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? This poll is closed. |
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44 | 35.20% |
| No |
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81 | 64.80% |
| Total: | 125 votes | ||
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This is what a leap second looks like on most clocks that support them, in the UTC timezone. We’re not getting one this December because the discrepancy created by Earth’s slow rotation, relative to the reference period circa 1900, hasn’t built up to the point where adding a second would help synchronise things. In fact, Earth’s rotation has lately been faster than it was in twentieth century, and we’re not entirely sure why. The general trend is that it slows because the Moon’s stealing our momentum. The speedup we are now experiencing must be due to changing mass distribution in one way or another, but degrees to which Earth’s interior layers, hydrosphere, and atmosphere are involved is an open question. There are many variables, we don’t have a good understanding of all of them, and we don’t have good historical measurements.  This is a graph of the difference in the length of the day versus the ideal of eighty‐six thousand four hundred SI seconds, as measured by atomic clocks. Units are seconds.  Ditto, but only the last five years For a comparison of the magnitudes involved, the complete melting of the Greenland ice sheet would bring that water closer to the Earth’s axis by an amount that would result in a speedup of two milliseconds. tl;dr: Earth is spinning faster and we don’t know why. But the changes are tiny and it’s probably not foreshadowing catastrophe. For all we know, the same weird things were going on in the time of Julius Cæsar; he just didn’t have cæsium atomic clocks to compare against.
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Dec 1, 2020 08:43
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I expected it was just some locals (broadly speaking) having fun, not that it was a worldwide campaign.
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Dec 1, 2020 11:53
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As Nero Danced posted:This year's felt like a decade. God I hope 2021 is boring, whoever said "may you live in interesting times" is an rear end in a top hat. Volcano, meteor, and we’re due for another tsunami on the scale of 2004 or 2011 We could always have a second pandemic. These things don’t actually work like the ones in Mister Burns.
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Dec 1, 2020 15:11
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pantslesswithwolves posted:Trump’s considering pardoning his three fuckup kids and Jared Kushner, totally cool and not at all suspicious at all He’ll pardon Barron for completeness. Not Tiffany.
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Dec 2, 2020 05:09
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Milo and POTUS posted:Now when you say playing switch... with a long, flexible piece of wood.
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Dec 2, 2020 05:14
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EBB posted:mods are asleep post non-current events The first artificial sustained nuclear chain reaction took place on December 2 1942, under the bleachers at Stagg Field at the University of Chicago.
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Dec 3, 2020 10:49
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Platystemon posted:I just look for the yellow in replies for my dopamine rush
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Dec 3, 2020 15:11
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Speaking of open carry and bicycles, All Bicyclists Are Cops?
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Dec 4, 2020 06:52
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There are plenty of assholes in my town. You’re welcome to come and take them.
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Dec 4, 2020 14:35
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Hyrax Attack! posted:Went to dentist yesterday. He mentioned people are absolutely destroying their teeth grinding at night that’s he’s had to schedule four emergency surgeries for people who previously had no problems. So if you have access to a night guard for your teeth that might be a good idea. I found myself clenching my teeth last month. I stopped in a few days, but I’d never done it before.
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Dec 4, 2020 16:45
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Mr. Nice! posted:Biff Tanner's world where he rules is explicitly based on what the writers of back to the future thought the country would look like under Donald Trump. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_iL8TtPOt0 e: Because this is an embed, I should note that it dates from June of 2015.
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Dec 5, 2020 17:33
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MazelTovCocktail posted:https://twitter.com/ozkaterji/status/1334791784564723712?s=21 Can Congress pre‐emptively override a veto? If the bill passed today, Trump has till the seventeenth to send it back to Congress (ten days, Sundays don’t count). If Congress overrode the veto that same day, the “thirty days later” provision would take effect on the sixteenth of January. It’s close to not being Trump’s problem. Just gotta kick that can down the road for four days.
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Dec 5, 2020 17:44
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His name even sounds like “Goonslayer”.
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Dec 6, 2020 06:07
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“Pig” is, I think, a mere insult, not actually dehumanizing. If someone calls me a “bitch”, is that dehumanizing? I’m not a female dog.
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Dec 6, 2020 18:26
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Comrade Blyatlov posted:And if I called someone a Jewish swine? Context matters. Calling Boeing engineers “clowns who are in turn supervised by monkeys” is very different than calling black people “monkeys”. Bret Stevens had a better case with the bedbug thing, and he was still wrong.
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Dec 6, 2020 18:42
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MazelTovCocktail posted:https://twitter.com/business/status/1335645707013906433?s=21 It’s not that weird if it’s an Iridium phone.
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Dec 6, 2020 19:11
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CBJSprague24 posted:https://twitter.com/axios/status/1335713280900345857 It’s probably for the best that he’s out of town at the time of the inauguration.
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Dec 7, 2020 17:35
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Mr. Nice! posted:Reminder that Air Force One is not an individual plane. Any plane the president is flying on at the moment is AF1. Any Air Force plane the president is flying on. The helicopter that ferries him to/from the south lawn is courtesy of the Marine Corps and uses the call sign “Marine One”. A civilian craft would be “Executive One”.
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Dec 7, 2020 18:26
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Mr. Nice! posted:Thank you for the correction. I thought all helicopters he flew on were Marine One. So when Bush was on the Navy S-3B right before his "Mission Accomplished" speech, would that have been Navy One? The Navy’s museum says “yes”.
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Dec 7, 2020 18:53
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Milo and POTUS posted:Yup. Wikipedia’s pages for the call sign says the president flew (nonexclusively) in Army helicopters between 1957 and 1976. It is not explicitly stated that the call sign has never been used since. “Coast Guard One” has, also according to Wikipedia, never been used, but Biden has flown on Coast Guard Two. G. W. B.’s flight home to Texas on the day he left office got the call sign “S.A.M. 28000” for “Special Air Mission”. “28000” is the tail number of one of the VC‐25s, i.e. the modified 747s usually used to transport the president. Platystemon fucked around with this message at 19:03 on Dec 7, 2020 |
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Dec 7, 2020 18:59
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Trump’s proposed scheme is his personal plane’s but flipped vertically. If Biden didn’t change it, Trump would complain. He’ll complain either way.
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Dec 7, 2020 19:32
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Woofer posted:Didn’t trump want to do something way more gawky than that 
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Dec 7, 2020 19:37
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Mr. Nice! posted:They didn't arrest her. They raided her house and took all of her equipment so they can figure out her sources and see if there's any crime they can charge her with. If she had full-disk encryption, current case law says that she could not be compelled to provide the passphrase, correct?
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Dec 8, 2020 04:49
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Watch out, angels. “The first time I saw a jet, I shot it down.”
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Dec 8, 2020 04:59
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:When I was a little kid I drew the X-1 and sent it to Chuck Yeager via my USAAF vet grandfather who was his neighbor. He was thrilled and sent me an autographed picture of him next to the X-1. That's my story. I saw an autographed model of Glamorous Glennis in an antique store on 21 August 2017, the day of the Great American Eclipse. I didn’t buy it, but I did take the opportunity to look up his signature online. He signed a lot of things and had a quite variable signature. I’m sure he’s a nightmare for authenticators, and I like to think that he revelled in that.
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Dec 8, 2020 16:25
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I honestly am surprised that I haven’t heard about more Democratic operatives coming down with the virus. They may not be gunning for the Darwin Award like Republicans, but they’re not exactly all taking it seriously. It just goes to show that there’s still a world of difference between low standards and no standards.
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Dec 8, 2020 18:20
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Proud Christian Mom posted:https://twitter.com/BenPhilpottKUT/status/1336314944279760899?s=20 Call Johnson Space Center because my sides are in orbit. What’s the most likely way this is shot down? Lack of standing?
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Dec 8, 2020 18:44
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American Catholics have a bimodal distribution. There are extremely bad patrician Catholics and there are cool ⁊ good Catholics who are typically from recent immigrant families.
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Dec 9, 2020 15:39
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BIG HEADLINE posted:His juiced-up SCUD-Bs could've made a real mess of Southern Italy, ~80% of Greece, and could've *barely* hit Israel if he'd launched them practically on the border with Egypt. How juiced were they? I’m seeing news articles saying three hundred to eight hundred kilometres (lol), but it would take nine hundred to more like a thousand to hit Israel or Macedonia.
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Dec 10, 2020 06:44
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It amuses me that American tourists fly to Scandinavia to see the northern lights when the geomagnetic anomaly brings the show much farther south on their home continent.
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Dec 10, 2020 10:05
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The world only needs so many larger transformers built in a typical year. If for whatever reason we needed many more, we’d have to retool facilities on a scale not seen since the Second World War, and after a bad magnetic storm, we’d have to do it with our systems already broken. Once they’re built, just moving and installing them isn’t easy. 
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Dec 10, 2020 11:11
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Pornhub’s whole thing was hosting pirated content, but like YouTube, they are less reliant on that these days. They own a sizeable amount of porn production now, arguably because piracy via their sites drove producers to insolvency. They’re also taking cuts from “amateurs” who sell on the site. Even if a wizard waved a wand and deleted any pirated material on the site with impossible precision, I don’t think they would go bankrupt at this point.
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Dec 11, 2020 09:41
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https://twitter.com/ddayen/status/1337297863932485634
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Dec 11, 2020 17:15
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Osama bin Laden was snubbed in 2001.
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Dec 11, 2020 17:52
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quote:In 1941, the fictional elephant Dumbo from the Disney movie of the same name was selected to be "Mammal of the Year", and a cover was created showing Dumbo in a formal portrait style. However, the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7 pre-empted the cover. The U.S. president Franklin Delano Roosevelt was named Man of the Year for a record third time, although Dumbo's Mammal of the Year profile still appeared on the inside pages of the magazine.
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Dec 11, 2020 18:18
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BIG HEADLINE posted:once SCOTUS Justices are seated the only thing they care about is their ~legacy~, and no one wants to die on Orange Hill. But I was told that if the left pressed Kavanaugh on his attempted rape it would drive him to the right. 
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Dec 12, 2020 04:38
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MazelTovCocktail posted:If anything this whole horseshit affair should restore some faith in the judiciary for people. That’s unfortunate.
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Dec 12, 2020 06:29
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsgnPsNrG8I
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Dec 12, 2020 06:53
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shame on an IGA posted:I mean, Sherman was president of LSU when the war started Here’s what he wrote to a professor there on Christmas Eve 1860. quote:You people of the South don't know what you are doing. This country will be drenched in blood, and God only knows how it will end. It is all folly, madness, a crime against civilization! You people speak so lightly of war; you don't know what you're talking about. War is a terrible thing! You mistake, too, the people of the North. They are a peaceable people but an earnest people, and they will fight, too. They are not going to let this country be destroyed without a mighty effort to save it … Besides, where are your men and appliances of war to contend against them? The North can make a steam engine, locomotive, or railway car; hardly a yard of cloth or pair of shoes can you make. You are rushing into war with one of the most powerful, ingeniously mechanical, and determined people on Earth — right at your doors. You are bound to fail. Only in your spirit and determination are you prepared for war. In all else you are totally unprepared, with a bad cause to start with. At first you will make headway, but as your limited resources begin to fail, shut out from the markets of Europe as you will be, your cause will begin to wane. If your people will but stop and think, they must see in the end that you will surely fail.
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Dec 12, 2020 17:13
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quote:“General Grant is a great general. I know him well. He stood by me when I was crazy*, and I stood by him when he was drunk; and now, sir we stand by each other always.”
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Dec 12, 2020 18:23
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