It certainly doesn’t always get it right - I’ve seen subjects lit by bright sunlight in a nighttime background, or just from a wildly different direction, but within a subject the lighting usually seems consistent.

I’ve wondered the same thing myself, my assumption is that it just correlates how lighting works across millions of training images, much like how it manages to get gravity right most of the time.

Whatever that was is gone.

No.

I suppose kids aren’t great at centering a dot. But they could draw a six pointed * as easily as an x, it’s one more line.

My wife and I have been playing Pikmin Bloom lately. It’s from the same company as Pokemon Go, but focuses a lot more on the actual walking - there are battles kinda like gyms (mushrooms), but you don’t need to hang around them at all (if you can see it on the map you can join) and you can even be invited to remote ones from friends. The other important points of interest - that are kinda like pokestops - are called “big flowers” and they require walking around them* to activate them, standing there won’t do much.

There are tasks to complete for events or leveling up which directly require certain numbers of steps or indirectly require certain distance traveled at walking speed*

(*it’s a little more involved but that’s the high level overview)

A similar thought I had ages ago is that if God exists, they would either want us to know about them, or not. It doesn’t seem reasonable for there to be this weird in-between where it’s possible to believe they don’t exist if they want to be known… Or for it to be possible to believe they exist if they don’t want to be known!

If I were a god that wanted privacy, I’d simply wipe the concept of god from all mortal minds and prevent it from reappearing.

If god did want worship it would be even easier to get it than just making everyone know about them (certainly an option!) - just manifest physically much more often and perform true miracles, none of this silly water into wine (or walkway) business, I mean like Actually moving mountains or something.

I believe the only case that is consistent with some people believing in a god and some not (or different gods) is there just aren’t any, or at least they don’t care what we think at all, which is similar to not existing and it’s unreasonable that we’d ‘guess right’ about them without their help.

Meanwhile, elsewhere on my front page:

https://github.com/xaitax/TotalRecall

Yeah, this is going to be a disaster.

(Edit: oh, it’s already a subject of the article. That’s good.)

Did the bunny make it?

Now dirt will get into your eyes and close them again.

Super Hexagon

I remember leaded gasoline (and prices under USD$1)

I saw (on TV) the Challenger explosion

On 9/11 I was staying at a friend’s house, and that morning basically every news site was brought to its knees. Like serving static text only summaries. I remember going outside and seeing the newspaper on the porch and thinking “This is going to be the last normal one for a very long time”. It was of course.

Some friends and I took a long road trip and in person we saw this fly the first of the two flights for the X prize (Note: that one actually had some decent reasons to use the name X)

I caught COVID-19. Twice. So far.

Astroturfers

“My God, this is an outrage! I was going to eat that mummy!”

I have a much more lighthearted answer.

This post contains some spoilers, but I consider it outside the statute of limitations for such things.

There’s this old movie where aliens are concerned about humanity developing a weapon that if used would Destroy the universe.

So the aliens use a really stupid plan to try and convince us to stop. And I guess this was after 8 other ideas either failed or were considered even worse.

Anyway at the end (of course) humanity wins and drives off the aliens. Wait, what was the aliens’ original goal? Something about the universe? Oh well, must not be important… The End.

And that was Plan 9 from Outer Space.

It would still be possible to answer the speed question, you just get different answers for different substances (and even phases of the same substance) at the same temperature.

Since something like water does have those additional ways to store energy, my guess is it would be slower at room temp than another liquid with less complex molecules that have about the same mass each. (If there is such a thing)

Also I expect different answers for each of mean, median, and mode speeds.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G13JKn-8NvE

Stuffing a corporation’s ticket system would just result in them removing it entirely and not dealing with the public. (See Google)

In most media time machines are also teleporters - many are explicitly so, with the destination space needing to be chosen at the same time as the destination time, but even when that’s not shown they still make the time traveller suddenly vanish and then just suddenly reappear elsewhen.

One movie I’ve seen with a more “realistic” time machine is Primer. It’s not at all a teleporter or portal. Very slight spoiler:

It sidesteps the whole issue that OP presents because the place where you exit the machine after traveling is just where the machine is when it’s turned on to begin with. You can’t time travel outside the machine, including to before it exists, and your path (in all four dimensions) is contiguous.

I’ve often wondered that about house flies.

I’m going to assume that there is no context here that I’m missing.