Were electrons supernatural before we had the laws to describe them? Would something that’s supernatural now still be supernatural if we came up with laws describing its behavior?

What does it really mean to be supernatural? What’s the difference between, say, a ghost and dark matter? We don’t really know what either one is. Is it that we can reliably find evidence of dark matter, even if we don’t know what it is, so it’s not “super” anymore? It seems to me that “supernatural” is just a name for the ones we don’t actually believe in.

I’m also a big fan of the smaller bubba mug that I have (https://www.amazon.com/Bubba-Stainless-Steel-Travel-Handle/dp/B00XMH7MRW/). It’s cheap, sturdy, and easy to clean.

I’m a liberal. I’d prefer the government be functional and running. But these days the government is pretty dysfunctional even when not shut down, so I guess as shutdowns go… In any case, I place all blame for the dysfunction and the shutdown on conservatives, and anyone who voted for them. There is no correct course for dems in the government when they’re in the minority to a party that doesn’t operate in good faith; I’m fine with them either playing ball or not as they think is best in the circumstances.

Good question. I think what it comes down to is that the idea of someone being trans is just kind of foreign to me. I never met someone in person who was trans until I was close to 40, as far as I know. So for most of my life I categorized people, at least as far as attractiveness and dating goes, without distinguishing between sex at birth and gender identity.
So while I treat (or hope that I treat) trans people as appropriate for their chosen gender, it doesn’t come completely naturally to me. It’s hard for me not to think of a trans woman as “a man who wants to be treated as a woman”, even though I know that’s not what they want. And while in day to day interactions I can just ignore that difficulty and treat a trans woman as a woman, when it comes to romantic interest it is not so easily ignored.

If I couldn’t tell, and they didn’t tell me, then i guess I’d just be happy in my ignorance. I can’t say that I can always tell, because… well I wouldn’t necessarily know about the times I couldn’t tell. But yes, if I knew then it would break the attraction for me.

I would not. I’m all for treating people as they want to be treated, but as far as my own attraction goes, I don’t think I’d be able to completely think of them as being of the opposite sex.

Aperiodic, in this sense, doesn’t mean that there aren’t any bits that repeat. In fact, if you pick any patch of tiles of any arbitrary size, that patch will be repeated infinitely many times. What it means to be aperiodic is that if you slide the whole tiling over so that one of the patches aligns with the repeated bit, there will still be something outside the patch that doesn’t align. Compare that with, say, a repeating grid of squares, where if you slide one square onto a different square then everything lines up, all the way to infinity; it’s impossible to tell that it’s been slid over.

Aperiodic tilings! Just a couple of years ago someone discovered a single tile (down from the set of ~20000 that was first used to prove that aperiodic tiling was even possible) that can completely cover an infinite plane without ever falling into a repeating pattern.

Does navidrome support Chromecast? I’ve had a hard time finding a self hosted music solution that will actual cast. I do have a public facing domain name with certs that, as far as I can tell, is working correctly.

One group chooses the algorithm and the second group chooses which side they get to on.

In practice this would require the second group to basically have a switch that switches all voters’ preferences. So I don’t think that’s gonna work here.

TUNIC
It’s a good game in general, but

Oh, and the second one.

If you don’t care about the digits of pi being in base 10, there’s also a formula that can be used to calculate digits at any position you want in hexadecimal without having to compute the preceding ones!

This is not the same for all crypto currency, but a bitcoin represents a “proof of work”. When people “mine” bitcoins, they are consuming computational resources, and when they find a bitcoin, it is a certification of the work that was done to find it that becomes the value of the coin. And then, as others as mentioned, people just agree that that work has a certain amount of monetary value. But the proof of work is what limits the supply and allows that value to exist. 3Blue1Brown has a really good video that goes into the technical details if you’re interested.

No, half the country voted for this. Or failed to vote against it.

I went on a trip to Oslo and Bergen last summer. I’d love to go back; they’re great places for mixing hiking and city exploration.

Inasmuch. It is the totem pole trench of words.

I think this would fall in to the latter scenario. 46 billion light years is the edge of the observable universe in the sense that light emitted by those regions has reached us by now. But these regions are beyond the cosmic event horizon, which is the distance at which light emitted now will ever reach us. That distance is about 17 billion light years.

Is there any point at which the distance becomes too large to the extreme where you basically get “deleted” from existence?

This is basically what the definition of “observable universe” is. It is the part of the universe that is close enough in space and time for light to reach us. So if you say they get transported to the observable part of the universe, then yes, their signals will eventually reach earth. But the closer they are to the edge of the observable universe, the longer the signals will take to reach, and the more red shifted they will be due to the expansion of the intermediate space as the signals travel to Earth.

Note that there are some semantics at play; “observable universe” might refer to the parts of the universe that have emitted light in the past that is reaching earth now. But the the light emitted by those places now might never reach Earth because they are now too far away. So if these astronauts got sent to one of those places then no, their signals would not reach earth.