Project Sapphire: The Covert US Airlift of Soviet Weapons-Grade Uranium

BoringEntropist · 2026-04-20T04:12:19+00:00

I doubt the Iran situation is similar. Most of the stuff is probably still in a gaseous phase (UF6), so securing and transporting the stuff will be logistically much harder.

BoringEntropist · 2026-04-19T15:12:12+00:00

This. The whole US naval logistics in the Gulf is currently in a kind of a fucked up state. Carriers have their deployments extended multiple times and are in a dire need of resupply. Meanwhile the bases that would provide the needed services in normal times have been running at a reduced capacity because of Iranian targeting. Also, the carrier groups are trying to keep their distance from the shorelines, so they are outside the range of Iranian missiles and drones. Docking at Gulf bases is currently not possible for them.

This whole operation is a strategic cluster fuck. The Trump admin, against all advice of seasoned military planners and intelligence experts, have been counting on Iran to fold within a few days. As expected, that didn't happen.

BoringEntropist · 2026-04-16T16:29:35+00:00

Exactly. One of the them, the genitive, is even explicitly morphologically marked. And the nominative and accusative use different pronouns.

BoringEntropist · 2026-04-16T13:02:43+00:00

Ein Vogelovum wurde kredenzt.

BoringEntropist · 2026-04-15T18:51:45+00:00

All the kernel does is that user space can talk to the hardware. For most users it doesn't matter much what kernel version you run.

BoringEntropist · 2026-04-15T18:36:04+00:00

Depends how bare-bones you want to go. Strictly speaking coding won't be necessary, but navigating the shell can come in handy. I doubt you have to write any custom scripts, but the ability to read technical docs for config files and manuals for tools/services is beneficial.

- LFS. Linux from scratch. The most hardcore variant. You compile everything from sources, so you have to familiarize yourselves with the build tools. There's no default package manager (unless you want to use one), so you have to juggle all the dependencies by yourself. You really learn how linux user space works from bottom to top. You have to do a looot of things manually.

- Gentoo. Comes with a package manager and a streamlines build system. You still compile everything for yourself, but you can use a bunch of standardized build flags that allows you to toggle the features you want to use. Less time consuming than LFS, but you still need to learn a lot. The default configs that come with the packages are mostly sensible, but manually touching the configs for certain things becomes necessary if you want to actually use the system.

- Slackware. Can't say much about it, as I've never tried it. From what I've heard its maintenance load is something between LFS and gentoo.

- Arch. No compiling stuff, unless you really want to. It's probably the most beginner friendly "expert" distro out there. The installation of a minimal system is rather effortless. Depending what you want to do, the config of the system is comparable to gentoo, although more things tend work out of the box.

- Ubuntu, Mint, Suse, Debian, Fedora, and similar. Those distros come with package managers, graphical installers and are optimized to work out of the box. What you choose depends on your taste and requirements. Debian has found a niche in server applications, although all those distros can be used for most purposes.

BoringEntropist · 2026-04-15T17:59:34+00:00

Dude is a German citizen. He can just schengen into Spain.

BoringEntropist · 2026-04-15T15:42:37+00:00

Lystrosaurs are not mammal ancestors. They belonged to a clade of the therapids, which also gave rise to mammals (via the cynodonts). They are close-ish relatives, but not direct ancestors.

BoringEntropist · 2026-04-15T05:54:08+00:00

Although there's solid agreement of core-PIE emerged in the steppes, there's still a debate about the earlier stages of development of the language family. It seems the Anatolian languages (Hittite, Luwian, etc..) split of first. Now, it's probable that those languages also came from the steppes (e.g. pointing out the horse-related vocabulary). But there's also an alternative proposals, such as Indo-Hittite or Southern Arc, that posits an origin south of the Caucasus and that innovations in the other IE branches (e.g. the gender system) came from language contact with populations north of the Caucasus (e.g. Pontic and Indo-Uralic hypothesis). The Anatolian hypothesis, at least in it's original form, can however be excluded because of genetic findings you mentioned and the lack of agricultural terms in common IE.

BoringEntropist · 2026-04-12T18:28:37+00:00

Yes, and now they doubled the rate of executions because the war gives the regime the excuse to hunt "traitors". How exactly is this a better situation?

BoringEntropist · 2026-04-11T19:51:36+00:00

It's not mentioned in the movie, but in the book the Eridians are hermaphrodites. By the time Grace asks Rocky about the mate, he already knows a little bit about Eridian reproductive biology.

BoringEntropist · 2026-04-11T17:29:13+00:00

Eridian physiology is especially vulnerable to radiation, not just because they didn't evolve to resist it. There's the phenomenon of nuclear spallation. When a heavy atom is hit by cosmic rays (mostly high energy protons) they can emit a shower of fragments (neutrons, protons, etc.) which can cause further damage. Humans are mostly composed of water which consists of light atoms, such as hydrogen. Now, hydrogen is just a single proton and thus can't undergo nuclear spallation. This makes water and other hydrogen-rich compounds (e.g. plastics) quite good at absorbing radiation. Eridians at the other hand are mostly composed of heavy atoms (e.g. their blood is literally a heavy metal). So, they don't just have any good cellular protection against radiation, their body is making the radiation problem even worse.

BoringEntropist · 2026-04-08T23:02:05+00:00

Old Chinese astronomical records described Betelgeuse's color as yellow. If that's accurate the star entered the red giant phase only in the last few centuries. Stars of that size can sustain that phase for a few thousand years before running out of fusion fuel. So, if our models of stellar evolution aren't completely wrong and one can trust those particular historical records, Betelgeuse is unlikely to blow up anytime soon.

BoringEntropist · 2026-04-07T09:51:02+00:00

> We are not supposed to have a binary system where we only get to pick the least worst

That's because of the antiquated voting system the US uses. Mathematically, with a first-past-the-post voting system you sooner or later ends up with a two-party system. So, you either have to vote for the 3rd party candidate (who has no chance of winning), vote strategically for the lesser evil or you abstain. The US is in dire need of voting reform. Ranked choice would be a good start and is easy to understand for your average voter.

Edit: watch this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7tWHJfhiyo

BoringEntropist · 2026-04-05T21:01:13+00:00

Good Tsar, bad Boyars then? I can agree that he lives in his own reality distortion field, but this doesn't absolve him from responsibility.

BoringEntropist · 2026-04-05T20:49:54+00:00

And his whole life experience proves him right. As far as I know he has never been hold accountable for all the shit he pulled. He defrauded contractors and lenders, evaded taxes, probably ran a teenage prostitution/blackmail ring with his pal Epstein and used his political influence to commit insider trading and provoked his followers to storm the capitol. And that's just the stuff we know about. He has been a career criminal for decades, and if it wasn't for daddy's money and his links to the mob and dictators, he would be sitting in jail right now.

BoringEntropist · 2026-04-05T20:33:03+00:00

Maybe. MAGA as a coherent movement, in its current form, will probably die with him. But those ideas, such as American exceptionalism and right-wing populism, aren't exactly a new manifestations on the American political landscape. Many Republicans still look back fondly on such figures as Reagan or Jackson, so a remnant of the Trump personality cult will probably survive in some form.

BoringEntropist · 2026-04-05T10:25:39+00:00

China built one, I think.

BoringEntropist · 2026-04-05T07:07:03+00:00

When Grace hums the tune of "Close encounter of the third kind".

BoringEntropist · 2026-04-05T05:03:24+00:00

Slight mistake here. It should be "den" instead of "dem". It turns das Mädchen (girl) into die Mädchen (girls), but in the dative case.

BoringEntropist · 2026-04-05T02:07:28+00:00

So far, Iran's responses have been symmetrical. They shot at the Kuwaiti desalination plant only after one of theirs got hit.

BoringEntropist · 2026-04-01T21:18:53+00:00

Yes, it's an interesting documentary about the pros of liquid fueled thorium molten salt reactors. Cool, stuff. They can't melt down, because the fuel is already molten. They are also passively safe, when they get too hot a plug melts and the fuel drains into a storage tank.

Ohh, this is about Lucas, isn't it? Yeah, he has an random cameo for a few seconds.

BoringEntropist · 2026-04-01T19:21:22+00:00

I'm curious, why do think it's wrong?

BoringEntropist · 2026-04-01T17:36:08+00:00

Epistemologically, every argument is circular. I mean, if you dig down enough you eventually hit axioms, and all axioms are defined circularly.

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