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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • I don’t know why everybody focuses so much on the top of the wing. Relative to ambient air, the pressure above the wing is slightly reduced, but the pressure below the wing is massively increased. That massive increase is far more important than the slight reduction above.

    We know this, because simple, flat airfoils are capable of flight. Think: paper airplanes, simple balsa models, etc.

    The shape of the airfoil is not actually very important for lift. You can make a brick produce plenty enough lift to maintain its altitude, if you can provide sufficient thrust and control it’s attitude.

    The specific shape of the airfoil is primarily important for minimizing drag across a variety of speeds and angles of attack at various loadings. This is where the top surface of the wing becomes important. By maintaining the flow over the wing, drag is reduced, and controllability is maintained.


  • While Intend to agree that the time needs to accommodate school schedules, it is ludicrous to base school schedules on the latest sunrise of the year, especially since that sunrise is only that late for a few weeks of the year, and for >2 of those weeks, the kids are on winter break anyway.

    Schools can adjust their schedules on much smaller increments.

    if new York stayed on -5 in winter

    New York is on UTC-5 in winter.




  • There’s an interesting possibility.

    If Trump strokes out before the EC votes are cast, Vance becomes president.

    But, if Trump strokes out after the EC votes are cast, but before they are actually counted in the House, Vance will be properly elected to the vice presidency. No presidential candidate will have 270 votes, so the decision will be made by the House, and the House can only choose from the top 3 candidates based on EC vote count. Harris being the only other candidate to win any EC votes, the House can only choose her. We end up with a Harris/Vance administration.


  • Timezones are already a step toward an arbitrary standard time for the purposes of making communication easier and not needing to change your watch just because you moved around. UTC everywhere would just be another larger step in that already established direction.

    The next step is to stop talking about “Daylight Savings Time” and “Standard Time” and phrase these as UTC offsets.

    The Eastern timezone uses UTC-5 over the winter. We use UTC-4 over the summer. In summer, if they used UTC-5, the sunrise in New York would be around 4AM. Which is way too early. New York should not be on UTC-5 in the summer. But there is no real problem with New York using UTC-4 year round.

    Detroit, on the other hand, would have sunrise after 9AM in winter if they used UTC-4. Which is absurd; they cannot use UTC-4 year round. But, there is no real problem with them using UTC-5 year round.

    The solution, then, is not to select permanent DST or Standard Time for the entire timezone. The solution is for the states (or localities) to each select which UTC offset makes sense for them, and the next time they are on that offset, they do not switch again.