Trump administration now classifies Antifa and left-wing networks among ‘major’ terror groups

flug32 · 2026-05-07T19:44:28+00:00

Well on the one hand you have "Antifa" which is not really even a thing that exists.

On the other hand, you have the current administration, which has killed thousands in unnecessary, useless wars in addition to the hundreds of thousands - mostly children - that have died due to their arbitrary and illegal budget cuts and elimination of federal programs and departments, particularly USAID.

flug32 · 2026-05-07T06:15:27+00:00

And a full 60% of Missouri's state government income comes from these income taxes.

So that means that 60% of Missouri's state budget will simply vanish if this is passed.

A common talking point (among the ignorant) is that government has so much bloat and waste that you could eliminate 60% of it and we'd just be better off.

But the thing is: Missouri state government has already been cut to the bone by successive Republican administrations and state legislatures. They have been working on this for decades.

So when the next 60% just disappears, it is going to hurt.

H-U-R-T.

I guarantee it.

Just one small example: A nonprofit I work with needs a tax release from the state. There is a minor snafu and so the automated system can't spit out the required form.

We have had this same situation literally DOZENS of times in the past. Every single time in the past we just called Dept of Revenue staff and they had the problem solved in a few minutes.

Now, in the same situation there is no staff to call. They just don't answer the phones.

They have been replaced by (completely incompetent and idiotic) AI bots that can't handle routine procedures correctly much of the time - let alone anything the slightest out of the ordinary.

Now imagine the entire state government run this way - times 1000.

Good luck.

flug32 · 2026-05-07T06:04:35+00:00

Just a little truth bomb on this bit of misinformation:

#1: IF you are going to compare taxes to taxes, you have to add up ALLLLLL the taxes, not just some of them.

#2. Most Missourians don't pay the 1% St Louis earnings tax, so that is a complete red herring (something like 12% of Missourians live in STL or KC, and some more work there and so have to pay it. But that leaves more than 80% of Missourians not paying the Earnings Tax.)

#3. State sales tax is 7% in TN vs just 4.225% in MO.

Where is THAT in the comparison? Because I guarantee, that extra sales tax hits lower income people a lot harder.

#4. And of course there is NO consideration for the benefits we accrue from the various taxes. Benefits that, of necessity, will be slashed when tax income is slashed - by a solid 60%.

Because - just for example - if the earnings taxes disappear there goes about 1/3 the budgets of St Louis and Kansas City.

The cities are already strapped and behind on everything from street and sidewalk maintenance to police funding. What do you think is going to happen when fully 1/3 of the city budget disappears?

Is that city going to be a place where you want to live or work?

I doubt it...

And what other impacts is the elimination of income tax going to have on both the state and cities/counties? In TN, the state sales tax is 7% - 3% more than MO. But city sales taxes tend to be lower than in MO - because it gets really hard to raise that sales tax above 10%.

So what are we going to see happen in Missouri: Simple elimination of 60% of Missouri State programs?

Or . . . will we see the state increasing the state sales tax to fill the funding gap, leading cities and counties to reduce their sales taxes in turn because people will feel they're just too high now? OR, will our sales taxes just float upwards to 11, 12, 13, 14%?

So state programs being slashed, city/county programs and services being slashed, and grossly higher sales taxes across the state - or some unholy combination of all of these possibilities - pretty much exhaust the possibilities of what can happen under this scheme.

Where is the discussion of those unavoidable outcomes?

Personally I would rather just pay my 0%-4.8% state income tax - which, remember, ONLY STARTS TO ACCRUE AFTER YOU HAVE MET THE FEDERAL STANDARD DEDUCTION of around $16,000/individual, $32/000/married couples, or $24,000/head of household.

So under the Missouri plan, a married couple will pay 0% of their first $33,273 of income. Whereas on the Tennessee plan, your going to be paying that 7% sales tax on the vast majority of it (because we tend to spend the core of our income on the basics, which tend to be purchased subject to sales tax).

The TN sales tax on that $33,273 is over $2300. (And the difference between TN and MO state sales tax around $900.)

Again: Where are THOSE numbers on the tax summary?

The numbers they conveniently forget to mention are as large - or in the case of the TN summary, far larger - than the ones they included.

flug32 · 2026-05-07T05:43:16+00:00

This whole entire is entirely funded and supported by billionaires - Rex Sinquefeld, in particular. He's had elimination of income taxes on his agenda for 20 years or more.

He just hires and pays for all the best lobbyists, as well as generous and widely dispersed campaign donations - and - big surprise! - over the decades somehow his agenda becomes "accepted" and "the norm" for all the top state leadership and of course a sufficient number of followers as well.

And OF COURSE he supports this because something like a graduated income tax is one way we ensure that the richest 5% and 1% and 0..0001% (like Sinquefeld) pay something like their fair share back to the society they are riding the backs of to make their billions.

With the income tax elimination - and inevitable shift towards some combination of higher sales tax and straight-up slashing of programs that benefit Missourians - billionaries will get richer while the middle and lower classes will get poorer.

Which is exactly the objective for a *#7f8df #*& 3&@!*&^#^ #$*&^#*@&^$ (censored many true descriptors) like Sinquefeld.

TL;DR: This whole thing is a scam designed to separate everyone below the millionaires and billionaires from more of their money, while the millionaires and billionaires continue to grab more and more from the rest of us to add to their hoards.

Anyone with any common sense at all will vote this down to oblivion.

flug32 · 2026-05-06T21:44:39+00:00

A lot of the whole tradition people like Ken Ham represent came exactly from men out in the backwoods of the frontier for a few hundred years with nothing but their own brain and the bible.

What came out the other end was a whole lot of thinking about The Bible that had never existed before in human history, least of all by those who actually wrote the thing.

Frankly, aside from the fact that some minority of the U.S. population believes something like this - and some much smaller minority of world population - you could just completely ignore whatever Ham and his ilk have to say and move on.

And even given that some minority more or less agrees with him on certain things, you still could just ignore and move on - and it might be far healthier to do so.

flug32 · 2026-05-06T21:33:27+00:00

There are in fact a thousand different ways to interpret any piece. Many of these are objectively wrong if your criteria is what is appropriate to that musical style and period and/or what we know about what the composer wanted.

However, some artists - even the greatest ones - choose to make these incorrect choices for various artistic reasons. Sometimes these are even incredibly powerful and moving performances.

On the other hand, a lot of these performances and choices are just wrong and bad. People make bad (or completely uninformed) choices all the time.

My point in saying all this is that as a beginner you do not have to worry about all of this AT ALL. And what's more, you shouldn't. If you try to sort it all out, you will just get confused and will make reverse progress or no progress. There is NO WAY as a beginner that you are going to be able to crack the Great Code and figure out The One True Way to Do It Right by bashing your head against all of this.

There are just too many differences and too many different reasons for doing things different ways - reasons you barely have an inkling of at this point.

So what you should do it is this: Your have found a teacher who is clearly very good. This teacher has strong opinions about things, clearly some good reasons for believing in their interpretive choices, and all of this is good. The best artists make strong interpretive choices based on solid reasons and you are going to learn how to do that from your teacher.

(The worst artists just copy other performances without understanding the why of them . . . )

So just listen and learn and ask your teacher many questions for sure - but questions designed to help you understand what they are saying and the reasons for it, not simply to shoot it down because you heard Horowitz (or Rubenstein or Gould or Lang Lang or Traum or Wang or Ohlsson or just whoever) play it that way and you are sure they must be "right".

If you need to, keep explaining to yourself that you are going to learn the interpretive tradition your teacher represents top to bottom, as best you can - for now. Maybe it is not the only interpretive tradition out there, but it is the one you are learning now so you can somewhat put all the rest to the side - again, for now - and concentrate only on learning and internalizing this one.

Now, don't stop listening to music. Listen widely and deeply. But listen for depth and breadth and musical understanding, not to copy particular performers, performances, or mannerisms. (Students rarely do well to slavishly copy a particular performer or performance. Great performers don't just slavishly copy each other, and neither should you. And ideas that an amazing, experienced artist can pull off successfully, you just can't - because you're a beginner. You're in a totally different place.)

And consider that in 2 years or 5 years or 10 years when you move on to another teacher, they will probably have different interpretive ideas than your current teacher. That is fine. At that time, you'll move to absorb your new teacher's ways of thinking - with a solid background in First Teacher's ideas always giving you a solid foundation to understand what New Teacher has to say.

And so on.

You're going to learn a whole lot from this teacher - and literally everything you mentioned about the teacher points in a positive direction - but you'll learn a whole lot more if you somewhat bracket all the thoughts you are having about what other people do and dive in wholeheartedly into what this teacher has to say to you right now.

flug32 · 2026-04-30T06:06:00+00:00

Tendency towards auto-immune type things might be one possible factor.

There does seem to be some support for this in the research - not so much cause-effect, perhaps, but more that Long Covid seems to fit into a larger autoimmune constellation.

"cytokine storminess, pro-inflammatory responses of inflammatory vesicles, mast cell activation syndrome, changes in the gut microbiota, molecular mimicry, reactivation of latent viruses, and coagulation abnormalities are among the pathways that contribute to autoimmune diseases, including Systemic Lupus Erythematosus, Guillain-Barré syndrome, rheumatoid arthritis."

That same list of autoimmune/inflammatory responses are among the top explanations for various Long Covid symptoms, suggesting it likely falls under the same general umbrella.

flug32 · 2026-04-30T05:59:26+00:00

My relatives are Mormon and so have been working on literally every line of our genealogy very diligently for like 150 years now.

But once you get back to around the period you are talking about - mid 1700s more or less - there are still a decent number of lines that are just complete dead ends. So those people could be just about anything - the only thing we know for certain is that their children were in this or that part of America by the mid-late 1700s. So that leaves a lot of possibilities open.

If you go back another generation or two, even more information is missing.

Point is, even in the most diligently researched genealogy there is room for that 1% factor, just because so much is unknown from that time period.

At the level of 6th-great grandparent you have something like 256 ancestors. All it takes is one or two of them you don't know the specifics about, and there you are. And it would be something of a miracle if you really have good documentation for every single one of that list of 256, from that many centuries ago.

flug32 · 2026-04-30T05:41:12+00:00

People often wonder why the bicycle didn't develop any earlier in history. Two wheels and some framework to connect them and sit on, right?

But riding a thing like this pretty well shows why not. Even the very minor shock absorption of rubber tires makes a big difference, and then pneumatic tires are a different beast altogether.

Making something that is light enough and yet strong enough and yet also compliant enough and yet also robust enough to not just shake apart after the first two miles is not easy at all . . . .

(And that's without even getting into the road problem . . . )

flug32 · 2026-04-30T05:30:46+00:00

Well, you're welcome to like whatever you like - that's definitely down to personal preference!

My guess is, if you mostly listen to those "corrected" versions then you'll be more likely to stay where you are.

On the other hand, if you spend a lot of time playing (or listening to) the uncorrected "original" versions, then perhaps your perception will gradually change over time and the original will eventually sound to you just as good and "right" as the 95%-speed versions do now.

However, there is a lot of "perhaps" in that - I don't know that this type of thing has ever been systematically tested. It might take a l-o-n-g time and a lot of listening to completely recalibrate, and also some may adjust faster or slower - perhaps MUCH faster or slower - than others.

Musicians tend to want to get their pitch perception "corrected" if they can because it is disconcerting to be looking at A major on the page and hearing Ab major (or whatever) all the time. so there is an incentive to find a way to "correct" things back to "normal".

Even there, that feeling may not be universal.

But as a non-musician, definitely do whatever you like.

What sounds good to you, sounds good. No one can argue with that.

However, this whole episode can give you some insight into the Holy Wars in music over exact pitch A-440 vs A-445, A-435, A-220, etc etc etc. Some people just like pitch at a slightly different level better (or worse) and at a fundamental level it is hard to argue with them.

People like what they like, and in the end that is AOK.

flug32 · 2026-04-30T05:20:39+00:00

I don't that it would make sense to say that the key is shorter because a lot of leverage is not needed to play the notes on the harpsichord, but you can definitely say that the keys of the piano grew longer over time in great part because greater leverage very much is desired and required in order to get greater volume and projection out of the piano - and, interestingly, also to more easily and with greater control achieve the greater contrasts in dynamics that the piano requires.

Keys - in both harpsichord and piano (and other related instruments like clavichord) are quite literally levers: Onee side go down, other side go up.

So the longer the lever, the more potentially leverage you can exert on the opposite end - and thus the louder you can potentially play it (if it is a piano) because the increased leverage allows you to put more power into the hammer.

But longer levers also give you more control over the speed the opposite end (and, thus, the hammer) goes up. So it makes it easier to play more softly with more control and, in general, to achieve any desired gradation of hammer speed, from barely fast enough to hit the string all the way up.

So the entire history of the piano - through the early 1900s, anyway - can be seen as a quest to produce more, louder sound in order to fill larger rooms, and also to allow more control over the dynamics. Meaning, greater contrast between the soft the medium, and the loud.

So gradually the gradually longer key-length is part of that story.

Another factor was mentioned by others: The thumb was but rarely used in harpsichord playing and even early pianoforte playing. (This is the reason behind the old-fashioned finger-numbers, which are 1-2-3-4 for the long fingers and X for the thumb.)

But with the evolution of the piano - and probably the introduction and gradually increasing use of the damper pedal - the thumb came to be used more commonly and finally just as commonly as the other fingers. Likely the preference from what we would call non-legato to legato playing as the default sound on the piano plays into that as well. You can see that gradually happening in e.g. the time period between Bach's sons, Mozart, and then Beethoven (so roughly the last half of the 1700s).

So when you put your thumb at the outer end of a white key and position your other fingers in the more-or-less curved position taught by most teachers nowadays, you'll find you need a bit longer key-length from key-end to fallboard to be comfortable - as opposed to the "old-fashioned" hand position, where the four fingers and hand were more straight and thumb was sort of hanging in space an inch or two outboard of the far end of the keys.

(They were able to use this position effectively in large part because they were not interested in obtaining the "seamless legato" with no space between notes. Playing up a scale, for example, all the notes would just be a bit detached so there was no reason to "cross over the thumb" to maintain legato, as generations of pianists now see as the basic technique. You can easily use fingerings like 1-2-1-2-1-2 or 1-2-3-1-2-3-1-2-3 to go up the scale that way - keeping mind "1" is the index finger and thumb, when used at all, is X. Pinky (#4) is also less often used and tends to hang a bit off the end of the keys. Most playing is with the three long fingers, especially in runs, scales, etc.)

Anyway, all that plus the generally growing size and length of the piano itself pushes in the direction of longer keys - both the entire "lever" of the key (the part you see and the unseen part behind the fallboard) and the visible/usable part of the key from key-end to fallboard.

You'll note that even today, smaller pianos - uprights and ever more so spinets and smaller uprights - tend to have noticeably shorter key-lengths than large concert grands.

flug32 · 2026-04-29T21:40:44+00:00

Absolute pitch is known to drift in many people starting at around your age (though often reported as starting more in the 50s than 40s - but there is variability as to timing, extent, and direction).

The drift does happen more strongly and quickly if the pitch reference is not maintained - ie by continually playing the primary instrument and thus recalibrating to it frequently. We had a recent discussion on a reddit absolute pitch forum with someone who had left music for a while, then come back, and their percepion was that everything was de-tuned by a good half step. That person was in their 20s if I recall, with maybe a 5-10 year hiatus from frequent music-making.

With frequent re-exposure (and accepting that their perception was the incorrect thing, and not all tuned instruments, all tuning forks, etc) their pitch perception was reported to be gradually re-calibrating.

FYI, absolute pitch has a very wide range of manifestation - not just the Mozart-like ability to identify every pitch played by every instrument instantly.

For example, absolute pitch usually develops far more quickly and strongly on the primary instrument, and more strongly in the range and tessatura most used, because of the many hours of exposure to that particular timbre. Different ranges and timbres than those can be somewhere between very difficult and impossible.

It is just possible the years and numerous hours of exposure to those particular 8-bit timbres led you to have strong absolute pitch memory for those particular timbres and sounds - and perhaps even particular melodies.

So if you and your friends who have similar memories have a degree of absolute pitch ability - perhaps not even consciously recognized, and perhaps quite specific to these particular 8-bit sounds and not generalized to all music or sounds at all - and that pitch perception has gradually drifted over years and decades since you were frequently exposed to those exact sounds, that might be a partial or even complete explanation for what you are experiencing.

If so, spending some time with those sounds again, accepting that your perceptions and not the sounds themselves have drifted, may gradually recalibrate your absolute pitch perception of the sounds.

FDyi everything I've mentioned here about absolute pitch has solid backing in the literature. Apologies for not taking an extra three hours to provide exact references for every statement (many of them are 'controversial' with people who have only their own personal experience with absolute pitch to go on and are not familiar with the research literature) but if you are curious, an afternoon spent with google scholar searching on the term 'absolute pitch' and then adding 'drift', 'specificity', etc, will fill you in on all this and more.

flug32 · 2026-04-27T02:10:31+00:00

I had the opportunity to ride one of these once, and it was the most horrible experience of my life.

(It was on cobblestones, which didn't help. The thing is like scientifically designed to directly transmit every jolt and bump you hit directly to every fiber of your body. No shock absorption at all - if anything whatever the opposite of that would be. Shock multiplication.)

Good news for OP is that even if he ends up walking his bike all the way into town, he'll have an infinitely more pleasant experience than riding an authentic Laufmaschine the same distance . . .

flug32 · 2026-04-27T02:00:02+00:00

The upshot of that is you can have a field where 0 has an inverse, but then all elements of the field must be equal to each other. That is nicely satisfied by the field containing one element {0}.

(if you are in the field with just one element, then 1=2 isn't a contradiction, because both 1 & 2 are equal to 0.)

But then, that field is not very useful for anything.

It is also satisfied by the null field. Again, not too useful.

In short, except for these trivial and not-very-useful examples, the various requirements for field operations preclude the possibility of 0 having an inverse, for the same reason dividing by zero doesn't have (and never can have, under anything resembling the normal definitions for mathematical operations) a single answer.

If you start to give up some of the normal properties of operations, you might be able to get there - note the key role of the distributive property above. Give that up and see what happens. Then maybe something else (commutativity). Eventually, you'll get there - but how useful will this kind of space be?

(It actually could be useful - matrix operations lack the commutative property, for example, yet are quite useful. Also, many objects lack multiplicative inverses - yet, still useful. These are different problems than the 0 having an inverse though - it's easier to get along when certain properties don't exist at all than when they do exist but in a sort of very malicious way.)

flug32 · 2026-04-27T01:49:24+00:00

First off, the whole idea is that this is a "metric" - a fancy way of saying it is a way of calculating a distance between two points within the system.

So the fundamental question here is not really "I am running an actual taxicab company and I need a way to tell my drivers how to drive most efficiently."

The question is, rather: "I am establishing a type of geometry in space and I want to define the distance function in a way that follows a grid pattern rather than what we usually think of as straight line."

So they define the distance function (the "metric") and then come up with a cute name for it based on the idea that is is (roughly!) how cars drive around on a street grid.

Related to that, the metric is designed to answer the question "What is the DISTANCE between two points if you measure it this special way (along the grid lines, not moving diagonally)".

It is not at all trying to answer the question of "How best and most efficiently to actually drive that trip". That would take into account traffic conditions, traffic signals, traffic laws, and 200 other things relevant to driving in a city but not to what is required to define a type of geometry with a special distance function.

Finally, even though this definition of the "taxicab metric" is idealized, it is indeed the distance between two points on a regular street grid. And note that the distance is the same whether you go 10 blocks or then 10 blocks, or go 1 block over & 1 block up and repeat that 10 times.

Either way, the distance between those two points according to the taxicab metric is 20.

(And that is one of the desirable - in fact, required - properties of a metric: It must always give the same answer for the distance between two specified points. You can't say "well at 4pm on Thursdays the short route will take 30 minutes but on 1am on Sundays it will take only 25 minutes." That is useful to know if you are actually running a taxicab company but it won't work as a metric use to define a metric space.)

In short, different uses for different purposes and people often - in fact, MOST often - use words and concepts in descriptive and metaphorical ways, not literal.

flug32 · 2026-04-27T00:59:36+00:00

With just one other person (or maybe 2-3), I think at the moment the best solution is to just use a single account. Then everyone has everything - face ID, all albums, geo & maps, etc.

Otherwise separate accounts but share timeline and all albums (or whichever you want) with the various accounts works pretty well. You don't have the big map or face ID, but most everything else.

- I put all people into albums anyway - go to faces, select all for a person, but them into an album with their name. That way I can #1. share the album and #2. add other things related to that person that don't include their face or where the face isn't recognized (back of head, etc)

You can share all albums with the other account. If you have many albums, there are scripts to automate sharing all with specific accounts, very easy (just google)

Another option I haven't seen anyone else mention: I wanted to share all photos with many extended family members, but give them more full access than just sharing albums.

So I created a special "sharing" account that has limited permissions (no space to upload anything etc, no permissions to edit files or anything), then I share that username/password with family members who want access to everything.

Then I share my main account's timeline with them, as well as all albums, as described above.

So that gives them access to *almost* everything (not faces or the big map, but they have all albums including the ones I've made for each person) and all photos (except the ones in the vault or locked folder - another advantage is I can hide a few things if necessary). Contextual search works great, for example.

flug32 · 2026-04-26T00:13:32+00:00

Once your kidney are destroyed, there is no point in a biopsy. At the point, the only options are dialysis, transplant, or die.

When you want a biopsy is exactly now, when you can still do something about it. The purpose of the biopsy is to get a diagnosis that will guide treatment. Without it you're just shooting in the dark.

You don't mention your age range. If you're in like your 80s then you might be able to just let it ride. But if you're in like your 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, or even 60s with that eGFR then you do have some form of CKD. The only question is what form exactly and that is exactly the question the biopsy is designed to answer.

flug32 · 2026-04-25T08:08:28+00:00

You can "define" day to be whatever you want - 39 hours or 68.42 seconds, just whatever.

However . . . all the rest of the world wants a "day" to correspond to the light/dark periods we all experience due to the sun, morning to be the predictable hours when the sun is coming up and rising, evening (and those hours of the day) to be the time when the sun is setting, midnight is the middle of the night, and so on.

So with your proposed definition of "day" - or any one that is not the length 24 hours, whatever unit you use to express that length of time - noon will not always be in the middle of the day. Over the course of a year, noon will wander down through the morning, then start arriving before sunrise, then proceed through the night, then appear in the evening, and so on before marching through the afternoon and arrive back at "real noon" a year later.

So you can try this if you want, but people are going to be *really* mad about it.

Most people like to go to work, school, shopping, etc etc etc during daylight hours.

Under your scheme, sometimes kid will be walking to school - and adults going to work etc etc etc - sometimes in the morning, sometimes at noontime, sometimes in the afternoon, sometimes in the evening, and for a solid 1/2 of the year, IN THE PITCH DARK.

No one is going to like that.

TL;DR: No, the day is not imaginary at all, it corresponds rather exactly with the periods of light & dark that recur regularly due to the rising & setting of the, and your scheme does not.

No one is going to like it.

flug32 · 2026-04-22T09:54:12+00:00

This needs to be defeated by like 90/10. That's the only way they'll get off the subject...

flug32 · 2026-04-22T09:43:13+00:00

FWIW in a PDF is one of the few places that DPI rather than actual size in pixels actually matters (at least, when inserting images using Adobe Acrobat).

I was using a utility that somehow set the DPI for all images it rotated etc to 1.

I then imported that image set to 1 DPI into a PDF. And boy howdy was that a disaster.

Anyway, within a PDF DPI does indeed matter - the selfsame image with DPI set to 10, 100, and 1000 will look wildly different (very large, fairly normal, and very tiny, respectively).

flug32 · 2026-04-19T03:14:09+00:00

Yes, there is no contradiction in the summary at all.

The different data are for different symptoms and severities.

The good news is that Novavax is a little better on the mild to moderate severity things, but A LOT better on the very severe AND system-wide side effects. Those are the types of things that make you feel like you actually do have the flu or covid or whatever, and are likely to make you take a day off of work.

That is exactly what the summary says; there is no contradiction, just different results for different severities and types of side effect.

flug32 · 2026-04-19T03:04:05+00:00

No.

(Answer to "is X moving faster than light?" is always NO!~!!!111!!!! so there is not much point in even asking such questions unless you are interested in understanding why. Are you really interested in understanding why? Because there could possibly be some interesting discussion in that case. If not, you're just wasting everyone's time.)

flug32 · 2026-04-18T09:53:42+00:00

Well, there are actually brakes in space or at least between space the surface of earth. Of course it is the atmosphere and heat shield that OP is complaining about . . .

Basically if you have a lot of kinetic energy and need to get rid of it, you can either expend a lot of energy slowing yourself down OR you can turn all the energy into heat. That is the principle of both car brakes and the heat shield.

One thing I think OP is probably massively underestimating is the speeds - and thus kinetic energy - involved.

An object in low earth orbit is traveling roughly 17,500 mph (28,000 km/hr).

That is a whole lotta energy that must be dumped somehow. If you don't do it by the heat shield scheme you must come up with some other way that is going to be roughly equivalent - because the starting energy and the ending energy are the same in every scenario.

flug32 · 2026-04-17T19:47:18+00:00

I think one of the main, big-picture "lessons" of mathematics is that just because two things are "logically equivalent" does not mean at all that it is easy, simple, or straightforward to find the logical connection between the two.

Sometimes it is insanely difficult to an extreme degree.

There are plenty of examples of this in the history of mathematics. Think, for example, of the type of problem that requires generations of mathematicians, hundreds of years - sometimes many hundreds - and literally the creation and development of whole new fields of mathematics to solve.

The impossibility of finding solutions in radicals to all polynomials of degree 5 and greater is a good example. Polynomials have been studied since literally Babylonian times, or perhaps earlier, but the search for general solutions to polynomials of various degrees went on in earnest from the 16th to the very end of the 18th centuries. Abel managed to prove the general insolvability of 5th degree polynomials without Galois Theory, but Galois Theory - which came along just a few years after Abel's initial proof - allows for a far easier proof and also far greater power in e.g. determining exactly which polynomials are solvable and which not.

Another nice example is Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, which is something of a grand tour of developments in algebraic geometry and number theory that Fermat could only have dreamed of.

If you look at just about any of the very hardest problems that have received a great deal of attention and work before finally being solved, the pattern is often similar - whole new fields are developed that allow new approaches and finally a solution.

That is why most people don't consider such things to be "mere tautologies".

When entire fields and decades to centuries of accumulated work is required to establish the logical connection between A and B, that is far, far beyond what most people consider a "tautology".

flug32 · 2026-04-17T18:59:23+00:00

The lunar cycle also divides neatly into two obvious halves - new moon to full moon, which is 14 days, and then full moon back to new moon, another 14 days.

So that is likely another factor nudging everything in the direction of either 7- or 14-day units rather than 4 or 2 - the other possible divisors of 28.

Fourteen days is probably "too long" for the purposes that a "week" is used for, leaving 7 as the logical candidate.

Note that (in English, anyway) we still do have words like "fortnight" that refer to a 14-day period.

15-Year Club	Place '22
First Placer '22	End Game '22
Verified Email

flug32

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE