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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • It really depends on how big your area is and what you mean by changing the climate. You can make your backyard way more pleasant by increasing the plant cover, which will drop temperatures in the summer and provide homes for bugs and animals if you do it right. Fifty acres might be enough for you to notice just a general cooler climate if you replaced mowed grass or farm with a dense forest. It would also help slow evaporation from the soil. But you’re not gonna noticably change the amount of rain until you get into land areas comparable to a US state or maybe large city, unless you have very particular geography.






  • The Israel and Palestine situation is way too complicated to be left to “I support Israel.” Support in what way? Their existence? Their military campaigns? Their government? Their settlements? Everything they’ve ever done ever?

    Do you then oppose everything done by people from Palestine? Do you then oppose the existence of Palestine?

    In my opinion it’s not okay to leave your opinion as that simple. If that’s all you’ve got your opinion is bad because it’s simplistic, not because it supports a particular side.



  • Entirely ignoring who is at burning man or why, I honestly think there needs to be a line somewhere for sympathy. If you truck yourself out into the desert and things go tits up, well, shit happens. That’s the risk you took.

    I say this as a person who used to ride motorcycles, rock climb, and go backpacking. If shit ever went down I wouldn’t have expected any sympathy. I put myself in those risky situations, and there’s just plain gotta be a line for personal responsibility.

    With all that being said, when such a massive group of people continuely take the same risk over and over, it’s kinda funny when they finally get bit. It’s the same reason COVID denires getting COVID is funny.




  • You generally do something like multiple gravity-assists perhaps coupled with going to a higher orbit first before coming back in. You have to remember that each individual space mission is centered around moving an object roughly the size of a minivan. It’s just completely not worth it to try and send our garbage or even just our space garbage anywhere far from where it is right now.

    For a while they did nothing with space junk. These days low-earth orbit is actually getting kind of crowded and people realized we have to be a little more responsible. Each mission has plans for how every piece of debris will be handled. For some, that means sending back down to earth, for others, that means crashing it into whatever planetary body is nearby, and for others that means putting the object into a graveyard orbit. A graveyard orbit is just an orbit where we’ve decided to leave the junk in an “out of the way” place where it’s unlikely to change orbit or collide with anything.

    These might help get you an intuitive understanding of how orbital mechanics works.

    https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSL-UN9SB11jK2pNTDffUS7vU-hJn7-Zf&feature=share9


  • That’s just plain not how orbital mechanics works. The difficultly with falling into the sun is that we’re starting from a high energy state (orbit) and so in order to fall into the sun we have to scrub all our extra energy to get back to zero.

    Think of it in reverse. If you were standing on the sun, it would take an absurd amount of energy to launch into an orbit, and only some of that energy actually goes into lifting your payload. Once your at your orbital height you have to keep adding energy in order to go sideways fast enough to maintain orbit.

    It’s all the sideways momentum that you have to oppose in order to be able to actually hit the sun.

    Edit: Orbital mechanics don’t follow your intuition, given that you didn’t evolve in an ecosystem where they impact your life. It’s actually less energy intensive to climb to a higher orbit first, then scrub your remaining horizonal velocity in order to fall into that sun.