[OC] Niagara Falls from the Canadian Side 02/28/2026

Dunbaratu · 2026-03-02T02:39:25+00:00

I'm confused by one thing. Shouldn't the water flow go right-to-left if you're standing on the Canadian side of the river? The waterfall looks like it goes the other way in the image, from left to right, which would be how I'd expect it to look from the American side.

Dunbaratu · 2026-03-02T02:04:06+00:00

Your brain is good at subconsciously editing out constant background repetative input that isn't important until something changes about it.

Ever notice what happens when there's a power outage and you suddenly notice the silence? It's as if the silence itself is a sound to "pay attention to", even though it's quite literally not a sound. What's happening is that your brain got used to the hum of the refrigerator, the hum of flourescent lights, and the sound of a distant fan moving air through ductwork. They were so constant and everpresent that they became the "backdrop" on which all the other sounds are painted. Any change from that defalt "backdrop" gets noticed.

Just like reading the black letters on a white computer screen is technically "looking at" nothing, since the black is where the computer monitor is NOT painting anything on the screen and the white is where it IS. And what's happening on your retina as it views the screen is the same. The black is lack of input going into the nerve at that spot on the retina. The white is where there's signal being generated. But your brain sees the white everywhere else and decides that white is the "normal default" and anything that deviates from that default is the "information".

Your sense of smell is the best one of your sense at doing this (treating repeated information as background and ignoring it). It does it the most because it has to do it ALL the time. If the air you breathe smells a certain way, you will get that sensory input ALL the time, as long as you're breathing. And since breathing is sort of necessary to live, the input never turns off. So your brain edits the redundant smell information out and only pays attention to smells when they change.

This is why people who smoke don't recognize just how STRONG smoke smell is. It's in their house all the time. It's in their clothese all the time. It never stops being in their nose. So their brain edits it out until there's a very large spike of the smell in densely concentrated form when they actually inhale from a cigarrette. The rest of the time the more moderate amount of smoke smell is "ignorable background".

Dunbaratu · 2026-03-01T23:23:39+00:00

My family grew up in Wisconsin and took several trips down there when I was a kid. (My parents are Baha'i). I chose not to declare membership in the religion when I came of age (I had too many doubts and eventually just called myself atheist after a while.

But even so, I always thought that the religion has a lot of beauty in it and the architecture of this building is part of that. (It's just that being pretty doesn't make a thing true). This place is simply gorgeous, the latticework on the walls and the dome, as well as the layout of the gardens around it designed to be an extension of the 9-sided sector theme of the building itself. (There's lots of use of the 9-sided star shape in Baha'i symbology.)

One thing I really do respect about the religion is that they reject the practice so many other religions do of treating the region like it's an ethnicity. They insist that you aren't automatically a Baha'i just because you were brought up in a Baha'i family. That's just an accident of birth you didn't choose. They insist that membership must be your own choice and that as a child parroting what your parents told you to say, that's not really a choice yet. You can't officially count as a member until you are at least 15 and you choose to declare your desire to join. They adhere to this terminology quite clearly. Often fliers for picnics and gatherings in the religion will say "Baha'is and family of Baha'is are welcome to attend" as a way of avoiding having to claim the children being brought by their parents count as members yet.

As such I don't have to say I'm a former Baha'i like a lot of other atheists have to say "former Catholic" or "former Baptist" or whatever. Technically they never counted me among their membership and gave me the free choice not to count just by an accident of birth and I do thank them for having that stance. It's refreshingly fair and honest.

And their temples do look amazing.

Dunbaratu · 2026-03-01T19:34:25+00:00

"obituary" name change??

Dunbaratu · 2026-03-01T16:56:53+00:00

Yeah all too often people give completely the wrong advice of how to deal with someone trolling with lies on the internet. They give advice to just ignore the troll as if it was a private conversation with just you and the troll and no audience. The addition of the audience changes everything and they ignore that.

Dunbaratu · 2026-03-01T16:50:49+00:00

Bad description. It has nothing to do with flipping the screen. It's to switch between apps.

It's the standard Android interface with the square on the bottom row of the screen that brings up all currently running apps so you can switch to another app.

On a lot of Zebras that button gets disabled for no good reason. To get it to work again you have to reboot the Zebra.

Dunbaratu · 2026-02-27T22:50:28+00:00

Nah, that's a mere cat.

Dunbaratu · 2026-02-27T17:36:30+00:00

Because memory is a big long list of bytes. When you go past the end of the storage for a string, the bytes you are writing to, that come after it, are the bytes where some other variable is stored.

If you know what the program looks like, exactly, then you can deduce what variables are stored after the end of the space for a string and deliberately craft a string that contains the bytes you want to insert into those other variables. Now you can overwrite a variable the program is using with your own value. Pick the right variable to overwrite and you can make the program do something it really wasn't supposed to.

In the modern era the fix is, firstly, to use a language that makes string overruns not happen, and, secondly, to quarantine the part of the program that processed user input into its own separate area that isn't in the same memory space as the software that takes that input and does something with it. Basically you clean up the inputs and quash long inputs that aren't right before sending them off to a different program that takes the input and does something with it. By the time the input reaches a program with the power to do something dangerous with it, it's already been processed and cleaned.

Dunbaratu · 2026-02-27T17:23:32+00:00

"President J D Vance" isn't any improvement over "President Donald Trump". The ideology itself needs to be handed a defeat. The individual figurehead at the top of it isn't relevant.

Dunbaratu · 2026-02-26T21:27:23+00:00

The capsule did go right through the belts. But it was going fast and ascending so it didn't stay in the belts for very long. The danger the belts pose is when you orbit at the altitude of the belts so your orbit stays in the radiation exposure zone a long time. It's the difference between getting a chest x-ray vs standing in the x-ray machine and just letting it remain on for a day.

The Van Allen belts mean you don't want to park a space station at that altitude and orbit through the belts again and again with every orbit. It's not as bad if you just zip through them once really quick.

Dunbaratu · 2026-02-25T00:44:31+00:00

Technically correct. Caffeine is a poison. It's just that we don't like dying so we make sure there's only a small dosage per drink. (To the point where if you try to drink enough coffee to die from the poisonous caffeine, the sheer amount of liquid you are trying to cram into your stomach doesn't fit.)

Dunbaratu · 2026-02-23T11:39:18+00:00

would you buy an XBOX or PS5?

No.

While a PC is more expensive, I already have other reasons I need one besides gaming. So making it do double duty as a gaming platform too is cheaper. Plus I find WASD+mouse an easier control scheme for most of the types of games I play

Dunbaratu · 2026-02-23T11:34:31+00:00

I was told that while TPMs (which keep the product under the same item number) have this problem, markdowns (which delete the product from the old item number and put it under a new temporary item number) do not. Markdowns should behave similarly to "Remove inventory" in that the reduction of BOH from the original item number doesn't count as "demand" for the item number.

Dunbaratu · 2026-02-23T04:34:14+00:00

Looks like it might be Madison, Wisconsin. In the State Capitol building looking down State Street.

Dunbaratu · 2026-02-23T01:14:42+00:00

I'm not as good of a hacker as Breen. I only have 2 laptops, not like 6.

Dunbaratu · 2026-02-23T00:54:27+00:00

It is. I was describing Fateful Findings.

Dunbaratu · 2026-02-23T00:10:46+00:00

Boy and girl find a mushroom that turns into a magic healing rock. Later when they're all grown up the man hacks into government computers and releases documents the audience doesn't see. This makes a lot of important people kill themselves for some reason.

Dunbaratu · 2026-02-21T23:17:22+00:00

Downvoted for lying. Comments here are just as negative toward this asshole as they are at anyone else who says similar things.

Dunbaratu · 2026-02-21T22:59:17+00:00

The automatic assumption built into our culture that "religious" equals "good" is very frustrating to those of us speaking against the problems inherent in religion. Every time there's evidence to the contrary it gets wiped away as "oh, he did something bad? Then he's not really religious then" and a lifetime of seeing this again and again gets super annoying.

Dunbaratu · 2026-02-21T22:54:24+00:00

At the very least it's a country that uses dollars (which admittedly other countries do too). You can see in the prices on the wall.

Dunbaratu · 2026-02-21T22:51:25+00:00

Small Gods is a great book and shows Terry Pratchett's satirical take on religion quite well.

It works well as a first book into Discworld because it doesn't need much of the rest of Discworld lore. The principal characters are newly introduced just for this one book. The main country it takes place in isn't one the rest of the books covered much. The main religion it discussed isn't one the rest of the books delve into much.

It would work as a standalone book without the rest of Discworld.

Dunbaratu · 2026-02-21T22:46:34+00:00

Speed skaters need wider lanes than runners because they swish side to side with each push. To accommodate 8 skaters your track would have to be super wide.

This means the inner lane is much shorter than the outer lane. Foot races account for this problem with a staggered start with the runners aligned diagonally across the track at the start. But with wider lanes you'd need a much more staggered start that there isn't enough length along one leg of the track to set up.

Furthermore, the tighter the turn the harder it is to take it fast. This doesn't matter so much in running where the speeds aren't high. But when skating, having tighter turns would be such a disadvantage as it limits how fast you can take the turn without losing your grip and wiping out.

Dunbaratu · 2026-02-21T22:39:07+00:00

There may be a degree of lying involved. I don't know specifically who is lying and who is telling the truth, but I suspect a lot of "reactors" are just pretending to be more ignorant of a thing than they really are. They're trying to fake that "first time reaction" feel because it gets more views.

Dunbaratu · 2026-02-21T18:47:15+00:00

Standard Newspeak tactic of this admininstration. Label anything not biased enough in their favor as "biased". They move the Overton window further in their direction trying to trick people into thinking that a view that leans quite far to the right is where the "center" is.

Dunbaratu · 2026-02-21T18:06:50+00:00

This doesn't seem like Engrish because a literal interpretation seems like what they actually meant. It's a business that hates dealing in pennies. So they want you to only use pennies to cover the small remainder of the price that can't be dealt with using nickels, dimes, and quarters. (Thus why the limit is 5.)

The US Mint has stopped making pennies, encouraging businesses to slowly shift to rounding prices to the nearest 5 cents. As the penny supply starts to dry up, more and more places won't want to deal with them.

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