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Cake day: July 17th, 2023

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  • Going through The Expanse again. Such a good show that unfortunately got soured towards the end by a bad egg in the cast. But I’m enjoying it regardless, the work everyone else put into that show deserves praise. They found such a good balance point on the hard vs. soft sci-fi spectrum. Just enough realism and scientific accuracy to make the setting feel authentic without getting in the way of the story.

    And Dominique Tipper as Naomi effortlessly code switching as she interacts with Inners and Belters is astounding. Not just her, all the Belter actors do such a great job with their dialects, but because of her screen time and back story it’s a lot more varied for her.



  • I love both, but I actually prefer Atlantis’s ongoing series arc over the more episodic/season arc structure of SG-1.

    Possibly unpopular opinion (?): Universe was a fantastic show that got cancelled right as it was getting really good. Stargate’s answer to Voyager and Battlestar Galactica. Really wish we could have gotten more of it. With the way they left things, it’s not too late to revive it if they can get actors on board. They can easily explain cast aging or not returning with the final cliffhanger.


  • Agnostic atheist: Doesn’t believe in any gods, claims the existence or nonexistence of gods is fundamentally unknowable

    Gnostic atheist: Doesn’t believe in any gods, claims to know no gods exist

    Agnostic theist: Believes in god(s), claims the existence or nonexistence of gods is fundamentally unknowable

    Gnostic theist: Believes in god(s), claims to know that those god(s) exist

    I think all four types of people exist in decent numbers, but personally I, as an agnostic atheist, think either version of agnosticism is the only logically sound position. Gnosticism just feels disingenuous to me. Unfortunately I get the feeling that Christianity in the US is slipping further and further towards gnostic theism, and with that comes very dogmatic and oppressive rhetoric and actions.







  • And this is why scientists tend to dislike science journalism. Whether intentional or not, it misses out the nuance that scientific findings usually require. And then those misrepresented facts start getting quoted elsewhere until you get a web of “sources” that just point in a circle and can eventually cut out the actual source that includes the nuance.

    Always be skeptical of journalism headlines and check the body. Then be skeptical of that and check the source. Then still remain skeptical of that because one study doesn’t determine scientific consensus. Before long you’ll be in the rabbit hole of the replication crisis.

    But don’t write off science. It’s flawed because humans are flawed, but it’s still our best tool for determining truth.


  • Officially they’re on hiatus. They originally said they were retiring the line, but then changed their tune and stated that the Bolt line will return after they can implement their new EV battery tech in them. I believe the statements have been imprecise about when that will be, but potentially sometime in 2025 (meaning the 2026 model). That’s assuming no delays or changes to the plan.

    If you want a new Bolt without waiting for the revived line, I’d think about acting soon. They’re moving really quickly in my area. I’m really happy with the EUV so far, but I’m still only at like 250 miles. I didn’t go for the Premier since I don’t care about adaptive cruise control or their “Super Cruise” self driving thing.




  • You’re being downvoted but I agree. None of this has anything to do with religion. A weird fiction that invokes “[the Christian] God provided the vaccine” is irrelevant and disrespectful to the humans that worked hard to create a vaccine.

    It’s a pretty bad idea in general to bring up a supposedly omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent “God” in the context of children dying of diseases anyway. What kind of God would allow children to die of cancer? Or any number of other currently incurable diseases?




  • On your second point, that’s what the science actually says. “Observer” or “observation” is used in a scientific sense and was probably a poor word choice. Science journalism gets carried away with anything that has the word “quantum” in it and it drives us mad.

    You’re absolutely right that the mechanism that’s causing the wave function to collapse is the presence of whatever piece of equipment the particle is hitting. Whether that collapse happens at the two slits or the back wall changes the pattern, and that change is what shows wave-particle duality.

    Also: physics doesn’t claim to know that the Big Bang only happened once. That’s just as far back as we can rewind with our current models. This is again something that science journalism takes a lot of liberty with.



  • Basically scripts you can run on the fly to pull calculated data. You can (mostly) treat them like tables themselves if you create them on the server.

    So if you have repeat requests, you can save the view with maybe some broader parameters and then just SELECT * FROM [View_Schema].[My_View] WHERE [Year] = 2023 or whatever.

    It can really slow things down if your views start calling other views in since they’re not actually tables. If you’ve got a view that you find you want to be calling in a lot of other views, you can try to extract as much of it as you can that isn’t updated live into a calculated table that’s updated by a stored procedure. Then set the stored procedure to run at a frequency that best captures the changes (usually daily). It can make a huge difference in runtime at the cost of storage space.