Provisional Logistics 2

Hi

I wonder how much more irritation they will be able to bear next time.

At this point I'm not sure what made them mad or what made them decide that my thread was inappropriate, so I'm going to sit on it for a while. It could be a simple human error on their part, after all.

Unfortunately, Celeste's commentator in the Japanese Restream of SGDQ 2021 was not the one I like. It's not that I hate anyone but him, but I can't help but feel that he has some special qualities or something.

Basically, I like my AirPods 2. I understand that they are not the best cost effective earbuds on the market today, but for me having several Apple devices and ears that fit EarPods it seemed like a good choice.

Actually my cock is just relaxing right now.

And, yes, I've just had a bowel movement. Now that I think about it, it seems that despite containing a lot of cruelty, Attack on Titan didn't have many obscenities, including scatology.

One of ZUN’s Melody and Countermelody Relationships
Electroll

Zun seems to like using melody 1 as the counter melody for melody 2 or vice versa. Here are three examples.
Sakura, Sakura ~ Japanize Dream Melody 1
Sakura, Sakura ~ Japanize Dream Melody 1 + Melody 2
Crazy Backup Dancer Melody 2
Some may regard this as a verse instead of a melody but I will just label it as melody for convenience sake.
Crazy Backup Dancer Melody 2 (Different key) + Melody 3
Thunderclouds of Magical Power Melody 1
Thunderclouds of Magical Power Melody 3 (Different key from Melody 1)
Thunderclouds of Magical Power Melody 1 (Lowest pitch) + Melody 2 (Middle pitch) + Melody 3 (Highest pitch)
Thunderclouds of Magical Power Melody 3 + Melody 4

So how did ZUN manage to harmonise the 2 melodies together without having them sound ‘dissonant’ or ’clashing’?
I have 4 theories.
1) Melodies at different pitches
2) Controlling dynamics
3) Syncopation
4) Same chord progression

1) Melodies at different pitches
I raised Melody 1 of DDC extra stage theme by 1 octave on every repeat. The one with closer pitch to the other 2 melodies (raised 2 octaves) sounds more dissonant, doesn’t it?

2) Controlling dynamics
I increased the dynamics of Melody 4 of DDC extra stage theme on the next repeat. The one where Melody 4’s dynamic is increased sounds not as dissonant, doesn’t it? By the way, it’s the major second which I feel is causing the dissonance (F# and G#)

3) Syncopation
What is Syncopation? Go google it yourself lol. Anyway, the noteheads marked X are notes of the main melody that do not fall in together with the counter melody. More than 50% of the main melody notes do not fall with the counter melody notes, creating lesser chances for dissonances. HM Magus Night is not arranged by ZUN, I just want to give an example to prove my point.

4) Same chord progression
If both melody and counter melody shares the same chord progression, then the chances of them harmonising together increase. Melody 1 and 2 share almost the same chord progression except for only 1 bar. When composing a song, the melody notes are usually derived from the base chords. Hence, with the same chord progression, chances of 2 melodies harmonising together increase. Credits to Kijiriki and Artist のくの as I used their Sakura, Sakura sheet. Some useful information…

The Types of Intervals

Perfect Consonances
Perfect Unison (P1, PP)
Perfect Fourth (P4)
Perfect Fifth (P5)
Perfect Octave (P8)

Imperfect Consonances
Minor Third (m3)
Major Third (M3)
Minor Sixth (m6)
Major Sixth (M6)

Diatonic Dissonances
Minor Second (m2)
Major Second (M2)
Minor Seventh (m7)
Major Seventh (M7)
Tritone (A4, +4, d5, °5, T, TT)

Chromatic Dissonances
Augmented Second (A2, +2)
Any Other Augmented or Diminished Interval

A list of songs I can think of that used that compositional technique.

Border of Life (Final)
Chinese Tea
HM Magus Night
Crazy Backup Dancer
Thunderclouds of Magical Power
Sakura, Sakura ~ Japanize Dream
Future Universe of Wheelchair
Swim in a Cherry Blossom-Coloured Sea
Into the Backdoor
The Yorimashi Sits Between Dream and Reality ~ Necro-Fantasia
Cinderella Cage ~ Kagome-Kagome
Voyage 1970 is literally the counter melody of Voyage 1969

Also, kudos to these 2 Japanese pianists as they manage to play both melody and counter melody with only their right hand which is bloody hard to do so.
Jam (ジャム) and Jumpny2010
Jam (ジャム) …
Jumpny2010 …

Wow, that's only 3,4% less! This is a benefit from the M1, isn't it?

I don't have a lot to say about MIMK-078, but one thing I can say is that for the first time in a long time, a real person has been the deciding factor in putting an end to my fapping, even if she is partially hiding her face. I would like to pay tribute to the original author, Etuzan Jakusui, the lead actress, Yuria Yoshine, and the production staff.

Yeah, it's damn hot.

I want to wipe out from this world the idea that roles shape the personality of each individual.

The first headphones I bought were M40X, which were essentially chosen as a compromise to the M50X. The choice was 100% determined by information on the internet, and it would be no exaggeration to say that I despised the importance of my own senses. I needed it mainly for listening to the original music of the Touhou Project. That requirement led me via Google to Yahoo! Chiebukuro (it's like Japanese ver. Reddit), where I first heard of the M50X. At the time it cost about $200, and the existence of the M40X at half that price immediately attracted me. Being a very lazy and stingy person, I didn't bother to look into other alternatives and it became my first choice, which resulted in my purchase. I like my M40X, but now that the price of the M50X has dropped to around $150, if I had to choose now, I would buy it.

Approximately 27% less expensive! Quite fascinating option :)

I feel that the relationship between the iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 mini is similar to that of the iPad 8 and iPad mini 5 in some ways. It is the regular model of each that is more cost effective, but each mini has the advantage of portability. Well, to be honest, I would recommend the regular model to most people, but for people like me with small hands and waning muscle strength, or for those who simply re-emphasize portability, the mini is a good option. I'm sure you're tired of hearing about this lol

What could be more painful than not being able to ask for help when someone is right in front of you?

I tend to pick at my ears even when there is no wax buildup. I tend to do this after showering, so I assume the purpose is drainage, but in any case, the fact is that I am contributing to the itchiness of my ear canal more than anything else. I want to stop, but it's become a habit.

It feels good to sniff vigorously, like a doppleganger.

>>18 Sorry guys, a doppelgänger is correct.

Yeah, sorry for the joke. It's actually not a doppelganger, but an onomatopoeia of ejaculation often found in Japanese Hentai manga. Like “Dopyu-ruru-ruru!” It expresses the sound of a highly viscous liquid passing through a narrow space.

Do aliens use mathematics to try to understand the universe? Maybe.

An immature idea that might be fresh: the succubus makes her imperfect alter ego to make her prey impatient and more engrossed.

Yahweh {"Yahweh" is God's proper Name, sometimes rendered "LORD" (all caps) in other translations.} spoke to Moses in the wilderness of Sinai, in the Tent of Meeting, on the first day of the second month, in the second year after they had come out of the land of Egypt, saying, Take a census of all the congregation of the children of Israel, by their families, by their fathers' houses, according to the number of the names, every male, one by one; from twenty years old and upward, all who are able to go out to war in Israel. You and Aaron shall number them by their divisions.

Somehow I like the sound of the word "intellectual problem".

Definitely I don't dislike it rather than I hate it.

So, every year, like clockwork, a new iPhone comes out. That’s a little better, a little faster, a little stronger than the last one. And as we know, Apple is the master of messaging. So they give an incredible onstage presentation with unreal video production. They paint the simplest, prettiest picture of how this is the greatest iPhone they’ve ever made. “The most powerful, fastest iPhone we’ve ever made.” But they also do something else very important, standard practice, but they give the phone to reviewers. And they don’t have to do this but they do and everyone involved will have essentially some date that they are first allowed to talk about their experience with this new phone. Now I’ve been a reviewer for years. We’re professionals. Our job is to take that week and do all of our testing and take all of our findings and find all the things we like and all the things we don’t like and all the new features and test all of the new claims and distill them all down into one piece. And that is a review. And if you time it all right, you can publish that review, right when the contract we signed say we’re allowed to. You might have heard of this? It’s called an embargo. So that’s what you’re seeing when you see all this first wave of reviews and impression videos about a product drop at the same time. The thing is every single one of these reviews is fundamentally a balancing act. Because there’s limited time. There is no possible way to meaningfully test every single new thing about every incredible new phone that comes out. And even if you do, how much time does that leave for writing down all these tests and then analyzing the results of these tests and that doesn’t even leave time for the production of shooting the video, editing the video, the color correction, the music, all the creative choices you want to make. There’s just too much. Being a video reviewer on YouTube today is like nine different jobs in one. So how do you decide what gets included in that review and how much has to hit the cutting room floor? So every review has its own style. Some reviews you’ll see are 5 minutes long. Super dense. Some might be 10 minutes long, even my own videos reviews over the years have gotten somewhere in the 15 to 20 minute range but that’s in an effort to give you as much information as possible in as short as time as possible. I’m not trying to waste anybody’s time. And don’t forget on YouTube we also have audience metrics and retention to think about. It’s a balancing act. So a review is basically the art of compressing and distilling as much useful information as possible into one piece. But because it’s an art, everyone’s going to cut different things from different places and make different pieces. But not this video. In this video, there is no time limit. This is everything you could possibly want to know about my last five months with the iPhone 12 Pro and what I really think.

All right. So now that the limits are off, I’m definitely going to be getting into the weeds a pretty good amount and multiple pieces of this video. You know, when it’s happening but I still it’ll be pretty fun when we do it. Now if you’re the mad man or mad woman who’s just going to watch this whole video straight through to the end, well you can see how long this video is, it’s good one, buckle up grab a snack, but if your attention span isn’t quite that long, well you can see there are chapters below for all these different topics, so if you want to get into the weeds on a certain topic you’re curious about, you can do that too, feel free to click around. Also, this video is mainly based on the iPhone 12 Pro that I’ve spent most of my last five months with, but anytime I reference other pieces of the iPhone lineup the 12 mini or the 12 or the 12 Pro Max, I’ll mention that too. Let’s get into it.

So the iPhone 12 series has a refreshed design this year which is always a big deal in the phone world and the iPhone design just doesn’t change as much as it used to and I think that’s pretty important. Design is really what most people look forward to and what seems to identify the iPhone forever. I mean, think about it, most of the time when you see new iPhone leaks or headlines or rumors, it’s mostly design stuff, right? You’re looking at new case designs or new dimensions or what is the camera bump on the back of this year’s rectangle going to look like. Mostly because we already know the next year’s iPhone is going to be pretty similar to this year’s iPhone. But we just want to know what it’s going to look like. The look and feel in the hand is is always the last most exciting unknown. I happen to love the new modern super flat design of the iPhone 12 series. It’s still a rectangle with rounded corners in a few different colors. But sides are flat. Straight up, 90 degrees, stand up on the edges flat. So the flatness has become this identifying characteristic of the phone just like it was for the iPhone 4, 4s, 5 and 5s. But it’s actually even flatter than most other flat phones because instead of 2.5D glass that’s flat for most of the surface and then curves over at the very edges. This is just straight flat glass on the front and the back and the flat stainless steel band around the edges. So this has a couple of effects. First, it gave Apple slightly more internal volume in the same shape. Second, it made the edges a bit shaper. So I happen to like the flatter edges just because I feel like it gives me something to hold when I’m picking up the phone, gripping it. Some people though dislike it for the same reason because it can feel a little sharp, like it’s sort of bumping into the corners of your hand. I haven’t felt that with this phone. The thing I like and dislike the most about this design though is the finishes. So all the iPhone 12 Pros have this sort of matte finish on the back which is nice. It’s actually satin that doesn’t show many fingerprints in any light which is awesome. It doesn’t change much as it wears over time but then you’ve got a glassy finish on the Apple logo, the camera bump and the stainless steel band around the outside. So the logo, that’s fine, I get it, but we know they could have made the camera bump matte because that’s what they did on the regular iPhone 12. Yet they went with a glossy finish just on this piece and then combined with the raised sharp camera rings. This has the tendency to collect a lot of dust. Every iPhone 12 Pro you see that’s outside of a case for more than a few minutes or put into a pocket is going to have dust around the camera modules. This doesn’t actually change the performance of the camera so it’s actually not a big deal but the dust is pretty much always going to be there because of the rings. The most annoying part of the finish on these phones for me though is the fingerprints on the stainless steel rails. They are constant. So much so that it’s not even worth cleaning in the moment when you notice there’s fingerprints on it. Like they’ve nailed everything else about this rail, the power button is slightly bigger and still very clicky, love that, the mute switch is a staple that still works exactly as you’d expect it to. I’ll talk about more about the rest of the button behavior later but basically my ideal iPhone 12 would actually be, a hybrid between the matte back of the Pro and the matte camera bump and aluminum rails of the regular 12. But guess what, most people put their phone in case and so none of that stuff about the finishes, about the grippiness, about the corners will really actually matter to you that much if you cover up all of this engineering in a plastic shell of your choice. The size of the iPhone has always been pretty reasonable although it’s slowly crept up in size over the years.

And this is my favorite size iPhone ever because it feels just about as big as it can get before I start to have to do hand gymnastics to reach the notification shade and the stuff in the top corner of the screen. For whatever reason, Apple just refuses to adjust the software on the gigantic iPhone 12 Pro Max to really take advantage of that bigger screen in a meaningful way. So I found the trade-off in cameras and battery for how annoying it is. To use, just isn’t worth it. So the iPhone 12 Pro is a great size, the iPhone 12 is an identical size, and the 12 mini if you can deal with the battery shortcomings is the best compact flagship phone out there right now. I’ll link my entire video about that below. A couple other things about the design though. This is a thousand dollar phone. Let’s not forget that. It’s a thousand dollars. And so there’s a lot of these premium design, industrial design features. And this would be the perfect video to shout out a lot of those things that we typically skip and take for granted. So the whole body is sealed and IP68 certified, I’m not the type to put it under water and test that, but it is able to withstand dust and dirt and is resistant to liquid submersion up to a max depth of six meters underwater for up to 30 minutes. So it’s always nice to see premium phones that would survive a quick drop in the pool or a toilet or something like that. And actually I also used to do a lot more tests if you go back far enough in videos where I would literally try to bend the phone and see if you could hear any flexing or creaking or anything like that. Phones these days just don’t do anymore and this is no exception. So overall, just in terms of raw industrial design, the iPhone is exactly what we’d expected. It’s great. It works great, it looks great, and it still has the widest most vibrant ecosystem of accessories. The worst part about it is technically that Lightning Port in a world of USB Type-C, but to most iPhone users that’s just a default and we already know Apple’s trying to get rid of that. Anyway, I’ll link a video below the like button or right up here in the corner to an entire video I made just about that topic. The best part though, I still think it’s actually the most underrated, the haptics. So I’m putting this in the design section because this is a consideration from the very beginning when Apple’s laying out the internals of the iPhone. There is a massive space set aside inside for a very large Taptic Engine as Apple calls it. And it’s REALLY good. So instead of previously typical rotational vibration motor, that Taptic Engine is a linear oscillating vibrator. And it can deliver incredibly precise convincing vibrations that literally feels like taps. Almost like you’re pressing a real button or your phone is tapping you in your pocket. And it’s better than any other phone’s haptics I’ve felt right now. This one in the iPhone 12 Pro isn’t necessarily better than last year but it’s just one of those things that we skip because we take it for granted. But it’s really good. Apple’s gotten so good at haptics that they’re comfortable replacing typical buttons like a track pad on a MacBook with just a flat piece of glass and a Taptic Engine underneath. It’s just, it’s that good. Also, do I think that this triple camera array looks kind of like a stovetop? Yes. Do I think Apple knew that when they were making this phone? Yes. But do I think they just went ahead with it anyway because the memes are inevitable and it’s kind of also extra press? Yes. So go ahead. Put a case on it.

If the iPhone 13 mini is released, and it has a matte black flat design with Touch ID, I guess it must look pretty attractive to me, to the extent that I'd consider it worth 80,000 JPY. It'll be a good deal.

Son of a bitcoin! I can't stop hiccupping!

I like Reach for the Summit.

Buenos días.

One of the strangest things about erections is that there is no choice. It progresses before any behavioural assessment has taken place.

I don't know why erection is in the plural, but it was probably done with noble intentions. No need to worry as I had already subsided without realizing it.

Ghostly Point of View, Ghostly Vision, Ghostly Perspective (06/10/2021, 17:52)
Seeing the True Nature of Ghosts and Withered Tail Flowers (17:52, 2021/06/10)
The Agitated Universe (2021/06/10/17:54)
A Senior Conflicts Between Reason and Instinct (2021/06/13, 0:30)
For as long as I can remember, a motion of no confidence in the Cabinet against the ruling party, the ego, has been submitted in the Diet of my brain, my highest decision-making body. (2021/06/16, 11:01)
Mario-like understanding of as a subcategory of gamification (07/22/2021, 7:25 PM)
Heattech can replace heating, but Airism cannot replace cooling. (2021/07/27/16:01)
If there is anything to strive for, it is only the realization of fairness. (2021/08/07, 0:01)
The fear of the collapse of intellectual constructs discourages constructive thought and action, whatever it may be. (2021/08/09/5:04)

Only those who can use the compass of duty when swimming in a sea of unlimited rights are free. (2021/09/02, 21:45)
Seeking External Intelligence (Sep 2, 2021 / 22:12)

I'm not going to save it in SP because it's not sophisticated enough to be called a Proverb, but I'll let PL spit it out, even though what's in SP is hardly a Proverb in the grand scheme of things. I mean, caring for a living thing is like not wanting to break your smartphone.

Is the hypothesis that something that foreshadows death is attractive a little too short-sighted?

Emil Cioran was a writer and philosopher born in 1911 in what is present day Rasinari, Romania. He is renowned for his penetratingly dark, nihilistic, yet beautiful writing style, considered by many to be one of the great writers of despair, building his philosophical arguments off the somber, emotional rhythm of his prose, often expressing shocking thoughts and dark humor, nearly every sentence and passage hung down from the very heights of despair. Born into a socially and spiritually volatile time of western history, somewhere in the middle of the increasing disintegration of traditional religious ideology and the newly emerging philosophical movements of existentialism, idealism, and other pessimistic schools of thought, Cioran would find himself positioned on the face of a mountain that humanity was desperately trying to get over. And from his view, he saw nothing. A deathly climb to another valley of nowhere. At a fairly young age, Cioran would become a heavy reader, going on to study literature and philosophy at the University of Bucharest, a public university in Romania. Here he would study and read the works of philosophers like Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Schopenhauer, Lev Shestov, Hegel, and many others. At twenty-three, he would publish his first book titled On the Heights of Despair, which would soon go on to receive controversial, but mostly positive critical acclaim, achieving him two notable awards, and setting him on the path to soon become an internationally recognized writer and thinker. In this first work, not only did Cioran reveal his promising, young intellectual mind, but also what would go on to become the reoccurring, lifelong themes and obsessions of his work; themes like despair, suffering, social isolation, absurdity, futility, failure, decay, and death. Written out of a spell of horrible insomnia, this first book would provide a foretelling of what awaited Cioran: a lifelong exploration of the underbelly of the human condition fueled by a depression infused insomniac lifestyle. “I’ve never been able to write otherwise than in the midst of the depression brought about by my nights of insomnia.” Cioran writes. “For seven years I could barely sleep. I need this depression, and even today before I sit down to write I play a disk of Gypsy music from Hungary.” Like many great writers and artists, Cioran felt as though he had to write. It was not as if he made his work sad, but that his sadness made his work. In the moments of depression, writing was, according to him, his only therapy. His first book, and the twenty plus others of his to come, according to Cioran, saved him from what might have otherwise seemed like the logical conclusion to much of his work. If nothing else, this aspect of his work and life reveals a profound insight into the potency of the creative process. That even in writing about the futility and meaninglessness of life and its endeavors, the power of the creative process can, in some sense, save the writer from the very substance and content of their own work, paradoxically making the futility and meaninglessness that they discuss somewhat less futile and meaningless. After leaving Romania in 1940, Cioran would end up living the majority of his life in Paris. He would go on to produce upwards of twenty books, written in both Romanian and French, keeping the same eloquence, wit, and intensity throughout. His work would increasingly develop and maintain him a highly respected reputation amongst the  prominent French intellectual scene, garnering the admiration of high-ranking philosophical peers as well as a large following of readers across the world.

Despite this, he would live a very modest, private life, going to great lengths to avoid any and all accolades and any way of life that would otherwise be considered ordinarily successful. In 1995, at the age of eighty-four, Cioran died after having developed Alzheimer’s several years prior. Slowly but surely, one of the most eloquent minds of the 20th century lost all relationship with words and then experienced the main theme of his life’s work firsthand. In terms of Cioran’s philosophy, despite his work being unmistakably perceptive and intelligent, he is somewhat interesting and perhaps debatable  in the context of a philosopher. For the most part, traditional philosophical work is almost always grounded in a particular system of thought, which is formed or integrated first as a foundation and then logically built on from there. Cioran’s work, however, does not really start from nor integrate any real system of this form. Rather, it relies more on his aphoristic, observational writing style, which seems to almost philosophize and reveal metaphysical ideas through the emotionally tense, subjective, and chaotic reading experience alone, without much consideration of logical structure or systematic reasoning. Seeing as how a key part of Cioran’s philosophy was that he disagreed with the premise of reason and traditional philosophy as a means of resolving life and explaining its reasonlessness, this approach arguably makes sense. To adequately argue for a philosophy of absurdity and reasonlessness, what better way is there than to write without priority for structure or reason? And in this sense, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Cioran is sort of an antiphilosophy philosopher. Which perhaps nonetheless is, ironically, still a philosophy. According to what CAN be surmised of Cioran’s views, it is more or less death specifically that both causes the futility of life and possess the inevitable limit to all reason within it. However, in his most famous work, The Trouble with Being Born, he discusses how since death necessarily follows from birth, it is actually the memory of our birth that is the tragic problem of life, and not death in it of itself. The attempt to reason an understanding or solution to the consciousness awareness of death stemming from birth is thus both the driving force of philosophy, religion, and science, and simultaneously their collapsing force. The unbeatable opponent under which all reason, logic, and human effort crumble. And consequently, any philosophical attempt to do so, for Cioran, can only be a contemplation on failure. Broadly speaking, this concept would also become a fundamental tenant of his philosophy, often underpinning his ideas on the notion that human endeavors are almost always synonymous and fated with failure. What his work also seemed to parallel alongside this dread and nihilism, though, is the notion of accepting and playing into the absurdity of it all. Loving the absurd uselessness for what it is, how it is, and using it against itself, and living anyway. In the words of Cioran, “When all the current reasons—moral, esthetic, religious, social, and so on—no longer guide one's life, how can one sustain life without succumbing to nothingness? Only by a connection with the absurd, by love of absolute uselessness, loving something which does not have substance but which simulates an illusion of life. I live because the mountains do not laugh and the worms do not sing.” It is in this dive into the absurdity that Cioran seems to pose the question: can those who accept and embrace failure and disaster ever really fail or be struck by either?

Pessimism, in this sense, almost serves as a trump card. The last true failure being the failure of optimism. From there, we become, as he put it, “invincible victims.” There is a certain unique and important quality to the irony of Cioran’s work. As a sort of antiphilosophy philosopher who argued that life cannot be made or reasoned into any sort of reconciliation or meaningful benefit, he nonetheless did so by philosophizing. At least in some form. Nihilism, of which he is generally associated, denies the value of all things. But can a nihilist philosophy be expressed as a philosophy and remain a nihilist philosophy? In other words, can the premise and conclusion be that life is inherently meaningless, and that endeavoring and seeking reason is entirely futile, whilst simultaneously making this meaningful claim through creative action and, albeit subversive, providing reasons for it? Discussing or creatively expressing the notion that all is meaningless and void of reason is itself a creation of meaning out of the void motivated by the very void of reason. The process of forming meaning, it seems, can perhaps not be escaped, even by one the greatest so-called nihilists. And perhaps then, at bottom, Cioran is never really declaring true nihilism. There is the more obvious reading of Cioran, and perhaps others like him, that can reasonably come off as if it was created by someone who outright hates life and lives with a constant bitterness towards everyone and everything. But there is also another read that seemingly reveals a paradoxical reverence and embrace of life. Although Cioran might not have explicitly agreed with this, to speak of life with such candor in the way he did, to think it is worthy to be spoken of at all, to refuse to lie to it or about it, despite how dark or bleak it might be, perhaps suggests a certain hidden, but nonetheless deep admiration and acceptance of it. When asked once why he writes about such dismal topics in the way he does, Cioran said, “Everything that is formulated becomes more tolerable.” His work time and time again demonstrates this, revealing the perhaps vile and horribly unresolvable qualities of life, while simultaneously reveling the potential for redemption contained inside them. A worthiness of enduring, of thinking, of writing, of living life. Cursed with the gift of consciousness, we are all inescapably forced into the beautiful confrontation of the void and the absurd inevitability of creating  meaning and somethingness out of it. Cioran’s work is likely not for everyone, but for those whom it is, it is likely with a great degree. As all art and literature arguably should, his work attempts to reflect, with as much brute earnestness as possible, the things most of us know and feel but are often too scared or unsure to not only talk about but think about. He was one of the rare explorers willing, or perhaps forced into traveling through the depths of hell and heights of despair and then tell about it. Perhaps Cioran’s work can be seen simply as a collection of life-refusing nihilistic thoughts, or perhaps it can also be seen as an embodiment of the irrational but no less potent force of human creative consciousness at work; its ability to meaningfully endure even its own horrible conditions. And in this, in his works’ arguably successful confrontation and embracing of the sad, hopeless, and absurd parts of life, it serves as an enduring and important connection point into these often hidden but deeply shared human experiences, reminding us that we aren’t so alone and reassuring us with the comforting notion that, “I'm simply an accident. Why take it all so seriously?” - Emil Cioran.

The belief that meticulous preparation will bring about our desires is neither good nor bad in itself.

Imperishable Night had 4996 words. Kinda nice.

The bipolarly decentralized female genitalia: the breast and the vulva are literally symbols of the female body and are essential to the history of the sex industry.

Is the truth an event that has passed through all the baptisms of doubt?

Shamefully, I ended up showing myself a typical example of short-sighted behavioral choices: I ate a ridiculous amount of snacks in the early morning under the current conditions where the day/night cycle has turned early morning into de facto evening.

I showered then refreshed!

Why is negative narrative so prevalent in modern society?

Genuinely useful information should be the most personalised, shouldn't it?

What I am interested in now is primarily how broad a concept the sexual attraction of the female body encompasses. I believe it has been tested on the basis of various nominal preferences, but the boundaries are undefined. Knowing the outlines is a useful first step towards a comprehensive understanding.

In Japanese ethics there is righteousness and in Western ethics there is duty. Righteousness is emotional ethics and private, but duty is rational ethics and public. Righteousness is affectionate but unfair, duty is fair but unsympathetic. Righteousness is a family morality and duty is a national morality. Without a strong sense of duty, national government cannot be sustained forever. (Kanzo Uchimura, Money and God, etc.)

It's all too clear that the curved edge iPhone is more likely to slip out of your hand than the flat one. No doubt.

I feel a bit weird because I haven't had anything in my mouth for two hours since I woke up.

"I love neutrality": I think we can agree on the definition of neutrality before it is clarified.

>>55 Correction: I think we can agree on that until we have a clearer definition of neutrality.

A plane plummets out of the sky, a speed runner inexplicably jumps to a higher platform. What the? What the?! And an election recount is triggered. All because of the same invisible phenomenon that permeates the universe. On May 18th, 2003, voters in Belgium went to the polls. In many regions, voting was done on a computer, something the Belgians had been experimenting with for over a decade. But the system had a backup. Each voter would insert a magnetic card into the machine and make their selection on screen. Their vote was saved both to the computer and the magnetic card, which they dropped into a box for redundancy. Late that night, as the votes were being tabulated, one of the election officials detected a problem with the results from Schaerbeek, a municipality in central Brussels. Maria Vindevogel, a little known candidate with her own party received more votes than was mathematically possible. They knew this because of the way the preferential voting system works. So they took out the magnetic cards and started a recount. One by one, they fed each of them through the machines again, and after several hours, the recount was complete. The vote totals for every candidate were exactly the same as before, except for Maria Vindevogel. In her case, the recounted number of votes was less than the original by 4,096. So what went wrong? How had her original tally been inflated by over 4,000 votes? Computer experts were brought in to run extensive tests on the software. They combed through the code, but could find no bugs. They got the computer that had made the initial erroneous tally and tested the hardware again and again, but they could not replicate the error. Everything about the hardware seemed to be in perfect working order. And this left only one possible explanation and it is seriously weird. The clue comes from the excess number of votes Vindevogel received. 4,096. Computers work using binary, strings of zeros and ones, each corresponding to a power of two. So somewhere inside the computer tabulating all the votes was a string of bits representing the number of votes Maria received. It started the day all zeros, and then as each vote for her came in, it would increment by one. Physically, this is done by turning on a transistor for one and turning it off for zero. What's remarkable about the number 4,096 is that it is exactly a power of two. Two to the power of 12. That is the 13th bit. So for Maria Vindevogel to receive an extra 4,096 votes, only one thing needed to happen. The 13th bit had to flip from a zero to a one. But why would that happen? Computers work precisely because bits don't flip unless we want them to, or do they? Looking into the problem, Belgian investigators found reports of similar issues from big computer companies starting in the 1970s. In 1978, Intel reported some strange errors popping up in their 16 kilobit dynamic random access memory or DRAM. Ones would spontaneously flip to zeros with no apparent cause. The problem turned out to be the ceramic packaging the chip was encased in. With the demand for semiconductor packaging skyrocketing in the 1970s, a new manufacturing plant was constructed on the Green River in Colorado. Unfortunately, this site happened to be just downstream of an old uranium mill. Radioactive atoms made their way into the river and then into the ceramic packaging for Intel's microchips. Intel scientists investigating the problem found that even trace amounts of uranium and thorium in the ceramic were sufficient to cause problems. In their DRAM, memory was stored as the presence or absence of electrons in a semiconductor well.

The alpha particles emitted by uranium and thorium were energetic and ionizing enough to create electron hole pairs in the silicone. If an alpha particle is struck in just the right place, it could create a large number of free charge carriers causing electrons to accumulate in the well flipping a one to a zero. This is known as a single event upset, a type of soft error. The error is soft because the device hasn't been damaged. The bit has changed, but you could erase it and rewrite it with no problems. Investigators exposed the chips to alpha emitters with different levels of activity. And just as you'd expect, they found the number of bit flips directly correlated with the number of alpha particles the chip had been exposed to. The reason this problem was identified in the 1970s was because chip components had been miniaturized to the point where a single alpha particle could produce enough charge to flip a bit. Immediately, these findings attracted a lot of attention. Before the paper was published, it was widely circulated in the industry. And as a result, chip manufacturers were a lot more careful to avoid radioactive materials when producing their microchips and packaging. Therefore, the bit flip that gave Maria Vindevogel 4,096 extra votes wasn't caused by natural radioactivity in the computer. So where did it come from? After Henri Becquerel discovered radioactivity with uranium in 1896, scientists sought a way to measure it. How radioactive were different materials? And one way to do this is with a gold leaf electrometer. When it's charged, the leaf is repelled and you can measure the amount of charge by the angle of the leaf. Now, if ionizing radiation enters the chamber, it rips electrons off air molecules, creating positive and negative charges. Opposite charges are attracted to the leaf, discharging it over time. The higher the level of ionizing radiation, the faster the device discharges. In 1910, Theodore Wolf took his electrometer to the top of the Eiffel Tower. Since radioactivity was found in the soil and rocks of earth, he expected that 300 meters up, the radiation would be just a few percent of the ground radiation. Instead he found only a slight decrease. In 1911, Austrian physicist Victor Hess decided to take this experiment further. Literally. He loaded electric scopes into the basket of a hydrogen balloon. In his first two flights, he observed the same thing as Wolf. Up to an altitude of 1100 meters, both trips revealed no fundamental change in radiation compared to the values observed on the ground. But the next year, he conducted seven balloon flights up to an altitude of 5,200 meters. And here he discovered something remarkable. While there was an initial drop in radiation for the first several hundred meters, above one kilometer or so the level increased with increasing altitude. At his maximum height, the level of radiation was several times greater than it was on the ground. The radiation appeared to be coming, not from the earth, but from the sky. Hess scheduled one of his balloon flights during a solar eclipse. And as the moon passed in front of the sun, he carefully watched his instruments. But the readings were unaffected. Even with the sun half covered, the level of radiation was the same. Since no influence of the eclipse on the penetrating radiation was noted, we conclude that even if a part of the radiation should be of cosmic origin, it hardly emanates from the sun. Victor Hess had discovered cosmic rays. High energy radiation from space. But what were these rays exactly and where were they coming from? Well, today we know they aren't electromagnetic rays as many suspected, but particles.

Around 90% are protons, 9% are helium nuclei, and 1% are heavier nuclei. Some of them are from the sun, but they have comparatively low energy. High energy cosmic rays moving very close to the speed of light come from exploding stars, supernova in our own galaxy and in others. And the highest energy particles are thought to come from black holes, including the super massive black holes at the centers of galaxies. But it's hard to pin down exactly where cosmic rays come from because as charged particles, they're deflected by magnetic fields in space. So they can wind their way through the universe for billions of years. A cosmic ray detected on October 15th, 1991 had an energy of 51 joules. That is a single subatomic particle with the energy of a baseball going a hundred kilometers per hour. For obvious reasons, it was dubbed the OMG particle. But primary cosmic rays like these don't make it down to earth's surface. Instead, they collide with air molecules around 25 kilometers above the ground and create new particles like pions. These collide and decay into other particles like neutrons, protons, muons, electrons, positrons and photons, which in turn collide with other air molecules in one long cascade. So from a single primary cosmic ray, comes a shower of particles streaming towards the earth. It is one of these particles that investigators suspect struck a transistor in a computer in Belgium, flipping the 13th bit from a zero to a one and giving Maria Vindevogel 4,096 extra votes. But how often do things like this happen? In 1911, Charles Wilson made it possible to see the cosmic rays all around us when he perfected his cloud chamber, an enclosure with super saturated water or alcohol vapor. When a cosmic ray passes through the chamber, it ionizes the gas causing vapor to condense into tiny droplets on the ions, revealing the path of the particle. Alpha particles, helium nuclei, leave short thick tracks while beta particles, electrons leave long skinny trails. In 1932, Carl Anderson identified a trail that looked like it was made by an electron, but in the applied magnetic field, it curved in the wrong direction. Implying it had a positive charge. Anderson had found the anti electron or positron. It was the first confirmed sighting of anti-matter. Four years later, also using a cloud chamber, he discovered the muon, again in cosmic rays. For his discovery of the positron, Anderson was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1936. He shared the prize with Victor Hess, the man who discovered cosmic rays in the first place, invisible particles that affect our lives in ways most of us are oblivious to. This is possibly the rarest thing to ever happen in a video game. In 2013, user DOTA_Teabag was speed running Super Mario 64 on the console. In the level Tik Tok Clock, he suddenly up warps onto a higher platform. - [DOTA_Teabag] What the? - [Player] Did you get invisible wall? What? - Please say you got the--- - [DOTA_Teabag] No, that was the craziest thing I've ever seen though. - [Narrator] The move shaves off a few seconds and it seems like a newly discovered glitch in the game that could give speed runners and edge. User PenandCook12 put out a $1,000 bounty for anyone who could replicate the up warp. But so far, after six years, no one has been able to. The best explanation anyone can come up with is that a cosmic ray caused the glitch. It's been shown that a single bit flipped in the first bite of Mario's height co-ordinate could have caused the effect.

On the main level, the bite was 1 1 0 0 0 1 0 1. But if you flip the last one to a zero, it changes his vertical position. And just by chance, this new height coincides with the higher floor. PenandCook12 wrote a script to manually flip the bit at the right moment and was able to achieve the same up warp. This is a particularly visible bit flip, but the truth is cosmic rays are triggering bit flips all the time. - An upset there, transient there can alter the function of these devices and we call that a single event functional interrupt. So an entire process can hang. So a blue screen of death that you get might actually have been a neutron or whatnot. - [Derek] When people see the blue screen of death, could that be caused by a cosmic ray? - Absolutely. - These days, there are a number of ways computer chips are made resilient in the face of bit flips like error correction code or ECC memory. But you can't totally prevent bit flips from happening. In 1996, IBM estimated that for each 256 megabytes of RAM, one bit flip occurs per month. And the main culprit seems to be neutrons created in the shower of particles from cosmic rays. Starting in 2009, Toyota recalled millions of vehicles due to the problem of unintended acceleration. - We were in the fast lane driving at about 70, and he said that the car was continuing to accelerate and he couldn't bring it to a stop. - Many speculated that cosmic ray induced bit flips in the electronic control system were the cause. So much so that NASA was called in to help with the investigation. But it turns out, cosmic rays were probably not the culprit. NASA identified as the main causes, sticky accelerator pedals, poorly fitted floor mats and most commonly, drivers pushing on the accelerator thinking it was the brake. But cosmic rays have caused crashes of supercomputers, especially at higher elevations. Los Alamos National Labs located 2200 meters above sea level is constantly dealing with neutron induced supercomputer crashes. So the software auto saves frequently and neutron detectors have been installed throughout the facility. If you go even higher, like climbing up to cruising altitude in a plane, you can see the radiation from cosmic rays increasing on a Geiger counter. To .5 microsieverts per hour at 18,000 feet. Up to one microsieverts per hour at 23,000 feet. Over two microsieverts per hour at 33,000 feet. And over three microsieverts per hour at even higher altitudes and towards the poles. At cruising altitude, this increases the chance of a single event upset by 10 to 30 times. This isn't critical if it happens in your laptop, but what if it occurs in the flight computer? On October 7th, 2008, an Airbus A330 took off from Singapore to Perth. Just over three hours into the flight, the plane suddenly pitched down diving 200 meters in 20 seconds. Inside the plane, everyone experienced negative 0.8 Gs of acceleration. It would have felt like the plane had flipped over. - The G-Force was enough, even with our three point harness to lift us both out of the seat and push us forward as well. - Minutes later, the plane dropped another 120 meters. 119 people on board were injured, many from bumping their heads into the ceiling. So the pilots decided to make an emergency landing in Learmonth. In the investigation that followed, the fault seem to occur with the first air data inertial reference unit, or ADIRU for short. This computer supplies critical data like airspeed, angle of attack and altitude. The way it supplies each of these pieces of information is in a 32 bit binary word. The first eight bits identify the type of information and bits 11 to 29 encode the actual data. What seems to have happened is that a bit flip in the first eight bits meant altitude information was mislabeled as angle of attack information.

Inside the cockpit, alarms went on for over speed and stall simultaneously, something that should be impossible. But the plane nose down sharply to correct what it thought was a stall, throwing passengers and crew into the ceiling. Investigators looked into software bugs, software corruption, a hardware fail, physical environment factors and electromagnetic interference. But each of these possibilities was found to be unlikely based on multiple sources of evidence. The other potential triggering event was a single event effect resulting from a high energy atmospheric particle striking one of the integrated circuits within the CPU module. One of the challenges with single event upsets is that they are soft errors. They don't leave a trace, but interestingly, the Airbus A330 was built in 1992 when there were no specific regulatory or aircraft manufacturer requirements for airborne systems to be resilient to single event effects. With the space shuttle, redundancy was built in from the start. For navigation and control, there were four computers simultaneously running identical software. If one computer had a soft error, the other three would overrule it. And using this setup, they could also track the frequency of bit flips. On one five day mission, STS 48, there were 161 separate bit flips. Above the atmosphere, cosmic rays are so energetic sometimes you can even see them. - Once in a while you have your eyes closed and you're not asleep yet. And if you wait a little while, you occasionally will see a flash of light. And we think it is heavy particles or individual bursts of energy coming from radiation that are either going through the eyeball itself or going through the optic nerve. And they, the way that your body registers radiation going through it is amazingly enough by showing you a little flash in one of your eyes, just to remind you that you are subject to the radiation of not only our sun, but every star of the universe, that is radiating at you. I picture back to the first astronauts who must have closed their eyes and seen that radiation and gone, "I'm not going to tell anybody about this "because no one's told me about it. "I'm not talking." I can just imagine the first two guys that said, "Hey, I am, "sometimes I see flashes of light. "Do you see flashes of light?" And then it's, "Oh, we all see flashes of light." "Oh, okay, well, that's all right then." (narrator laughing) - [Narrator] For missions to other planets, protecting electronics is critical. - If a single bit of information controls a critical function on your spacecraft, let's say your thrusters, and that goes from a one to is zero, from a on to off, or vice versa, you could lose the mission. - [Narrator] That's why the computer on the Perseverance Rover that just landed on Mars is 20 years old. It's a power PC launched in 2001 with only 256 megabytes of Ram and two gigabytes of flash storage. But it is radiation hardened, meaning the design, materials, circuits and software are built to withstand 40 times the radiation of an ordinary computer. It's been used on over a dozen space missions going back to 2005. - In fact, when we first started doing the power PC testing years ago, the way we did it, we just simply stuck an operating system processor in a beam line where we generate these particles on the planet and look for blue screens of death. You can kind of figure out what's going wrong and try to undo that. So you don't get to the blue screen of death because a spacecraft that gets into that mode is basically unrecoverable. - As the Voyager 1 spacecraft departed the solar system, one of the ways we could tell was by an increase in the flux of cosmic rays it experienced. Although on earth, the particles streaming from the sun and the solar wind are a source of radiation, further out these same particles maintain protective bubble. The heliosphere. It helps deflect and slow cosmic rays from interstellar space protecting the solar system from ionizing radiation.

But the sun has an 11 year activity cycle. So this protection fluctuates. The flux of cosmic rays on earth is much lower when the sun is active than when it's dormant. In the history of our planet, cosmic rays may have played an even larger role flipping bits, not in electronics, but in the genetic codes of living organisms, providing some of the variation on which natural selection acts. Maria Vindevogel is now a member of the Belgium Chamber of Representatives, elected by people, not a particle, but her story is a reminder of the zillions of particles winding their way through the universe for millions or billions of years. One of which might at any moment, change your life by passing through a tiny transistor and cra.... (electronic disturbance) Discovering the origin of cosmic rays or where 4,096 extra votes came from or how to protect the Mars Rover from radiation requires problem solving, which is a perishable skill. And the best way to keep your problem solving skills sharp is to solve a diverse range of problems, which you can do with the sponsor of this video, Brilliant. Brilliant is a website and app that teaches you STEM concepts in an interactive way. They have courses on topics from applied computer science to special relativity. Two courses I would recommend if you enjoyed this video, are computer memory and algorithm fundamentals. Brilliant have really upped their interactivity recently. So instead of reading about algorithms, you're taught how to write algorithms yourself. Brilliant engages you in active learning. Instead of telling you the right answer, they allow you to figure it out for yourself with plenty of helpful hints and guidance along the way. And for viewers of this channel, Brilliant is offering 20% off an annual subscription to the first 200 people to sign up. Just go to brilliant.org/veritasium. I'll put that link down in the description. So I want to thank Brilliant for supporting Veritasium and I want to thank you for watching.

Why is negative narrative so prevalent in modern society?

Is it wrong to stylise a sentence in the translation process? Maybe it's also a question of degree.

If my son doesn't become independent, it's not good for him or for me. Supporting independence is not a correction.

If you can't use it as it is, maybe you can refer to it.

My scrotum is consistently flaccid, even though my penis is capable of becoming erect enough to masturbate. Wouldn't this be trivia?

Never before in human history have we been richer, more advanced or powerful. And yet we feel overwhelmed in the face of rapid climate change. It seems simple on the surface. Greenhouse gases trap energy from the Sun and transfer it to our atmosphere. This leads to warmer winters, harsher summers. Dry places become drier and wet places wetter. Countless ecosystems will die while the rising oceans swallow coasts and the cities we build on them. So why don’t we just like… prevent all of that? Well, it’s complicated. The public debate about stopping rapid climate change often focuses on a few key features, like coal plants, cars or burping cows. And so the solutions are often simplistic – rows of solar panels, biking to work, something something sustainability. And a huge talking point is personal responsibility. How YOU should change your lifestyle to prevent rapid climate change, which we will find out together in the next few minutes. This is one of those videos where we want to encourage you to watch to the end, because to discuss real doable solutions, we first need to understand the problem. A Fuller Picture Modern industrial society as we constructed it in the last 150 years, is inherently destructive to the planet. Basically everything we do to make our lives easier, safer and more comfortable is making things worse for the biosphere. The food we eat, the streets we walk on, the clothes we wear, the gadgets we use, the way we move around and the pleasant temperatures we artificially create around us. While most people know about the serious impact of energy, beef, cars and planes, many major polluters are barely ever talked about. The emissions leaking out of landfills are as significant as the emissions of all the jets in the air. More CO2 is released to run our homes than from all cars combined. And the emissions produced when making a new car is equivalent to building just two metres of road. So it is nice to switch to electric cars but they won’t solve anything if we keep building roads the same way. Fixing one small part of the industrial system is not enough. Each of the many different parts needs its own solution and many of them aren’t straight forward. But even where we know what to do, just because a solution exists doesn’t mean we are able or willing to implement it. There are many gray areas in the fight against rapid climate change, the most prominent one is the divide between rich and poor. Emissions vs poverty There is a clear connection between the prosperity of a nation and its carbon emissions. In other words, richer people tend to cause more emissions. So the key to fixing climate change is simply for the world’s richest to cut back on their extravagant lifestyles right? While this would help, it wouldn’t make the problem go away. This is because 63% of global emissions come from low to middle income countries. Countries where most people are not living extravagantly but are trying to escape poverty at worst, and achieve a comfortable lifestyle at best. The unfortunate reality is that, currently, escaping poverty and becoming middle class creates unavoidable emissions. So asking developing countries to cut emissions just looks like an attempt to keep them down. It is very hard to argue that a region should protect their primeval forests and spend money on solar panels instead of burning wood, when it can’t meet basic needs for significant parts of its population. So, cutting back is not a popular demand, especially if the countries making these demands got rich by causing environmental damage in the past. For billions of people, more emissions are a good thing personally. When we forget about this, we tend to propose unworkable solutions. Take concrete. 8% of CO2 emissions are released by the concrete manufacturing industry.

Ok cool, stop using concrete, right? But right now, concrete is also a cheap and easy way for growing populations in developing countries to build affordable housing. And there are many examples like that. Even rich countries aren’t immune from disagreeing about rapid climate change solutions. Banning coal, gas and oil from the energy mix is slowed down by heated discussions about what should replace them. Citizens can be strictly against nuclear power but also oppose wind or solar infrastructure in their backyards. In principle all of these issues can be overcome – but there are things we don’t currently know how to overcome. The most problematic one is food. Emit or Die We will soon need to feed 10 billion people, and we don’t know how to do that without emitting greenhouse gases. Because of the nature of modern food production that requires fertilizers or manure, it is impossible to have zero-emissions food. Rice alone emits so much methane each year that it practically equals the emissions of all the air traffic in the world. What’s worse is that the foods we like the most emit the most. 57% of food emissions come from animal-based foods, although they make up only 18% of the world’s calories, and 37% of its protein. And as people across the world grow richer, they want more meat. Traditional diets in most cultures were primarily plant based with a little meat on top. But with the rise of industrial style meat production and factory farming, meat has become a staple food; a regular indulgence in developed countries and a symbol of status and wealth in developing countries. Today about 40 percent of the world’s habitable land is used for meat production in some form or another, the size of North and South America combined. This is land on which we could otherwise allow native ecosystems to regrow, like forests in the Amazon, and suck carbon out of the atmosphere, but instead most of it is used to feed animals. The available solutions are uniquely able to make everybody on the political spectrum, rich or poor, unhappy. Meat is highly emotional and there are a lot of whataboutism arguments floating around, like comparing it to the worst sources of emissions. In the end it is pretty simple: eating less meat alone won’t stop climate change, but we also can’t stop climate change without eating less meat. The same holds true for other things that are less crucial to our survival but frankly not realistic to make go away. Like air travel, oversea shipping, mining and the production of devices that play youtube videos. So what does this mean? Do we need to give up our way of life and can the poor never achieve it? Can’t some technology save us so we can continue to drive our big cars and eat meat every day? Solutions vs Expenses In principle, this technology already exists: Direct Air Capture of CO2 draws carbon dioxide from the air so that it can be stored underground or transformed into products. So why aren’t we implementing it in every industry, everywhere? Because with the technology we have right now, this would cost some ten trillion dollars per year, or half the United States’ GDP. This money has to come from somewhere and currently no-one is offering it. Just dumping these costs on massive polluters like steel mills and coal power stations would double the cost of their products – and so these industries that operate on very tight profit margins would go bankrupt. Getting the government to pay for it seems logical but a lot of state resources are actually tied up doing the opposite, like subsidizing oil and gas. Which seems counter intuitive but follows clear incentives. By artificially keeping fuel prices low, shipping and everyday goods are kept artificially cheap too. Which has a major social impact on billions of people around the world. That creates political lobbies and incentives that perpetuate this cycle that makes it so hard to cut off fossil fuel production.

Meanwhile, very costly solutions for a far-off problem like carbon capture seem like they can wait, as technically nobody benefits from it right now. Some argue that a move away from capitalism is the only solution to this mess, others insist that markets should be even freer, without any interventions like subsidies and some suggest that we need what’s referred to as “degrowth” and to cut back as a species overall. But the truth is at least as of now, no political system is doing an impressive job at becoming truly sustainable and none have really done so in the past. We also don’t have the time to figure this out and do a lot of experiments. We must implement solutions now. Not just to halt the release of all possible greenhouse gases, but also to start reducing the amount of CO2 in the air. It’s too late to just mend our ways, we have to actively correct our past mistakes. With every year we waste, more extreme changes will be unavoidable. Ok. Let’s take a deep breath. Rapid climate change and the world we live in are complicated. So here is where YOU, dear viewer, come in again. Could YOU please fix the climate? A narrative of our time is that we are all responsible for rapid climate change. That everyone needs to play their part. Why don’t you buy a new electric car? Why don’t you replace your gas stove with an electric one? How about you double glaze your windows, stop eating meat and switch off your lights? Shifting responsibility from the largest carbon emitters to the average person, you, is much easier to do than solving problems. There’s an extra bonus if solving rapid climate change sells a new product. If you don’t have the money or time for these things, you should feel bad. It’s an effective message because it is true. The quickest way to cut CO2 emissions would be if all rich populations on Earth drastically changed their lifestyles and if the people on the rise would not seek to achieve it. Favouring the climate over comfort and wealth. If you are able to watch this video, this includes you. But we’ve just witnessed a global experiment in staying at home, not using transport and consuming less during the coronavirus pandemic. And all it did was reduce CO2 emissions by 7% for 2020. Asking average people to solve rapid climate change breaks down when we look at the scale of the problem. Personal contributions toward reducing greenhouse gas emissions are nice, but they are dwarfed by the systemic reality of global emissions. The concept of your personal carbon footprint was popularized by the oil producer BP in a 2005 ad campaign. Arguably one of the most effective and sinister pieces of propaganda that still seriously distracts all of us from the reality of the situation. If you eliminated 100% of your emissions for the rest of your life, you would save one second’s worth of emissions from the global energy sector. Even the most motivated person can’t even make a tiny dent. When we put together the dangers of rapid climate change, the scale of emissions and the lack of consensus over how to solve it, the challenge seems insurmountable. It can cause decision fatigue and moral licensing, where you no longer feel bad about behaving in a counter productive way. We have struggled a long time with this, which is why this video took us so long to make. So. What can you actually do? There are many different takes and they are passionately discussed. We don’t know who is right, so we can only offer you the Kurzgesagt perspective and opinion. Opinion Part: What can you ACTUALLY do? We need a different way to think and talk about rapid climate change. An all-encompassing systemic approach, nothing less than changing the fundamentals of our modern industrial societies. As discussed in frustrating length, the personal responsibility angle is overplayed. For systemic changes in technology, politics and the economy of this magnitude, we need to influence the people at the levers.

Politicians need to know and feel strongly that the people care, that their own success depends on tackling rapid climate change. When governments and local politicians are reluctant to change laws that affect their biggest tax contributors or campaign donors, we need to vote them out and vote in people who respect science. We need to hold them accountable for implementing the most effective climate change strategies. Not waste our time with things like banning plastic straws but by moving the big levers: Food, transportation and energy while not forgetting the smaller ones like cement or construction. When industries fight against changing their ways, for fear of losses or in an honest attempt to protect their own, we need politicians to change the laws and incentivise the deployment of existing technologies and massively invest in innovation for the fields where we don’t have great solutions yet. There is no reason that the profit interests of industries could not match the need to reduce carbon emissions as much as possible. And if they still don’t cooperate harsh punishments and regulation need to force or bankrupt them. It's still unrealistic that change of that scope can be forced onto a worldwide economy quickly enough, because many low carbon technologies still need a lot of time and research – which means they are expensive. But more companies will make more efficient carbon capture systems, tasty meat alternatives, better batteries, cement alternatives and so on, if there is a clear and growing demand. And if you are affluent enough, you can do your part by investing in these things right now while they're still expensive. These are the mechanisms that will drive the prices down later on. So this is basically what you can do. Vote at the ballot, vote with your wallet. There are too many opposing interests and complicated grey zones. In the end if we truly get the systemic change we need, everybody will be unhappy about some aspect of it. Only if we all accept that some solutions will have negative impacts for us, can we have an honest conversation and make progress. Everybody will be a little unhappy. And that is ok. This is the best you can do. You can deal with the reality of the situation and promote your priorities through your behaviour and your actions. And while you do so, you can eat less meat, fly less or get an electric car. Not because you should feel guilty if you don’t or because you naively believe that you alone can stop rapid climate change – but to do your tiny, tiny part for the systemic change we need. This video was supported by Gates Notes, the personal blog of Bill Gates, where he writes about global health, climate change, and more. Check out gatesnotes.com to learn more about ways the world can work together to reach zero greenhouse gas emissions, or use the link below. And in the spirit of transparency, if you want to learn more about how we handle Sponsorships like this one, we also have a medium article describing how we do it.

We have to live as people born in a country of losers and it is important and beneficial for us individually and for this country to be aware of this.

What's up?

The driving ideology that has shaped the history of religious development is to be as logically invincible as it can be. Whatever it is.

Poetry is one of the most effective ways to compress information, I guess.

A disturbed lifestyle creates a disturbance in the autonomic nervous system, which inhibits all production behaviors including cooking rice.

"I've never seen someone with strabismus before! Do they still have bad vision?" - I feel that I have slight exotropia, but I have never had any particular problem with my vision.

"Instant miso soup is the best!" - I don't really like instant miso soup, and I don't consume it on a daily basis, but that's because I'm brazenly dependent on this minimal community. You probably live off the money you earn.

The fact that you can only unlock security with facial recognition is purely a handicap. There are times when I'm glad I have in-screen fingerprint recognition, but never when I'm glad I don't. It should definitely be on.

And yet, it's still not available in 13. It doesn't make sense anymore. I don't care if you're obsessed with face recognition, but I really want fingerprint recognition too.

The reason why sexual activity is one of the most widespread forms of entertainment is because motivation is automatically generated in the brain.

Please don't cry in front of my prostate.

Dishonesty comes from desperation.

Well, I think it was a reasonable reimbursement.

This is more realistic, I guess.

Mr. Slow Internet: I have the impression that your problem is probably of a solvable kind.

>>85
Sorry, I shouldn't have used a colon.
Correction: Mr. Slow Internet - I have the impression that your problem is probably of a solvable kind.
Wait, I feel like this is wrong too, but I don't know what to do.

I'll hyphenate for the time being.

[Verification] I tried to live by sipping muddy water! - If I had been able to recognise and advise you sooner, I might have been able to stop your heinous act.

Apparently, as far as I can observe, fappable content requires a certain immorality.

To be honest I'm starting to get fed up with bicycles and increasingly see them as an inefficient means of transport, especially in city centres. A significant contribution to this is the constant squeaking noise from around the front wheel of my bike while driving.

From birth we have been educated to turn away from the tremendous sin that everything we see is an accumulation of the embodiment of the human ego.

One person was very interested in my story "I recently realized that if I use pictures of characters as the object of my study, I will never be able to write a theory of character pictures", so I mentioned fappability and zero-fappability and said "In short, 'Moe' is a concept in the field of literature and art, and that it is impossible to make a rational analysis in the field of visual art research without introducing "fappability", he listened to me with great interest, which may have increased my motivation to write a book about “fappability”.

Source: https://twitter.com/pinetree1981/status/1201044260541218818

Every action is just a way to postpone the other actions.

If I die one of these days and something asks me what I think of my life, I'll probably say “it was itchy as hell.”

The largest things in the universe are black holes. In contrast to things like planets or stars they have no physical size limit, and can literally grow endlessly. Although in reality specific things need to happen to create different kinds of black holes, from really tiny ones to the largest single things in the universe. So how do black holes grow and how large is the largest of them all? This video will not discuss how black holes work or how they form since we’ve looked at that in detail in our black hole and neutron star series, you can check them out afterwards. For now we are interested in finding the largest thing in the universe. Let us start really, really small. Primordial Black holes The smallest kind of black holes may or may not exist. If they do, they are probably the oldest objects in the universe, older even than atoms. They would have formed just after the big bang, when the universe was so dense with violent energy, that any tiny pocket that was just slightly more dense than its neighbors could produce a black hole. The smallest Primordial Black Hole that could still be around would be a trillion kilograms or so, the mass of a big mountain. And yet they would be no bigger than a proton. A Primordial Black hole with the mass of earth would barely be larger than a coin. This makes them very hard to find, so we haven’t actually observed any yet – if they exist they may even be the mysterious dark matter that holds galaxies together. Let’s move on to the kinds of black holes that we know for sure ARE out there. Stellar Black Holes To make a black hole we need to compress enough matter so that it collapses into itself. After that, the more mass we throw at it, the larger it becomes. In today's universe, only the most violent cosmic events can create the necessary conditions, such as the merger of neutron stars or when the core of a very massive star collapses in a supernova. To have a unit to work with here, we’ll use the mass of our sun, about 2 million trillion trillion kilograms. The smallest known black hole has 2.7 times the mass of the sun which works out as a sphere around 16 km in diameter, large enough to cover Paris. Another lightweight black hole is the companion to the V723 Mon red giant star. This star is 24 times larger than our sun, 30 million kilometer in diameter. And yet, it is thrown around by a tiny black hole just 17.2 km wide. This tiny thing bullying the star is so much smaller that we can barely even show them in comparison. One of the largest known stellar black holes is M33 X-7. It currently spends its time eating a 70 solar mass blue giant, bit by bit. As all that stolen matter circles towards the black hole, like water going down a drain, friction heats it up to temperatures high enough to shine 500,000 times brighter than our Sun! And yet, X-7 is ‘only’ 15.65 solar masses and 92 km wide, just big enough to cast a shadow on Corsica. To grow much larger, black holes have to either devour a lot of stars or better, merge with one another. The instruments that make it possible to detect these mergers are very new so we are currently discovering a lot of exciting things. Like two massive black holes that we detected in a galaxy 17 billion lightyears away. As they spun around each other violently, they released more energy in the form of gravitational waves than the combined light from all the stars in the milky way in 4400 years. The new black hole they formed is about the size of Germany and is 142 solar masses. And here we hit a curious gap in scale. There are lots of black holes up to 150 solar masses. And then there is nothing for a long time. Until we suddenly hit black holes, that are millions of times more massive. Which is a bit confusing, because we had this idea that black holes are consistently growing and growing. But for the most massive black holes this process is not fast enough to explain their existence today. The universe is simply not old enough for these supermassive black holes to have formed by eating stars and merging with each other.

Something else must have happened. To explain how we got the largest black holes in the universe, we might need the largest stars that ever existed: Quasi Stars. To get a sense of scale, we can compare them to the largest stars that exist today. Our Sun is like a grain of sand next to them. We don’t know if Quasi Stars actually existed but they are an interesting concept when it comes to supercharging black hole development. The idea is that the matter in the early universe was so dense that quasi stars could grow to thousands of times the mass of our sun. The cores of these stars might have been crushed by their own weight so much to actually collapse into black holes while the star was still forming. In contrast to stars today that would destroy themselves in the process, inside quasi stars, a deadly balance could emerge. Gravity pressed the supermassive star together, feeding the black hole and heating the material falling in to such a degree that the radiation pressure kept the star stable. And so these quickly growing black holes might have been able to consume the quasi star for millions of years and grow far bigger than any modern stellar black hole. Black holes several thousand times the mass of the Sun and wider than the entire earth. These black holes might have become the seeds for supermassive black holes. Supermassive black holes So now, we arrive at the kings of our universe, the largest single bodies in existence. The centers of most galaxies contain a super massive black hole, and they are monstrous. In the Milky Way we have Sagittarius A Star, a super massive black hole with about 4 million solar masses that is calm and collected and just does its thing. We know it sits there because we can see a number of stars being thrown around by a seemingly empty spot. And despite its incredible mass, it’s radius is still only 17 times our sun. Smaller than most giant stars, but millions of times more massive. Because Supermassive black holes are so massive and located at the center of galaxies, many people imagine them as being a bit like the Sun in the solar system. An anchor that glues everything else together and forces it into an orbit. But this is a misconception. While the sun makes up 99.86% of all the mass in the solar system, SuperMassive Black Holes usually only have 0.001% of the mass of their galaxy. The billions of stars in galaxies are not gravitationally bound to them, instead it is the gravitational effect of dark matter which holds them together. Many supermassive black holes aren’t gentle giants, especially when they are feeding on the clouds of mass in their galaxy. The one at the center of the BL Lacertae galaxy is devouring so much material that it produces jets of plasma accelerated to nearly the speed of light. If Earth were orbiting this huge body, it would seem 115 times larger than our Sun in the sky… and we’d be burnt to a crisp in seconds by its glowing hot accretion disk. At this point black holes become so large that stars seem ridiculously tiny compared to them. The galaxy Cygnus A has a super massive black hole with 2.5 billion solar masses and 14.7 billion km wide, which would mean that if it took the place of our Sun, it would swallow all the planets and stretch halfway to the edge of our Solar System. It is devouring so much mass and material that it churns its disk into a kind of magnetic funnel, spewing gas out making tremendous radio lobes, towering over the galaxy, half a million light years in diameter. That is 2.5 Milkyways wide. Another pretty large Super Massive Black hole sits in the galaxy Messier 87. It has 6.5 billion solar masses and was the first black hole we got an actual photo of. Or rather of the glowing gas around the edge of a menacing shadow. This sphere of darkness is so large that it covers our entire Solar System. And yet, there is a scale even above these kinds of objects... Ultramassive black holes Now we reach the most massive black holes, perhaps the largest single bodies that will ever exist.

These black holes have eaten so much that they've grown to tens of billions of solar masses, their gravity the engine for a ‘quasar’- an accretion disk shining brighter than thousands of galaxies full of stars. So massive that they deserve a title of their own - Ultramassive Black Holes. The Ultra Massive Black Hole at the center of galaxy OJ 287 is 18 billion solar masses. It is so big that it has a Super Massive black hole, nearly forty times larger than sagittarius A star, orbiting it! This thing defies imagination and is really hard to compare to anything. It can comfortably fit three Solar Systems side by side inside of it. Let us end this insane competition and get to the king of kings. TON 618, a black hole that we can observe consuming galaxies worth of matter is shining with the brightness of a hundred trillion stars, visible from 18 billion light years away. It has an incredible 66 billion solar masses. A black hole so large that it would take light a week to reach the singularity after crossing the event horizon. About 11 Solar Systems could sit inside of it side by side. It may very well be the largest single body in the universe. But in reality, it is probably even larger. Since TON 618 is so far away, we only see what it looked like 10 billion years ago. In any case, black holes are scary and mysterious and gigantic. They will be here after everything else dies, and growing larger and larger. So now let us do the trip again. From the smallest possible black hole, all the way up to the largest. Let’s try something new today, we can call it: “Behind the Lies” a short behind the scenes bit about the necessary inaccuracies in this video because it's really not actually possible to rank black holes like trading cards. How so? Well, while we have catalogued millions of stars, we really only have good data on a couple of dozen black holes. That’s because black hole gazing wasn’t really a thing until 50 years ago – and technically still isn’t, because we can’t see black holes. We can only derive their properties from studying their gravitational effects on the matter around them, like the orbit of stars that come close to them. This effect depends on the mass of the black hole, which we can approximate at the most basic level with Kepler’s Laws. But this comes with huge uncertainties and error bars. Then we have to convert mass to size next, which brings new uncertainties. For example, we calculated the radius from the mass using the Schwarzschild equation which for the sake of simplicity assumes black holes are perfectly round and don’t spin: a kind of black hole that doesn’t really exist. The reality is that physics on these scales is a bit fuzzy. So some of the black holes we talked about here may be way smaller or way bigger. We just don’t know for sure. We shimmied around this problem by comparing different sources with different kinds of values and using different mass calculations to arrive at a standardized list that allowed us to be as accurate as humanly possible. You can look at all of this in our source doc. As a result this script was written with the tears of experts we drove crazy with our obsession for the best values they could live with. In this process, tons of stuff got cut and didn’t make it into the final video – but luckily we found a way to not waste all of it: We created a lot of black hole merch, spanning the whole range from somewhat bonkers to more serious. This way we get to explore a topic from different angles – and you get to continue having fun with black holes after this video ends.

I'm Merek Reichman. [dramatic music] And I'm now gonna talk you through all the Aston Martin cars that appear in the James Bond movies. I'm an industrial designer and I trained as an automotive designer. Wanted to be a designer all my life. And have been designing Aston Martin's for 15 years. [raucous music] DB5, "Goldfinger," 1964. It was an evolution of the DB4, very successful car for us, used in racing. But it was very mechanical in a way. And the consumer wanted more luxury, bigger seats, electric windows. Therefore the wheelbase had to grow and the car needed more power. Beauty comes through proportion. The body to window height, the overall length to the length of the cabin, the width of the car to the grill, all fit within the golden proportion. - You'll be using this Aston Martin DB5 with modifications. Now pay attention, please. - It's so difficult to pick a favorite gadget from the car, but a few I gotta mention, the wheel spinners and the bulletproof shield. But really the tracking system, which was a form of satellite navigation system, way back in '64, advanced technology. We were inspired by the anniversary of "Goldfinger" to make some continuation cars. So we made 25 continuation DB5s, that have all of the gadgets that you would see in the movie. The only thing that was missing was the actual ejector seat system and an opening roof. One year later, it was 1965, and "Thunderball" featuring the DB5 again. "Goldfinger" made DB5 a huge success. By the time we got to "Thunderball" DB5 was going out of production because we oversold. We could only make 11 cars a week, and there was a demand for 50. There were no differences between the DB5 in "Goldfinger" and "Thunderball." It was a year later, and actually we'd only just started production of the DB5. So it was so successful in the prior movie that it was used again, and there were no differences. Same color, same color interior. "On Her Majesty's Secret Service," 1969, with the Aston Martin DBS. Bill Towns, or William Towns, was a designer, like myself, for Aston Martin. And was responsible for the Aston Martin DBS and some of the Lagondas. One of the leaders really, and a hero of mine, because he brought some of the Americana type design to the UK. The layout with this brilliant engine in the front, and where you sit relative to the engine, makes the car and gives it that presence. But it had real power. [engine rumbling] I like all of the movies. I particularly like this one because of the change of pace, the change of scenery, the lighting, the actor, the gadgets on either car. The DBS didn't have gadgets because the car itself was the gadget. It was an incredibly modern, powerful car. A new generation of Aston Martins. But it did have an ArmaLite AR-7 in the glove box. [man yelling] [dynamic music] "Diamonds are Forever," 1971, and briefly, the Aston Martin DBS. The DBS appears in "Diamonds are Forever" with rocket missiles being loaded into the bonnet. It doesn't appear driving in the movie at all. "The Living Daylights," in 1987, with the V8 Volante. After an absence of eight films, "The Living Daylights" featured the Aston Martin V8 Volante, in 1987. There is a little bit of confusion about the actual car that was in "The Living Daylights" because it starts life as a V8 Volante, which is a retracting soft top, so an open-top car. But it gets winterized, i.e. it becomes a coupe. - Mind your head. - Then it becomes the coupe version, so a V8. The V8 can be driven in snowy and icy conditions. The addition of winter tires, spike tires, would allow Bond to drift and drive the car beautifully on snow and ice. The retractable outriggers is probably the only request we haven't had for any of our cars. We've had lots of requests for many other things, obviously ballistic protection, stowage of weapons, et cetera. But no one's ever asked for outriggers. I do think absence makes the heart grow fonder.

I still have a backward view of Uba Yoshiyuki's work, and I think that is mainly due to his creative attitude. Also, the characters' faces might be a little too big.

To tell you the truth, I'm pretty pissed off because I have two mouth sores on the back of my lower lip that haven't healed in a couple of days.