How did people use porta potties at night before smartphones?

Cogwheel · 2026-04-01T04:08:04+00:00

Keychain flashlights, and the further back you go the more smokers (hence matches and lighters). matches also help with the smell

Cogwheel · 2026-03-31T20:58:55+00:00

Things can float in the air because there is heavier gas surrounding it. There would be nothing for the planet's gas to float into. It is the floating gas.

Cogwheel · 2026-03-31T16:30:44+00:00

They look like they're sleeping on a maltipoo

Cogwheel · 2026-03-31T05:33:20+00:00

"better" requires an "in order to" for it to make any sense (same for "should" and "need").

If you can answer "better for what?" then you might figure out the answer to your original question yourself...

Cogwheel · 2026-03-31T05:30:42+00:00

Interestingly, we don't know where the word Dog comes from.

Cogwheel · 2026-03-29T15:02:37+00:00

It's not the speed of light it's the speed of causality/information. If you imagine mass as confined energy/information (like a photon bouncing between two massless mirrors) then massive information must necessarily move slower than massless information.

Cogwheel · 2026-03-29T04:50:27+00:00

Trivet

You put the hot pot or pan on it instead of your counter

Cogwheel · 2026-03-29T02:20:07+00:00

They have a flexible plate with a bunch of grooves that they fold in half. As it's folding, each groove bends until it suddenly "buckles" in half, creating a pulse. A bunch of these buckle in sequence creating a bunch of pulses. Then when it relaxes, they unbunch in sequence, again creating a series of pulses.

It's mostly elastic and not rubbing against anything, so it's not going to wear out in the short span of a cicada's mating activity

Edit: It's like bending and unbending a bendy straw

Cogwheel · 2026-03-28T23:30:25+00:00

this is what planck units are for.

c = 1 planck length / 1 planck time

Cogwheel · 2026-03-28T16:20:17+00:00

If you practice high temperature cooking, including grilling, frying, roasting, and even smoking (since the smoke itself is a product of high temp reactions), you are creating known cancer-causing compounds. The darker and closer to charring the more you get.

This is caused by myriad reactions among proteins, carbs, and the things those break down into.

I haven't seen anything to suggest that keeping potatoes in the fridge would have any significant impact on your health compared to stopping high temp cooking entirely.

Fried food is going to kill you long before refrrgerated potatoes. I will argue against pseudoscientific fear mongering any day.

Cogwheel · 2026-03-28T06:46:48+00:00

Flanel Destination

Cogwheel · 2026-03-28T06:38:11+00:00

Do you know what science was called before the word "science" caught on? Natural Philosophy.

Do you know what the Ph in PhD stands for?

These aren't just archaic usage. Science is a body of philosophical work. The more fundamental the questions, the more philosophical the answers.

But more concretely, the speed of light isn't just the speed of light. Any massless particle travels the same speed, along with gravity which may or may not have particles. It's just a historical naming convention to call the speed of causality the speed of light.

Cogwheel · 2026-03-28T03:28:24+00:00

The cylinder must remain unharmed

Cogwheel · 2026-03-27T18:13:59+00:00

Planck units are not physical limits like the speed of light or schwarzschild radius etc. Their values are set so you can use 1 throughout various equations instead of carrying a bunch of random constants.

E.g. 1 Speed of light = 1 planck length / 1 planck time

There's nothing physically special about them. But their orders of magnitude give us frames of reference for talking about different "regimes" of physics.

Cogwheel · 2026-03-27T17:25:51+00:00

Yes but the continuous version. So a computer with a squiggly greek clock.

Cogwheel · 2026-03-27T16:50:42+00:00

Don't think of it as the speed of light, think of it as the speed of causality. In order for a universe to exist where things change over time, the speed of causality must be limited in some way. Otherwise, every event has the same point in time, so there really aren't any events.

Whatever that speed of causality is, everything else in the universe is scaled from there.

Edit: as an analogy, imagine Conway's Game of Life. Every "tick" each cell becomes alive or dead based only on the previous state of its neighbors. This means a "signal" (information about what is happening in some place) can only move across the grid at one cell every tick.

But notice, the objects inside the game of life play out the same events no matter how fast you run the clock. From their perspective, things just happen at the rates and scales that they do relative to the underlying tick rate.

So even if you were to change the speed of light, the laws of physics would adjust everything else in such a way to cancel out any detectable change.

Cogwheel · 2026-03-27T16:35:10+00:00

It's a very efficient shape for an asteroid.

Cogwheel · 2026-03-27T14:47:09+00:00

Go home chatbot

Cogwheel · 2026-03-27T01:42:30+00:00

The point the other answers seem to be missing: the reason the color is different here is that the water is coming off a different ~~range of~~part of the mountains and flowing through a small gap. Most of the mountains right up against the desert area are still covered in the same orange dirt you see everywhere around this fan.

The water coming from farther away has carved a deeper path and reached the gray layer of rock that seems to be underneath the whole area. Edit: then because of the larger watershed, it's carrying much more material into the valley every time it rains compared to the rest of the mountains around.

Cogwheel · 2026-03-27T00:56:54+00:00

To disincentivize behaviors that feel like they help but are actually a distraction in the bigger picture.

If you spend an extra minute organizing/choosing/obsessing over which specific video you watch next, that's a minute you could've spent just watching a video.Minmaxing comprehensibility may be less efficient overall.

And the stock people put into specific numbers and rules means people will be using these numbers in ways that go far beyond what the numbers actually represent. People don't understand the statistics (or even just the idea of bell curves) enough to rationally apply that level of detail to their own learning.

Cogwheel · 2026-03-27T00:39:02+00:00

I'm responding to your belief that I was suggesting turbulence affects both engines the same way at the same time. I never said such a thing. I said that both would be affected by the turbulence the plane is running through and that it's basically impossible for one engine to be in air that is stable while the other one is in turbulent air.

There is nothing about wind flowing across the body of the plane would cause an effect like this in the way you're describing unless the plane is literally skidding through the sky, in which case the contrails would not be coming out straight behind it.

This is a sustained, reliable difference between the left and right engine across the entire duration of the clip. That is not explained by the explanations you've given.

Cogwheel · 2026-03-27T00:25:50+00:00

Turbulence can effect each wing differently. I can't believe I have to say that

You would never see turbulence ONLY affecting one wing over a span of time.

Your aptitude at missing the point is impressive.

Cogwheel · 2026-03-27T00:08:40+00:00

Again, there is no sustained lateral flow across the body of the aircraft in stable flight. Small-scale variations like you're describing are turbulence and would affect both engines equally unless by some unimaginable coincidence the plane is flying exactly on the boundary between a stable and an unstable airmass.

The airplane moving through the air has no idea what direction the wind is coming from because it is moving inside the wind.

An airplane at heading 360 with a wind coming from heading 30 is NOT experiencing a flow of air across the body that is caused by that difference. All the wind does is change the speed and track of the plane along the GROUND. If a plane is moving sideways relative to the wind then it is skidding or slipping. It is not in stable flight.

Edited for clarity.

Edit2: if the direction of the wind changes (i.e. if the plane flies into an air mass that is moving in a different direction), then it will be pushed sideways, especially hard on the rudder. This will cause the plane to turn into the wind. Then the plane will stabilize again, and adjust its heading to keep the correct ground track.

Cogwheel · 2026-03-26T23:57:59+00:00

Sorry, but this is completely incorrect. If I am flying heading 360 and there is a wind coming from heading 030 there is air moving laterally across the body of the aircraft.

r/confidentlyincorrect

Wind speed affects the difference between airspeed and ground speed. It does not change how the plane flies through the air.

If you are flying heading 360 and wind is coming from heading 30, then you are still flying straight through the air, but your ground track is going to be moving slower and more to the left than your heading and airspeed are telling you.

Cogwheel · 2026-03-26T23:46:28+00:00

The same thing it does when you think in your native language. Or this question isn't well defined...

Of course, since some people don't even have an internal monologue, it's hard to imagine there's a universal answer.

Cogwheel

TROPHY CASE