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Cake day: August 1st, 2023

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  • This is dumb, but I actually don’t blame the couple THAT much. It’s probably a shitty sexual education coupled with the taboo of talking about it. I went to abstinence-only sex ed back in the day, and all we were told was “sex before marriage is evil,” and basically nothing else. If it wasn’t for my church’s (yeah, seriously!) really good sex-ed classes, I would have been dumb as bricks.

    The DARE officer at my school (anti-drug police officer supposed to scare you straight) was actually yelled at by my health teacher for saying “sharing needles can cause STIs, oh and also wear a condom.” A teacher shouted “Abstinence only, no condoms!” at a bunch of ninth-graders. Moron. Although I guess the kids in that class wouldn’t have had trouble getting pregnant.


  • Before I realized and came out as bi, I was in the GSA (gay-straight alliance) in high school as a “straight.” My state was voting to ban gay marriage at the time, and we campaigned against it. I got just as much if not more hate from people than the LGBT members. Maybe because they viewed them as a lost cause? It was usually adults yelling at a 17-year-old kid for being a “betrayer” and a “pervert lover” (I liked that one), just because I supported two consenting adults marrying regardless of gender. Staunch allies definitely earn the title.











  • I loved the SW card game as a kid, but everyone wanted to play Magic instead. I will admit, however, that the rules probably weren’t the greatest. You just played for that 1 game out of 20 where you actually managed to get the right cards out to blow up the Death Star or superlaser a planet, or had a Vader vs. Luke fight.

    Also IG-88 had a whole backstory in the EU (now SW Legends) where there were FOUR of him






  • If tomorrow we banned non-self-driving (NSD) cars, sure. But in most countries, grandfathering in old cars is going to happen for a while. Which means that self-driving and non-self-driving cars will have to share the road.

    I could see some transitions possibly. For example, on a 4-lane highway: “In 2027, lane 1 will be separated by a barrier and only allow SD cars. Lanes 2-4 will be for NSD cars only. In 2029, lanes 1-2 for SD. By 2033, NSD cars will be banned on this highway.”




  • Yes, there’s a bit of a myth around Bernoulli’s principle (faster moving fluids have lower pressure) and how much it matters for lift in plane wings. It came up in the conversation because I was trying to describe what air pressure is in general, and made an analogy to a pan flute (he plays flute in band).

    Disclaimer: I’m an aerospace engineer, but I do not claim to be an expert on topic.

    But for plane wings, the myth is really that the air above the wing moves faster because the curved surface is longer. That’s pretty much dead wrong, but is still in tons of textbooks. The air above the wing does move faster, but it’s because of a bunch of complicated physics that to be honest, I don’t really understand any more. I may have even been taught wrongly in college. But the result is that there is a velocity difference on a cambered wing even when it’s flat, and thus Bernoulli’s principle does apply, and there is a pressure difference giving you lift.

    But that speed difference is mostly important at cruising altitude, when the wings aren’t angled, and it’s positively correlated with airspeed, so the thrust matters way more. When you’re climbing, the angle matters more. The camber (curvature) of the wing, the airspeed, and the angle of attack all lead to that pressure difference, along with a few other things like circulation, which is also caused by a sharp edge at the back of the wing. But everything kind of works together to generate that pressure difference and hence the lift that can combat gravity. It’s actually pretty hard to try and dumb it down without saying things that aren’t wrong.