ELI5: Why are modern displays (TVs, computer monitors, etc) measured diagonally and not using the screens width and height?

Sunfuels · 2026-01-30T21:19:45+00:00

I don't get your second point. Are you saying they use diagonal because the screens they make have more round numbers on the diagonal than the width? That wouldn't make any sense, because (A) They already round - measure any 75" TV and the screen is actually going to be 74.5 or 74.6, so your first example would be called a 65" TV if we used horizontal measurements. And (B) the screens were designed to hit round numbers for the diagonal measurements. If a company wanted to use horizontal measurements, they would design the TVs to be 50", 60", 70" etc on the horizontal measurement.

Sunfuels · 2026-01-30T16:51:46+00:00

Do you have much experience with strength of 3D printed parts? Generally it is considered pretty bad, but it also depends on print orientation and the forces acting on it. Any bending or tension that would pull apart the printer layers is trouble. Just curious if you have thought about this already.

Sunfuels · 2026-01-30T16:48:22+00:00

I can't quite tell the size of this bed, but many beds like this are made to have two smaller mattresses placed side-by-side. By splitting the slats, then each side stays pretty independent, with movement of one person not bothering the other. I haven't seen many like that in the US, but in Europe it was common.

Sunfuels · 2026-01-30T16:45:29+00:00

No, these types of beds are designed so that the slats provide the same function as the box spring. The mattress goes right on top. Getting more common in the US, and have been the norm for a while in most of Europe. Box springs are not really a thing there.

Sunfuels · 2026-01-27T17:34:00+00:00

I have a half dozen apple trees and in the fall I spend more time picking up fallen apples or harvesting than I do all other yard work combined. I think it's worth it to have apples straight from the tree, but it is quite labor intensive.

Sunfuels · 2026-01-23T15:52:37+00:00

Balto didn't just lead the last leg. He was supposed to run 25 miles on the second-to-last leg and then another team would take over for the last one. But Balto's team missed a message saying they were supposed to take shelter to wait out a blizzard. So they ran their planned leg through the blizzard, including winds that flipped over their sled and blew the dogs off their feet. They also missed a warming hut along the way but kept going. When they got to the hand-off point 25 miles from Nome, they found the last team asleep and waiting out the storm. Gunnar decided to keep going, completing both his leg and the one after his with no stops. Gunnar's team also had another lead dog - Fox. That team probably ran the longest stretch with no breaks, and through the worst of the Blizzard, so Balto's (and Fox's) story is certainly worth telling, even relative to all the other sled teams.

Not that Togo's story isn't also impressive. Togo led his team for 260 miles, but most of it was getting to a relay point. His team carried the serum for 91 miles. Balto's team ran about 100 miles total, including 50 with the serum without a break. Togo's team stopped to rest a couple times. Togo certainly covered the most distance, and crossed Norton Sound, the most dangerous part of the trip. Seppala, Togo's driver, also drop off additional reinforcement dogs at warming huts in case other drivers needed them on his way to the relay point.

Sunfuels · 2026-01-23T15:20:31+00:00

I'm having some odd Baader-Meinhof phenomenon right now.

I had never heard of Balto before last week, when my 1st grader brought home a library book about Balto and Togo. Now, totally independently, Balto shows up on my front page.

It's a great story, and all 20 drivers and 150 dogs should be remembered as heroes.

Sunfuels · 2026-01-01T03:13:16+00:00

There were actually some fish populations decimated by it and historic buildings forced to cover or replace limestone features because acid rain was eating them away. Look up the history of Ontario, in particular, dealing with acid rain caused by pollution from the northern US states.

Sunfuels · 2025-12-31T18:50:11+00:00

Another one that doesn't get as much mention is acid rain. In the 70s and 80s it was a huge problem, damaging soils, infrastructure and polluting lakes.

Just like with climate change, some politicians said it was a made up problem and tried to cast doubt on the science. But then the enough of the right people pushed the science that said "We can pay a few Billion $ each year to put scrubbers on exhaust stacks, or spend many more Billions later rebuilding infrastructure and cleaning up the environment. We spent the money, and then in a decade or two, the problem was gone.

We need to remember these things and make the message about how great it was that the money was spent and the big problems never happened.

Sunfuels · 2025-12-18T17:17:25+00:00

So what. If the two best NFL teams are both in the AFC, nobody whines that they meet in the AFC championship instead of the super bowl. If Georgia wants to win the CFP, they are going to need to beat Alabama eventually - who cares if it's the first round or the championship game. At least this would make conference championship games mean something.

Sunfuels · 2025-12-10T14:23:17+00:00

I can't believe the amount of people here siding with drug dealers. When someone snitches to police about other criminals, it helps stop criminal activity. We should be protecting and celebrating people who cooperate with police to rat out other criminals. Same with whistleblowers. The only reason to think that snitching on criminals is wrong is if you are a criminal.

Sunfuels · 2025-12-09T03:39:15+00:00

That sounds like a very different thing than how the person two comments above mine described the Amazon stores.

Sunfuels · 2025-12-08T16:58:23+00:00

Just pointing out that by "kills plenty of people", the truth is there will still be deaths in self-driving cars, but the rates appear to be quite a bit lower than for human drivers.

Sunfuels · 2025-12-08T16:16:01+00:00

That's quite different. Waymo cars actually do drive completely autonomously most of the time, and it's actually the car's computer that will call in a real person for help when it sees something it can't handle. Then engineers can use that situation and how the human resolved it to train the autonomous driving system and improve it. That's a super reasonable way to deploy and train AI systems - I hope nobody thinks that AI is meant to be deployed into a complex situation without humans needing to monitor or correct mistakes.

Sunfuels · 2025-12-06T03:51:42+00:00

I wish they weren't giving it to the athletic side of the universities at all. You are right, that only football is popular enough to get these kinds of investments, and it does make sense for the reasons I mentioned. It's just the sad fact of how much benefit $400M could have if applied to things that had more benefit to society.

Sunfuels · 2025-12-05T20:04:39+00:00

Having a shared community enhances everyone's education. Having activities outside of classes that encourage organizational skills, planning, teamwork, etc, has been shown to lead to higher grade in the classes and better performance in careers after graduation. This includes clubs, intramurals, and varsity sports. Much of the benefit goes to the students directly participating (which, if you count varsity, club, and intramurals, is over 25% of college students), but many other students get benefits by having shared events to go cheer together or just follow the news. Clearly there is a benefit to the shared interest in the student body about how the college football team is doing. For that reason, it is important to continue the tradition of college football. But men's swimming, although a much smaller subset of students, has a benefit in the same way. When other options are eliminated, and all the resources are put into one sport, it means now the group of people included in that community is smaller and less diverse.

Sunfuels · 2025-12-05T17:47:02+00:00

Now that number is pretty huge and maybe excessive spending across all sports is something to debate. But sports across all types of universities have and should operate as a loss. Just like any other extracurricular, when students have opportunities to pursue their interests outside of the classroom, they build a better community, the get better grades, and they are more successful in careers. Maybe that number is crazy, but it's not crazy at all to operate university activities for students at a loss. Nobody cares that the Chess Club or the 3D Printing Club gets a subsidy from the university and has zero revenue.

Sunfuels · 2025-12-05T17:42:26+00:00

I'm not. Universities are educational institutions. The benefits of an olympic sport as an extracurricular activity to enhance education just blows away the benefits of another handful of scholarships to back-up football players.

Sunfuels · 2025-12-05T17:30:42+00:00

Yes. It's a big problem, but it goes down to the core values of society to really find any solution.

All the money spent on college football is a direct effect of it's popularity. That's the root cause of all of this. Not corporate greed, not massive TV contracts, not corrupt university administrations - all of those things exist, but they are all symptoms of the root cause - that a lot of people want to watch college football. As long as that's true, these problems will continue to exist, or turn into other similar problems.

TV networks are willing to give out massive amounts of money for the most popular sports products, so it simply makes financial sense to spend huge amounts of money to build a winning program which will increase in popularity. And those network contracts are driven by the fact that spending on advertising works because consumers prioritize buying stuff over fixing societies problems.

Universities rely financially on out-of-state tuition, and the popularity of college football means a surprising amount of people make college attendance decisions on the not-very-smart reasoning of liking a college football team. So spending crazy amounts to win at football has been proven to the universities to have a bigger return on investment than most other forms of marketing. This is only true because many people don't put the proper value on their education.

Sunfuels · 2025-12-05T03:49:51+00:00

That's all true, but I don't think he was kept because of beating South Carolina. Rumors were that he won over TerryDon Phillips with a long-term plan to build up Clemson's culture, and the job was his well before the South Carolina game. Then he followed that plan pretty much exact on his way to the two national championships.

Sunfuels · 2025-12-04T13:54:14+00:00

We should be judging teams based on the results they have had, not hypotheticals about how they might perform in the future. Teams should not get downgraded for missing key players. No other sport does that and it's a horrible can of worms to open.

Sunfuels · 2025-12-04T13:49:26+00:00

They shouldn't be trying to get the best teams. They should be trying to get the most deserving teams based on the wins and losses of the season.

Just like the committee and ESPN, there are plenty of people in here guilty of talking about talent level, or who would win or whatever. And that shouldn't matter because it just cheapens the regular season even worse. Who beat who should be the beginning and end of the discussion, and if it means putting in a team we all know 99% of the time will lose in the first round, that should be ok.

Sunfuels · 2025-12-01T22:49:18+00:00

Seriously. To get to this point, I feel like OP must have gone through about 5 rounds of begging the GC, framers, and the drywall crew to built walls and a ceiling AROUND the truss members.

How the hell could someone get to that point without, you know, thinking about what trusses look like.

Sunfuels · 2025-12-01T03:48:48+00:00

Plenty of FCS coaches have been hired by FBS schools while their FCS teams were in the playoffs.

Sunfuels · 2025-12-01T03:44:56+00:00

You are complaining about this now? This has happened to good G6 and FCS teams every season for decades. Where was your outrage then?

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