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TIL about Sebastian Münster's 1540 map of the Americas, the first one to show that North and South America were connected by an isthmus and the first to call it 'The New World.'
  • As it should be... Navigators could determine latitudes pretty accurately by using astronomy. It was the longitude that was a big problem (maybe that's part of the reason Japan is placed in the middle of the Pacific).

  • The Floor Is Comfier Than Beds and Couches
  • Some natural cushioning is needed to appreciate the comfort of the floor, I imagine. I'm too boney for that.

  • How many pairs of sunglasses do you think you've owned in your lifetime?
  • I'm pretty sure I'm in my fourth pair now.

  • Removed
    What does everyone make of Tom Bombadil in the Rings of Power S02E04?
  • How about no fucking spoilers in the title and thumbnail?

  • Seconds
  • That may be relativists (they would actually measure anything in units of mass, with everything else defined through G = c = 1). Astrophysicists commonly measure mass in solar masses, long distances in parsec (or kiloparsec, megaparsec), short distances in solar radii or AU, and time in whatever is relevant to their problem (could be seconds or gigayears)

  • Beanut Butter Cups
  • Well, peanuts are legumes, so beans basically.

  • Behold, the rule
  • I'm sitting on an Aeron at work, it's good, but I can't in good conscience pay that much for a chair. I was recently on the market for a new office chair and extensively researched it. It really looks like it's a hit or miss with every chair in every price range, and I was very seriously considering replacing my Hyken with another Hyken. I decided to go with the IKEA Markus and have been sitting on it for about a month. I'm only moderately happy with it, may even return it before the year is up although I'd hate doing it.

  • Behold, the rule
  • That is almost certainly Staples Hyken. Comfortable chair but cheaply made, mine started disintigrating in a couple of years.

  • What's your favourite Star Trek theme?
  • My top intro music shows: TNG, VOY, DS9, DIS, SNW, LD
    Honorable mention: ENT
    Top movie theme: First Contact

  • Supein sama
  • Rumania and Makedonia probability the closest to the country's native name.

  • perspective
  • EM and gravitational waves are seen as analogous because as I wrote, they are produced by acceleration of charges and masses, respectively. The physics behind them is very different (described by Maxwell's equations for EM and Einstein field equations for GW), but all systems that have waves in them (including sound in the air, waves on the surface of water etc.) can be approximated as linear for small perturbations, which means that they satisfy the wave equation at that regime.

  • US/Canada time zones if they were not adjusted for political boundaries
  • It's not me who didn't use a tool, it was the other guy.

  • US/Canada time zones if they were not adjusted for political boundaries
  • I just had to coordinate an online meeting with some guy at a company, I had no idea where he's based but he suggested time slots in EST (I'm in Toronto). I asked him twice if he's sure, thinking he may be based outside of North America and doesn't know that Toronto currently follows EDT which is GMT-4h, and he just responded "Eastern Standard Time".

    And of course he actually meant EDT. Turns out he is based in North America, just dumb.

    Fuck timezones, but more than that fuck daylight saving time. You want an extra hour of sunshine after work in summer? Shift the work schedule, not the fucking clock!

  • Map of the A.S.U.
  • It's a map of the AƧU

  • The hero of the story
  • The balrog was already awake, but maybe wasn't paying attention 😜

  • perspective
  • They are quite similar to electromagnetic waves, but also quite different. They are produced by masses accelerating (just like EM waves are produced by charges accelerating), and indeed cause orbital decay. But this orbital decay is only important in relativistic systems (so the Earth, which is orbiting the sun at 0.0001 the speed of light, is not going to fall into the sun because of gravitational waves).

  • perspective
  • See my response below to Captain Aggravated about how dilute those large stars are.

    It's an interesting question whether anybody would actually feel spaghettification 😁 I actually don't know. You can use physics to calculate the proper time derivative of the tidal forces, but you need biology to define the start (and end...) of the process. My intuition says that it probably happens too fast, so once the tidal forces are strong enough to be perceptible, they grow strong enough to rip you apart before you realize (again, just a hunch).

  • I re-discovered a video library on an old laptop

    I turned on an old laptop and found a fairly sizable library of videos I accrued between 2013 and 2019. It contains 329 hours of content across 38 movies and 464 TV episodes (of 29 different shows), and that's even after removing 42 corrupted video files (about 14G). There are also 64 standalone videos, mostly stuff I downloaded off YouTube for the purpose of watching on the road (but that's just 10 hours of the content).

    I'm kinda wondering what I should do with that. It's 230G, so not really small, but I'm not short on storage space.

    A big chunk of the content is current events, like The Daily Show and Colbert Report (including an interview with Bill Cosby from 2014, yikes...) Would you re-watch that?

    3
    Home Improvement @lemmy.world observantTrapezium @lemmy.ca
    Floor-to-ceiling vertical blinds

    I'd like to hang vertical blinds on my floor-to-ceiling windows (272 cm in height). Ceiling is concrete and has a rail already mounted.

    The off the shelf solutions I see have mounts that are fixed to a wall, not to the ceiling.

    • Can I fix a mount to the white window frame shown in the picture?
    • If not, is it a good idea to remove the existing rail, and use the existing holes in the concrete to hang a mount for the vertical blinds mount? Perhaps with a right angle bracket?
    1
    Question about interest calculation (mortgage)

    I don't seem to understand something regarding how interest is paid on a mortgage. Say the loan is for $100,000 at a 5% rate for 10 years, paid monthly.

    I would think that on the first month, the interest I have to pay $100,000 × (0.05 ÷ 12) = $416.67. However the mortgage calculator says that the first payment is actually $412.39. While it's not a huge difference, it's a difference nonetheless and I can't really figure out where it comes from.

    My intuition is that it's somehow related to the fact that interest is compounded daily, but when I take r = 0.05 ÷ 365 and N = 365 × 10 payments (keeping leap years in mind for later), and calculate the first 30 days, I get $409.70, and the first 31 days give $423.32. I guess that the "actual" number is some kind of weighted average since the calculator doesn't ask at which month your loan starts.

    So where is this $412.39 coming from? In reality when paying a mortgage, do you see the interest fluctuating as it decreases, depending on the number of days every month?

    5
    Shatner's "do over" of the Veridian III death scene on Kimmel

    I recommend watching the whole interview, it's hilarious.

    8
    Anybody at CppNorth this week?

    Pretty interesting talks, especially focusing on safety.

    0
    Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Toronto episode

    The picture is from very early in the episode, I'm trying not to spoil it to anybody. The new Star Trek show "Strange New Worlds" just released an episode that mostly takes place in present-day (more-or-less) Toronto, with familiar city sites in almost every scene. It's a pretty good episode for Kurtzman-era Trek, although it's hard to concentrate on the plot as Torontonians.

    0
    observantTrapezium observantTrapezium @lemmy.ca
    Posts 6
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