Anyway this lead me to learn that in 1494, Portugal and Spain agreed to divide all non-European land on earth equally between the two of them. Which … wow. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Tordesillas

In French they’re called “cochons d’Inde”, i.e Indian pigs, which, they’re not Indian either but at least it’s seems to be true that for a time Europeans though South America was India, (or did we just call everything India? I can’t quite tell)

@futurebird Regardless of where you go with this, would love to hear more about what you and the CS club get up to!

Right now teens go off into the wild to find a place on social media and adults are rightly alarmed. Companies like Facebook, Instagram, X etc. have no interest in "modeling a healthy online environment" or "teaching young people to use social media constructively" -- instead everyone is acting […]

I support:

* this server
* other servers
* the wikipedia
* Karamu House Theatre
* people who sell ant art
* a ton of people who tiny youTube channels
* Pregones Theatre
* community gardens
* xerces society
* new SF authors selling their first book(it's aspirational)
* building food and supplies […]

The options I’ve come up with so far are: 1) somehow detect the link preview crawlers and serve them a special stub page without authentication. 2) serve all unauthenticated requests a stub with a prompt to login. 3) embed some kind of auth token into each link I send to people. The stub page I […]

[ok, now i'm getting slightly salty]

@xgranade this is bonkers

what the fuck is rapydscript and why is there 26k lines of it

So what is an amphibian to do? One solution is to flatten the cornea. This works because a flat interface does nothing optically. With a flat cornea and a more powerful lens, it doesn’t matter if you’re seeing in air or water because the cornea does nothing in either case.

In fish, the cornea has water on both sides so it does nothing. In fish all the focussing is done by the lense inside the eye. Laser eye surgery would not work for fish!

In animals this means the cornea is a lens because it has air on one side and water on the other. The cornea accounts for about 1/3 of the overall focussing power of the human eye. When you get laser eye surgery you change the shape of this lens a bit.

Why have flat corneas? It’s due to a unique problem faced by amphibious animals. You see, you get a lens whenever you have a curved interface between two dissimilar, transparent materials. (Roughly).

Wanna know why seal cubs are so cute? 🦭

Here’s a schematic view of the human eye called the Gullstrand schematic human eye. Fun fact: I have intraocular lense implants so my own eyes actually have two extra surfaces compared to this diagram.

It seems like the equations for the photography/telescope regime are all written in the paraxial (small angle) approximation. If you do away with that they tell you that if you keep making your telescope bigger and bigger while keeping it the same distance from the object, you’ll eventually just […]