviews.


I read "Beyond: The Astonishing Story of the First Human to Leave Our Planet and Journey into Space" and found it very interesting. It is a detailed history of the early Soviet space program and Yuri Gagarin's flight.


Why would a vacuum tube „pop“ when exposed to vacuum?


Possibly nowhere for the heat to go. Some tubes need a certain amount of ventilation depending on the application. It wouldn't pop, but might fail.


Some of Soviet spacecrafts were known to have been built around ~1atm pressure vessels as a brute force means to reduce unknown unknowns. I suspect it could be reverse reasoning from there.


probably because the vacuum of space is way more extreme than inside the tube which would cause pressure on the seals


Vacuum tubes typically have an internal pressure of less than 0.001 atm, sometimes much less.

Any seal that can withstand a pressure difference of 0.001 atm to 1 atm from the outside can almost certainly withstand a difference of 0.001 atm to 0 atm from the inside.


that's bullshit. vacuum tubes are used in spacecraft by NASA too. it's likely they are still used. they don't pop in vacuum. plus they're more radiation resistant thwn transistors.


You are correct. The mandatory military service is for males 18-45.


That's like someone asking if it's safe to travel to Los Angeles, and answering that there have been reports of pick pockets on the New York subway.


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