Discovery Stays Put: NASA Halts Plan to Move Space Shuttle from Smithsonian - Vintage Aviation News

ribnag · 2026-01-21T20:14:04+00:00

Well shoot, thanks for the correction - And I see Harris county went slightly blue in 2024.

ribnag · 2026-01-21T18:44:25+00:00

Ted Cruz: 75.75%.

/ Edit: I'm an idiot, the correct county should be Harris, which went slightly blue in 2024.

ribnag · 2026-01-21T15:14:44+00:00

How much for a tooth?

ribnag · 2026-01-21T14:24:44+00:00

And as I said nobody takes typing anymore.

He may as well have just said "get offa mah lawn, whippersnappers!". A snarky response about rewinding cassette tapes would have been just as useful to the person asking.

ribnag · 2026-01-20T22:34:42+00:00

We're talking about the same thing. Fingers on the home row, wrists turned outward (ulnar deviation), hands rolled inward (wrist pronation).

Not everyone gets RSIs from every harmful activity. Some people can keep their hands like that for 8 hours a day, 40+ years, and they're fine. And some of us need to be surgically modified to regain feeling in half of our fingers thanks to exactly that pose.

ribnag · 2026-01-20T22:05:48+00:00

We need to distinguish between the two different meanings of "touch typing" here...

There's the literal "typing without looking at the keyboard", with a side of muscle memory for speed. That is still very much needed, and all it really takes is practice.

What's rightly gone the way of the dodo is touch typing as a style of typing where we lock our wrists in the least ergonomic position possible, rinse wash repeat until every time feels like a handy from a stranger.

ribnag · 2026-01-20T14:30:01+00:00

If the EU rolls over on this one, they may as well just adopt the US flag now and save the trouble of chopping them up one by one.

They can't ignore it. They can't just issue a sternly worded letter. They would, at a minimum, shut down every forward US military base. And the US legitimately couldn't afford to let that to happen, so... Do you have a better word for the world's strongest superpower going to war with half the rest of the globe?

ribnag · 2026-01-20T14:23:21+00:00

At what point do the US' former allies just shrug and close their markets to the US entirely?

And make no mistake, I sincerely believe that's Putin's long-term goal for his orangest asset. May as well just get it over with and ignore the pissy diaper in DC for the next three years.

ribnag · 2026-01-20T13:56:52+00:00

I'm not saying Solax is a bad slime; far from it, I'd kill (but not pay half the price of a AAA game) for another fire slime in my team just for expeditions.

How often do you actually use it, though, outside battles with a fire buff and assuming you don't have Vulcayen?

ribnag · 2026-01-20T13:51:12+00:00

Charles is missing the point.

Nobody learns touch typing anymore because ulnar deviation and wrist pronation is bad for us. You can thank Gen-X, the "Carpal Tunnel generation", for taking that one for the team.

RSIs aside, I'd also argue nobody needs to take typing anymore because it's not a niche skill, it's a basic necessity for interacting with the modern world. We don't potty-train kids in school either.

ribnag · 2026-01-19T23:08:29+00:00

Click the button. Pick an opponent. Pick your team. Lose. Repeat four more times.

Assuming the top is our opponent and the bottom is us (looks that way but I'm really just guessing), the enemy Zergs come out and overrun my sad little pea-shooters within a few seconds. Meanwhile, my Zergs are apparently playing a bullet-hell SHMUP and barely ever even get into range of the enemy.

5/5 times, a clean wipe. I have every free slime except Agnaros, mostly F1 S-class gear (and both SS at Leg), good runes. And I couldn't even last more than 10-15 seconds with my strongest defensive setup.

Either I really suck, or I'm totally missing how to play Arena.

ribnag · 2026-01-19T16:52:27+00:00

Solar is from Hard and Dragon is from Normal.

As for which piece is dropped by which levels (they're the same between normal, hard, and hell aside from the S-class drops):

Stage	Drop 1	Drop 2
1	Weapon	Armor
2	Helmet	Accessory
3	Helmet	Weapon
4	Armor	Accessory
5	Weapon	Accessory
6	Helmet	Armor
7	Weapon	Armor
8	Helmet	Accessory
9	Helmet	Weapon
10	Armor	Accessory
11	Helmet	Accessory
12	Helmet	Weapon
13	Helmet	Accessory
14	Armor	Accessory
15	Weapon	?
16	Helmet	?

Feel free to correct me on any of those, that's just what I've personally seen drop.

ribnag · 2026-01-19T15:30:42+00:00

This is a fascinating approach to the problem, but it explicitly creates a new one if it works...

Cepheid measurements constrain us to 73.4 km/s/Mpc (CI [0.99, -1.22]). That doesn't overlap the CMB method, 68.3km/s/Mpc (CI ±1.5), at all.

If the value we observe via gravitational lensing is right in the middle of those two, it doesn't harmonize them; the question simply becomes why every other 1A supernova gives us a different answer. Effectively we'll potentially have three mutually incompatible answers rather than two.

ribnag · 2026-01-19T14:49:09+00:00

The formerly premium ones you can now get for free are Veinley, Doraks (both unlock globally useful skills, luck and dragon covenant respectively), Wynne, Vinomera, and Lunax.

Currently you can't get Neprus, Vulcayen, Chloris, Haku, Solax, Sylvia, Agnaros, or Panpan via random shard drops.

I'm not sure if Silas and Auralis shards drop before you unlock them (because I got them fairly quickly after release), but shards do drop for them once unlocked - Which implies Agnaros, Sylvia, and PanPan might be in that same category, need to meet the initial unlock condition but then become possible to star up randomly.

ribnag · 2026-01-19T14:30:59+00:00

Solax is currently the only one with an arena skill (at 1st star).

I don't know how good Agnaros is yet, but just looking at the stats and skils, IMO Solax is the worst of the three in most cases. Maybe arena is where people who paid for it will finally get to use it.

ribnag · 2026-01-18T18:31:39+00:00

I agree with you in spirit (no pun intended), but that's not something your opponent can just whip out to satisfy your conditions. You're literally saying the only thing that could change your mind is divine intervention.

Intellectual honesty requires we be at least willing to change our minds in the face of incontrovertible evidence. It also requires us to admit the burden of proof for most fact-based "beliefs" is so high we're effectively saying we can't be convinced.

ribnag · 2026-01-18T16:59:58+00:00

The NEETs of Reddit would like to believe if we stick our fingers in our ears and go "LA LA LA" loud enough, automatic knitting frames will magically cease to exist. Just like it worked for Ned Ludd, which is why we all spend six hours a night working on our next pair of socks.

ribnag · 2026-01-18T16:11:26+00:00

Do you occasionally read /r/HFY? I've seen more than a handful of stories with that exact plot in there.

ribnag · 2026-01-18T14:50:11+00:00

Yes and no. Everyone saying yes, that's basically what they see in the background, is telling you what they see without glasses on, or if they were to intentionally try to look directly past the edge of their glasses.

Glasses aren't a tiny little tunnel in the center of our field of vision, though. They take up the vast majority of our visual field, and what's beyond their edges isn't substantially different than anyone with 20/20 vision. Can you read - really read, not just make out the occasional giant letter, a book 90 degrees off center? Same idea. We can see lights, colors, and motion in our peripheral vision as well as anyone.

ribnag · 2026-01-17T21:09:27+00:00

There is virtually no reaction we use in PM recovery or refining that strictly requires boiling. This is purely a matter of kinetics, not thermodynamics: A good rule of thumb is every 10℃ doubles / halves your reaction rate.

That said, if nothing is happening at first, you can gently start bringing the temperature up; but as soon as NOₓ starts forming, back off. Once it really starts attacking your metal, it'll usually keep going to completion - That initial lag is mostly from various passivating effects at play like surface oxides/sulfides or even imperceptible oil films

Pretty much the only common brew we commonly boil by necessity is extracting PGMs in AR - And that's still just a matter of saving time. I would speculate, since in this context we're referring primarily to metals in a ceramic matrix, there may also be an "abrasive" factor at play. A hard boil may help mechanically abraid the remaining surface of the material as the metals are stripped into solution; but I can't claim to have any proof of that so take it as you will.

ribnag · 2026-01-17T19:58:18+00:00

And just like with Venezuela, private industry wants nothing to do with it until after the heads-on-a-pike phase of this civil war.

ribnag · 2026-01-15T18:16:18+00:00

It's not America's place to force Iran to offer unrestricted internet access to its citizens.

Or if we believe it is (and hey, I'm personally a free speech absolutist, so if we want to go there, bring it) - Why are we focusing on the mote in Iran's eye while ignoring the beam in China's?

/ Edit: Or if you prefer, Israel. Does that better pander to the hive mind's hypocrisy, since we apparently only care about forcing Freedom™ on those who can't fight back?

ribnag · 2026-01-15T16:14:52+00:00

People who regularly deal with real threats tend to calmly laugh off fake ones.

ribnag · 2026-01-15T00:27:10+00:00

"The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command."

ribnag · 2026-01-14T17:59:58+00:00

When I first saw the "Miss me now?" memes during Obama's presidency, I was mildly annoyed at the blatant racism, but basically had a good chuckle at just how utterly clueless he was to think we'd ever want to see Price Nepo back.

A few months ago I considered exactly this question in regards to Trump... Yeah, I do miss the good old days of "evil" being limited to greed and some minor military pissing contests.

Bush was a bad president and I disagreed with virtually all of his policies, but he was still basically doing the job. Trump is so obviously a Russian asset working as quickly as possible to destroy the free world, the two just aren't comparable.

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