

Smokejumper by Jason A. Ramos and Julian Smith


Smokejumper by Jason A. Ramos and Julian Smith


I don’t know about the Spanish wildfires, but I know in America there’s a whole slew of challenges associated.
The first is the unpredictability of wildfires. You don’t want to over-evacuate, that causes unnecessary disruption. But conditions can change rapidly, and a plan that looked good 6 hours ago can quickly become bunk.
Another is speed. Wildfires can travel much, much faster than people’s intuition leads them to think. So, it can go from “over there” to “oh shit” quick enough to be life threatening. Wildfires counter-intuitively go uphill faster than downhill, winds can pick up, blowing embers can cause it to jump, etc.
A third is that some people try to protect their property. This is actually possible if you’ve taken proper precautions of removing burnables from your property and have a garden hose that you are 100% certain will keep running. This is not recommended, but some people will try and that is their right. It’s a calculated risk they have to decide for themselves to take or not.
Fourth might be various other failures to evacuate. Evacuation order didn’t arrive in time, elderly resident didn’t hear in time/can’t move fast enough, someone got stuck in evacuation traffic, mental illness, stubborn conspiracy nut thinks tin foil hats protect against wildfire, who knows, it’ll vary case-to-case.
Fifth could be firefighter deaths. It’s a highly dangerous job with a significant fatality rate, and our wildlands firefighters (colloquially called “hotshots”) are basically like the special forces of firefighting. They airdrop into wilderness areas with whatever gear they can carry, with instructions to change the course of an oncoming force of nature. They have the tools (chainsaws and shovels mostly) and training to do this, but it’s still exactly as dangerous as it sounds.
Wildlands firefighting is really fascinating stuff. I got an audiobook ages ago written by a retired one that talked a lot about the process. Was like 100 pages or something and super interesting, highly recommend.


Kyiv Post tends to be a little less bombastic with their reporting:
https://www.kyivpost.com/post/79532
They word it differently, saying the US warned that Russia was “considering” an attack. This is probably true, and has probably been true every year for the past several decades. Simply because a nation’s military planners “consider” pretty much everything they can think of.


Once you lift the narrative requirement, the number of hits balloons into the millions. I would personally draw the line between education and edutainment on the issue of thoroughness. Education needs to be fairly thorough, while edutainment can skip all the boring (but necessary for full understanding) parts and exclusively handle the fun ideas-based stuff, usually with some oversimplification here and there just to keep things moving in an entertaining way.
I would describe Kings & Generals on youtube as a solid example of good quality military history edutainment.


If you’re looking for a medical drama that health care workers seem to find an acceptable representation of their work, take a look at The Pitt. Apparently they put a lot of effort into being as accurate as possible.
Overall I think your definition of edutainment as requiring a narrative is overly restrictive, I think we could call narrative-less science shows like this edutainment, despite lacking narrative:
All that said, the specific combination of scientific accuracy, narrative and for-adults does seem to be a rarer combination of traits. I cannot think of very many at all, and those I can do tend to fudge some of the accuracy here and there for dramatic appeal.


Now that’s a sign of an impending apocalypse.


Except that in my experience, even a supporter of said party, when talking about how a member of ours “just toes the line” is communicating a negative, not a positive. That’s not a good, genuine guy we’re proud of, it’s someone to watch out for.
Colloquially too, the way I was raised, it’s a bad thing, you did not want to be a line-toer. And I’m not referring to discussions of politics, but how it was used in day to day conversation. I’ve been accused of toeing lines, for instance, with the implication being that continuing may get me in trouble some day and I should be a little more careful.
Perhaps it’s a regional thing.


The same dynamic I was discussing appears in that case as well. The politician may not agree with the policy, and may be willing to violate it, but still toes the party line.
If someone was doing something somewhat shady, but still keeping within the bounds of some rule, you might say they are similarly toeing that line.
The big question to me has become, can you toe a line in a positive way?


Yeah, I just made another edit to my original comment. lol


For the traditional toe the line imagery, it helps to imagine a very rebellious kid that you have firmly told to absolutely not cross some line under any circumstances.
Imagine the kid looking you dead in the eye and smirking, as they stretch out their big toe and put it all over the line while barely not crossing it.
This captures the aspect that you don’t have to follow the spirit of the rules or believe in them in any way, you simply have to follow the letter of the instruction to be “toeing the line”. There is an inherent malicious coloring to the term that is important, where people that only toe the line are bad people.
edit: It needs to imply that you’re searching for ways to break a rule and get away with it on a technicality.
edit2: This got me curious enough to google the origin of the term, and it actually has a wikipedia article, amusingly. Apparently it has a military origin, and the article makes no mention of the negative connotations I mentioned. This makes me think my personal interpretation is actually incorrect, and I now wonder why I picked up on it. In the US, toeing the line does have a subtle negative connotation to it, and people that do it are looked down on somewhat.
I see nothing wrong with suggesting that, so long as it is made clear he is discussing one of many theoretical possibilities.
Is he a kook? He does kinda look like one, but so do a lot of legit scientists, so that’s not a good measure.


I feel like if you avoided giving it long-term goals you could still retain most of your humanity. You could also mainly rely on the divination aspect, and avoid the perfect-execution aspect unless necessary.
Would still be the world’s greatest crutch, but the sheer power it offers is too tempting.
Gonna have to be more specific. What part of life?


Path to Victory, from Wildbow’s web serial Worm.
It’s a two-part power. The first looks into the future to determine the exact set of steps necessary to accomplish any given goal, if it is at all possible to accomplish in any way. The second makes you execute those exact steps with zero chance of deviation or error.
It only fails when interfered with by another power also capable of seeing the future.
edit for grammar


Ultimately, I think it’s a convenient excuse to cover for how truly difficult it is to teach people important things.
The adult mostly doesn’t actually remember the specific logical and/or experiential steps that contributed to whatever understanding they now have. The events are too disconnected in time, and too large in quantity to really parse that way. You need that background info to teach well, though, otherwise you can’t handle questions, you can’t explain, etc, which are all genuinely important parts of teaching.
So, it’s easier to just handwave the problem away and focus on going to work, whatever is for dinner tonight, what’s going on in the neighborhood, cleaning the house, etc etc etc, and leave the teaching to the ostensibly qualified people.
If you want to attempt to do things differently, when you learn something life-lessony, remember that to teach it to a teenager someday, it’s not good enough to have just learned the thing. You’re also going to have to be able to offer a decent-enough explanation and answer any questions.


Maybe.
A salt molecule is 1 sodium and 1 chlorine. If you measure by mass, the chlorine is about 50% heavier than the sodium, so salt is not 50/50, it’s actually closer to something like 33.3/66.7.
Another possibility is the addition of something like potassium chloride, which is similar to table salt. It obviously won’t contribute any sodium though.


Credit where credit is due, to reddit for making them go to court over it.
I have a feeling that an actual martial law declaration would be enough to motivate a general strike.
This actually happened when early nationalists tried to overthrow the Weimar Republic in interwar Germany. Some old generals and their men took over the capital and declared themselves in charge of the country. A general strike was declared, and the whole country shut down. The generals were then left “in charge” of a totally shut down society. Needless to say, the coup lasted a short enough time that it’s usually not even mentioned in world history lessons. This whole event pre-dated Hitler’s first beer hall putsch by like a decade or something, if memory serves.


Oh, interesting, thank you. I did not realize that was a thing.
The main difference I see is that when a professional wants to read something very thoroughly, they employ techniques of what’s called slow reading. That’s usually when the highlighter comes out along with note-taking materials.
This is possible with print information because of how much of it is put in front of your eyes at once. Rereading a paragraph, even a half dozen times to guarantee you fully understood it, is very easy with print. It is not with audio. Flipping back to page xxx to check something, also very easy with print and less so with audio. Smoothly speeding up/slowing down your rate of consumption to match the complexity of the current topic, also easier with text than audio. Etc etc.
So, for casual consumption, they’re fairly equivalent and both fine. But if you wanted to claim mastery of a complex topic after putting years of intensive effort in, I’d say that probably required some reading that could not have been replaced by listening, and if you did no reading, I’m going to be a little doubtful of your mastery of the knowledge. It’s possible to still understand what you need to, of course, but you definitely neglected what is usually the most efficient, reliable method by far.