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Cake day: November 26th, 2023

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  • Nope, the movie takes place in Utqiagvik (formerly known as Barrow), Alaska, which is one of the northernmost populated areas on earth. From the Wikipedia page:

    When the sun sets on November 18, it stays below the horizon until January 23, resulting in a polar night that lasts about 66 days.[37] When the polar night starts, about 6 hours of civil twilight occur, with the amount decreasing each day during the first half of the polar night. On the winter solstice (around December 21 or December 22), civil twilight in Utqiagvik lasts a mere 3 hours.[34][38] After this, the amount of civil twilight increases each day to around 6 hours at the end of the polar night.

    Edit: to OP’s point, most depictions of the Arctic aren’t that far north. 30 Days of Night happens to be one that really does have that level of continual darkness. Even so, while it’s night for several months, it’s really just the day shortening to the point that you don’t see the sun with that civil twilight reducing to a few hours, and then as the “days” get longer eventually you start to see the sun again. The reverse happens for the summer, where eventually the sun doesn’t set enough to be out of view.


  • A BS in Physics was my primary degree (I double majored so I also had a BA in a language that has never been of any professional use to me).

    Python is so ubiquitous that it’s a great tool to know for a multitude of applications, and it pairs well with a physics background since that increases your usefulness as a generalist.

    It is important to make the distinction between a programmer with a hard science/math degree and one with a computer science degree. The former will likely struggle more with building up larger libraries, following best practices for modularity/extendability/backwards compatibility, and other computer science sort of stuff that the latter will ingrain much better. The flip side is that computer science tends to not have as much of an emphasis on a math background, so analysis and Data Science applications often benefit more from the science/math background than the comp sci one (please note that I’m making highly generalized statements here based on what I’ve observed).

    To summarize, if you want to build an app to do something, you want comp sci, but if you want to build a statistical model and have the ability to rigorously validate it and explain what it’s doing, you’re going to need that math background.


  • I did what you’re describing and it worked out well for me, but YMMV. Here’s what I did:

    I got an undergrad degree in physics, and was hired right out of school by a government contractor. My only hard skill from the degree was coding in LabVIEW, something I never have done in the workplace. Arguably my only real use in my first job was to be a person who submitted a timesheet that could be billed as a person with a STEM degree.

    I changed jobs for a much better contractor where I did a lot of “system engineering” style analysis with MatLab, which I mostly learned on the job, and eventually moved into Python which I learned entirely on the job. Python really resonated with me, particularly using it for Data Science applications. I got a Masters degree in Applied Physics from a highly renowned school taking after hours courses that my job paid for. Most of the courses had no conceivable application to my day job.

    I eventually was hired away from the contracting world and am a Data Engineer for a private company.

    The thing a physics degree truly demonstrates is the ability to learn difficult concepts, think analytically, and have the math to back it up. If you go this route, you’ll kind of be a generalist right out of the gate and need to be open to trying a bunch of new things to figure out what works for you. A master’s degree certainly helps, and learning a useful programming language really helps. Be prepared to start somewhere as an analyst, and build from there.



  • How do you feel about the direction that new planes have taken? I think it’s fair to say the scope of what can be a magic plane has increased dramatically recently, from the guns of New Capenna, the tech in modern Kamigawa and Duskmourn, and the increasing variety of intelligent animals that aren’t humanoid like lionen.

    We’re getting an Omenpath racing set and a space plane this year, which I think will be distinctly different from previously explored tropes and backdrops.


  • I understand that WotC wants to capture the potential for MTG as a game and framework to be applied to nearly anything, and that for whatever franchise they choose to expand Universes Beyond to there will be a bunch of fans who are thrilled to see cards for their beloved characters.

    What worries me is that the more MTG is everything, the more diluted the game’s own identity becomes. I fell in love with a game that depicted its own worlds and told its own story. I came to accept that Universes Beyond had a place in MTG and it felt ok when used sparingly, but I think 2025 is the year that we cross the threshold into hugely expanded scope for crossovers.

    I just hope Magic still feels like Magic a year from now.





  • Is there a reason it needs to be an app? I was in a similar situation and what worked best for me was just replacing the YouTube app with a Firefox shortcut to YouTube.com. I’m still logged in and the uBlock Origin extension strips the ads out. I think the Sponsorblock extension should also work with this system.

    In general I’ve just started replacing apps with annoying ads with either a Firefox webapp or a Firefox shortcut. Works great and reduces the app count on my phone too.




  • At the risk of being dogpiled, I’d like to try to have some discussion on this.

    Up front, I want to say that Ohio does a lot of dumb shit, trans rights are human rights, and weaponizing random laws against queer people is bullshit.

    It seems clear to me that:

    • There is a reasonable motivation for requiring reporting of recent name changes, and the exception for marriage is due to this being extremely common. The article states that this usually came up in the past when people wanted to run with a nickname rather than their given name.
    • Not stating this requirement on the form is stupid and bad.
    • This is compounded by the lack of a box for a former name, practically guaranteeing that this information is omitted.
    • All of this is a problem that should be fixed. The Republic governor has acknowledged this, according to a quote from the article.

    What isn’t clear to me is that this is selectively enforced against trans people. We only know about the cases where it has happened to trans people because those are the cases that are being reported on. It is not surprising that a cis person encountering a bureaucratic annoyance because they put the name they go by rather than their birth name on the form was not considered newsworthy.

    The vibe I get from this is that this is ragebait where the headline invites the reader to jump to conclusions while the contents of the article suggest that this is actually just a stupid case of the government being bad at making a form (something I have personally encountered a lot).

    I’m totally fine with being proven wrong, it wouldn’t be surprising in the slightest if there is malicious intent here. Is there evidence of selective enforcement here?


  • Believe me, I wouldn’t be surprised if that was the case, and I 100% think this is wrong.

    My take here is that filling out a government form and having it be rejected because you didn’t put required information that isn’t stated as required into a box that the form doesn’t have and getting denied/made to redo it is an extremely plausible scenario. In the case of a cis person being denied this way, it’s a mundane bit of bureaucratic nonsense that nobody would blink an eye at.

    The article states:

    The law has been in place in some form for decades, though it’s rarely been used and usually arises in the context of candidates wishing to use a nickname.

    The fact that this law has been identified as a real problem for trans people and that there is a quote in the article from the (Republican) governor saying “this is bad, we should fix it” strikes me as acknowledgement that this dumb rule is disproportionately affecting trans people and should be fixed.

    We have a depressing number of real examples of malicious use of the law against trans people, so all I’m saying is that this one doesn’t seem worth getting fired up about unless there is evidence of actual malicious intent here.