100% - have always loved Mr Pollan's pithy summary. I also like Alan Goldhamer's (I am paraphrasing): "There are two types of cardiologist; vegans, and the ones who haven't studied the data yet."
I accept you have to invest in your skills occasionally, but there are so many providers to choose from. Anyway, thanks a lot for the suggestions - I am now looking into these.
What do you mean by "encounter lasted maybe 5 minutes"? Where did the lights go after the 5 minutes? From your description these could potentially be military grade illumination flares, which fall very slowly and can burn for several minutes.
From the photos alone it's also hard to rule out distant airplanes with their bright forward landing lights on. When planes are flying towards you they appear to move very slowly and at a distance they appear as single bright orange/yellow glowing spots. Take this example showing 3 airplanes a few miles away:
They just fell out of my sightline. Whether trees or something else. It's fairly urban where I am, always stuff blocking the view. Not like the great plains, desert etc.
We're seeing two sets of UAPs -- blue on the left and yellow on the right. Were there really two sets when you were looking? Or is one of them a photographic artifact?
If you have good zoom binoculars or a zoom monocular, and a bit of practice, you can zoom in if you can hold it very steady, such at a window sill or against the window itself.
It's increasingly accepted that a large portion of human history is 100M underwater on the continental shelves, estuaries, and other coastal areas where humans would have liked to live.
Much appreciated - living in the UK, I have heard of Doggerland and should have expected there would be plenty of similar areas worldwide - this is interesting stuff.
It's really amazing how much more connected the world was not very long ago. Take a look at 24k years ago here: https://sea-level.vercel.app/ Nearly every continent is one connected landmass. And all the most prime real estate is now under water.
I came here to say something like "This is a joke, right?" Not to be snarky, but because I just assume everyone throws the Inevitable Looming Tool at docs, especially where resource is scarce.. but this point has already come up and I suppose there is some truth in the idea that folks detect AI and are often put off by it - but while I think that's true in creative/blog pieces, is it really true in formal docs? For me that is in the same column as cancer cures, gene comprehension, room temperature fusion wrangling etc. - the 'lets-get-AI-onto-it-pronto' column...
Anyway, my vapid observations aside, I have a couple of related questions:
- I too would be willing, even keen, to contribute to good documentation of FOSS projects that need it and that I am interested in - a huge barrier to me is that a person needs sufficient understanding to really contribute, don't they? To the point that you pretty much need to get into the code quite deeply or else endlessly pester committers to explain how it works? OK, I am generalising, but it seems valid in the main. A while ago, I observed on a relevant list that the libvirt documentation of how to take qemu snapshots was amazingly fragmented, inconsistent and out of date and this led to comments that I should step up and produce some PRs - but my whole point was that this sh1t is hard to understand without very good docs! I would barely know where to start and I would be very hesitant about making definitive statements...
- As for improving doc structure - and this is a serious consideration as soon as you sit down to think about this stuff - I came across and adopted the https://diataxis.fr/ framework a few years ago.. I have to say the uptake among my co-workers has been dismal. Can anyone suggest doc frameworks or approaches that are more motivating, have less friction, whatever?
The problem with AI generated documentation is: you don’t know if it’s accurate/misleading because you don’t know if the docs have been reviewed before being published. With manual generated docs you at least know that someone put the effort to write something. So that effort counts for something. With AI you know that’s it’s perfectly possible to come up with dozens/hundreds of pages with a single prompt that takes zero effort to write. I don’t trust AI generated content by default
Oh hey - the TLA/milspeak guy (gal?). I wouldn't wish more typing upon you but I would love if you could do a bit more 'longhand' so I could have a better grasp of some of the stuff you say - genuinely not being snarky, you seem to have great and informed insights! Thanks!
1IC / 2IC: First Island Chain / Second Island Chain.
ABM: Anti-Ballistic Missile.
CENTCOM: United States Central Command, combatant command for Middle East
MENA: Middle East and North Africa, in this case oil that comes from gulf to asia.
IR: Iran
MIC: Military-Industrial Complex.
PRC: People's Republic of China.
SKR: South Korea (Republic of Korea).
PH: Philippines.
The broad analogy is imagine a boxing match. US is aging heavy weight with finesse, Iran is a teen whose been training for a few years. The super weight's day job is protecting other teens from Iran.
On paper one would expect US to absolutely brain Iran in first round. Before fight, heavy weight had to spend months training / prepping. Which is strange vs fight against teenager, but we can charitably interpret that as diligence. Fight starts, teenage Iran somehow lands a few blows. Which is concerning. Maybe got lucky, a little embarrassing but as long as US heavy weight knocks out teen emphatically in first round. Then teenager survived first round, spent rest period between rounds to punch the other teens US was obligated to protect in the face. Fight continues, what if that knockout doesn't happen until round2... 3... 4... etc. What if heavy weight drags out and wins by TKO in 10th round, what if heavy weight gets tired and forfeits by 5th round. Other teens in protection racket gets nervous, because PRC is not Iran, PRC is like 10 super heavy weights with homefield advantage watching US heavyweight borrow equipment to finish a minor fight with Iran. Some will fixate on the fact that yes, in deed the super weight can probably murder that teen eventually, but the amount of effort required feels insane.
Maybe the strategically dignified / smart thing was for US not to accept (pick) that fight in the first place. Especially if staking credibility/reputation on fighting PRC one day. I'm 50/50 on this, there's medium/long term reason why Iran missile complex is existential for US regional posture (and Israel), taking it out is strategically sound. Taking it out while revealing that's about the limit of what US can take out is... not.
I have been lusting after a decent visual interpretation of Ringworld ever since I read it decades ago... I was thrilled to hear Halo was set on a ringworld and - because I am diehard Nintendo guy - had to go to a mate's house to see it on his XBox.. I spent ages wandering about looking up, but it wasn't quite what I was after and hey, given the era, the graphics were not up to much. I am still amazed it has not been well done in a film or game or VR to this date - at least afaik, i am open to suggestions. (One of the most visually plausible habitats in film imho was in Elysium and I always feel this film has been a little overlooked. The parallels with the modern world's refugee issues are overstated but I thought incredibly compelling.)
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