tal

https://www.amazon.com/White-Corrugated-Paper-Sheet-Pack/dp/B08D2GT19P

A 10 pack of "20 x 30 x 0.16 inches;" cardboard weighs "6.4 Pounds".

10x30x10 is 6,000 square inches, or ~3.87 square meters. 6.4 lbs is 2.9 kg. So figure ~0.75 kg per square meter of corrugated cardboard.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun

Its diameter is about 1,391,400 km (864,600 mi), 109 times that of Earth.

Area is r² times pi.

$ maxima
(%i1) float((1391400*1000/2)^2*%pi);
(%o1)                        1.520526100532553E18

So that's an area of about 1.52×10¹⁸ m² and a mass of about 1.14×10¹⁸ kg for the cardboard cutout.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth

Mass: 5.972168×10²⁴ kg

Earth has about five million times as much mass, so the Sun cutout would have about a fifth of a millionth Earth's gravitational pull.

EDIT: In the grand spirit of what-if.xkcd.com I think it behooves us to take a humorously dark scientific look at this.

A larger problem would be 1.14×10¹⁸ kg of cardboard suddenly falling onto Earth's surface. Aside from any effects from it, like, directly impacting, you've just dumped 1.14×10¹⁸ kg of wood pulp onto Earth. Aside from any unpleasant effects from chemical additives, or blotting out the Sun's light to plants and causing biological collapse, I imagine that there could be some other unpleasant effects:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Earth

The atmosphere has a mass of about 5.15×10¹⁸ kg,

Earth's atmosphere is mostly nitrogen and oxygen, and by volume about 20% oxygen, so we'll back-of-the-napkin it and say that about 20% of the mass is oxygen. So about 1×10¹⁸ kg of oxygen, fairly close to the mass of the cardboard cutout.

That cardboard is presumably flammable.

So if this vast expanse of cardboard ignites

like, from heat produced by falling through Earth's atmosphere, falling on any open flame in the world, or whatever, but seems like a pretty safe bet that something will touch it off

I'd assume that a considerable portion of Earth's oxygen supply would be converted to water and carbon dioxide in the resulting combustion reaction. Even aside from the global wildfire itself, that seems like it'd be pretty bad news for humans.

Complexity doesn't really add difficulty to 3d printing. My 3D printer doesn't much care whether a head is moving in a straight line or doing a zig-zag. It's gonna just keep extruding that concrete.

Kinda like how a 2D printer doesn't much care whether you're printing a detailed image or a very simple one.

I guess that there's a material cost. But, then, that's also true of existing buildings, and they clearly don't optimize for that to the exclusion of all else, else there'd be no aesthetic used in designing those buildings.

I'm guessing that either (a) the method of concrete extrusion or (b) the process the particular company uses doesn't permit for what I've generally heard in the plastic 3D printing world called "bridging"

being able to create some limited degree of overhang to create arches. If you look at the building, there are no arches

the places with windows are gaps reaching to the roof in the 3D printed wall.

Normally, with a brick building that has load-bearing walls, you can see a different pattern of bricks directly above a window, where the mason has to go out of their way to support the gap.

kagis

I think that that structure is called a lintel.

I'd think that one route to achieve that might be, during the printing process, sticking some kind of metal support above the window during the printing process, even if the extruded concrete alone doesn't permit for it. But if they can't do that as things stand, it'd explain why they might not want to have a lot of windows.

You don't need municipal water to be fluoridated if you just want your kids to have fluoridation. When I was a kid, we didn't have fluoridation available in our municipal water, and so my folks got themselves a water cooler and ordered delivery of five gallon bottles of fluoridated water for it. Mom made a point of making milk with it from powdered milk so that everyone got their fluoridation. You can still get those bottles.

I mean, I'm sure that the great bulk of people aren't going to do that, and that it's going to lead to dental problems down the line, but it's not like an individual can't get ahold of the water if they want it. Costs more per unit of water volume to have it delivered than to pipe it in, but then, you're not drinking all that much volume of water, either; most residential water use goes to things other than drinking.

EDIT: Plus, if you have a water cooler, you also can have chilled water. We didn't have a powered cooler; ours was just an unpowered, gravity-fed dispenser, but all of the modern-day ones I've run into in offices have a chiller.

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=water+dispenser+cooler

If I lived in (tropical) Florida, I'd probably want to have chilled water handy...

Anyone who writes a spider that's going to inspect all the content out there is already going to have to have dealt with this, along with about a bazillion other kinds of oddball or bad data.

I kind of think that if they're going to do 3D printed structures, they'd do better to do buildings that can really play to the technology's strengths: the ability to create fairly-arbitrary, organic shapes.

I mean, what they've got there is basically a rectangle with rounded corners. I guess the rounded corners are aesthetically unusual, but it doesn't seem like it's buying Starbucks a whole lot.

Starbucks clearly has been willing to set up custom locations using all kinds of architecture in the past:

https://www.klook.com/en-PH/blog/beautiful-starbucks-around-the-world/

Same thing with McDonalds:

https://www.businessinsider.com/weirdest-coolest-glamorous-mcdonalds-restaurants-in-the-world-2020-5

You'd think that if you're going to use this exotic new construction technique that permits for a lot of unusual stuff, you could figure out a way to make some kind of eye-catching thing that leverages its strengths. Cost saving on construction is nice, sure, but...

Could be. I don't think that it's that old, though. Maybe the original Hornet rather than the Super Hornet, which was a smaller aircraft.

kagis

Yeah. The game F/A-18 Interceptor is probably what you're thinking of. It came out in 1988, and the Super Hornet was only produced starting in 1995.

Despite the fact that they both share an identifier ("F/A-18"), I think that it'd probably be fair to call the Hornet and the Super Hornet different planes. I don't think that there's been another case where we've produced a warplane and then made a significantly-larger aircraft and used the same identifier.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_F/A-18_Hornet

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_F/A-18E/F_Super_Hornet

The Navy retained the F/A-18 designation to help sell the program to Congress as a low-risk "derivative", though the Super Hornet is largely a new aircraft.

I haven’t built a PC in 10 years, I gave no idea where to start.

The only really notable change I remember being surprised by on my last build over the past decade was the shift to NVMe for desktop machines. I thought of it as laptop storage media, hadn't realized that the desktop had shifted as well.

If you're thinking about any used parts, I'd avoid buying any used Intel desktop CPUs from the 13th or 14th generations, since Intel had some serious problems, especially with the high-end models, that led to some of them suffering irreparable damage over time, and I don't know if there's any way to determine whether a CPU that someone's selling has already been damaged.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raptor_Lake#Instability_and_degradation_issue

I use org-mode, which is kind of a structured text format, like Markdown but far fancier, in emacs. Can have to-do lists, deadlines, tables, display a weekly/monthly agenda with planned items, etc. I sometimes use it as a sort of mini-spreadsheet, as it can act something like a spreadsheet, with recalculating tables. I don't go in for the "whole life organizing in a tool" thing, so there's a lot of functionality that I don't use, but it's generally a superset of what I want, so it works well. There are various other software packages that support it.

I figured out (while using obsidian) that my brain works better when I dont have to worry about where to put things, but just tag them with topics, by relevance, e.g. So tags and the option to filter them would be nice!

Org-mode supports tagging, though I don't use them.

https://orgmode.org/manual/Tags.html

That being said, while other software packages do have varying degrees of support, and vim has some support it's really an emacs thing at its core, so I think that it's most interesting if you use emacs.

Without digging further, if you can do both on Android, there are Android e-ink devices out there. As long as those let you install whatever apps you want, that'd let you use said apps. I assume that both can be viewed on Android. I don't know if the general Android e-Ink experience is going to be quite as optimal or low-power-usage as that of some dedicated e-Ink reader platform like Kobo, may not be animation-free or whatever, but...shrugs

looks

bookshop.org does

Browse and buy on Bookshop.org, and read right in your web browser, or download our iPhone or Android apps for the full reading experience.

Libby does:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.overdrive.mobile.android.libby&hl=en_US

kagis

https://www.bookrunch.com/overview/android_e-readers/

Top 10: Android e-Ink e-readers

F/A-18E

That's not a young jet, but apparently we still have the production line active for a while longer. I suppose if the Navy wants another one, they can still get them.

https://breakingdefense.com/2024/04/boeing-to-shutter-super-hornet-line-in-2027-after-final-navy-order-boeing-vp/

Boeing to shutter Super Hornet line in 2027 after final Navy order: Boeing VP

https://apnews.com/article/trump-penny-treasury-mint-192e3b9ad9891d50e7014997653051ba

Trump says he has directed US Treasury to stop minting new pennies, citing rising cost