I feel rather silly, all the news about the heat deaths in Paris must’ve crossed wires in my brain. But it seems the two cities have similar temperature extremes, so my point is the same
> but if you get a really cold spell and it drops to -35C
Temperatures near 40C have been recorded in Paris dozens of times since the early 2000s. I don't think the winter temperature in Paris has ever dropped much below -20C, let alone -35C. So this isn't a very fair analogy.
When I see dark matter in the news I'm always reminded of the story of Vulcan.
In the 1800s, detailed observations of the planet Mercury showed that its orbit was slightly different than Newtonian mechanics predicted-- a difference of about 43 arcseconds per century. The study was rigorous enough to rule out any observation errors.
Le Verrier, the astronomer who made these observations, wondered how to explain the difference. A decade earlier, he had noticed a similar irregularity in the orbit of Uranus, which led to the discovery of Neptune, whose gravity caused these perturbations. So Le Verrier reasoned that something similar must be going on for Mercury, and he posited the existence of Vulcan, a tiny planet close to the Sun.
Many attempts were made for decades to observe Vulcan. It was even included on some maps of the Solar System at the time (https://www.loc.gov/resource/g3180.ct003790). But it was never conclusively observed.
When Einstein published his theory of relativity in 1915, the mystery of Mercury's orbit was finally explained-- Newtonian mechanics were simply incomplete, and the irregularity of Mercury's orbit was due to relativistic effects.
Could it be that something similar is happening today? Observations of gravity on galactic scales doesn't quite align with what relativity would predict, so we use dark matter to fill the gaps. We've tried for decades to detect dark matter, with no dice. Is our theory of gravity simply incomplete?
MOND may not be the solution, but I'm still skeptical about dark matter.
Oleophobic coating is standard on phones and tablets, which is part of why they don’t pick up fingerprints as easily.
Some brands offer coating you can DIY yourself (eg ProofTech OLEOPEL) but these seem mostly designed for phone screens. I don’t know whether they’d be as effective on laptop screens
Similarly, it's possible to take the derivative of a song. You can use a Fourier transform to express the song's waveform as a series of sin and cosine functions, then take the derivative.
Imagine, for the sake of simplicity, you could express the song's waveform with the function 13 * sin(41x).
The derivative of this function is 533 * cos(41x).
Cosine, of course, is just a phase shifted sine, and the constant coefficient inside the function stays the same. So you're not changing anything about the shape of the wave, just stretching it vertically.
This has the effect of mimicking a "high pass filter," amplifying the volume of the highs.
Google and lots of other firms use a "leap smear" to hide the leap second from end users, essentially "smearing" the second across the hours before and after each leap.
I guess it shouldn’t be surprising for this post to be LLM-written when the author’s point is that they use LLMs to write a bunch of social media posts, but it still makes me a little sad.