The blogger recommends Warmshowers for accommodation. That's good, but costs money.
BeWelcome.org is free accommodation, like Airbnb or CouchSurfing but without money! And open-source, in many countries, and very hospitable to refugees.
Do circles exist, or are they just spirals? In space, they’re all spiral galaxies - the only sphere is the observable universe based on the speed of light in every direction.
I used Copilot to play a game "guess the country" where I hand it a list of names, and ask it to guess their country of origin.
Then I handed it the employee directory.
Then I searched by country to find native speakers of languages who can review our GUI translation.
Some people said they don't speak that language (e.g. they moved country when they were young, or the AI guessed wrong). Perhaps that was a little awkward, but people didn't usually mind being asked, and overall have been very helpful in this translation reviewing project.
I see the ".fr" in your profile; but, in the United States, that activity would almost certainly be a conversation with HR.
If you really, really wanted help with a translation project and you didn't want to pay, professional translators (which you should do since translation-by-meaning requires fluency or beyond in both languages), then there are more polite ways of asking this information than cold-calling every person with a "regional" sounding name and saying "hey, you know [presumed mother tongue]?"
There's nothing racist about what he said. It's not racist, or even particularly impolite, to nicely ask someone "hey, I noticed you have x name, are you from $country by any chance?"
The observable universe is expanding into the unobservable universe.
What would be interesting is to run a diff on the cosmic microwave background and the pictures from the James Webb space telescope to figure out where the true centre of the universe is, and derive the poles from there.
Thats just a distinction between the Observable Universe and the Universe. The observable universe should be labeled "Our" Observable Universe as what is observable depends on where you are. Imagine a sphere growing outward at the speed of light, this is what is observable this region is aka the Hubble Volume. Right beyond the edge there just hasn't been enough time for the light to reach our location. No woowoo required.
There are ongoing debates whether the actual Entire Universe is infinite or not.
There is only one Entire Universe; it's not a multiverse. And we observe it as a sphere, sized by the speed of light in every direction.
Trying to see beyond the edge would be like trying to peer out of a black hole. It would probably look blue, like Cherenkov radiation. (but I'm biased, due to having blue eyes).
If the Entire Universe is infinite, then it's eternal in time. And then we get philosophical again.
Again there needs to be a distinction between the Observable Universe and the Universe. No Physicist thinks the actual Universe ends at the edge of the Observable section. Most estimates put the Actual Universe as ~250x larger than the Observable Universe, if it is finite at all.
Space and time are related, and expanding rapidly since the Big Bang (though there was a time in the early universe when the expansion rate was faster).
Observing the edge is effectively looking back in time, to see the conditions of the universe closer to the time of the Big Bang.
New telescopes keep expanding that edge, and new particle colliders (such as those at CERN or Fermilab) keep "bashing 2 rocks together to make fire" - recreating the conditions of the Big Bang to see what comes off.
What I'm not sure about is whether the speed of light (assumed to be constant) is correlated with the size of the observable universe. Perhaps a physicist could shed some light on that question. Relativity means that galaxies that are moving at the speed of light away from one another (one travelling at c, another travelling at -c) have a relative velocity of higher than the speed of light (|c| + |-c| = 2c).
There's also the theory of the One Electron Universe, which I quite like (though that reveals my bias as an electronic systems engineer). Perhaps what we see is the One photon universe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-electron_universe
The terms are:
v is the relative velocity between inertial reference frames,
c is the speed of light in vacuum,
β is the ratio of v to c,
t is coordinate time,
τ is the proper time for an observer (measuring time intervals in the observer's own frame).
If we could compare the time as we know it (based on the SI unit of seconds using an atomic clock) against the time at the singularity at the centre of the universe, we could figure out whether we're in a black hole, whether we're at the event horizon, or whether we're outside.
But we would have to assume space is a vacuum, which isn't entirely true.
Finding a way to reverse the expansion of the universe would imply time travel being possible. It hasn't happened yet, but perhaps that's just a technological limitation. And if you ask my Mac, then Time Machine is very much possible - that's just the name of the backup system.
The question starts to become very philosophical if there is a backup system for this universe. Everything being saved, for eternity, in infinite time. It would require very advanced computational power and storage, but it would probably work in binary (but that's just the kind of thing a computer engineer would say).
Maybe, though, the observable universe is rotating clockwise around a centre that is in the unobservable universe, and time is just a measure of how many rotations have been made since the Big Bang.
Downloading is a "grey-zone", but no one that I know of got in trouble for that.
Uploading is not allowed, and the little seeding done while downloading a torrent is still illegal. Although getting in trouble is rare because ISPs are not allowed to give out user data to random companies.
The Internet Archive provides direct downloads for the content they host, so the fact that they also offer torrents doesn't really change the legal situation.
BeWelcome.org is free accommodation, like Airbnb or CouchSurfing but without money! And open-source, in many countries, and very hospitable to refugees.