I remember my 4th grade teacher having one of these and showing it off around 2000, it may have been the first digital camera I ever saw.

Blew my mind back then.

He was one of my favorite teachers, really into science, loved gadgets. He was an older guy who retired a few years later and I heard he wasn’t in the best of health, no idea if he’s still around, but I hope he at least lived long enough to appreciate how far digital cameras have come since then.

For me, a lot of it has to do with how it’s presented in schools

Pi, for example. One day my teachers just kind of dumped this magical 3.14… number on me without any real explanation. Just basically “use this number to do stuff with circles,” no real explanation on what pi actually is on anything, just “remember this”

Years later I found a gif of a circle sort of unraveling that showed how the circumference is π × the diameter of the circle

And sure, mathematically, the formula tells you that, but actually seeing that animated out made a hell of a lot more sense to me.

Now I got most of my basic math education before those gifs were so readily available, and smart boards were just becoming a thing when I was in high school, so it would have been a little hard to show that to a bunch of elementary or middle school students without having us huddle around a desktop.

But that’s something that could have been illustrated pretty well with a couple circles of different sizes (cardboard cut-outs, printed on paper, different jar lids, etc,) a piece of string, and a ruler.

And the same goes for a whole lot of different math things.

In the interest of battery life and redundancy, I think it might make sense to have 3 devices.

Ereader with an e ink display for reading, a lot of these can last days or weeks on a charge easily

An mp3 player for music. I don’t know what the current state of mp3 players is, I suspect a lot of no-name imported garbage, but over a decade ago I know my iPod used to go days or weeks on a charge with pretty heavy usage. Probably look for whatever has the least bells and whistles you can find- no touch screen, physical controls, etc. if you’re up for a bit of tinkering I’m pretty sure there’s a pretty active scene for people modding old iPods with better batteries, more storage, etc. that would probably be a great option.

A tablet or smartphone for movies, or possibly a laptop (I’m not an apple guy, but I’ve heard MacBooks have pretty insane battery life these days.) Keep all the wifi/cellular/Bluetooth/gps, etc. turned off, keep it on power save mode, disable anything you can that you don’t need to watch movies. Unfortunately if such a thing as a dedicated video-only tablet exists, I couldn’t find it with a quick search. If such a thing can be found, I’d probably recommend that.

A dedicated device that does one job well will usually be more efficient at that thing than a multipurpose device like a tablet, smartphone, or computer that needs to be able to do it all. An mp3 player only needs to be able to play music, it doesn’t need to be running a full-on OS that’s capable of sending emails, making phone calls, playing games, etc.

Also that way if one of those things does die on you, you still have the other 2.

I saw in one of your other comments your concern about a tablet having a bigger screen would be a bigger drain on battery life. That’s true to an extent, bigger screens draw more power, but since the whole device is bigger they can compensate with a bigger battery. I haven’t exactly done an exhaustive survey of tablet battery life and don’t care to look into it, but in my (fairly limited) experience, they usually pretty much at least break even or surpass phones in battery life. I have a cheap tablet that I really only use for reading it lives in my bag, usually in my car, often forgotten about for days or occasionally weeks at a time, and doesn’t exactly get heavy usage, but it usually can go at least a few days without a change, even with WiFi and Bluetooth left on. If I’m not using it at all, it can sometimes go a couple weeks just sitting idle. It’s usually good for at least a couple hours of streaming HD video, with WiFi turned off and 720p video on internal storage I imagine it’s good for at least a couple movies.

WiFi and cellular data are pretty big power drains too. I know when I check my battery usage on my phone that probably accounts for about ⅓ or so of it. Having those turned off can go a long way. Jailbreaking/rooting your phone to disable unnecessary services probably wouldn’t hurt, but that’s probably a drop in the bucket compared to just keeping your device offline.

I don’t really like brand favouritism, but if you’re able to find a Toyota in your price range, as far as I’m concerned it’s pretty hard to go wrong with them. I’m pretty hard-pressed to think of anyone I’ve ever known who’s had a Toyota who had anything really bad to say about them, even with the few years of Tacomas that had major rust issues around the early 2000s, everyone I know who had one felt that Toyota did a pretty solid job of doing right by them.

My current car is an '07 4runner. I bought it used with around 150k miles on it about 5 years ago, I now at just over 200k miles. and except for the usual shit like brakes that are expected to wear down every few years, the only major thing I’ve had to deal with was replacing the alternator. It does have a small exhaust leak that throws a code for the catalytic converter every so often (it’s on for maybe a couple weeks every few months or so) that I’m not particularly concerned about. I’m fairly confident that with not much beyond regular upkeep this car could make it to 300k+ pretty easily.

My wife is driving a Prius that’s a few years newer (2012 I think) she’s had it for a few years now, only thing she’s needed is new tires so far.

Growing up my mom had an '89 Corolla, and there’s a damn good chance it’s still on the road. At some point we sold it to my uncle who later sold it to a cousin, and after that we lost track of it, but around that time (circa 2010-ish) it was still going just fine, even after having a pretty large tree fall on it and all of the usual wear and tear you’d expect on a 20+ year old car.

Outside of my family’s favoritism for Toyotas, I also have a hard time thinking of people who have anything bad to say about Honda’s. I’ve also never heard anyone complain about their Subaru, I have less personal experience with Subarus overall, I’ve never driven one, but my overall impression of every one I’ve ever ridden in has been positive, and Subaru owners sing their praises.

Most people I’ve known with Kias and Hyundais have also spoken highly about them…

Overall, my general advice is buy from any of the major Asian car brands unless you need a larger pickup truck (¾ ton or bigger,) then pretty much your only options are pretty much American trucks. For ½ ton or smaller trucks, I’d personally stick to Asian brands still, with the possible exception of the Ford Maverick.

As far as specific models, my personal recommendations are

Subaru in pretty much any market segment they inhabit. Smaller sporty cars are dumb regardless of brand, but if that’s your thing, go Subaru.

Sedans/hatchbacks- Toyota Corolla or Prius, Honda Accord or civic.

Compact suvs/crossovers- Toyota RAV4, Honda CRV, Kia sportage, Hyundai Tucson. Wrangler if you actually intend to go off roading, Suzuki samurai if you’re going off roading and not in the US.

Mid-sized SUV: Toyota 4runner (I’ve dialed in that a midsized SUV is the right sized car for me personally at this point in my life, not going to go into all of the reasoning for that, but having driven a few different brands and models I am personally confident in saying that it is the be-all end-all of mid sized SUVs for me, if Isuzu ever makes a comeback in the passenger vehicle segment and resurrects the trooper I may be open to reevaluating that because I loved my trooper, but they’re all 20+ years old now)

Full-sized SUVs: do not recommend. If you can find one of the old school jeep wagoneers maybe do that for the cool factor, but if you’re contemplating a full sized SUV what you really want is a minivan, or maybe a Ford flex. They’re not “cool,” but trust me, minivans are the shit.

Minivans- they’re all pretty good, never met a minivan I didn’t like.

Small pick-up trucks- Ford Maverick, or if you need/want a “real” truck get a Tacoma or Frontier, or go for old rangers/Mazda B series or a t100 if you’re ok with an old truck, or replace all of those recommendations with a Toyota Hilux if you’re not in the US/Canada

½ ton pickup- Toyota tundra

Bigger than ½ ton- you don’t need this unless you are regularly towing a heavy trailer or live and work on a farm, or do major construction business with your personal vehicle, or something to that effect. If that applies to you, take your pick of any of the big 3 American brands, I like Fords, but honestly I view this as the same as picking your favorite color, it’s what you like personally, don’t let anyone else yuck your yum.

Personally, and I’m not saying this applies to everyone by a longshot, what car you need/want is fairly personal, but if I had carte blanche to go out and buy any newish car I could find to replace my current vehicle I’d be looking at

Toyota 4runner or Tacoma Subaru Crosstrek or Outback
Ford Maverick

But I’m an outdoorsy, DIY-minded person, who goes “off-road” occasionally (I don’t go off roading for its own sake, but my life sometimes tak me driving onto a beach, or down some shitty dirt paths, over fields, etc.) has to commute in the snow, often has to pick up bulky lumber and such, and occasionally how small trailers.

My wife who doesn’t usually have any of those needs would probably be looking at a newer Prius, or maybe a Hyundai Kona if she decided she wanted something bigger.

And in an ideal world, I’d probably have a maverick or 4runner for my various outdoorsy and DIY pursuits, and whatever the smallest cheapest DIY hybrid or electric car I can find is for my daily commuting as long as it has 4 wheels, a/c, and a radio, pretty much anything out there would be just fine for me. But I can only count on having 2 parking spaces.

Honestly at 5k in this economy, you’re probably scraping the bottom of the barrel of anything that can be considered a “good” car, and you’re probably going to just end up with whatever is available near you in your price range with relatively low miles. Go asian if you can’t but don’t expect anything amazing to present itself.

True, I did think about mentioning that but decided to skip over it to keep things simple.

Animals like cows for example, can get by almost entirely on fiber. Stuff like grass doesn’t have much in the way of carbs we can use, but it contains a ton of fiber, and cows digestive systems are set up to actually do something with them.

The extra “stomachs” they have allow for some extra fermentation and such to happen so they can break down that fiber into simpler carbs.

Gonna try to give a very general ELI5 sort of answer

There’s basically 3 main types of carbohydrates

Simple carbs- basically sugars (mono- and di-saccharides)

Complex carbs- starches, whole grains, etc. (polysaccharides)

Fiber- arguably these are just really complex carbs that your body can’t really break down

In general, sugars are the source of energy your body actually runs on, especially glucose. Everything else basically gets broken down into glucose.

Your body can pretty much use simple sugars as-is or can easily break them down into a form it can use. There’s some variation just how quick and easy it is for your body to use different sugars, but in general your body will start to feel the effects of eating sugar in the space of a few minutes, and the effects will peak within about an hour or two.

Complex carbs take a little more digesting to break down into a form your body can make use of. They’re basically being turned into simpler sugars, but that process takes a while. You might hear about athletes carbo-loading with a big spaghetti dinner or something the night before a big competition. The idea there is that the energy from that big, complex carb-heavy dinner won’t really hit them for a few hours or even until the next day, and it will keep providing that energy for a longer period of time.

Fiber is, for the most part, indigestible, your body can’t really break it down into simpler sugars that it can make use of. It goes in your mouth, through your digestive tract, and out the other end relatively unchanged. That doesn’t mean it’s useless though, it still plays an important role in digestion. It takes up space in your stomach helping you feel more full. It absorbs water and helps keep your stool soft and helps waste move through your intestines, and it minds to things like bile acids and cholesterol so that they can be passed as waste.

Again, this is meant to be a very general answer, there’s a lot of details I’m glossing over both just to keep things simple, and because I’m not a doctor or anything of the sort and I’m not 100% sure myself.

I’m not looking for troubleshooting

WTH is going on with my phone? Anybody else having new problems?

That sounds a hell of a lot like a troubleshooting question. Otherwise you’re just screaming into the void and I’m not sure what kind of interaction you were looking for by posting here. I suppose we could just say “that’s rough buddy” and “yes/no, I am/am not having that problem” and move on.

His tone could use some work, but so could yours. Those are very relevant pieces of information to ask for when trying to figure out what’s wrong with your phone.

I believe in Iceland’s case it has to do with how the Icelandic language works and certain names just kind of don’t work with the rest of the language. I’m far from an expert on the Icelandic language, but my understanding is that nouns, names included, sort of get “conjugated” (I’m not sure if “conjugation” is the correct term, I think that’s specifically a vowel thing, but it’s similar in that the word changes depending on how it’s used in a sentence and most of us are familiar with the concept of conjugation.)

There’s a few random things in English that do it, like depending on the sentence, you might use I/me/my/mine/etc. when you refer to yourself refer to yourself, but in icelandic all nouns do that in a regular predictable way, so they have to be pronounceable with certain suffixes tacked onto them.

I think they also do the old school patronymic/matronymic name thing instead of family names. So if you meet someone in Iceland whose name is something like “Steve Robertson” then “Robertson” isn’t his family name, his dad is literally named “Robert” and so he is “Steve, Robert’s Son” so names kind of have to work with that kind of naming convention as well.

So it’s less of a “this name is stupid” and more of a “this name breaks our language”

It also seems like they’ve eased up on some of the rules in recent years, first names are no longer gender restricted, and they’ve added a nonbinary suffix for the patronyms/matronyms so now you can be a -bur instead of just -son or -dóttir

I have a friend who’s grandfather was a chemist who at least claimed to his family that he mixed up small batches of DDT for mosquito control on his property.

I have no way of verifying that, but I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if some rogue chemist with a vendetta against mosquitos was out there doing it.

In a sort of abstract sense, there are some parallels.

In a system like the US, corporations and those with a lot of money hold a lot of power, and unionization is a way for everyone else to take some power for themselves to make sure that their voices are heard.

In a system like China however, most of that power is instead concentrated with the government and upper echelons of party, so attempts at democratizing fill a similar role of giving regular people a voice.

There’s a lot of nitty gritty details, cultural differences, etc. and I don’t really want to gloss over those, but the root in either case is common people organizing and trying to make sure their voices are heard.

I work in 911 dispatch, a lot of the 10 digit non emergency lines also redirect to our center, we get a lot of wrong numbers calling into us

One of those numbers is just one digit off from a pizza place, which is always fun because once in a while someone is a domestic calls in pretending to order pizza because they don’t want the person they’re with to know they’re calling police, so we kind of have to grill those calls with are you having an emergency/do you know you’re calling the police/are you safe to talk kind of questions

Pro tip for anyone who finds themselves in a situation like that, most dispatch centers are aware of those types of calls, but some posts online will tell you that there’s a code that pepperoni = they have a gun or something like that. No such code exists, at least not in any way that’s universally recognized. Maybe some departments have that standardized but it certainly wasn’t part of my training.

Every once in a while, as an out of shape guy in my 30s, I think about buying myself a pair of heelys.

Was never a skater, never really had much interest in them as a kid, but something about the idea of rolling around in Costco while I do my grocery shopping appeals to me.

That’s where my mind went to, a member of Congress taking on themselves to fly to South America to investigate some weird shit going down there involving Americans maybe isn’t the best move.

Jawn

It’s Philadelphian, it’s a general purpose noun and can be used for any person, place, or thing.

Go birds!

I think I already addressed your first paragraph pretty well in my comment.

If you’re touting something as an alternative to the Global Positioning System, I think it’s reasonable to expect that it’s going to cover at least most of the globe.

It also doesn’t really seem like it’s intended to be an alternative, more like an extension or backup to GPS. If I available you should still be using GPS, this is just something you’d fall back on if regular GPS goes offline. Sort of like how you wouldn’t want to run your house off a generator 24/7/365, but if a tree falls on the power lines by your house you at least have the generator to keep your fridge running.

EDIT:

Also, for pretty much the entire history of TV, different parts of the world have operated using different and often incompatible broadcast standards. I don’t really see that changing and the rest of the world adopting ours, especially with the current administration being blatantly hostile to our allies. At best they’ll adopt their own standards that will do something similar to BPS but probably won’t be directly compatible, there may be devices that can make use of both, similar to how a lot of GPS devices can also use Galileo or Glonass.

It does sound a lot like LORAN-C, which I admit I forgot was a thing that once existed.

I know that in areas it covered, LORAN was supposed to be pretty accurate for positioning. I don’t know exactly how well this would compare to that, things like what frequency they transmit on, how much power, digital vs analog, number of transmitter sites, etc. will all come into play, and I don’t feel like digging into exactly how the two systems would stack up against each other. Could absolutely be the BPS totally blows LORAN out of the water, they might be comparable, it might be markedly worse, we’re well outside of my pay grade now.

If I understand it, the title while technically accurate, may be a little misleading.

And to be clear, it’s very possible I’m misunderstanding it, and a brief Google search doesn’t turn up a whole lot of good information in a format that’s easily digestible to me.

When most people hear “gps alternative” I think most of us are picturing some kind of system that will tell you where in the world you are.

It seems to me that BPS is mostly concerned with time and not location.

Gps relies on having very accurate time information, you need to know exactly where the satellites are supposed to be at any given moment, and since they’re whizzing around the earth every 12 hours or so, you need to know exactly when it is to know where those satellites are supposed to be in order to properly triangulate a position from them.

So since we have these super accurate clocks flying around overhead beaming out time information, a lot of other critical infrastructure that relies on accurate timing has just latched onto using those time signals because they’re already there, no need to reinvent the wheel and come up with your own timing system.

But since GPS is theoretically susceptible to jamming, anti-satellite weapons, etc. we need a backup time signal in case gps goes down.

And since we already have television stations everywhere already broadcasting all kinds of digital data, we can just kind of piggyback off of them to broadcast the same sort of timing information you’d get from GPS.

I’m unclear whether it could actually be used for navigation, the name (Broadcast Positioning System) would seem to imply that it can, but I can’t seem to find anywhere that’s talking about it being used in that way.

In theory I suppose it can, no reason you can’t triangulate your position from some radio towers. In at least one sense it’s probably easier than satellite because those towers aren’t moving much (maybe swaying a few feet in the wind or so, but otherwise they’re about as stationary as anything is on this rock hurtling through space) so they make for a nice fixed reference point.

On the other hand, I suspect there’s kind of a line of sight issue. In general there’s not much between you and a gps satellite except for a few thousand miles of atmosphere, that signal is coming in a straight line down to you from space. That makes the math nice and easy.

That may not be the case with a TV signal, theres a good chance that there’s all kinds of buildings, hills, valleys, etc. between the tower and you, and so it’s harder to know if that signal is coming to you in a straight line or if it took a longer route and bounced around off of some hillsides and skyscrapers.

If it does bounce around, it takes longer for the signal to reach your device, which would make the calculations show that you’re further away from the tower than you are.

It’s also not at all a global system. It’s part of the ATSC 3.0 standard, which is mostly only used by North America and South Korea, the rest of the world uses different broadcast standards (that may or may not have similar provisions, I haven’t looked into them) so if you’re not in one of those places, you’re probably not going to be able to make use of BPS in any capacity.

Again, I’m a bit out of my depth here, I’ve said a lot of words, but I don’t have great confidence in a lot of it, I didn’t do any deep research into any of this and a lot of this was just me throwing thoughts out there. If anyone knows this stuff better than I do I’m excited to hear from you and for you to tell me what I’m wrong about.

Not that it isn’t a little sus, but my personal interpretation would be:

Blue sky is still fairly new, most people haven’t been on it for very long, not everyone is really an active poster, some are just there to follow other people, and maybe only decide to create an account or start posting if something exceptional happens, like maybe getting an email like this that they feel they need to share.

So that explains the short history.

She makes the post, it gets attention from being seen by the right person at the right time who shares it to Reddit, Lemmy, a news outlet, a YouTuber, etc. and it blows up, a bunch of people show up to follow her to see where it goes, so she goes “ah shit, I have followers now, I guess I’d better introduce myself”

As for the people joking in the comments, welcome to the internet. We have a lot of idiots here, and a lot of people who cope with fucked up shit with dark humor that not everyone gets.

Just kind of my 2¢ on it anyway.

Could absolutely be fake, could be bots, trolls, foreign agents, whatever your favorite online boogie man is. Or it could be just the internet being a dysfunctional mass of assorted individuals using it however the hell they want.

I’m not considering it verified, nor am I dismissing it out of hand. I’ll wait to see what else comes of this.

There’s a short story that kind of touches on this, and I’m pretty sure it’s pretty readily findable online. “The Road not Taken” by Harry Turtledove

Spoilers, I guess

The basic premise is that the secret to FTL travel is ridiculously simple,and most civilizations stumble onto it fairly early, and it just happened that humanity never did. Every other civilization once they discover it tends to pour all of their resources into developing that technology, but because of that they don’t really advance in other aspects, so aliens arrive on earth expecting to face a primitive civilization because they didn’t detect any signs of FTL travel, but it turns out that we far surpass them in every other aspect. They attempt to invade earth with basically flintlock muskets, and are met with tanks and fighter jets and such.

The definition of a species is a very fuzzy thing, being able to breed or produce fertile offspring used to be considered a defining characteristic of a species, but there are a ton of exceptions to that.

I think I also remember hearing that something about canid (dogs, wolves, etc) DNA makes them very tolerant of a lot of genetic variation (I mean look at dogs, would you ever in a million years think that a great Dane and a teacup poodle were the same species if you didn’t have prior knowledge about dogs being a thing?) There’s a decent amount of debate over how to classify various candids and a lot of them can interbreed just fine, and there’s more than a few coydogs, coywolf, and wolfdog hybrids out in the wild. The company that made these “dire wolves” also said they cloned some red wolves, which is considered a subspecies of wolf, however every known living red wolf also carries coyote DNA, and there’s some debate over whether they should actually be considered their own thing, or are they just a specific population of wolf/coyote hybrids (wolves and coyotes are considered different species) and should they be reclassified to reflect their coyote ancestry as well?