I definitely don’t want to downplay a crisis, but I feel like I’ve been seeing headlines saying “all the bees are dying and we don’t know why” every year for nearly 20 years now.

I’m no bee expert. Just seems to me, based on the headlines, bees would’ve been extinct 10 years ago.

Some cursory searching led me to Colony Collapse Disorder which seems to have no agreed-upon cause. It appears devastating losses to honey bee colonies started being reported around 1900. But it also mentions:

In 2024, the United States Census of Agriculture reported an all-time high in commercial honey bee hives (mostly in Texas), making them the fastest-growing livestock segment in the country.[38]

Link to the source cited there: https://archive.is/nfeb2

Apparently last year saw the largest honey bee populations in US history. Though they write that huge boom in honey bee population is a threat to other native pollinators, so I guess that presents its own unique problems.

Reminds me of this old gem:

I’ve spent the last couple of hours re-watching WKUK skits because of you.

Man those guys are funny.

I revisit his channel every year at Thanksgiving when I need to prepare a turkey. His super simple roasted turkey video has served me well the last 5 or 6 years.

He doesn’t really talk in his videos, but I really enjoy watching Philippe Faraut sculpt in clay. Guy has masterful technique.

I recommend Technology Connections to anyone who enjoys learning about how stuff works. I really appreciate the way this guy explains things for laypeople.

SummoningSalt is super interesting if you like learning about speedrunning. My only gripe is that the videos are all really chill, but tend to have clips of people breaking world records and flipping out, like “FUCK YEAAAAAAAHH WOOOOOOO FUCK YEAH LET’S FUCKING GOOOOO FUUUUUUCK” and it can be very jarring, lol. But I do enjoy seeing those clips in the videos.

Grand Illusions is a fun channel where an older British gentleman named Tim presents curiosities, puzzles, toys, and the like.

Honorable mention: while I don’t watch many of his videos these days, Smarter Every Day is fantastic STEM content

Electricity and sound are actual physical phenomena though

Those physical phenomena are the manifestation of the transfer of energy between systems. Electrons carry charge (a fundamental force, like gravity, which transfers energy through the system) through conduits and sound carries air pressure fluctuations (force per unit area, transferring energy through the system) through the air.

Does energy have some sort of “matter”?

Energy, in the mechanical sense, is “the ability to do work” (where work is defined as the ability to move a mass over a distance, i.e.: Force = Mass * Acceleration). The situations you described can be ultimately represented by fundamental physical principles like F=ma. Energy may be described as the medium through which matter interacts with other matter, but energy does not, itself, have matter. Though my academic background is more in the realm of mechanical physics; there may be some newfangled theoretical energy-mass superposition concept that I’m unaware of.

It only becomes sound when a listening device of some sort registers it (usually an ear, but could also be an insect leg, etc.).

Acoustic waves propagating through a medium (air) exist regardless of whether or not something can perceive it as audio. I would argue that the mechanical phenomenon we call “sound” (acoustic waves) exists regardless of whether or not someone hears it. Similar to how light (electromagnetic radiation) exists regardless of if someone is around to look at it.

I’m no expert, but I was an aerospace engineering student once upon a time. So here’s my take:

Energy is not “manmade” because it would still exist and be transferred between systems even if humans didn’t exist.

Stars would still burn. Gravity would still pull. Inertia would still inert. Accelerating mass would still require energy. There just wouldn’t be anyone around to punch in numbers into a calculator and name the concept “energy”.

Of course all math and physics are “manmade” insofar as they are theorized, discovered, and proven by humans. But these phenomena would still exist regardless of humanity. This feels analogous to asking if “electricity” is manmade. We discovered and named the physical concept; it doesn’t mean we invented it. If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, it still makes a sound.

I managed to inadvertently cure myself of this problem by recording a lot of music in my early 20’s. I became accustomed to hearing what my voice actually sounds like and got a lot better at controlling it as a result.

Those first few months of recording were rough though, lol. I hated listening to all of my recordings.

The Onion Ring to Rule them All

Hell yeah. I’ve been looking forward to the parade of planets and have caught it a few times over the last few days. Been lucky enough to have clear skies the last couple of nights.

It doesn’t exactly unsettle me, but pondering the mind-boggling scale of celestial bodies and the cosmos can certainly be… humbling, I guess?

I had a co-worker a while back who couldn’t talk about the great scale of the universe cause he’d get freaked out. It didn’t come up much, but when it did, he’d be like, “Please stop, it’s stressing me out” so we’d change the subject.

Experimented a bit with my usual bread recipe. It’s cooling off right now, so I’m hoping to have some fresh bread in an hour or so.

I had the privilege to see them live about 8 years ago and it was an incredible show. Dickinson has incredible stage presence; really puts a lot of energy into the show to keep the crowd engaged.

The giant animatronic zombie freaked me out a bit. It was enormous and moved realistically enough to be unsettling since I wasn’t that far away from it. Most metal shit I’ve ever seen in person.

Probably! He was a very smart guy (way more formal education in computer science than I), so I’ve always assumed there was some truth to what he said, but he didn’t elaborate further and I didn’t like bothering him with unnecessary questions, so I never followed up on the topic despite my confusion.

Not a teacher, per se, but the senior dev on my old team once said something that left me scratching my head. We were trying to troubleshoot an inconsistent bug in our software, and I said, “Maybe it’s a race condition,” to which he replied, “There’s no such thing.”

Still trying to figure out what he meant by that.

Agreed. I’ve learned most of what I know about computers by fixing broken stuff. Like you, my first serious daily driver was Manjaro. And after dealing with broken systems time and time again, I’m tired, boss. My daily driver for the last 2 years has been Mint and I love it to death for how stable and functional it is. But the lessons I learned along the way with other distros have been invaluable.

I’m a big fan of this one:

“Somebody that I used to Know” by Linkin Park

I’m sad to see that the original got taken down, but someone reuploaded it here.

My friends and I started off playing D&D 3.5e in high school and college. We played it a lot over the years. Eventually we started playing 5e, and that’s mainly what we play today (on the rare occasions we actually sit down and play).

I had a friend who enjoyed experimenting with other systems like “GURPS” and “Swords & Wizardry”. We only ever played a few sessions with “Swords & Wizardry” but I enjoyed it a lot. It was an extremely lethal system where players were encouraged to be clever rather than solving problems through comat, since players weren’t particularly powerful compared to your typical monster or NPC.

Most recently, another friend introduced us to “Apocalypse World”, which we really enjoyed. We originally were just gonna play a one-shot, but wound up having a dozen or so sessions to keep the story going.

You could try opening up the Resource Monitor and checking out the Network tab:

It might have the same issue (grouping everything under the VPN .exe), but it’s worth a shot.