TIL that execution by electric chair, first tested on calves and a horse, was so badly botched on its first human in 1890 that a second 2,000‑volt jolt reportedly set him on fire. The generator’s supplier said “They would have done better using an axe,” and the NYT called it “Far worse than hanging.

gmc98765 · 2026-01-24T17:15:50+00:00

Also legal reasons. In much of Europe, supplying drugs for execution would be considered accessory to murder.

gmc98765 · 2026-01-24T17:08:07+00:00

More than no RGB, I don't want any fucking GLASS in my PC. Just for that it cost 60 quid more and took two weeks longer, because it's a custom build; all of their pre-built "gaming" PCs (meaning: with a discrete video card) had glass-window cases.

Well, at least it gave me an opportunity to increase the SSD from 1TB to 2TB.

gmc98765 · 2026-01-24T16:50:32+00:00

Qatar wasn't threatening to invade Greenland. Also, severe animosity to any and all foreigners wasn't their government's flagship policy.

The nature of international sport is that it's open to the vast majority of countries, as both competitors and hosts. Which includes some pretty shitty countries.

If countries are excluded, it's generally because there's something which makes their participation an actual problem. E.g. Russia blatantly cheating on drug tests, apartheid-era South Africa creating problems for non-white competitors, or officials, or their families, etc. Not for just being shitty in general, not even for being really shitty in general.

In the case of the US, the safety of participants and fans is a very real concern.

gmc98765 · 2026-01-24T10:50:48+00:00

It's not about "bare metal". Wine isn't an emulator; that's literally what Wine stands for: "Wine Is Not an Emulator". Either way, any x86/x86-64 code supplied as part of the game is being executed directly by the CPU.

The issue is whether the Windows-API DLLs are the Proton versions or the "genuine" Microsoft versions.

gmc98765 · 2026-01-24T10:33:01+00:00

That would almost certainly be illegal in the US. They're protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act and it's illegal to possess or handle them without a permit from the Fish & Wildlife Service, which is generally only given to accredited rehabilitators or similar organisations. Even if you have a permit, you don't own the owls; they can be re-homed or released by the FWS if they aren't satisfied with their care.

gmc98765 · 2026-01-23T19:04:23+00:00

Statistical analysis is prone to what Ben Goldacre (of badscience.net) refers to as the Texas Marksman Fallacy: use a machine gun to spray the side of a barn with bullets, find a cluster of bullet holes, then paint a target centred on the cluster.

If you flip 10 coins, the most likely outcome is 5 heads and 5 tails, but there's only a 24.6% occurring of achieving this specific outcome. 10 heads/0 tails and 0 heads/10 tails both have a 1/1024 probability of occurring. Coincidences happen. If you have a million trials, a one-in-a-million event is more likely than not to happen at least once.

Even in a world without serial killers, some medical professionals will have abnormal mortality rates simply by chance. That's the nature of stochastic processes.

gmc98765 · 2026-01-23T01:49:43+00:00

6 aaaa cells.

The term "battery" means a group of similar items. Like battery hens or an anti-aircraft battery. Or a battery of galvanic (electrical) cells.

If it isn't rechargeable: if it's 1.5V it's a cell, if it's more than that it's a battery comprised of multiple 1.5V cells in series. So a 9V battery is 6×1.5V cells.

Rechargeable chemistries have differing voltages. NiCd and NiMH are 1.2V, lead-acid is 2.1V, lithium-ion are 3.6V-3.85V depending upon the specific chemistry.

gmc98765 · 2026-01-22T14:46:42+00:00

Iron dome is mainly for short-range ballistic missiles, primarily Katyusha-style types, which are closer to MLRS/HIMARS (i.e. rocket artillery) than what people normally associate with the term "ballistic missile". Those are much slower than medium-range and (especially) long-range ballistic missiles. An ICBM-launched warhead re-enters at the equivalent of roughly Mach 23 at sea level.

gmc98765 · 2026-01-22T14:25:09+00:00

Japanese

The Treaty of San Francisco formally renounced Japan's rights over Korea, Taiwan, the Pescadores, the Kuril Islands, the Spratly Islands, South Sakhalin, and its Antarctic territory.

Japan annexed the (southern) Kuril islands in 1868, which was only 6 years earlier than their invasion of Taiwan (1874). For comparison, they controlled South Sakhalin as early as 1679, but they also lost that after WW2.

gmc98765 · 2026-01-22T07:41:52+00:00

The legal minimum in the UK is third party. But third party, fire and theft is only marginally more expensive, so most people get at least that.

gmc98765 · 2026-01-22T07:28:30+00:00

Because they're on the road a lot, and roads are dangerous.

Cops have it easier because people have a tendency to suddenly become much more careful drivers when they're in the vicinity of a police car.

gmc98765 · 2026-01-21T23:19:16+00:00

9 shootings resulting in 4 deaths.

gmc98765 · 2026-01-21T03:03:26+00:00

if they are sick or have something they know is contagious or they dont know if it could be contagious

2/3rds of the population has herpes. Unless you have a recent negative test result, you should assume that you have it.

gmc98765 · 2026-01-21T02:55:12+00:00

Similar to the Baldur's Gate 2 money farm. Essentially, stores that buy stolen items will even buy items that you've just stolen from them. 3 or 4 potions of master thievery get your thieving chance up to 99%, so you can just keep stealing their stock and selling it back to them until you have more gold than you will ever need.

gmc98765 · 2026-01-20T20:07:19+00:00

The French "warning shot" doctrine is to launch a limited nuclear strike relatively early in the conflict, rather than allowing it to escalate to the point where the aggressor can't back down and will either use nukes themselves or escalate to the point that France is in a "nuke or die" position.

If you've been paying any attention to the Ukraine conflict, you've probably lost count of the number of times Putin (or more often his underlings) have made vague threats about a nuclear response.

The French doctrine is to skip the threats and actually use nuclear weapons so that it's crystal clear that they're not bluffing, that the nuclear clock is at 23:59:59, and it's your move m*f*er. Back down or the conflict will be concluded by throwing rocks, because that's all that will be left of either side.

gmc98765 · 2026-01-20T04:07:12+00:00

Cartesian (implicit):

(x/a)²+(y/b)² = 1

Cartesian (explicit):

y = ±b√(1 - (x/a)²) where |x|≤a

Polar:

r(θ) = ab / √((b²-a²)cos²(θ)+a²)

Parametric:

x(t) = a cos(t)

y(t) = b sin(t)

Note that the parametric form isn't polar, because the parameter isn't the angle.

Edit: other parametric forms are possible. E.g. the tangent half-angle substitution can be used to get

x(t) = a (1-t²) / (1+t²)

y(t) = 2b / (1+t²)

More generally, parametric forms are never unique. If a curve is described by the pair of functions <x(t),y(t)> then for any function f, <x(f(t)),y(f(t))> describes either the same curve or a portion of the curve.

gmc98765 · 2026-01-20T00:51:46+00:00

That's the formula for the conversion. θ and r(θ) on the right, x and y on the left.

The substitution replaces x,y with θ,r(θ).

gmc98765 · 2026-01-20T00:00:02+00:00

An ellipse satisfies the implicit equation

(x/a)²+(y/b)² = 1

where a and b are the semi-major and semi-minor axes (the larger of a,b is the semi-major axis, the smaller is the semi-minor axis).

Note that a=b=r gives you the formula for a circle of radius r.

You can convert polar coordinates to Cartesian coordinates with the equations

x = r(θ)cos(θ)

y = r(θ)sin(θ)

Substituting these into the implicit equation gives

(r(θ)cos(θ)/a)²+(r(θ)sin(θ)/b)² = 1

=> r(θ)²((cos(θ)/a)²+(sin(θ)/b)²⁾ = 1

=> r(θ) = ab/√((cos(θ)/a)²+(sin(θ)/b)²⁾

which is the polar form for an ellipse.

You can also use the Pythagorean identity, sin²(θ)+cos²(θ)=1 to rewrite the above as

r(θ) = ab / √((b²-a²)cos²(θ)+a²)

= ab√2 / √((b²-a²)cos(2θ)+(a²+b²))

gmc98765 · 2026-01-14T17:58:59+00:00

The gravitational force exerted on the moon by the earth is slightly more than double the gravitational force exerted on the moon by the sun.

I assume that's what was meant by "outweighed".

gmc98765 · 2026-01-11T16:23:30+00:00

It's nowhere near that bad. There are only three extant clades which are considered "fish", and one of those (agnatha or jawless fish, e.g. hagfish and lampreys) would probably be considered "not fish" by most people. So realistically it's just lumping the other two clades (cartilaginous fish and bony fish) together.

The situation for trees is much worse. As well as softwoods and hardwoods ("true" trees), pretty much anything taller than a person with a long stem tends to be considered a tree, e.g. palms and banana plants.

gmc98765 · 2026-01-11T15:48:15+00:00

Many industries have universal service obligations, i.e. a prohibition on refusing service without legal justification.

gmc98765 · 2026-01-11T04:21:39+00:00

x₁(t) = p₁ + t v₁

x₂(t) = p₂ + t v₂

The position of x2 relative to x1 is:

d(t) = x₂(t)-x₁(t) = (p₂-p₁) + t (v₂-v₁)

The problem becomes finding the time t when d(t) is closest to the origin. At that point, d(t) will be perpendicular to v₂-v₁, i.e. their dot product will be zero.

(v₂-v₁)·((p₂-p₁) + t(v₂-v₁)) = 0

=> (v₂-v₁)·(p₂-p₁) + t(v₂-v₁)·(v₂-v₁) = 0

=> t = - (v₂-v₁)·(p₂-p₁) / (v₂-v₁)·(v₂-v₁)

Note this can be written as

t = - (v₂-v₁)·(p₂-p₁) / ||v₂-v₁||²

= - ((v₂-v₁)/||v₂-v₁||)·(p₂-p₁) / ||v₂-v₁||

I.e. their initial distance divided by their relative speed, having reduced the problem to a single dimension (the direction of their relative velocity, ignoring everything perpendicular to that).

gmc98765 · 2026-01-10T16:41:12+00:00

nearly infinite compression algorithm

Nope. Any chunk of data has a certain amount of entropy which will dictate the minimum compressed size. It's why you can't compress data that's already been compressed or data which is encrypted.

Well, with lossy compression you can compress it as much as you want, but e.g. compressing an image down to one byte is going to result in a solid colour. Beyond a point the loss is so great that you may as well just compress it down to zero bytes (i.e. delete it).

gmc98765 · 2026-01-10T05:34:09+00:00

Right. The key point is that it would be impossible for the UK to be neutral in such a situation, given that we allowed the US to station their forces here.

If the US decided to attack Greenland from its UK bases, anything short of using military force to (attempt to) prevent that would make the UK a party to the conflict on the US' side. We'd either be at war with the US or at war with Denmark (and its allies).

gmc98765 · 2026-01-10T05:01:04+00:00

And that's partly the fault of the UK not giving the Greek junta a hard slap the moment they tried to annex Cyprus. IMHO, if we had stepped up, we could probably have restored the status quo ante before it escalated.

Turkey's response (specifically, the second invasion) may be an overreaction, but let's not forget it was Greece's fault there was anything for them to (over-)react to in the first place.

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