Sensei

14 hours ago, raphaelh42 said:

If i kill myself, would you consider i've been a coward? Why?

ps: please don't tell me to go see someone, i don't want to give money to someone to obtain tips about being happy

You have depression. It's a chemical reaction. It could be caused by reversible or irreversible factors in the past, or these factors are still in your environment. Irreversible factors, like the death of a loved one or the death of a child, are difficult to come to terms with. Reversible factors are within your control. People who only talk and listen, those you say you don't want to pay, only force you to analyze yourself while confessing on their couch. If you're intelligent, you can conduct such an analysis yourself, and for free. To heal the brain damaged by prolonged depression, you can use pharmacology (i.e., chemicals; but they are usually either illegal or prescription (which you won't get because they didn't prescribe it to you) ) or just food. Very good results are achieved after eating very spicy food (Carolina Reaper style). Eat spicy food for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. For months. This causes a positive reaction in the brain. Positive thinking allows you to reprogram yourself.

Start by changing your place of residence, changing jobs, etc. This will eliminate environmental factors. And a breath of fresh air in your life. Go on trips/excursions, to other countries, to warm countries, explore the mountains and surround yourself with beautiful places where you can say “how beautiful it is here”...

Going to a job you hate when you've depression is a pretty bad idea. It only deepens depression.

Chemicals such as alcohol, marijuana (it also depends on the variety of the plant, but that's a topic for a completely different story), etc. are also a bad idea - they are depressants.

The goal is right - to suppress negative emotions to the point of flying away - but it won't have lasting effects.

14 hours ago, raphaelh42 said:

ps: please don't tell me to go see someone, i don't want to give money to someone to obtain tips about being happy

...instead you prefer to get such advice for free from online people you don't know and have never seen. Right. That makes sense... ;)

On 8/25/2025 at 1:39 PM, studiot said:

Apparantly the AI will monitor for such things as not wearing seat belts, talking on the phone whilst sriving, eating whilst driving, children and animals incorrectly secured in the cabin and so on.

I don't think that in the near future it will be able to detect the examples you gave. Detecting seat belts when someone is wearing black clothes and/or has tinted windows? That's not very realistic. *) Detecting children or dogs in the back seat?! The rear seats are not visible at all to such cameras.

Detecting license plates is difficult enough in itself. The faster someone is driving, the more blurred the image is. At 70 km/h, a vehicle travels 19.4 meters in one second. At 30/60 fps, this gives ~ 65 cm/frame and ~ 32 cm/frame, respectively.

Your phone has a sports mode that allows you to take better quality photos by shortening the exposure time. But this, in turn, means that nighttime, cloudy, and rainy conditions will be recorded less well. This sport mode only reduces blurring, it does not eliminate it completely. It registers fewer photons. In order not to lose quality, it must be took in good lighting (lots of photons).

*) ChatGPT calculated that 1 pixel of a 4K camera (3840 x 2160 pixels) corresponds to 3 cm when the camera is 100 m away from the car.

I think the whole process will look completely different. AI will analyze the car at point A (first camera) and look for it at point B (another camera). The distance between A and B is constant and known, so we just divide by the number of seconds and check if it exceeds the average. So, for example, our 19.4 m/s for 70 km/h limit. If so, it will search for that car on the exits from highway, comparing only the appearance of the vehicles. And there, at low speed, it will get a clear image of the license plates.

Human assistance will still be needed to check if plates were good enough and cars were not mixed.

Detecting someone who is speeding (or riding with someone who is speeding) can be done by analyzing the login logs to GSM network base stations. If someone does this regularly, they will often be at the very top of such a database, so all you have to do is wait for them to drive off the highway.

You shouldn't go overboard with enforcement here. Sometimes speeding up and exceeding the limit is necessary to avoid an accident.

ps. Now imagine how absurd this is: cameras to catch drivers and give them tickets are everywhere, people have them in their cars, especially in Western countries, but planes don't have video recorders to capture what pilots are doing, even though the lives of hundreds of passengers depend on their mistakes.. When pilots report an emergency, all data from their cockpit could be sent to headquarters in real time, and a whole team of people could analyze it even before the crash. Depending on the type of fault, this drop from 10 km to 0 can last up to 15-20 minutes after engine failure.

Since you mention biology, you might be interested in a water pump and/or solenoid valve for turning on watering. You can also combine this with a water moisture detection module so that your Arduino project waters the plants on its own.

Soldering , preheater, hot air gun, all with temperature control in one piece:

Cost $250

(preheater small size, so not good for mobos except mobile)

To desolder and repair, you will also need items such as 1L of IPA, distilled water (to clean dirt and/or flooded laptops) - it must be evaporated well - use IPA + hot air for this, ear sticks. But these are negligible costs.

A desoldering hot air gun can be stand-alone or built into a soldering iron. The cheapest stand-alone model I've seen costs 8 USD (when it is good device you can control temperature with potentiometer and LED screen)

If you don't intend to repair electronics professionally, there's no point in overpaying for fancy soldering stations. You'll use it once in a blue moon (i.e., never).

Electronic boards may have internal tracks that are hidden. multi-layer boards. Such boards are extremely difficult and/or impossible to repair, and in most cases, it ends up being a waste of time. How can the internal layers be damaged? Water from flooding, warping of the board due to uneven heating (because you don't have a preheater, which is quite expensive equipment (entire computer/laptop mobo must fit in it), and you used a regular hot air gun from a soldering iron or a stand-alone device), or an electronic component explosion and charring underneath it due to high temperature (caused by high current flow and/or excessive voltage). Charring allows current to pass with high resistance in random places that are completely unintended for this, what damages other elements.

As a beginner, you are unlikely to encounter such hardcore problems, and if you see such a hole in the board, you will probably just throw it on the pile of potential components to be used in other repairs.

To perform CPU/GPU repairs, you must have a BGA resoldering kit with balls and nets, various sizes of balls and nets. They are sold in sets containing, for example, 25,000 balls, so once you buy them, you probably won't use them up in your lifetime.

But these are already “serious repairs”..

This requires a microscope and a hot air to melt these balls. If you make a mistake and they stick together, or if one is missing, the CPU will burn out.

Processors are not resistant to hot air that has no temperature control.

The simplest project on Arduino is simply turning the built-in LED on and off. If you connect a digital pin to a 120/240V relay, you can control a serious electrical device such as a light bulb or motor. If you buy a slightly more expensive Arduino clone that has built-in WiFi (I see them for $7 here), in the fraction of time I spent writing this post, you can make your own HTTP server on that WiFi. There is a library for this. A few lines of code are enough. You can access such a server via your cell phone and remotely control lights and/or motors and/or TV and/or refrigerator, etc.

Here is a simple example of flashing a light bulb with Arduino:

To complete this project, you do not need 95% of the items I mentioned above; just an Arduino, a relay, and male-female quick connectors will suffice. You don't even need a soldering iron here.

To control the motor speed, instead of using a digital pin, you can use an analog pin and a transistor and a separate power from the external power supply (devices up to 5W can be connected directly to the Arduino). Arduino has a power supply input. However, it only accepts 5V. 12V+ is not recommended. This may not be enough for the motors. Or you would have to tinker with some step-up/boost-up modules to convert 5V to 12V or 24V which will be enough for a more powerful motor.

12 hours ago, Trurl said:

It could be any theme: electronics,

An electronics technician needs: a multimeter, a soldering iron (preferably with adjustable temperature, but these are more expensive), a solder sucker, a set of screwdrivers of various types, miniature tweezers (such as those used for plucking nose hair), and an antistatic mat may also be useful. If you intend to repair phones, there are special mats with designated places to put screws, which will prevent them from getting lost. e.g.:

Their prices are so low that if I were you, I would immediately order one for repairing phones and one normal large one.

A cell phone repair kit would also be useful—they are very cheap. Around $5 for Android and $5 for iPhone.

If you also have a 3D printer or a more expensive soldering iron with a built-in hot tip, then you have everything you need to repair a damaged phone screen.

(The filament 3D printer has an adjustable printing surface temperature. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fused_filament_fabrication

The cheapest FFF/FDM 3d printer from Creality Ender-3 costs 250-300 USD)

That's probably everything that's cheap and for everyone.

More expensive items include adjustable power supplies, both voltage and current, which prevent exceeding the range. These devices can be purchased for between $50 and $200.

Even more expensive items include microscopes for electronics engineers (although there are some imitation models available for less than $25—I have one, and it works fine, but it is slow rate at 640x480).

An IR camera is very useful for checking which component is heating up the most, i.e., is likely to be damaged because unlimited current and/or excessive voltage is flowing through

The cheapest IR cameras cost around $300-400 and connect to cell phones via USB. I've seen some junk for less than $100, but they have a resolution of around 32 pixels or something like that, so it's better to go for higher resolution.

An oscilloscope is a useful but expensive tool. $100-$500. However, it can be simulated using Arduino and a voltage divider and/or an opto element that will buffer between the circuit and Arduino.

An oscilloscope will allow you to see what current and/or voltage is flowing through a given circuit over time. This way, you can find out whether the computer is booting and at which stage it fails.

More expensive laboratory power supplies have their own current/voltage consumption graph on a time chart.

The repair procedure for any electronic device is as follows: connect a laboratory power supply to the device, point an IR camera at it, and start increasing the voltage and current from 0V/0A (remember to zero it prior connecting!), watching which components heat up. You reach the voltage that it gets from the power supply at the factory (search the net/read etiquette). You see if it draws current, and you adjust it along with the voltage. If it's a simple fault, the damaged component usually lights up on the IR camera. Then you start analyzing whether it exceeds its parameters and why this may be happening. A typical component that breaks down is an electrolytic capacitor that has worn out and whose parameters have changed, causing it to no longer meet the basic design specifications.

Sometimes you can even see which components have burned out and literally exploded. This often happens with capacitors, for example, and sometimes with resistors and chips (they then have a hole in their casing).

If the CPU or another chip is damaged, you will still have a problem finding a replacement. Often, you have to buy other devices, the same model, and transplant them, cannibalize them.

Chips can be non-programmable or programmable. To repair a programmable chip, you not only have to re-solder it, but also copy and extract data from the old broken one. Various readers are used for this purpose. That's a different story and a different level of difficulty.

To properly replace such a chip or CPU on a computer or laptop motherboard, a so-called preheater is useful.

If you intend to solder a lot of cables, you may also consider purchasing a soldering pot. Their prices vary depending on their tin capacity and power.

If you don't intend to repair but design electronic circuits, you will need breadboards and cables for them (male-male, male-female, and female-female), as well as quick connectors for breadboards. Cheap. $5 for a large breadboard. A set of cables for them probably costs $5-10. Arduino is a must-have. Raspberry Pi optional. You don't need starter-kit - it is a waste of money. You don't need original - clone is good and cheap too. $10 for Arduino-clone is fine price.

I hope this is enough to get you started on your adventure with repairing and/or building electronics.

13 hours ago, Trurl said:

What goes in the home lab.

Your wallet is your limit.. ;)

KingKobra, from your arguments, it seems that you are giving science some human-like attributes.. Which is basically absurd (but very typical for humanists)..

1 hour ago, KingKobra said:

How limited is science, when it comes to big, and important problems facing the world today, such as wars, terrorism, violent crime, anger issues, domestic and child abuse, sexual assaults, governmental corruption, etc. to name just a few.

Now the absurdity of your argument has been further reinforced by your ignorance of mathematics. If we take the number of people who die in current wars, terrorist attacks, disasters, whatever, and divide it by the total population, we get a tiny fraction and percentage of population. It is the mass media (and the speed they share some unverified information) that blow these tiny numbers up to gigantic proportions because that is how they make money. And if we compare this to what happened a thousand or two thousand years ago, the loss of 100,000 people today vs. 100,000 people 2,000 years ago (with a world population several dozen times smaller) looks completely different.

How can we talk to humanists? Go learn some math!

Science has nothing to do with the problems you are talking about.

So how could this indicate the limits of science? Which science discipline? Humanities or real science?

1 hour ago, KingKobra said:

Science doesn't seem very far reaching, when it comes to what matters most.

Science is not a living entity, and it should not be endowed with any humanistic, fantastical attributes.

20 minutes ago, studiot said:

No I didn't say that.

I know that. It must be forum software bug, because I quoted Patch Cabbage, not you..

22 minutes ago, studiot said:

You must have been getting out of bed the wrong side recently, your responses have been so grumpy which may have been what has led to several inaccuracies, quite unlike your more usual input.

I don't know which part of my post was grumpy. Was it when I wrote “This is nonsense” to summarize his post.. ?

I copied and pasted his post into ChatGPT (without suggesting my answer), just in case I had made a mistake in the translation, and it agreed with me that the post didn't make sense.

For example, ChatGPT: "CRT televisions rely on careful HV safety design. That modification could have been extremely dangerous, even if it “worked”. " (about replacing transformer by resistor+diode)..

"The person is expressing real safety concerns, but much of their reasoning is incorrect or based on misunderstandings."

"Their message reflects anxiety, personal anecdotal experience, and some misconceptions—not an accurate technical assessment."

36 minutes ago, studiot said:

So please don't frighten him off.

OK. I will try..

On 11/25/2025 at 2:59 AM, Patch Cabbage said:

Also if you look at the capacitors on the switching supplies you see at first a 25 for voltage level. It's not 25 it's 250.

You can use a 250 V-rated capacitor in a 25 V circuit, as long as the capacitance value is correct. The voltage rating just indicates the maximum voltage the capacitor can safely handle. Sometimes manufacturers use components with higher voltage ratings simply because they had them in stock and/or they were cheaper. It doesn’t mean the design is ‘dangerous’. This is not a rule. Just because someone uses 250V in a 25V circuit does not mean that there is high voltage there - you would have to measure it in real time on a working device.

BTW, to rectify 230/240 VAC, capacitors rated at 400 V (!) are used, not 250 V. So you're wrong anyway..

On 11/25/2025 at 2:59 AM, Patch Cabbage said:

I have a very strong opinion of switching supplies. I hate them. They work good for computer stuff, which makes them even worse in my opinion. They are dangerous because of high voltages. High voltages on a transistor board are like some of the old tube transistor hybrid boards. Also if you look at the capacitors on the switching supplies you see at first a 25 for voltage level. It's not 25 it's 250. A beginner could make a serious mistake there when working on one for the first time. I once replaced a transformer on a portable tv with a crt with a resistor on a heat sink and a diode. I made sure to insulate everything since high voltage would be present at the junction. It was way lighter and the vertical sync worked just fine. Switching supplies to me are the same kind of circuit only with more parts. I like older circuits where the voltage levels never exceed 25 volts. Switching power supplies are a dangerous design. Also don't get me started on lithium batteries. Anything but lithium because it reacts with water. Hey if you design something, try to make it safe.

What a load of nonsense..

A mains-powered supply - whether switching or transformer-based - always has the same dangerous high voltage on the input side. The difference is in efficiency and design, not in the presence of high voltage. The real difference between a linear and a switching power supply is not the presence of high voltage, but the operating frequency and the way energy is transferred. Both are mains-powered and both have dangerous primary-side voltage. SMPS just use high-frequency conversion to make the transformer smaller and more efficient.

18 hours ago, studiot said:

I once replaced a transformer on a portable tv with a crt with a resistor on a heat sink and a diode.

Well, that's just total nonsense. A transformer changes the AC voltage to a higher or lower one, while a resistor and a diode only cause a current limitation, rectify the sine wave to pulses, and still leave the voltage unchanged. The pulse frequency before and after remained the same.

On 11/23/2025 at 11:28 PM, geordief said:

Be careful.Screwdrivers can slip very easily.The glass itself is very slippy and you don't want the end of the screwdriver going into your wrist .

It's physically impossible. You're holding the jar in your left hand, so your hand is holding it from behind, and your right hand is holding the screwdriver. You can't hurt either wrist.

Insert a screwdriver (only a flathead/minus type) into the gap between the jar and the lid, and gently turn it clockwise until you hear the hiss of air entering the jar. It's just a millimeter to the right. Once the pressure has equalized, you can unscrew the lid. There's no hocus pocus involved. You don't need to be a nuclear physicist to know how to open a jar.

I open beer bottles like this every day.

On 11/21/2025 at 5:07 PM, studiot said:

Some manufacturers really seal their jar tops on tightly.

So most of my family can't open them.

Up to recently I have managed to supply the neccessary brute force, but I am getting older.

Once technique I can really recommend is to use a hair drier, on max, bot perhaps 30 second to 1 minute.
Play this directly onto the metal top only.
the metal wi;; heat up quickly and expand, but the glass will not so voila.

The result is a dead easy to open jar.

All you needed was a screwdriver.. quick and easy.. pry off the lid and let air in, and once the pressure is equalized, you can unscrew it without any problems.

On 11/21/2025 at 5:29 PM, geordief said:

I always make a small hole with a ( hopefully short) sharp knife if they are too tight.

That's a bad idea because you'll ruin the lid.

On 11/21/2025 at 5:29 PM, geordief said:

It also helps if hands and lid are very dry.

You're right here. Jars are easier to open if you put a cloth on them first.

On 11/18/2025 at 2:40 AM, Patch Cabbage said:

That's why most regulated power supplies use the zener or have a million chips in them.

They have “a million chips” (seriously, not quite) because modern power supplies are usually “switching power supplies”..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switched-mode_power_supply

They are more efficient (lose less energy) than traditional power supplies (from your sketches) with a transformer.

They generate less heat.

They are smaller.

They are cheaper to manufacture (contain less expensive copper).

They use MOSFETs (on your sketches there are NPN/PNP).

6 minutes ago, sethoflagos said:

Steaming them is a bit of a chore,

No one here steams them. Put them in water and boil for over an hour (don't peel). Then wait for them to cool down, peel after cooking, and grate them. Next, fry them in a pan with oil, with onions, also grated. Season with salt and pepper. This is called fried beets. It is used with Viennese schnitzel with a potato puree.

5 minutes ago, studiot said:

Or I could have quoted Brouwer "All architects should actually be designing a chair".

So that it's difficult to understand what it's really about? ;)

It is difficult to come up with something innovative. One innovation is a development of an innovation from years ago, which is a development of an innovation from hundreds of years ago, etc.

Innovative, it is a flying chair (magnetic? drones?) with a built-in toilet for waste disposal.. ;)

8 minutes ago, studiot said:

I am hoping that Tonia is a real human being and that "dear colleagues" is only an excruciation of a translator.

I did not suggest what you are suggesting.

The use of a translator is obvious because it makes mistakes that are easy to spot, which ordinary people do not use in their speech ("dear colleagues", this is not what I meant - translators put quotation marks with an internal comma or period, e.g. “blah,” whereas someone writing it by hand would write “blah", ).

On 11/13/2025 at 4:29 PM, sethoflagos said:

A single 5.6 litre cork topped drinks dispenser (of all things) appeared in one of our more upmarket shops this week. Gave me the chance to kill two birds with one stone.

Any glass jar will do, with metal lid, because you can make a hole in it, and then use a glue gun (available at electronics stores) to attach it to the lid permanently, sterilely, and hermetically.

https://www.google.com/search?q=glue+gun+ebay

On 11/13/2025 at 4:29 PM, sethoflagos said:

... Getting a ginger beer production line underway and piloting my makeshift airlock idea. Seems to work.

Today I made 2 liters of beetroot sourdough starter.

500 g beetroot

4 cloves of garlic

350 ml lukewarm water

large bay leaf

6 peppercorns

4 allspice berries

teaspoon of salt

Peel the beets, cut them into cubes to make them easier to put into the jar. Add spices and water. Wait 7-10 days.

After drinking the first portion (e.g., 1/2 - 2/3 of the juice), you can add water to the rest and repeat.

I usually add onions too, but today I'll try the procedure without them.

If you want to do the above, I will give you the procedure for making soup from it in a week, once you tell me you have the sourdough starter.

It's a question of whether you have red beets at all.

On 11/11/2025 at 4:10 PM, dimreepr said:

The point of philosophy, especially in this context, is to ask and answer what is real.

Philosophy, not to mention that it is abstract, has never been able to do the things you are talking about..

On 11/11/2025 at 4:10 PM, dimreepr said:

It's like the same river that can't be crossed twice question, to which the answer is, the bridge hasn't moved and nor has the river...

This shows that you don't understand this saying at all.. the water molecules have moved, so it won't be the same river, but a different one, with different contents..

“Untangling Gordian knots” does not mean cutting them, unless it is a play on words. Someone could just as well knock over the chessboard and say, “I won this game of chess.”..

The Gordian knots remain tied.

2 minutes ago, studiot said:

It is quite a different matter to look at an empty valley and buiild a bridge across it, that can carry say a railway train.

It's just a matter of purpose (aim/goal in AI/LLM world). Before they build that bridge, they have to get around by boat..

The only questions are: 1) how, 2) how much will it cost, and 3) will it ever pay for itself?

Some say that the goals in the current LLM are poorly set, which is why they make statements (hallucinate) when they don't know something.

If someone plays a game where you live or die, you will choose your answer without batting an eyelid.

6 minutes ago, studiot said:

It is instructive to find out how they knew where to start the base of the arches so that when the got to the top and the edges it would all end up in the right place and fit together.

If someone can place a piece of wood across a river that is 2 meters wide so as not to get their feet wet (or if the tree fell down on its own due to old age), then they can imagine everything you are talking about right now. Don't go to extremes. Bridges were built long before the Romans.

If you give a three-year-old child building blocks e.g. Lego, they will figure out how to build an arch bridge on their own. All they need are the blocks.

Arkadiko Bridge (Greece) is from 1300-1200 B.C. (i.e. 400-500 years before Roma establishment).

Modern methods of creating AI/LLM involve designing a world in which this new creation learns everything on its own, i.e., there is no stage of imposing knowledge on it that is provided by humans during training. It has to go through this millions, billions of times to understand and remember what it can and cannot do, and how “physics” works in a given “world”.

For example, we have an 8x8 chessboard and pieces, but we do not tell the AI/LLM what the possibilities are for each pieces. We only do f(x)=[giant number of parameters] which returns true or false. If it tries to move a piece to a place that the piece cannot move to, it immediately fails (return false) the entire game. From this, the AI/LLM deduces what possibilities each piece has. It learns “physics”. Later, through millions and billions of repetitions, it figures out how to play the game. *)

If you create a function f(x,....) = (....) that returns true or false, and you start randomizing the parameters, eventually some combination may work.. You just need a very long time for randomization.

You have four blocks in your DNA, and you arrange them in some order, e.g., random, and it either works or it doesn't. The creatures that survive are those that have the right combination of these random blocks in a given environment ( f(x,....) = true for them)

*) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaZero

Using crap like the cloud to protect against DoS/DDoS attacks or bots results in such a website is not archived:

https://web.archive.org/web/20250000000000*/rationalwiki.org

At this point, we should have a complete backup of all posts:

https://web.archive.org/web/20250000000000*/scienceforums.net

It's total crap.

Who in their right mind cares that there is no spam now, and in 20 years, not to mention hundreds of years, no one will know what we were talking about here?

1 hour ago, exchemist said:

Thanks. This would seem not to rule out the possibility that Rationalwiki may be under some sort of attack, then.

A day like any other. I had tens of thousands of hacker attacks on my servers every day.

I'm watching a video on YouTube with one of the most famous local physicists, and he said:

The coolest questions are philosophical ones, of course, but there's no chance of getting close to them, so we don't ask them, at least if we don't want to make a bad impression. So, we ask questions that are within our reach.

I disagree with the first part, of course, but with the rest, absolutely... ;)

3 hours ago, exchemist said:

But tell me, as I’m not an IT whizz like you, what would be the typical reasons for a 503 error?

HTTP server can return any code they want. It could be a lie/fake. But suppose so it is true return code, we make things like these (you lucky *** I have this error at the moment):

This means that rationalwiki.org is in an Akamai cloud. I don't have any servers in this cloud, so it's hard to say, but I can talk about similar situations in other clouds. Cloudflare has an option to act as a proxy server between its server and the real server that is set in the configuration (therefor the name "cache..."). Ping IP domain.xyz gives the cloud address, the cloud forwards this data to the real server, and it responds, and the data comes back. If possible, the data is cached so that the same data does not have to be sent to multiple users.

"backed fetch failed" sounds like connecting to the original server that is proxied is impossible (from Akamai cloud server).

People use cloud servers such as Cloudflare to hide the addresses of their real IP servers. scienceforums.net also uses Cloudflare to hide its real server IP.

If hackers discover the real IP address of a server, they can attack it and prevent the cloud from connecting to it.

It could also be an attack on Akamai (or some other cloud) that would have a similar effect. But there is no indication of this, because downdetector shows nothing.

It also depends on what servers the real RationalWiki server uses, e.g., database. If it connects to other servers that are down or currently under attack, requests to it will fail, as they will e.g. timeout, and it will also be down from the user's point of view.

I have a VPS that, after restarting the server (physical), does not start the Apache servers (application/service) it has on it. You have to start them manually. If Cloudflare acts as a proxy for it, you will have connection errors with that server (VPS). Some pages load (because some have been cached by cloud proxy service), but others do not (giving the illusion that it works partially)..

On 11/5/2025 at 7:33 PM, exchemist said:

For the last few days I have ben unable to reach Rationalwiki. There does not seem to be any commentary on the internet about this, and I suppose there may be an innocent explanation. However I have an uneasy feeling about this, in view of the attack on academic freedom by the Trump administration. I would expect Rationalwiki to be something of a target, as it focuses on debunking pseudoscience, conspiracy theories and misinformation. Snopes I see is still however functioning normally.

It would be difficult to imagine a more grotesque text than the one above. Creating a conspiracy theory to explain an attack on a website that fights conspiracy theories. Simply chapeau bas..

If time flowed backward instead of forward, everything would flow backward, e.g., a star would gain mass-energy (an aging star has less mass than the gas cloud from which it was formed (ignoring incidents such as the intrusion of some object) )..

12 minutes ago, Duda Jarek said:

But CPT symmetry says that both are governed by the same equations - so why the former loses energy, but applying symmetry it gains energy instead?

If one equation has a + sign and the other has a - sign, then they are not the same.

On 10/30/2025 at 1:31 AM, Externet said:

Manufacturing ropes...

Found a video that deserves sharing. But is not in English. You should be able to enjoy it anyway ---> https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=137162458444242

"Electro luminescent (EL) light is technically described as a Light Emitting Capacitor (LEC)."

I have rather something else than what you wanted to share..

Wave on water (often) does not move a tons of water (in direction it goes), instead just transfers momentum between particles..

If you go with the sea current, you don't have to do anything, it flows beneath you, but when you fight against the current, things get rough.

For modern means of transport, such transport is too slow.

In different regions of the earth, the sea current flows in opposite directions, so the first explorers of America could sail with it (rather than against it) and reach America (or return), but they had to use it, not fight it.

When you fly airplane from the US to the EU, and vice versa, you either fly with the wind and your actual speed is much greater than the speed of sound, or you fight against the wind and your journey takes much longer. It depends on how the wind is blowing and whether the pilot has flown into the right zone.

https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/jet-stream-flights-speed-of-sound

If someone wants to achieve good speed on the water or underwater, they strive to minimize resistance between the vehicle and water molecules.

If someone wants to achieve good flight speed, they strive to minimise resistance between the vehicle and air molecules.

If this resistance cannot be avoided, water currents or air currents are used, which flow wherever they want.

Before the invention of steam engines, in the age of sail, this meant that you sailed where the sea current took you, which meant that you did not sail the shortest possible route in a straight line.

Today, the same applies to aeroplanes, only much more dynamically, because at different altitudes you can have winds blowing in opposite directions.

(which looks funny in films, because you have a cloud flowing in +x, and at a different altitude a cloud flowing in +z, etc.)

Perhaps in order to appreciate my statement, you need to know the speed of an ocean current?

https://www.google.com/search?q=sea+current+speed