There's a quote in the Count of Monte Cristo where Edmond explains punctuality something to the effect:
> Being early to an appointment is as rude as being late because you may be disturbing your host before they've taken all the efforts they require before your arrival
( VERY rough quote, the english translation is 100x more eloquent than my half-remembered version )
Edmond Dantès arrives exactly as the clock strikes the minute of his appointment no later and no earlier. I remember reading that when I was ~16 and it always seemed to make sense to me
"Being on time is rude because you may be disturbing your host before they’ve made all the preparations they need before your arrival. Being early would be an outrageous offense."
It always amazes me how Brazilians and Germans can be so different when it comes to punctuality and yet so similar when it comes to their love of bureaucracy (and devotion to soccer, for that matter).
I specifically give people a time somewhere in the middle of a window in which they could arrive that neither disturbs my preparations nor disturbs the schedule I've devised. Everything may not be exactly ready at the beginning of that window but any preparations left to do can be performed while socializing (finish making appetizers, for example).
It also depends on who my guests are. If I know they are consistently late, I give them an earlier time. If they are always early, I give them a later time.
My grandfather was overly punctual. He'd show up 30-60mins early for dinner and my mom hated it. My mom loves hosting people but she can't do that while she's blowdrying her hair or helping her children get ready. So she would tell him a different time than everyone else coming over so he'd show up when everyone and everything was ready.
In the Brazilian case, it is not so much "love of bureaucracy" but rather "bureaucracy as a protection against private capture of public goods and services".
my own experience is that in the city the bell was to alert people that I think aren't paying attention to me and may be about to step into the bike lane. 100% like you said, I'm letting someone know I'm there
Now that I moved to the country with a comprehensive rails-to-trail network, I thank all the cyclists that use the bell to let me know they're coming up behind me. What really irks me is the dudes going 30+mph silently coming up behind me, passing less than 2' from my dog (who is at my side) when there's PLENTY of room to give me space. No, we can't hear them coming all the time. Yes, it's startling, rude, and dangerous for all of us.
In Germany it's illegal to drive bikes that assist beyond 28km/h (about 20mph) in what are true bike paths (which can be built as lanes! And, notably, they can be marked as virtual-lane-shared (pictogram side by side with a vertical divider) or as true shared (pictogram above and below at a horizontal divider), if pedestrians are also allowed to use them.
An ancient gas-e-bike rating is allowed on them outside city limits but iirc those bikes are exceedingly rare since even before e-bikes became truly mainstream.
The statement is a bit too strong. It's not malice, it's just plain old stupidity. In the same way as soviet nuclear reactors don't explode, nuclear submarines don't either. Nobody have thought it might happen, nobody was aware, and no special "on call" service for recovering people from sunk submarine ever existed. _Of course_, it would never happen in just 6 hours.
In the same way, if you don't have anyone on-call to recover the backend along with backups and recovery plans, the chance to have production up and running in 6 hours will be zero.
In case of a way more physical thing of "submarine sunk in polar cold waters", it'd take a good 4 hours just to get _something_ there. Not to mention extracting a person from 300ft involves a good plan on avoiding decompression sickness, and you can't really bring a 50-ton decompression bell on a helicopter and hover for half a day. I can hardly imagine what would such a disaster recovery plan even be.
It would be unfair to form such a generalized opinion from a single incident, even it that incident was quite brutal.
However, 4 years of following RU military attempts to take over Ukraine have reinforced my belief that RU army doesn’t give two shits about its personnel. They got plenty of people, and their value seems to exclusively correlate with the person’s usefulness towards the Tsar, which at an individual level is generally zero.
I too was curious so I searched and found "using a technique called the isotropic fractionator (or "brain soup" method) which involves dissolving brain tissue and creating a homogeneous mixture of nuclei to allow for accurate sampling and estimation."
All highly fictionalized and I have had trouble finding information on the real counterparts (aside from the Cardinal). I started learning about that period of history after listening to the D'Artagnan Romances in audiobook form.
The other interesting thing is Gatien de Courtilz de Sanras wrote semi-fictional accounts of D'Artagnan, published 27 years after D'artagnan's death and 144 years before Dumas' The Three Musketeers ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gatien_de_Courtilz_de_Sandras ).
I wonder how they prevent contamination of the containers used to collect and store samples.
I assume they have to be ultra clean in every sense of the word 'clean' with the cavity pulled to a vacuum. And also the equipment that collects the sample and puts it into the canister has to be clean as well.
> Researchers from Imperial College London have discovered that a space-returned sample from asteroid Ryugu was rapidly colonized by terrestrial microorganisms, even under stringent contamination control measures.
> As described in the discussion of the journal paper, all samples received from JAXA have undergone the initial description, storage, and sealing in dedicated containers under a nitrogen atmosphere. The samples are distributed to researchers without exposure to the Earth's atmosphere. The possibility of microbial contamination is therefore considered extremely low. In addition, organic and microbial contamination assessment of the environment at the curation facilities within JAXA (clean chamber) in which the Ryugu sample grains undergo the initial description are conducted 1 ~ 2 times a year. It has been confirmed and reported that the concentration of organic matter is at or below the same level as that of the OSIRIS-REx asteroid return sample glove box at the NASA Johnson Space Center, and that no microbial colonies have been detected in the microbial contamination assessment conducted with swabbing and culture medium (Yada et al., 2023). Based on these facts, we agree that the microbial contamination described in the paper did not occur during a process within JAXA, but under the laboratory environment of the allocated researchers.
Please don't just post slop anyone else could have gotten from AI. It undermines the entire purpose of this site, and reduces the quality of discourse drastically.
Once I figured out how to use the UI I did 2 scans. first one I had to zoom in before the identification boxes popped up. At first I thought it didnt do anything
Second scan I put over a local aviation museum with a mix of helicopters, unusual planes, cars, buildings, and other equipment. I was surprised to see everything identified correctly, though it missed a single helicopter.
I'd love a little bell or notification when the scan completes, as I hit 'scan', switch to a different tab and then forgot I was waiting
Thanks for trying it out. The detections not all appearing before zooming is because I added a LOD (level of detail) rendering method, so if hundreds of thousands of objects are detected, it won’t crash the system. Only the areas you’re looking at render, and the more you zoom in, the more objects are displayed. It was a pain to set up, but it’s worth it. The notification idea is great, and I’ll add a sound to play when a scan finishes.
I wonder why the commenter discounts the idea that they were used to store things. Especially since the article gives evidence that things were stored in the holes:
"Hole soil analysis also found ancient pollens of maize – a key staple in the Andes – and reeds traditionally used for basket-making. In addition to this, there were traces of squash, amaranth, cotton, chili peppers and other crops that haven't been farmed on the arid land where Monte Sierpe sits. Because many of these plants produce little airborne pollen, it's unlikely they settled in the holes naturally."
Yeah, they're just assuming that if you wanted to store something you'd store it at the bottom of the hill.
While I'm no archeologist/anthropologist, I have seen an ancient grainery near the green river in Utah. It was about an hour long very steep half hike half rock scramble to get up to the ledge where it was at.
So maybe ancient people had reasons to put storage sites in more difficult to access locations.
It’s actually pretty common to store food at higher elevations in the historical and archaeological record, including among the Incas (but mostly in qollqas). More wind at higher elevations means less moisture, which is the biggest factor in preservation. There are plenty of examples from every era, stretching from ancient Minoans to 20th century Berbers.
> Especially since the article gives evidence that things were stored in the holes
They explain it as these holes are at the top of the mountain. Why climb the large mountain to store your grain there just to have haul it back down later? My own guess answers: safer from animals, precipitation, safe from enemies.
Storing in general could mean different things: putting baskets with grain and produce there for a minute and them someone else immediately pick it up in some bartering exchange, it's not really storing then, I guess? Or, even religious offerings can also be explained as "storing" -- they are stored in there until the "gods" (i.e. elements) destroy them (i.e. consume them) and the gods are appeased, that way ensuring good harvests and other benefits.
>Why climb the large mountain to store your grain there just to have haul it back down later?
Yes and after going on a trip to Machu Picchu a few years ago, the locals don't seem to feel gravity quite the same way most of us do these days. There was a gal on our 4 day hike that got hit pretty hard with altitude sickness a day in. A local porter about her size carried her on his shoulders for the rest of the trip, in flip flops, and the only reason he stayed back with our slow asses was so she could talk to her husband along the way.
It's the most visceral experience I've had in the levels upon levels of human capability. Really wild to see in person.
High and dry, a good place for preservation of organic material. Maybe the holes were simply to get out of the wind.
New idea: this looks the the holes on the surface of a golf ball. Maybe this was an attempt to alter the wind as it crested the hill? Would a strong wind perhaps even whistle as it passed over these holes?
That's within the range you can acclimate to. They don't feel the altitude like we do.
I've made an attempt on Kilimanjaro. We ascended the first three days with porters but no guides. Our guides met us at that camp, they had come up in one day--they did it all the time, going from the surround to the summit in one day was possible and safe. For us--out of the question. The expected outcome would be unconsciousness before reaching the summit.
From a pure endurance sports point of view, natural ability of latin americans in altitude has been successfully reached by other athletes through altitude training camps, tents simulating altitude and drugs (epo,...).
I mean it can certainly help, but this is still well within an average human's range of adaptability. Building up new muscle "easily" (and also atrophying muscle when it isn't used) is one of human kind's super powers in the animal kingdom.
You aren't going to run into any real significant physical limits from your genes until you are pushing beyond what the top 1% of other humans can do, and being able to run up and down mountains all day isn't something only a portion of the locals could hope to achieve, native to the area or not, they just gotta do it for long enough.
My first explanation would be offerings. The rarity of those crops in the area would mean they were more valuable and therefor likely to be used as offerings.
edit: Or heck, maybe they wanted to keep it away from wildlife or invaders.
This is just a little strange to me. Pollen is produced at the flowering stage, not the growing and harvesting stages, months later. While there may be pollen on a grown ear of corn, it would be there for the same reason that it is everywhere else, because it is airborne and somewhat durable?
Why wouldn't you spread out, though, instead of working in basically a line? (At least, as much as topography reasonably allows.) That way, your travel distance to any particular item increases at like sqrt(stuff), instead of just linearly.
yeah, I've been thinking about that since I read the article!
I'm wondering if the line goes along the crest of the hill, so it's basically as wide as the crest is. But there's still, why 7-8 holes wide, and why are there some groups... lots of questions to think about!
> Being early to an appointment is as rude as being late because you may be disturbing your host before they've taken all the efforts they require before your arrival
( VERY rough quote, the english translation is 100x more eloquent than my half-remembered version )
Edmond Dantès arrives exactly as the clock strikes the minute of his appointment no later and no earlier. I remember reading that when I was ~16 and it always seemed to make sense to me
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