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JamesM

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JamesM

372

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The last in-person UPF and literally none of these people are with the site any more. Man.

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JamesM

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@danryckert

Since it's a recurring question in this episode, here's my attempt at a simple summary of why shipping by boat is generally preferred:

1) Boats float. Keeping them afloat doesn't cost any fuel, and moving through water is easy because there isn't much friction. Think of pushing a rubber duck on water versus pushing one on land - which will travel further? Boats are slow to get going, but the cheapest mode of transport once they're in motion (even cheaper than road travel). Planes are fast, but you would need dozens if not hundreds of trips to transport what a large boat can in a single trip, and an awful lot of fuel is spent just on getting planes off the ground and keeping them in the sky, which is expensive.

2) There isn't actually that much benefit to companies in having things arrive there faster. Manufacturers plan ahead - they don't suddenly decide "we should make this now" - so they can book supplies to arrive when they need them. For most goods it really doesn't matter how long it spent in transit, as long as you have a steady supply. When a consumer orders a PS5, they want fast courier delivery because it's just one PS5 and it's no good to them until it's in their hands, but a company will be getting regular deliveries of the supplies they need.

Say for example a manufacturer uses a ton of iron every day. As long as they have sufficient storage capacity, it really doesn't matter if they get a delivery of 7 tons every week, or 30 tons every month, or 365 tons every year. Likewise, if they're getting one delivery a week, it doesn't matter if it was dispatched from the supplier on an express flight the previous evening, or on a boat a month ago. They might even have several boats on the way to them simultaneously - a new one could be dispatched while the previous one is still in transit.

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JamesM

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@giese333 said:

The video on refrigeration should have gone over changing from a liquid to a gas more in-depth. That change uses a lot of energy. The energy needed is heat.

This is one of the few things I very specifically remember learning at school, because it was such a puzzle piece falling into place moment. It initially seems counterintuitive – specifically the chart showing how temperature plateaus during phase change even as more energy is added or released (depending on whether it's heating or cooling) – but it explains how so much stuff works.

In short, the key is this: melting and vaporising require energy (they're endothermic), which will be absorbed from the surroundings, while condensing and freezing are exothermic, which means they release energy into the surroundings. So if you can manipulate a fluid to vaporise in one place and condense in another, heat will be absorbed from the former and released to the latter. That's heat transfer, which is how most conventional cooling works - generally the only way we have of making one place colder is by making another place hotter (which can have environmental consequences!) - we move heat from one place to another. There are other methods of cooling such as firing lasers at molecules to slow down their vibration (I think), but that's really not practical outside of a lab and at an extremely small scale.

The YouTube channel Technology Connections has some really great videos about air conditioning and heat transfer, as well as a bunch of other fascinating stuff.

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JamesM

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@vinny Some cursory googling suggests DV wasn't introduced until 1995, with MiniDV coming around in 1998.

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JamesM

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@peterab said:

As for the confusion over "freezing," seems like Abby was getting temperatures in Celsius, and Vinny in Fahrenheit, which is odd. I'm Canadian, so I notice these things, but it's understandable an American might not.

Looks like the developer is based in the UK, so I'm guessing the game defaults to Celsius, but Vinny had a look through the menus beforehand and switched to Fahrenheit.

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JamesM

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Edited By JamesM

If PS4 having bad wifi could really account for the appalling network performance they experienced, surely every single matchmade multiplayer game on the console would be a complete shitshow? It may not be great, but in my experience it's been perfectly serviceable; certainly not the unplayably laggy mess we saw here.

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JamesM

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One small detail of the Teletext/Ceefax experience - which I think might be interesting for @brad - was typing in a page number (or pressing one of the four colour buttons, which were shortcut buttons whose destination depended on the page you were viewing, kind of like hyperlinks), then watching the page indicator in the corner tick forwards until it reached what you were after. I believe the reason it worked this way was that the whole thing was essentially blasted out to everyone a page at a time (about 1000 pages per channel, though I think colour buttons could take you to letter-variant page indexes that couldn't be reached directly by index, so perhaps a bit more), so when you wanted to view a new page you had to wait for it to come around again. I think that was also the reason that you could frequently page forward with no delay, but if you paged backwards it would have to cycle through again - presumably TV sets would cache the next few pages, since related material tended to be in sequence. I may be misremembering, but I think even newer sets may have just cached the whole lot, so pages would load instantaneously.

Someone already mentioned that page 888 was always subtitles. It was kind of interesting to watch that for live TV such as the news, because it would fill in a word at a time. As a kid it puzzled me that it wasn't a letter at a time, and that the typos seemed more phonological than typographical - much later I realised that both of those things were because the subtitler would be using a chorded keyboard similar to what courtroom stenographers use. I guess there was a colour index for transparency, which was also used by a "now and next" TV listings summary overlay in a little box at the bottom of the screen. I forget what page that was on - I think either in the 500s or 700s? Also, many later sets had a button that would turn set black to be transparent, too, so you could watch a programme behind all the text.

Also of note is that BBC Red Button - the successor to Ceefax - was scheduled to be discontinued this year, but it looks like that's been delayed due to complaints.

Finally, it's great to see the shipping forecast is getting some appreciation. To get the true experience, though, you should be alone in the middle of the night, and immediately preceding the forecast you should listen to Sailing By. That's how end of service goes for Radio 4 - they play Sailing By, read the shipping forecast, then hand over to the BBC World Service for the night. I used to have the radio on in my room when I was at my computer, and there was something so nice about the soothing tones and the feeling that the whole world had gone to sleep and only I was awake (which was obviously completely untrue, but that was what it felt like).

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JamesM

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@splodge: Yeah, I can see that. That move never really felt good for me in the first game, so I generally avoided using it. I think it's part of why I felt like I hit a wall in my skill progress.

I did actually make it to the last boss, but from what I remember that was from some lucky boss room placement. I never beat him.

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JamesM

372

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