Our Internet went out for a few hours today, so naturally my smart switches, lights, cameras, motion sensors, door sensors, and power monitoring… continued to work as of nothing was wrong.

Home Assistant is great, and using local-only devices is awesome. If my smart home stops working it’s my own fault, not some 3rd party.

OTOH, if you can afford basic necessities, hobbies are just a rounding error on top of them.

Your numbers seem reasonable — more intuitive for me to work in terms of pressure. Atmosphere is (roughly) 1e3 Torr, good UHV can be around 1e-10, so that’s 13 orders of magnitude, which is (roughly) the same difference that you calculated.

I am becoming increasingly more appreciative of the fact that I have root access to “my” company provided work device.

Aluminum foil is very common in physics labs. And a main use for it is “baking”! To get ultra high vacuum (UHV)* you generally need to “bake out” your chamber while you pump down. Foil is used same as with baking food — keep the heat in and evenly distributed on the chamber.

Sadly, it’s usually not food grade aluminum foil, as that can contain oils, and oils and vacuum are generally a big no-no.

*Just how good is UHV? Roughly: I live in San Francisco, which is ~7 miles by ~7 miles (~11km). Imagine you raise that by another 7 miles to make a cube. Now, evacuate every last molecule of gas out of it. Now take a family sedan’s trunk, fill it with 1 atmosphere of gas, and release that into the 7 mile cube. That’s roughly UHV pressure.

Is he coping or just surviving?

From TFA:

“I have failed you completely and catastrophically,” Gemini CLI output stated. “My review of the commands confirms my gross incompetence.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackbird_(wind-powered_vehicle)

Can go directly upwind (no tacking required). Can also be applied to boats.

99 what you did there…

(I know, IC isn’t valid Roman numeral representation of 99, but it was the only joke I could think of.)

Because it’s not an X at the end, it’s a Greek chi. Same with the arXiv preprint distribution — it’s “archive,” not are-ex-iv.

From https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharon_Osbourne

The couple used to physically fight regularly and, according to Osbourne, they would “beat the shit out of each other.” She has described herself as “a beaten woman” when she was at the hands of husband Ozzy where he once knocked out her front teeth. She once retaliated by throwing a full bottle of scotch at his head.

ethic cleansing

Tbh that doesn’t sound too bad? Like maybe take a nice shower but with cruelty free/plant-based soap that wasn’t animal tested (and obviously there’s no drought concern in this scenario).

go2rtc, a camera streaming tool that’s useful for security cameras, at least has some humor in their choice — port 1984, of course.

All I see is *******

Anyway, here’s Wondersmall.

I’m drunk, and it’s all Mexico’s fault!

Beautiful!

Sorry you’re getting down voted — lots of replies from folks unclear on what the diffraction limit means, atomic resonances, etc.: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2161094-a-single-atom-is-visible-to-the-naked-eye-in-this-stunning-photo/

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2161094-a-single-atom-is-visible-to-the-naked-eye-in-this-stunning-photo/

Parent didn’t say resolve, they said see — you can’t resolve stars but you can most certainly see them.

Light up a single atom enough and you can see it (unclear if this works with a dark adjusted naked eye or if a long exposure is required): https://www.newscientist.com/article/2161094-a-single-atom-is-visible-to-the-naked-eye-in-this-stunning-photo/