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Cake day: June 27th, 2023

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  • If you ever use SQL Server Management Studio, you can experience the opposite. Whenever there’s an update, you’ll get a notification in the application, but to actually install it, you need to go to Microsoft’s website to download the latest version and install it yourself. Chrome, on the other hand, updates itself upon restart without requiring anything special from the user.

    As a software developer, I really like that part. It means that websites I work on only need to consider the features supported in the latest version of major browsers rather than the last several (as was the case with Internet Explorer).

    So, it’s nice and something that I remember really appreciating when Chrome was getting popular. But it’s still a weird thing to brag about.





  • I like Robert Delaunay, and also his wife, Sonia Delaunay. Their work involves a lot of bright, vibrant colors. It also was rather abstract or impressionistic, which I enjoyed. I think I like Piet Mondrian for similar reasons. Jan Sluyters would be another.

    I also like JMW Turner a lot. I’m a sucker for lighting and dynamic skies in paintings, and his work features that very prominently. Frederic Edwin Church is another painter along these lines that I really enjoy.

    A more contemporary passive that I like is Nina Tokhtaman Valetova. Her work also involves a lot of bold colors.



  • The idea here are very interesting to read, but I think I’m leaning most favorably towards the last group’s idea to bury it with as little marking as possible. The plans modeled on Stonehenge seem odd to me. Stonehenge is famously a monument whose origin and purpose was a mystery, and that mystery enticed people from all over the world to travel to the site and excavate it. It seems more like a good reference for a method that would not work. How many people would have toyed around at Stonehenge if the monument weren’t there?

    At the same time, we have events with contaminated materials being used in construction within a matter of months or years, so it’s not like these are abstract problems. E.g., look at the 1983 Ciudad Juárez Cobalt 60 incident. We have the technology to identify contaminated materials, but we’d only use them if we have reason to believe we should. It’s probably fair to assume the same of future societies, so it makes sense to want to make sure they have reason to believe they should test the area.



  • The vacuum is the hard part, not the maglev. You would need to enclose the entire track inside if a vacuum, and that world be ridiculously expensive and practically impossible with current technology. It’s already very expensive to build a tunnel for a train, which is why they are avoided if possible. But this would need to be all tunnel that is air tight, so even more expensive than regular train tunnels.

    To put it into perspective, the current largest manmade vacuum chamber is at a NASA research facility in Ohio. It’s a cylinder with a diameter of 100 feet and a height of 122 feet. If this were laid on its side, about 1.5 New York subway cars could fit inside. The largest vacuum ever made can barely fit the vehicle inside, let alone allow it to travel between two different places where the extra speeds would be warranted.