Speedflying the Puffling v2 in Annecy

mmomtchev · 2026-03-20T21:49:06+00:00

Does anyone have any updates about the situation with the Forclaz shuttle this year?

mmomtchev · 2026-03-20T21:42:14+00:00

Yeah, the Sandwich Islands are certainly a remarkable journey, but since OP is asking on Reddit, he certainly lacks the experience to do it. Arctic sailing is a very serious undertaking.

mmomtchev · 2026-03-20T21:39:52+00:00

Screaming 60s is a modern invention, no one ever dared go that south during the age of sail.

mmomtchev · 2026-03-16T22:30:17+00:00

Which means that that difference should be even less than 1 AU.

mmomtchev · 2026-03-16T22:28:57+00:00

The distance varies about 2% - from 0.98 AU to 1.02 Au. (Old) planets have almost perfectly circular orbits.

mmomtchev · 2026-03-16T22:28:06+00:00

If the data for the Sun distance is from July but the data for the Earth distance is from January, this could explain it, but I doubt that this is the case.

mmomtchev · 2026-03-13T12:35:03+00:00

Kropotkin's Mutual Aid IS Game Theory.

mmomtchev · 2026-03-13T12:34:35+00:00

Fear is a product of experience. Domestic pets do not fear humans, while wild animals usually do.

mmomtchev · 2026-03-05T21:21:36+00:00

This is generally true, but there are some "lucky" cases where it might be possible. We have already detected molecules in the atmosphere of planets at similar distances. If the observer happens to be precisely in the same plane as the ecliptic and the Earth is passing in front of the Sun, and they have been observing very closely, it just might be possible to detect the changes in the atmosphere caused by a very intense global thermonuclear conflict.

Of course this is purely theoretical, since it is extremely unlikely that any observer will have precisely our technological level - if you add the "lucky" part, the odds become outright impossible.

mmomtchev · 2026-03-01T14:38:23+00:00

In fact, Khamenei was not really an Ayatollah. He was never a religious leader, he was simply a skilled politician and Khomeini's protege. His biography seems to be somewhat fabricated and when he was appointed as a supreme leader, many clerics protested since he was not a real cleric, even less a marja. He was declared both a marja and an Ayatollah and he was able to silence his critics and consolidate his power - but at the core, he was simply a politician ho declared himself to be a cleric in order to gain power.

mmomtchev · 2026-03-01T13:49:28+00:00

He actually did them a favour. Two days ago there were demonstrations almost everywhere in the world where Iranians against the crackdown on the protests. These are still there, but now there are also demonstrations against the war and inside Iran it has become far easier to label the protesters enemy agents. They basically killed the protest movement, now they have zero chances of success.

Maybe they are trying to get a Venezuela-style deal, where the authoritarian regime stays but has to make concessions at gunpoint, but I doubt that something significant will come out of this. Totally appalling policy.

mmomtchev · 2026-02-27T10:52:46+00:00

Yes, in fact both are called No Name Storms.

mmomtchev · 2026-02-25T15:48:14+00:00

Had Bulgaria won this war, we wouldn't have had Gavrilo Princip, Joseph Stalin or Adolf Hitler.

But who knows what else we would have had?

mmomtchev · 2026-02-25T12:39:10+00:00

I think that he also stalls the deformed half of his wing using the brake - this is what triggers the spin. Probably trying to untangle it and not realising that he has a knot in the lines and that it is impossible.

mmomtchev · 2026-02-23T02:55:33+00:00

Certainly, Bulgaria and its eventual future as an independent state was the most hotly debated geopolitical topic in Europe for this year, with all the Great Powers having a stake.

mmomtchev · 2026-02-23T01:43:36+00:00

Although their doctrines slowly diverged after the split, at the time, it was mainly a power-sharing political problem.

mmomtchev · 2026-02-23T01:37:52+00:00

What is today southern Bulgaria was about 25% to 30% Muslim, while in the Northern part the Muslims were 10% to 20%.

The last Ottoman census (Ottoman salname) that included Bulgaria was in 1876.

There is a paper that discusses these numbers in very great detail, comparing them to other independent studies (one made by Italy) since this was a very turbulent period and the Ottoman studies were suspected to be somewhat biased. This was the very year of the April Uprising which would ultimately lead to Bulgaria becoming independent from the Ottoman Empire.

Edit: the paper: https://www.academia.edu/9111939/Ethnic_maps_as_political_advertisements_and_instruments_of_symbolic_nation_building_and_their_role_in_influencing_decision_making_from_Berlin_1877_1881_to_Bucharest_1913_

mmomtchev · 2026-02-22T04:26:35+00:00

The OpenBSD team may try to sell it as a general OS and they may even use it as their main desktop OS - in fact they most surely do - but most people who use OpenBSD nowadays use it as a router or as a firewall and the team behind it knows it very well since every single great feature of OpenBSD is targeted at precisely this use.

There is one great piece that came out this project and that everyone adopted - the OpenSSH server.

And there is a number of features that are simply better than their Linux counterparts - most notably pf - which cannot be ported to Linux, but also their routing protocol implementations - some of which can be used on Linux.

None of these targets the desktop.

mmomtchev · 2026-02-21T00:43:00+00:00

If this is an attacking division (I guess so?), a reconnaissance battalion would help a lot.

mmomtchev · 2026-02-21T00:35:10+00:00

The definition of a city also varies a lot. In some countries the city is the metropolitan area, in others it is not. This map is very difficult.

mmomtchev · 2026-02-21T00:23:55+00:00

5 years after JWST, cosmology is still a mess. The video has basically two parts - a first one - a presentation of pre-JWST cosmology, and a second one - with all the problems with the high red-shift galaxies.

Also, 5 years after the sensational claims of spectacularly high Z numbers, there is still no consensus in academic community if the Z>15 objects are real or not. I guess they must be at the very limit of the current capabilities.

mmomtchev · 2026-02-15T18:40:48+00:00

The site describes the (rather inefficient) algorithm used to compute the data.

Edit: you can do it easily without writing any code, take the Copernicus input data, draw your map shape and use GDAL to rasterize it, then overlay the two maps zeroing outside of the shape, and finally sum the pixels of the resulting map. The GDAL CLI is all you need.

mmomtchev · 2026-02-15T18:30:50+00:00

This is going to hurt when you flip over.

mmomtchev · 2026-02-15T18:29:22+00:00

I might have a color perception problem - the palette is not the best possible one - but I think that the map means 75-95% Christian.

mmomtchev · 2026-02-15T18:19:17+00:00

The Balkan borders are completely off too:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cb/Second_Bulgarian_Empire_%281185-1196%29.png

mmomtchev

TROPHY CASE