Skua

I imagine this is kind of like steam engines right

Yeah, exactly. That’s also how coal, gas, and nuclear power plants work too. Turns out that running steam through a turbine is just a really good way to make power.

i expect this is just hydrogen?

You actually can make other fuels with solar power too, and since they’re listing it separately from water splitting I think they might be doing that. It is possible to make hydrocarbon fuels out of CO2 and water (or mlre accurately, carbon monoxide and hydrogen) with the right combination of catalysts and energy. It’s an application of the Fischer–Tropsch process, which has traditionally just been used for converting coal or biomass into more useful forms. So if that’s what they’re doing, they’re taking carbon out of the air and hydrogen out of water and then combining those two into petrol and such, using solar energy for each step of the process

I don’t think this is what they are directly aiming for with this specific one, but this general idea of a large field of reflectors and a central receiver can be built to store heat for a while. That lets you use solar power overnight

This sort of solar power generally doesn’t compete successfully with regular solar panels in cost, and obviously it can’t just be set up on a bunch of random roofs like panels can. Still, it’s potentially a very useful technology if someone does work out how to make it a bit cheaper or more efficient, and it still generates clean power in the process too

I’m afraid I am completely unqualified to answer this beyond that Irene’s reign was a very messy one, ending with a rebellion against her. Her own son (the legal heir to the throne for who she was originally just regent) also rebelled against her earlier, and she had his eyes put out. It seems to me like Irene specifically was just absolutely ruthless enough to get past whatever societal rules may have been levelled against her

That said, there absolutely were empresses-regnant of the Byzantine empire, and there’s no reason to consider that a separate entity. Irene Sarantapechaena and about four or five others absolutely were ruling Roman empresses

Empress-consort rather than empress-regnant, I’m afraid. She was Julia Domna, wife of emperor Septimus Severus and accompanying him on his attempt to bring the north of Britain under his control

To be fair that makes a lot more sense than it happening the other way around

The oldest recorded words from any woman living in (what is today) Scotland are someone telling the empress of Rome, to her face, that they fuck better than her

Oh, good call, I didn’t think of that! Assuming I did my sums right, the Roche limit probably destroys the fourth innermost moon, but it still leaves the big four (which are the fifth through to ninth in ascending order of size of orbit). They’re quite substantially farther out than the prior four

There are also like eighty smaller moons even farther out, but they don’t meet the roundness criterion to be a planet because they are too small

The sun and Jupiter are pretty close in terms of density, and Jupiter would need to get at least an order of magnitude heavier to start fusion. I think it’s just a coincidence that the outward pressure of the sun’s fusion makes these numbers roughly line up.

Thirteen Jupiters seems to be a commonly-given lower limit for fusion, so let’s go with that. To increase mass by thirteen times while maintaining density (and assuming the whole thing is a perfect sphere, which it obviously isn’t), Jupiter needs to increase its radius by a factor of about 2.35. This increases its equatorial radius to about 168,000 km, which does swallow up the three innermost moons, but leaves the four big ones alone

The IAU’s list of requirements to be a planet is:

• Orbit a star
• Be big enough that it becomes round
• Clear the neighbourhood (meaning you’re way bigger than anything else in your orbit)

The last one is the one that disqualifies Pluto. For comparison, Pluto is roughly 8% of the mass of the other stuff in its orbit (not including Neptune, given that their orbits cross), whereas Neptune is thousands of times more than the rest of its orbit. The closest non-planet to meeting this criterion is Ceres, which is roughly one third of the rest of its orbit (in the asteroid belt).

Based on this list, I think Jupiter’s four biggest moons (Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto) would make the cut.

honestly I don’t like anything or i give up on everything. I don’t wanna try new things anymore.

That sounds an awful lot like depression. That’s nothing to do with being in a relationship or not; it’s not healthy to not be able to enjoy anything or take interest in anything. Forget about the relationship stuff. You can be and deserve to be happy without one. You need to address the other stuff first.

I don’t understand how legislators can look at the fact that their country already works longer hours than anyone else in Europe and conclude that the problem is that they aren’t working enough hours

I came extremely close to owning a Toyota MR2 mk2, a car I’ve liked since childhood, only to discover that I am too tall to sit up straight in one. There is just straight up not enough headroom.

Also that. But I’d say that wewbull’s point stands that there are more and less authoritarian flavours of that too

My description is what brown sauce is

Based on his past I assume he intends on simply not actually paying half of the people involved

It’s basically ketchup, except it has dates and tamarind in addition to tomato

While I agree that instruments should generally aim for sound and ergonomics over appearance, those things don’t always have to clash with each other. To take Selmer clarinets as an example, since you said you liked them, it’s normal for the keys and posts to have a highly-polished silver appearance, but you can get the signature model with matte black keys and posts if you want. That’s a totally visual choice that won’t change anything else, but it makes for a really distinctive-looking clarinet. Same goes for all the decorative inlays in the wood.

Besides that, though, I don’t necessarily mean the visual appearance of the instrument. Check out the synth that the other reply to me linked. It barely has any concessions to aesthetics at all, but someone has clearly experimented with ways to get a highly-personalisable playing experience. My dad and I are both guitarists, but we set our instruments up for totally different sounds because people experimented with stuff and we got to follow in their footsteps to pick what we subjectively liked best - the clear treble sound of thin roundwound strings for him, the rich warmth of thick flatwounds for me. Those are also things that came about because someone, at some point, had the curiosity and ability to just try it out and see what it sounded like, and I love that we get to enjoy the fruits of so many of these experiments now.

I think musical instruments could definitely be one of them. Yes there are many that are mass-produced and pretty utilitarian, but honestly that’s fine, that’s a way for people to access the artform that they wouldn’t have been able to otherwise. That’s a great thing. And the stuff that’s not mass-produced? Damn there is some real love and skill put into a lot of it

I’m more or less defaulting to kbin.earth now. It’s a shame to see the original fall apart, but the idea and foundation are being carried on. I hope Ernest is doing alright