I heard that in Czechia and Slovakia, the word for jeans is/was "Rifle" (pronounced "reef-le"), since Rifle was the first brand of jeans imported there in the 80s.
Using tap water for cooling is such an idiotic engineering decision it feels like it was suggested by an LLM chatbot.
Power plants use water too, but they draw it from the nearby river or lake, recycle it through cooling towers, and/or dump it back out into the river or lake. Or course that has its own effects, but at least it's not depriving a nearby town of drinking water by existing.
Bowerbirds build elaborate color-coordinated displays to attract mates. How the female bird chooses the bower (and mate) is still unclear - it is not simple number or color or shape. So, in our human understanding, bowerbirds have a concept of "art".
Toki Pona specifically makes me think of overly verbose programming languages. With limited ~120 word vocabulary, describing things can be lengthy. Orange pet cat would be something like "good animal of house and of red yellow".
AFAIK Librem claims they use separate verified suppliers and builders (compared to more common Android manufacturers, for example). Kind of a zealot thing too though.
And PinePhone (original) at $200 is not that expensive if you think of it as a compact version of a Linux platform like Raspberry Pi. Raspberry Pi + charger + battery + touch display + 4G modem + GPS unit + microphone + speaker will probably run close to $200 too.
After discovering everything you can, you still cannot stop the end of the world. Everyone dies. At least you can get the astronaut band to play together one last time.
This reminds me of a story my graph theory professor told me (long before LLMs). One of their grad students discovered that a subset of graphs that are of type A and B at once has fantastic properties, such as fast searching, and a few others, useful in communication networks etc.
Excited about their potential thesis, student asked the professor to take a look. After calculating which graphs actually are types A and B at the same time, professor found that the intersection of such graph types is a null set. So the theoretically nice graphs the student "discovered" simply do not exist.
Another consideration is some tool to heat up the display or back. iFixit has the iOpener, a silicone "pillow" you heat up in the microwave, which works okay, but you might prefer a heat gun, or a plate (3D printer's heated bed works too).
Some immigrants change their name to the variation that is more common one in the new country, especially if they use it every day already. Or to un-botch the transliterated spelling. So Oleksandr or Aleksandr is now Alexander, Katerina is Catherine, Ielizaveta is Elizabeth.
Station Eleven takes place over a decade after a catastrophe, and has an unusual accepting-optimistic tone to it. Since it has been so long, people mellowed out, communities are slowly rebuilding (and rediscovering technology), and although there are some weirdos, it's not the stereotypical Mad Max post-apocalypse.
Free People's Village by Sim Kern is on my shelf, haven't read it yet. The premise is that history went differently in 1990s and US is now a solarpunk utopia... For the rich.
Makes perfect sense. This comment just made me realize English does not have a distinction between order and request. While, for example, in Russian, orders are said in indefinite tense (?). So when you order a dog to sit, you would say "to sit!" (сидеть!), or to order someone to stop, "to stand!" (стоять!). Another less formal way to order (usually a group) is to use "we" as the subject, for example, "[we are] not sitting, [we are] working" (не сидим, работаем)
Free, sure. There is only one app that does it, with huge dependency on Google and/or carrier (whoever runs the servers), which could just... stop working one day, like it did for me.
I heard that in Czechia and Slovakia, the word for jeans is/was "Rifle" (pronounced "reef-le"), since Rifle was the first brand of jeans imported there in the 80s.