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Watching live coverage of the Spa 24hrs race. Seeing those handful of people in the illuminated grandstands in the small hours..that's fan dedication.
youtu.be/8_iaEpdMUq4

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My car is repairable. No frame damage. Huge hit in a small area which I thought would have buckled the unibody. The shockwave broke the interior trunk liner. It will however be a while due to large number of parts and the ongoing CDK outage. Had the wheel and transfer case been dinged it would have pushed it over the underwriter's number. As it happens it did not even lose alignment. So lucky.

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Today in 1969, 55 years ago: in London, the British band Pink Floyd releases the album Music from the film "More".

#OnThisDay

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An uncanny blobfish crafted from the flesh of man: exactly what we needed from science at the moment

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When a proton and neutron crash into each other, they can stick together and make a deuterium nucleus. After another proton and neutron hit this, you get helium. That's how helium was made in the early Universe. But there was a bottleneck which limited this process!

About 15 seconds after the Big Bang, it cooled down enough for antimatter to go away. Then all we had was protons, neutrons, electrons and a shitload of light.

But neutrons are unstable - they decay into protons - so it was a race against time to make deuterium by smacking protons and neutrons together. And it was still way too hot. All that energetic light destroyed the deuterium nuclei as fast as they got made!

Only later, 3 minutes and 45 seconds after the Big Bang, did it cool down to the point where deuterium nuclei become stable. Alas, by then most of the neutrons had decayed. There were about 7 protons for every neutron.

At this point, most of the remaining neutrons quickly combined with protons and made deuterium and then helium. But a lot of protons were left without dance partners! So the universe was roughly 3/4 hydrogen and 1/4 helium.

By then, it had cooled down too much for heavier elements to be formed. This only happened much later, in stars. And the universe is still roughly 3/4 hydrogen and 1/4 helium... with a tiny bit of other stuff.

(2/2)

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Slept well for the first time in days. I had a very pleasant dream about hiking in the Himalayas, edging steadily towards Everest, which I think I intended to climb. Oddly fitting at the moment.

Amazon AI product summaries are a goldmine that encapsulates the hype. I'm looking at a replacement bike seat and Amazon ensures me people like it for pain. I know cycling attracts all types but I doubt that's what they meant...

On quite a high dose of steroids to control some eye inflammation. They are steadily working, but the side effects are usually mean. I can't get to sleep, wake up early, and feel like I'm jetlagged or in nicotine withdrawal. A nice afternoon nap ought to do...

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After AI took his job as an online assistant, Mr Clippy was obliged to seek work in other sectors

Yesterday evening, while waiting at a stop light to turn left, I was struck by a felon running from police. This is not a fun week. I am alright.

At the dealer for a warranty recall and inspection. The nationwide system outage is still ongoing. Apparently they attempted a restore but it got immediately compromised, which means they didn't fix the issue in testing or the threat actor was in for a while and their backdoor is in the backups.

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"The fact that the EU interior ministers want to exempt police officers, soldiers, intelligence officers and even themselves from chat control scanning proves that they know exactly just how unreliable and dangerous the snooping algorithms are that they want to unleash on us citizens."

eureporter.co/business/data/ma

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