Two orbital things we might look for:

1. Activity in geostationary orbits.

2. Orbits where the planet's year is exactly divisible by its day, eliminating leap years.

Are you suggesting #2 is sufficiently unlikely to occur naturally that it becomes a likely technosignature of an alien race whose programmers got so fed up with calendrical calculations that they megaengineered their planet’s rotation as a way of streamlining their datetime libraries?

Programmers with that amount of political power are definitely a sign of an advanced race.

Based on our experience on Earth so far, that seems to be the easier route to correct code.

Fredkin’s Self-Replicating Cellular Automata:

Sum the neighbors, modulo 2, and assign to the cell on the next timestep.

Astonishingly this allows patterns to replicate in multiple directions across the plane. https://cellpylib.org/fredkin.html

Works with any kind of lattice. Even works in 3D.

"According to biographer Robert Wright, the character Stephen Falken in the film WarGames was modeled after Fredkin." [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Fredkin]

Did you know, cats are believed to be the only mammals that don't taste sweetness! To unsubscribe at any time, reply STOP to this message.

I have heard (and perhaps misremembered) that the only taste receptor remaining to whales detects saltiness, which seems a bizarre outcome given that their mouths are constantly filled with brine.

Maybe because it is useful for the whale to know if it suddenly entered freshwater? Idk

Sandy Crush

The only was I can remember which is port and starboard is by thinking about boarding an airplane. The steps/tunnel are always docked on the 'port' side, just as boats always dock on the port side. The cockpit/bow is always on your left when you board.

My shortcut: "port" and "left" have the same number of letters.

And further, "port" wine is red, and the red beacon light is on the port side of an aeroplane (with the starboard side having green, and white on the tail)

the shorter word:

    port
    left
    red

the longer word;

    starboard
    right
    green

But if you are working with horses or other draft animals, you work them from the "near" (left) side, and not the "off" (right) side. Next up in directions trivia: shotgun, deasil, and widdershins.

This is the same method I use. I always wondered why they didn't use the cardinal directions (north, east, south, west) or why they didn't use the hours of a clock face to indicate direction. With the clock face, you get even more precision where exactly something happened. Man overboard, 4 o'clock!

In my experience with man overboard drills clock faces are used as you describe. Port/starboard is only for low precision things.

That’d be “3 points abaft the starboard beam”

r and s are next to each other, l is closer to p than to anything else.

I always remember the phrase ‘there’s no port left in the bottle’. Similarly, the port-side navigation lights are red, the same colour as port.

It's not true in general that boats always dock on the port side.

I’ve always remembered it by “port and left both have 4 letters”. It has always worked for me.

That'll trip you up if you ever board Tally Ho, her front door is on the starboard[0].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpulXX1cros

Always? Ferries are boats, demonstrably not true there as they dock both sides.

And "fore" and "aft" are useful to disambiguate the ends of boats that flip 90 degrees in pitch, because the front becomes the top and the back becomes the bottom.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULvLeK9O7fY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shPATcV9Dzw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQxQfQU_hsk

An excellent way to remove unwanted crew members!

Not hidden in the knitting in the sense of the specific stitches (which is also very cool: https://www.popsci.com/story/diy/secret-code-messages-knitti...) but it seems she needed the knitting needle to insert the one-time codes (on a piece of silk) into a shoelace. Amazing story.

That was my first thought too. Different stitches such as knits and purls could serve very well as dots and dashes. Maybe that could've been too easily spotted.

She transmitted her messages via radio, which allowed her to skip the messy business of smuggling knitted intelligence out of occupied France.

That being said, I'm 100% stealing the knitting-as-writing concept for a TTRPG campaign. It's just too cool of an idea to go to waste.

Thank you! I remember learning about this in an art history class decades ago, but I'd completely forgotten and I never would've remembered the name.

One route to understanding how CPUs work is to explore the computers that have been made in cellular automata. Golly (https://golly.sourceforge.net/) has several, including one by John von Neumann, one by Edgar Codd and another by John Devore. The advantage of course is that the physics is trivial and you can see everything that happens and step backwards and forwards.

Example:

https://timhutton.github.io/2010/03/10/30984.html

https://github.com/GollyGang/ruletablerepository/wiki/CoddsD...

I'm very skeptical of hydrogen as a general solution for reducing carbon emissions. It feels like greenwashing.

"As of 2020, the majority of hydrogen (∼95%) is produced from fossil fuels" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_production

Producing "green hydrogen" is much more expensive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_hydrogen

If this is true then Haskell's type system is Noether's Theorem.

Are you familiar with this? https://bentnib.org/conservation-laws.html