Hidden underground around the world lie 110 quadrillion kilometers of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal networks—webs of ultra-thin threads that, if connected in a single line, would stretch almost a billion times the distance between the Earth and the sun, according to new research published in Science on Thursday.

These fungal communities form intimate relationships with the roots of plants, which they provide with nutrients like phosphorus and nitrogen in exchange for carbon, 1 billion tons of which the networks sequester underground annually, previous research has found. If the fungal network wasn’t storing it, that carbon would be warming the atmosphere.

In a Thursday blog post, Amazon claims its data centers withdrew “about 2.5 billion gallons” globally in 2025. That number sounds incredibly large at first glance, but it looks downright puny compared to the 117 trillion gallons of water withdrawn in the US alone in 2015. It’s also useful to compare Amazon’s number to stats from more water-intensive areas, from the 3.3 trillion gallons used annually on US lawns and landscaping to the 1.3 trillion gallons a year used in California almond orchards to the 531 billion gallons a year used just for US golf courses.

Amazon is just one company, of course, and a relative latecomer to reporting its data center water usage numbers. Google data centers withdrew about more than 6.1 billion gallons of water in 2024, on top of about 2.75 billion gallons from Microsoft and about 1.4 billion gallons from Meta in the same year.

The Great Lakes Ships of Frank E. Kirby: America’s Greatest Naval Architect,” by Richard Gebhart, Michigan State University Press, May 2026, 231 pages, $59.95 (Hardcover), $29.10 (Paperback), $29.95 (E-book)

From the 1870s through the 1890s most of the world’s ships not built in British shipyards were built on the North American Great Lakes, a vast interconnected yet isolated inland sea system. Of these Lakes vessels built during that period and for the first two decades of the 20th century, many, including the best designs came from the mind of naval architect Frank E. Kirby.

“The Great Lakes Ships of Frank E. Kirby: America’s Greatest Naval Architect,” by Richard Gebhart, is a biography of the man and a history of his ships. It charts his career, and follows the course of the shipyards he ran and the ships he built.

If you have Cisco 9300 model Ethernet switches and haven’t checked their OS versions lately, you should probably do that. Early releases of Cisco’s IOS version 17.x have an issue with flooding ports when a topology change is detected.

Topology changes like bringing a port up or down could cause flooding. When a port being used for WheatNet IP is flooded, the device connected to that port will most likely miss one or more network packets (potentially hundreds), resulting in loss of control signals and/or audio issues (including but not limited to distortion or dropouts).

Every port in your system should have the no ip igmp snooping tcn flood command applied. But even if this command shows up in your switch configuration, it is ignored in some versions of the Cisco operating system.

1. Place the mini-marshmallows in the dish one layer thick.
2. If your microwave has a rotating platform, remove it. We don’t want the dish to rotate.
3. Put the dish in the microwave for 10 seconds.
4. When you remove the dish, you’ll notice only certain parts are melted. (Time may depend on the microwave – if all or none of your marshmallows melted, adjust the time.)
5. Measure the distance between melted marshmallows using your ruler. Measure in centimeters. This is half the wavelength of a microwave.
6. Look for a sticker on your microwave that tells you its frequency in Hertz (Hz). Most microwaves are around 2450 MHz. Note: MHz = 10^6 Hz
7. Use the following equation to find the speed of light: Speed of light = 2 x (distance between melted spots) x (frequency of microwave)
8. The actual speed of light is 3.00 x 10^10 cm/s. How close were you?
    

View system information and VM configuration details

The VBoxManage list subcommands enable you to obtain information about the Oracle VirtualBox software, the VMs and associated services that you create.

NTP SERVER — SMOLNUT
smolnut.kml.lol • pool.ntp.org member • GPS-disciplined via NTP270

The goal is to make Syncthing easier to deploy, manage, and operate for families, teams, companies, and larger multi-device setups.

What syncding provides:

• Managed Syncthing instances for individuals, families, teams, or companies
• Syncthing kept updated and securely maintained
• Storage backed by ZFS
• Automated immutable ZFS snapshots
• Recovery of files, folders, or full rollback to earlier states
• Additional off-region snapshot replication
• Protection against ransomware through immutable snapshots
• Glass-break emergency access via SFTP or Rsync
• Centralized monitoring and administration

Well, you see, Norm, it’s like this. A herd of buffalo can only move as fast as the slowest buffalo. And when the herd is hunted, it’s the slowest and weakest ones at the back that are killed first. This natural selection is good for the herd as a whole, because the general speed and health of the whole group keeps improving by the regular killing of the weakest members.In much the same way, the human brain can only operate as fast as the slowest brain cells. Now, as we know, excessive intake of alcohol kills brain cells. But naturally, it attacks the slowest and weakest brain cells first. In this way, regular consumption of beer eliminates the weaker brain cells, making the brain a faster and more efficient machine.

And that, Norm, is why you always feel smarter after a few beers.

syncspirit is a continuous file synchronization program, which synchronizes files between devices. It is built using the C++ rotor actor framework. It implements the BEP-protocol for files synchronization, or, simplistically speaking, it is a syncthing-compatible synchronization program at protocol level, which uses the syncthing infrastructure (for global discovery and relaying).

Despite being functional, syncspirit is less feature-rich than syncthing and is still in heavy development

Encounter the Faith and Wisdom of C.S. Lewis
C.S. Lewis’s writings bring the great questions of the Christian faith to life. Through his imaginative and invigorating style, Lewis answers these questions in ways that are compelling to those outside Christianity and energizing to those within the Christian faith.

In this free, seven-lecture course, Professor Michael Ward—a leading scholar of C.S. Lewis—will explore Lewis’s:

Russian satellites have been identified as the cause of mysterious, seconds-long bursts of GPS interference across Europe—a rare example of human-made GPS interference coming from space. But uncertainty still hangs over whether such interference is intentional and if it could be more powerfully weaponized as GPS jamming with continental reach in the future. //

Such interference patterns happened mostly on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays during business hours in Europe, Humphreys told the YouTube channel Veritasium. Because such “continental-scale” interference was simultaneously affecting GPS receivers across Europe and beyond, Humphreys and his colleagues calculated that the source had to be at least 1,200 kilometers above the Earth. //

But Russia has been demonstrating a growing number of systems that can potentially neutralize space-based assets belonging to the United States and Europe. In April 2026, the leader of US Space Command warned that Russia had operationalized anti-satellite weapons capable of targeting US government satellites. In May 2026, open source orbital tracking data revealed that at least four Russian military satellites performed orbital maneuvers to match the orbit of a Finnish-American radar surveillance satellite.

Mission Commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, and mission specialists Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen (the latter with the Canadian Space Agency) spent 10 days in early April flying by the Moon. Their journey took them farther away from Earth than any humans have gone (52,756 miles [406,771 km]) and then, on the way back on board their Orion spacecraft Integrity, they sped up to about 24,664 miles per hour (39,693 k/ph) reentering the atmosphere.

Only three other people in history have traveled faster. NASA’s Apollo 10 astronauts Thomas Stafford, John Young, and Eugene Cernan set the record for the highest speed attained by a crewed vehicle relative to the Earth’s surface: 24,791 mph (39,897 kph) on May 26, 1969.

Cernan died in 2017, Young in 2018, and Stafford in 2024.

Treating a minor shift in a trace gas as a 'code red' planetary emergency—while ignoring the massive planetary buffer systems—is a failure of perspective.

The oceans are a vast thermal and chemical flywheel. Because they are so vast and deep, their capacity to absorb, store, and redistribute heat and gases operates on centuries-long timescales. This dwarfs the short-term models of centralised bureaucracies. For example, the oceans contain 86% of the world's global carbon reservoir; yet the atmosphere holds a mere 1% to 2%.

Science itself shows that human-produced CO₂ adds only around 3.4% to the full annual global carbon cycle. But natural climate variation has been enlisted by globalist power brokers to drive a campaign blaming CO₂ for a future catastrophe. The roles of water vapor, clouds and oceans are being bypassed. They don't suit the agenda. Yet oceans cover 72% of the Earth's surface to an average depth of 2.3 miles and contain 91% of all the world's retained heat energy. The atmosphere retains hardly any.

They are so vast that all variations in concentrations of soluble CO₂ are readily absorbed into the marine sink. As oceans warm they retain less CO₂; when they cool, they retain more. This is known as Henry's Law. Natural processes heavily influence how much CO₂ resides in the atmosphere at any given time.

The human contribution, while measurable, is a fractional perturbation within a massive, dynamic system dominated by water vapor, cloud albedo and the sheer thermal inertia of the oceans. This also overlooks the complex, self-regulating feedback of cloud albedo.

As evaporation increases, cloud cover expands, acting as a natural planetary shield that reflects incoming solar radiation back into space—a chaotic, balancing mechanism that a simplified, CO₂-centric model cannot fully capture.

Water vapor is the Earth's most abundant greenhouse gas, making up to 4% of the atmosphere by volume in the tropics. This is 40,000 ppm compared with CO₂ at roughly 420 ppm. Yet water vapor has been minimised by a simplified political narrative because, unlike well-mixed atmospheric gases, it is not uniformly distributed—its concentrations are constantly shifting over the vast expanses of the seas.

We seem to know more about the topography of the Moon than the geography and dynamics of the deep oceans. The tropics and rainforests are accepted zones of peak water vapor. These are also primary zones for storm activities—like monsoons and seasonal rainfall—essential to atmospheric turbulence and heat redistribution.

Basic physics reveals that water vapor and clouds account for a vast majority of Earth's natural greenhouse effect—roughly 70% to 85%—while CO₂ is a minor shadow at around 9% to 12%. Its role is important to the atmospheric mix, but this doesn't mean it runs the world's climate. Water absorbs and traps infrared radiation on a massive scale, playing the dominant role in weather, cloud formation and precipitation.

The 'global warming or bust' agenda minimises the importance of cloud albedo and regional complexity. By flattening water vapor into a simple mathematical slave to CO₂, global models ignore the chaotic, self-regulating dynamics of cloud formation (which reflects sunlight and cools the earth) and localised tropical dynamics.

A decentralised, water-dominated climate driven by regional ocean currents and chaotic cloud formations cannot be managed, taxed or centralised. This offers no financial leverage for global governance.

A well-mixed, uniform trace gas like CO₂, however, provides the perfect metric for a centralised system and a whopping (and unnecessary) $275 trillion grid duplication.

Image: The oceanic flywheel; Deep-sea thermohaline circulation currents that regulate global heat distribution over centuries. Source: ttsz / Getty Images

People are always pestering me for concrete examples of the cost of NRC style regulation. I turn them off by telling them it doesn’t work that way. It’s about incentives and motivation. What are the sticks and what are the carrots? Suppose you tell a football player, your overriding priority is not getting hurt. If you get hurt or do anything that might get you hurt, you are out of football for life. Now go out there and win this game.

When you go from a competitive environment where it’s build better/cheaper or die to an environment which is ruled by an autocratic regulator’s goal to prevent a release, everything goes to hell. Paperwork and process trumps substance erecting massive barriers to entry. Cheap becomes “unsafe”.

Everybody’s motivation gets wrong headed, not just the regulators. Incumbents work harder on protecting and deepening their artificial paperwork moat than they do on their product. Workers forced to follow ridiculous, wasteful procedures and sit around waiting for a series of sign offs on an obvious fix rationally decide if the bosses don’t care about doing the job right neither should they. Fixed price contracts become infeasible. The vendors’ goal becomes milk each project for as much money as possible for as long as possible. And the next thing you know, plants take three or four times as long to build as they should and cost five or more times what they should.

My inquisitor walks away shaking his head and saying to himself, where are the facts, he doesn’t have a real argument. //

But an important factor is that getting rid of open racking is at least three times as expensive as it should be because of the paper work required to build a simple steel and concrete can.

In short, NRC style regulation is the reason every nuclear power plant in the US uses dense-packing, which is by far the most likely, non-weapons path to a Chernobyl or larger sized release in the USA. Such a release coupled with the NRC’s immoral, indefensible defense of LNT will cause panic, evacuation, and exile that will shake the country to its roots. Is that a big enough cost for you?

If you don’t pursue safety in a way that is cost effective, you are killing people. -- [David Okrent, Past chairman, Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards]

Suppose early in 1979, you asked yourself what is the most definitive experiment we could do to learn about the radioactive harm associated with a nuclear power plant release. The obvious answer: a big release would be that experiment. But you would immediately reject that idea on both ethical and economic grounds. Since then we’ve inadvertently run that experiment three times. Let’s look at the results. //

Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima //

So we did the definitive experiment. The result: even in a very large power plant release, dose rates to the public are almost never higher than the dose rates our bodies know how to handle. Nature had to equip us with those repair systems to cope with the onslaught of DNA damage from our internal metabolic processes, which damage our DNA at a rate that is at least 25,000 times higher than the damage rate from average background radiation.

Nuclear power plant casualties are extremely expensive economically, which means it’s in the operators’ interest to build robust plants and operate them prudently. But from a public, radiation point of view almost all releases will produce no detectable harm, and the very worst releases are no worse than a bad refinery fire at killing the public.

This puts nuclear in the same category as wind and solar, when it comes to directly killing people per TWh of electricity, and orders of magnitude less directly deadly than coal plants. But it’s the indirect deaths that really count. The easiest way to kill a lot of people is to make them poorer. With a few exceptions, wind and solar will do that. Nuclear will too unless it is as cheap as coal. Nuclear has been cheaper than coal, and can be cheaper again; but only if we regulate nuclear in a way that eliminates barriers to entry and forces the vendors to compete on an even playing field. Right now we are doing exactly the opposite. We are killing people.

The Rockefeller Foundation and its allies decided to argue that radiation produced genetic damage and that damage was unrepairable. Radiation damage just keeps building up. Therefore, the harm was proportional to the total dose, regardless of how rapidly or slowly that dose was incurred. This is like saying taking 365 tablets of aspirin at once is the same as taking 1 tablet per day for 365 days. This no repair hypothesis is called the Linear No Threshold model or LNT.

If LNT is correct, then the Banners could aggregate the tiny increases in dose rate due to test fallout over hemispherical populations and over decades to argue that Bomb testing was invisibly killing millions of people worldwide. The Foundation expertly (and unscrupulously) promoted LNT with all its resources.

82 years later, Pointe du Hoc still teaches a hard American lesson: plans matter only until war wrecks them.

Mike Tyson had it right; all plans go out the window when you're punched in the face.

Courage shows itself when the map is wrong, the guns are missing, the commander is wounded, and the enemy still holds the ground. On D-Day, Rudder's Rangers didn't stop at the cliff; they went looking for the guns, found and destroyed them, and held the road.

“Rangers lead the way” wasn't a slogan in the morning; it was a record of what they had already done. Thank God for such men.

“The Iceman is not a static relic, but a dynamic biological interface,” wrote Sarhan and his colleagues. And that’s the great truth of existence: life’s short, then you die—and the whole time, you’re a dynamic biological interface.

voline Ars Scholae Palatinae
20y
853
fe3a8b63 said:
https://isaiprofitable.com/

Even if we ignore all other problems in regards to environment, pollution, water, electricity, etc. it still doesn't make sense.

It's just burning money to.... burn money to..... uh what? What's the goal. You ain't making money.
I think Signal CEO Meredith Whittaker had a good answer:

I’m going to give a sideways answer to this, which is that the venture capital business model needs to be understood as requiring hype. You can go back to the Netscape IPO, and that was the proof point that made venture capital the financial lifeblood of the tech industry.

Venture capital looks at valuations and growth, not necessarily at profit or revenue. So you don’t actually have to invest in technology that works, or that even makes a profit, you simply have to have a narrative that is compelling enough to float those valuations. So you see this repetitive and exhausting hype cycle as a feature in this industry. A couple of years ago, you would have been asking me about the metaverse, then last year, you would have asked me about Web3 and crypto, and for each of these inflection points there’s an Andreessen Horowitz manifesto.

It’s not simply that one piece of technology is overhyped, it’s that hype is a necessary ingredient of the current business ecosystem of the tech industry. We should examine how often the financial incentive for hype is rewarded without any real social returns, without any meaningful progress in technology, without these tools and services and worlds ever actually manifesting. That’s key to understanding the growing chasm between the narrative of techno-optimists and the reality of our tech-encumbered world.

— Meredith Whittaker, Signal CEO, to Derek Robertson. "5 Questions for Meredith Whittaker". Politico, 2023-12-01.
https://www.politico.com/newsletters/digital-future-daily/2023/12/01/5-questions-for-meredith-whittaker-00129677