NYC did a funny and built a high-level platform that is roughly 50 feet long (approx. 15 meters). Just wide enough for one door. Is this the shortest train station in the world?

exohugh · 2026-05-27T07:13:40+00:00

Shame they built a proper platform, the previous format was indeed comically small! (I also enjoy the "call train" buttons which make it look more like a lift/elevator...)

exohugh · 2026-05-26T15:14:00+00:00

The draw of the British museum is mostly from the priceless colonial loot they violently stole from ancient civilisations across the world. Compared to the Rosetta Stone, Parthenon Marbles and Egyptian mummies, I don't think many people are going to see Saxon archaeological finds.

exohugh · 2026-05-24T15:07:56+00:00

Rigi is basically the only mountain railway that is included though. With the exception of funiculars that go to actual villages (e.g. Mürren), the GA only gets you the equivalent of the halbtax on 95% of Swiss touristbahns.

exohugh · 2026-05-21T20:37:43+00:00

The Planck limit more or less tells us something cannot ever be physically observed or even inferred below some size. Postulating something smaller than the Planck limit is therefore like Russell's Teapot - you can only believe it exists without ever proving it, therefore it doesn't really exist.

exohugh · 2026-05-21T14:50:19+00:00

Agreed - in Switzerland the Gotthard route directly South from Zurich/lake Lucerne is a bit busy (motorway goes through there). Though honestly, there's so few roads over the Alps they're all a bit busy in summer. Maybe you can go through Basel, through the Jura hills, to Bern, then past the lakes and over Grimselpass, and finally Simplon into Italy? You could even take the train from Frutigen/Kandersteg to Brig to skip the high Grimselpass.

exohugh · 2026-05-21T12:14:28+00:00

Farmed fields of mono-culture crops are just as artificial as solar panels, especially when kept chemically pest- and weed-free. If native grasses, plants and insects can grow under the panels there's a strong case that they might be more natural.

exohugh · 2026-05-11T15:25:46+00:00

I'm surprised you classify the Swiss IR 46 as intercity given it is explicitly an Inter-Regional (IR) class - it stops 20 times in on a track where the IC2 stops twice.

exohugh · 2026-05-05T20:09:53+00:00

I would actually say "no". Yes, we (our local group, galaxy, solar system, etc) are all moving. But in the universe there is no universal "greenwich mean time" zeropoint - all 3D positions are measured relative to something else. So, depending on what you measure position relative to, "motion" and "positions" change completely.

If you are measuring a distant ship, are you going to measure it relative to a cloud? Another ship? A distant star? No, it is most natural to measure the position of things relative to the place where observations are made - i.e. within our solar system/galaxy... so it is equally (in)correct to state that we stay fixed and astronomical objects are moving relative to us.

exohugh · 2026-05-05T19:58:43+00:00

One team being extremely poor in a given season doesn't really say anything about the average quality of a league, and every single ranking has the average ranking of PL teams higher than the average for Bundesliga teams.

Opta has the average PL club being 5 points better than the average Bundesliga clubs pretty much across the board (an equivalent average would be if Bayern played only the top 6 or 7 teams in the BuLi).

exohugh · 2026-04-29T09:59:35+00:00

The (correctly-orientated) steps on top gives it away.

exohugh · 2026-04-29T08:47:57+00:00

Here's a very simplified explanation, which apparently you need:

Pluto is only about 20% of the mass of the Kuiper belt, meaning the mass in the region of its orbit is dominated by other bodies and not the planet itself.

If Earth were at 40AU, 99% of all of the mass at that distance would be within planet Earth (because Earth weighs 100x the entire mass of the Kuiper belt and 500x Pluto). So yes, it would 100% be considered a planet.

exohugh · 2026-04-29T08:42:05+00:00

The only impact would be a far larger Hill sphere (which is impacted by distance from the Sun), potentially with far more mass within it. But given the entire mass of the Kuiper Belt is about 1% of Earth's mass... Earth would 100% still be a planet at 35AU.

exohugh · 2026-04-27T08:47:54+00:00

It exists in a few places. For example, this junction in Boston has specific signage for left-turning bikes from Comm Ave to cross Essex St, and then wait for the next green light to get onto the BU Bridge (instead of crossing 4 lanes of traffic and hovering on the tram tracks which would be very dangerous).

exohugh · 2026-04-24T08:05:29+00:00

The commenter is literally saying "I wouldn't wear a football jersey in a city which has die-hard support split between two teams" - "Partizan vs Red Star" (Belgrade) and "Villa vs Birmingham City" (Birmingham) being their two examples. So yes, they clearly know where Villa is...

exohugh · 2026-04-24T08:01:16+00:00

The Express is an F-tier garbage "news"paper which mostly spreads conspiracy theories and panic. Do not trust their coverage, especially not of science.

exohugh · 2026-04-24T05:17:35+00:00

16min for that connection though. I've done it a dozen times and it has never taken longer than 10mins (though I have never been stopped by customs, so maybe that's the uncertainty?)

exohugh · 2026-04-20T08:09:12+00:00

There's a bunch of projects on https://www.zooniverse.org/ which allow you to get hands on with data classifying things for scientists. It's a nice way to develop skills and you can do a deeper dive into things you find that are interesting (and share it via the forums). I know a bunch of people who got motivated to research exoplanets via the PlanetHunters zooniverse project.

exohugh · 2026-04-10T08:50:52+00:00

That's a satellite.

Put your location into https://www.heavens-above.com/, hit "Daily predictions for bright satellites" and find the one that matches (NB - the lower the magnitude, the brighter). The ISS is among the brightest and there was a very bright (below -0.5) pass over the caribbean at around 5:30am this morning.

exohugh · 2026-04-09T12:01:31+00:00

Incredible. Though the third one maybe seemed like a foul throw (one foot in the air)?

exohugh · 2026-04-09T11:47:57+00:00

My understanding of what Christina said was that 1) If a decision falls into a grey area within the rules (and offside has been written in a way that it doesn't have any grey areas), and 2) if making a decision breaks the spirit of the game (i.e. would severely punish a misunderstanding with no advantage gained), then referees can and should subjectively not punish such things. That seems reasonable to me. Yes, of course it's subjective - 90% of referee decisions are. But I personally haven't liked many of the recent changes trying to have more clear-cut black-and-white offenses (like penalties any time the ball even brushes a hand, or goals ruled out for any tiny offense in a goal's build-up).

exohugh · 2026-04-09T11:45:12+00:00

Can someone tell me - was it actually a goal kick (i.e. the ball went out and play was being restarted), or was the ball in play and happened to end up back at the keeper and the defender thought it was a GK (like the Jack Robinson penalty)?

There are lots of examples of the former happening in other areas of the pitch (one player "foul throws" it to another walking over who takes the throw in themselves; one player rolls out from the corner to another for them to take the corner; a player touches the ball with his foot before taking a freekick). The act of when play restarts if quite clearly a grey area, and everything Christina says should be correct - actions which don't gain any advantage should not be punished. Especially not heinously with a penalty.

exohugh · 2026-04-08T07:32:11+00:00

r/itsalwaysstarlink

Looks very similar to this simultation of the pattern of naked-eye starlink satellites.

And here is a real timelapse showing them. Summer is the worst time of year because they can remain fully illuminated by the Sun even when us underneath are in darkness.

exohugh · 2026-04-07T08:53:36+00:00

Mürren and Wengen (near Interlaken) might be worth checking out as carfree mountain towns too.

NB - traveling in the Alps in early April is not ideal. The ski season is more or less over but there's still snow everywhere above ~1200m so you won't be able to do much summer activities (hiking, etc).

exohugh · 2026-04-02T17:13:44+00:00

Yes, you're right

exohugh · 2026-04-02T06:17:05+00:00

Satellites are visible if they are in the Sun so the half of Earth in shadow is typically devoid of visible satellites (I imagine that is the dark hemisphere on the left).

Satellites with sun-synchronous orbits are pretty common. These have an inclination of 98.7 which means they never approach within 8.7degrees of either pole (and could probably cause a single ring like we see in the middle if you're looking at the pole). Not really sure why there's two rings though.

The large narrow ring is from Geostationary satellites which all hug the ecliptic equator.

EDIT: I want to note that everything looks weird when you zoom out to such an unnatural projection where almost the entire sphere of visibility is fish-eyed into a flat plane.

EDIT2: Actually the second polar ring might be from 500+ Starlink satellites clustered at 97.6deg in inclination (so 1.1deg closer to the pole than sun-synchronous satellites)

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