I like to imagine the origin of life as some organic scum sloshing around in a tidal wavepool. The evaporation creates concentration, the soapy foam provides compartmentalization. The bubbles merge and break apart, hosting populations of spontaneously-polymerizing goo. With enough time and luck, you get some randomly-formed polymer that is able to catalyze more polymerization. From there natural selection takes over. Sometime later the polymers learn how to stabilize their own bubbles, so they are not at the mercy of the waves any longer. This keeps the other random polymers out, such that when the auto-catalytic polymers catalyze more polymerization, they create more copies of themselves rather than of random junk. This is hugely advantageous to their population numbers, so that if such bubble stabilization can happen at all, it will happen and then dominate.

In this fantasy it is difficult to point to any single bubble and say “This, this is the first cell.” It’s all just a bunch of foam seething, forming and reforming. The polymers keep mixing and separating. To draw a line at one is as arbitrary as to say “This, this is the first chicken, born of an egg, laid by a bird-like creature who is not a chicken” to solve the chicken-and-egg problem. There could be thousands of generations of chicken-like creatures, any one as good a pretender to be the first as another.

There are thousands of bubbles, no single moment of transition between non-life, proto-life, and cellular life, but I do believe they have to come from around the same time and the same wavepool. There isn’t some other wavepool from a hundred million years later that completely independently grew its own bubbles and resulted in a separate line of universal descent that later got merged into the tree of life. It happened on Earth once, so it could have happened again in a hundred million years… EXCEPT that now that it has happened, the existing life would colonize the entire planet and eat up all the organic goo molecules as quickly as they become available. Proto-life cannot outcompete full-life.

I like this cosmology calculator: https://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/CosmoCalc.html Enter redshift z=1100 (which is the observed redshift of the CMB) and hit the “general” button, which calculates the distances using the currently-accepted general model and Hubble parameter/dark matter/dark energy values. This gives the “comoving radial distance” of 45.5 Gly (giga light years). That means that if right now, at this very instant, you put down a meter stick in front of you, and the buddy next to you put down a meter stick, and the buddy next to them, and so on through the next galaxy, and every galaxy, all the way to the place where the CMB in that direction originally came from (the place is still there and there is probably a galaxy there now though there wasn’t one back then), there will be 45 billion light years worth of meter sticks.

The other values of note are the light travel time of 13.72 Gyr (travel time is how distances are usually reported in news articles, as opposed to scientific articles that only report the redshift z), and the age of the universe at the time the light was emitted: 0.37 My = 370000 years, which is the age when recombination happened. The total age of the universe (13.721 Gyr) is the sum of these two.

The value you probably want is the “angular size distance” in the calculator, which is the meter-stick method done in the moment when the light was emitted rather than at the moment right now. In this case the distance is 0.0413 Gly. Only 41 million light years, really close by! There was a lot of stuff packed together, but it has stretched out since. The relationship between the two distances is:

comoving distance = angular-size distance * (z + 1)

So redshift of 1100 means the spacing has been made 1101x times wider.

Of course if the universe were literally stationary then your question wouldn’t make sense because the universe would never cool down and CMB would not happen. If the universe expansion had stopped at the moment the CMB happened, then the distance to the CMB you want is the 13.72 Gly travel time distance, but it wouldn’t be our CMB anymore, it would be some other last scattering surface much farther out away.

I knew that motion sickness is triggered by frequent starts and stops and frequent turns, but even I was not aware of how big a contribution the engine vibration makes until I got to experience a ride without it.

I was apprehensive about EVs but the first time I rode in one I immediately fell in love with it. I get carsick easily, and the super-smooth ride without the chug-chug-chug of an internal combustion engine made the experience surprisingly much more pleasant for me. I do not use a car, but if I had to buy one, I don’t think I could ever stomach an ICE again knowing that this alternative is available.

The credit companies do not insure against fraud, they simply take the money out of the merchant account and put it back into yours. Now it’s the merchant who has no recourse, if they have already shipped the product. So the only difference between CC and crypto is who is typically left holding an empty bag in case of theft - the payer or the payee. Certainly not the banks!

I’d argue in terms of assigning responsibility, it seems more fair to expect you the customer to keep your digital wallet secure from thieves, than to expect the merchant to try guess every time whether the visitor to their online store happens to be using a stolen credit card.

Question: do the Japanese actually care about privacy? I know I do, but if you were to ask a Japanese person why does their country use cash, would they say “We have considered a system of payment cards and decided against it for privacy reasons” or would they just shrug and say “I dunno, I’m not in charge of payment systems, I use what I have”?

Yeah, for getting kidnapped 🤣

German is perfect. Everyone will agree how to spell Schifffahrkarte the moment they hear it.

I had to, I just didn’t.

*Yawn!* Wake me up when they stop requiring phone numbers to sign up.

Got charged $100 for “dental hygiene training” during annual dentist visit after dentist walked in and asked “Do you floss?” - “Yes.” - “Good. Floss every day.” and walked out. I only know of this charge because insurance refused to pay and they sent the bill to me. I know it’s definitely about these two utterances because this was the only interaction I had with this doctor at all. Everything else was performed by dental students.

I now refuse to answer any questions that do not directly pertain to the immediate procedure.

It’s just fine if he runs from prison as well.

I live in New York. 9/11 was like 35 9/11s for us.

Look at this fatcat using a water bottle! You can drink perfectly fine water from the tap. Don’t even need a cup if you put your palms together.

I too think having factors of 3 and 4 would be neat, which just proves we should change our number system to base 12, as somebody else in the thread suggested 😊.

The picture is clearly at the very least a composite, because there are zero clouds anywhere. I was skeptical whether it can be called a “photo”. Given how clear the unlit terrain is, even in the ocean around the Bahamas for example, I thought it must have been a visualization, or a photo of daytime terrain shaded blue and overlaid with a map of nighttime lights. But I found the actual source:
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/79765/night-lights-2012-map
https://eoimages.gsfc.nasa.gov/images/imagerecords/79000/79765/dnb_land_ocean_ice.2012.13500x13500.B1.jpg
It really is a (composite) photo taken by the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership satellite, whose cameras are so sensitive they can see reflected moonlight and “the nocturnal glow produced by Earth’s atmosphere”, albeit partially in the infrared.

This new image of the Earth at night is a composite assembled from data acquired by the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (Suomi NPP) satellite over nine days in April 2012 and thirteen days in October 2012. It took 312 orbits and 2.5 terabytes of data to get a clear shot of every parcel of Earth’s land surface and islands.

The nighttime view of Earth was made possible by the “day-night band” of the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite. VIIRS detects light in a range of wavelengths from green to near-infrared and uses filtering techniques to observe dim signals such as gas flares, auroras, wildfires, city lights, and reflected moonlight.

I’m unsure though what “assembled from data” means exactly. At the very least the colors are artificial, shifted from the infrared-to-green range of the camera into human visual range. This page describes some more how the sensor functions, along with raw photos:
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/IntotheBlack

That’s true! Receipt checks can get lost! I was replying to “They can’t detain you even if they think you have stolen” though. The “can’t” is a store policy thing, not a law thing.

The fractions don’t help me when I go to the grocery store and unit price of one bag of nuts is “per pound” and the unit price of another is “per ounce”. You’d better be good at dividing by 16 in your head if you want to price-compare! And you’d better be good at remembering how many fluid ounces are in a quart when you go to the olive oil aisle (hint: it’s not 16).

Shopkeeper’s privilege does exist, many stores simply choose not to exercise it.

Fucking R-rated maps…