Kuromantis's recent activity

  1. Comment on New moons of Uranus and Neptune announced in ~space

    Kuromantis
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    This new faint neptunian moon in particular claims the new spot of most distant moon with the longest orbital period from it's planet in the whole solar system, beating Neso to this accolade.

    Washington, D.C.— The Solar System has some new lunar members—the first new moon of Uranus discovered in more than 20 years, and likely the smallest, as well as two new moons of Neptune, one of which is the faintest moon ever discovered by ground-based telescopes. The discoveries were announced today by the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center.

    The new Uranian member brings the ice giant planet’s total moon count to 28. At only 8 kilometers, it is probably the smallest of Uranus’ moons. It takes 680 days to orbit the planet. Provisionally named S/2023 U1, the new moon will eventually be named after a character from a Shakespeare play, in keeping with the naming conventions for outer Uranian satellites.

    The brighter Neptune moon now has a provisional designation S/2002 N5, is about 23 kilometers in size, and takes almost 9 years to orbit the ice giant. The fainter Neptune moon has a provisional designation S/2021 N1 and is about 14 kilometers with an orbit of almost 27 years. They will both receive permanent names based on the 50 Nereid sea goddesses in Greek mythology.

    This new faint neptunian moon in particular claims the new spot of most distant moon with the longest orbital period from it's planet in the whole solar system, beating Neso to this accolade.

    Discovering all three of the new moons required taking dozens of five-minute exposures over three- or four-hour periods on a series of nights. These exposures were shifted by the apparent motion of each respective planet and added together to create one very deep image. Using this time intensive observing technique on some of the largest telescopes in the world allowed the survey images to go deeper than any previous observations near Uranus and Neptune.

    10 votes
  2. Comment on Kyoto Animation arsonist given death penalty over 2019 mass murder in ~anime

    Kuromantis
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    I remember this attack being a really big deal when it happened, seeing it be resolved, even with Death, is a big deal.

    I remember this attack being a really big deal when it happened, seeing it be resolved, even with Death, is a big deal.

    Shinji Aoba was handed the death penalty on Thursday for setting a Kyoto Animation studio on fire in 2019 and killing 36 people, in one of Japan’s deadliest mass murders.
    The Kyoto District Court found the 45-year-old man guilty of setting the three-story building on fire because of a grudge he had against Kyoto Animation. He claimed the studio had stolen his ideas after it rejected his novels in an annual contest the company hosts. There is no evidence the company plagiarized any of his work.

    On July 18, 2019, Aoba bought 40 liters of gasoline, after which he entered the Kyoto Animation studio, splashed gasoline on six workers while shouting “Go to hell!” and set the building on fire with a lighter. The fire engulfed the building, killing 36 people and leaving another 32 injured.

    A survivor who had testified in court said she escaped from a window after she was splashed with gasoline. She sustained burns over 94% of her body and had to undergo surgery 49 times.

    "I feel despair whenever I look in the mirror. It's grueling to live with this body," she said.

    Kyoto Animation President Hideaki Hatta said in a statement afterward that although he thought the ruling was appropriate, his feelings of frustration remain strong.

    Nevertheless, Hatta said he hopes to continue making anime at Kyoto Animation so that the works of the victims will be passed on into the future.

    24 votes
  3. Comment on So, is Dash a good level? (Geometry Dash, 2.2) in ~games

    Kuromantis
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    Geometry Dash released it's largest update that took 7 years to make, and the newest level has to show off all the features added in this massive, and yet short level. The video being 40 minutes...

    Geometry Dash released it's largest update that took 7 years to make, and the newest level has to show off all the features added in this massive, and yet short level. The video being 40 minutes long when the level is only a minute and a half, especially when there's a "spider" section that this guy has spent several minutes complaining about in not one but two videos including this one, which only lasts a second or so, which has basically become a meme with people constantly remaking this section online. Despite the meme having kind of a mocking aura to it, I think Colon's criticisms are completely reasonable and the footage he has of multiple youtubers including pro GD players struggling at this section multiple times prove that spider section is in fact actually troublesome level design.

    4 votes
  4. Comment on Don't look so blue, Neptune: New study (re)reveals Neptune's blue hue to be very pale and similar to Uranus, unlike edited Voyager 2 images in ~space

    Kuromantis
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    For good measure, here is a link to the actual text of the study, including a few more pictures through various levels of correction from other comparable sources, namely hubble. Particularly...

    In 1989, Voyager 2 became the first and only spacecraft to ever fly by Neptune, and images from that mission famously show a planet that's a deep azure color.

    But in reality, Neptune is far more of a light greenish blue. It's actually pretty similar in color to its fellow ice giant Uranus, also visited by Voyager 2.

    The researchers rebalanced composite color images taken by the Voyager 2 camera, using data from instruments on the Hubble Space Telescope as well as the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope.

    The resulting images more accurately reflect the true colors of these planets, says Irwin, as they'd be seen by the naked eye.

    As a result, some of the key features of Neptune, such as cloud bands and a dark spot, become "indistinct and difficult to see," he says, noting that the Voyager team deliberately processed its images in a way that would highlight the unusual features of this planet.

    For good measure, here is a link to the actual text of the study, including a few more pictures through various levels of correction from other comparable sources, namely hubble. Particularly pertinent is this spectral chart of the 2 planets, which are extremely similar but do in fact indicate that Neptune is ever so slightly more blue.

    6 votes
  5. Comment on 31 minutos - Calurosa Navidad (Heated Christmas) (2004) in ~music

    Kuromantis
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    A funny Christmas song for anyone who lives near the equator or in the Southern hemisphere, where summer has just began and snow is alien. I'm typing this from right besides my fan here in São...

    A funny Christmas song for anyone who lives near the equator or in the Southern hemisphere, where summer has just began and snow is alien. I'm typing this from right besides my fan here in São Paulo. English subtitles included.

    3 votes
  6. Comment on In Cold War II, the US risks playing the Soviet role in ~misc

    Kuromantis
    (edited )
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    Honestly, I think that it's just really obvious/blatant that this guy wants to project the past into the present for the sake of it, because the idea of playing a "Soviet role" doesn't make much...
    • Exemplary

    Honestly, I think that it's just really obvious/blatant that this guy wants to project the past into the present for the sake of it, because the idea of playing a "Soviet role" doesn't make much sense beyond being an old power with slow economic growth and a smaller population, and the geography of a new cold war is fundamentally different and taking place in a fundamentally different world. Above all else, a world not born out of harsh ideological war partitioning the world, but of capitalism managing to sustain itself beyond communism thanks to globalization, less extreme authoritarianism and not screwing up planned economies, and then absorbing the second world into itself with globalization, a far less violent beginning (though that isn't much by the standards of peace.)

    But talking about how the 2 nations actually are and where they might want to go, I get the impression that the USA and China share something like 60-80% of their economic defects (expensive and questionable housing, overworked people who don't feel like having children, discontented young people without a clear path to wealth beyond decades of waiting) and their strengths are far more important to discuss than weaknesses. And personally, I think it's very self-evident that the USA, even when US politics break down completely, can basically manage to run on autopilot as the federal government just casually takes a 2-week-long break from working on the whim of conservative politicians because something like a million people immigrate to the USA every single year, a figure which has been growing to this value for the last 50-60 years (since 1965 due to LBJ) and the appeal of the USA for most of these people is basically working for a huge multinational or Silicon Valley tech company, regardless of if the government is actually functioning or not, and this massive influx basically keeps the US (well, the parts with said immigrants) away from population decline, and inevitably that is just pure soft power and economic status as the incumbent power. China's strength is that it builds much more infrastructure and is the factory of the world, but inevitably it becomes fairly obvious that this role is very dependent on free trade and the US being incapable of gathering the political/economic will to break up fully as idealized by protectionists and trade war supporters which it definitely is, don't get me wrong, but manufacturing things for the immense US consumer market doesn't lend itself to harshly opposing and fighting against America, and they seem to be distressingly near having built all the infrastructure they would ever need and then enough for the several ghost cities we hear about in the west, which is one of the many fronts where we suspect China could be inflating their GDP and other economic figures to us and themselves.

    I think that the role of the US is basically to just keep being the incumbent and soft power and keep using brain drain and immigration to keep economic power to itself and away from China while China's role is basically to seek alternate pathways to economic power such as dedollarization, the new silk road and investing in Africa, which they have already been doing. Most importantly for the article though, neither of these paths involves splitting the world in 2 in a decades-long ideological conflict, especially when China as an "Arsenal of Autocracy" isn't super helpful since when you look at the relationships that these autocratic old world societies that oppose the US (China, North Korea, Russia, Pakistan, Iran, Syria, etc.) hold with eachother, you don't actually see that much in the way of actual amicableness, if anything the constant need to grandstand against their enemies makes these autocracies want to convey an image of being on their own against the USA, which does not bode well with the grandiose image of a neo-warsaw-pact of authoritarians of all ideologies.

    13 votes
  7. Comment on Despite it still being spring in Brazil, temperatures reach 35-40 degrees Celsius almost every day in dangerous heatwave in ~enviro

    Kuromantis
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    A personal comment from someone who lives in São Paulo, we already got temperatures of 35 degrees in early October, just a week or 2 removed from Winter. In that heatwave, record numbers of people...

    It’s still spring in Brazil, but a dangerous heat wave is sweeping across large swathes of the country, forcing Rio de Janeiro’s vendors off the streets due to health alerts and driving up energy demand amid reports of power outages.

    The heat index — a combination of temperature and humidity — hit 58.5 degrees Celsius (137 Fahrenheit) Tuesday morning in Rio, the highest index ever recorded there. Actual temperatures dropped slightly on Wednesday, but were forecast to rise again to 40 degrees Celsius (104 F) on Thursday.

    Amid the high heat, wildfires are burning widely in the Pantanal biome, the world's biggest tropical wetlands spanning parts of Mato Grosso and Mato Grosso do Sul states. The fires have ravaged an area about the size of Cyprus, or more than 947,000 hectares (about 3,600 square miles), according to the Environmental Satellite Applications Laboratory of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.

    A personal comment from someone who lives in São Paulo, we already got temperatures of 35 degrees in early October, just a week or 2 removed from Winter. In that heatwave, record numbers of people (including some of my classmates) used the heatwave as a good excuse to go to the beach, but that's pretty much the only silver lining to something that's evidently caused by human industry managing to reach the "turn back within 5 years or else" stage of Climate Change. Europe has been recording 30 degree heat in temperate zones like Germany and 40 degrees in Semi-Arid Spain nearly every summer now. I get the impression that South America is the same and this will be our new normal now, for decades to come.

    8 votes
  8. Comment on The Republican Revolution and how the party switch actually happened in ~humanities.history

    Kuromantis
    (edited )
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    An article about the history of the 2 US political parties in and surrounding the south and broadly racism, and why the party switch is much more complicated and gradual than southern racism:

    An article about the history of the 2 US political parties in and surrounding the south and broadly racism, and why the party switch is much more complicated and gradual than southern racism:

    November 8, 1994 was the day the New Deal coalition died. That night, Republicans swept over fifty seats in the House and found themselves in unprecedented territory. After sixty years of Democratic dominance, they were in the majority. Republicans pushed deep into traditionally Democratic strongholds in the South, taking more than half the seats in the region for the first time since 1872. White Southerners had broken off from the Democratic party.

    The story of how the post-Depression political order collapsed and Democrats lost control of the Solid South is a story that’s been told in many a think piece. These explainers always go something like this:

    During the Civil War, Northern Republicans abolished slavery, and slaveowning Southerners reacted by joining the then white supremacist Democratic party. Following the Great Depression, Democrats added urban Northern progressives to their coalition with a new left-wing economic platform. This New Deal coalition dominated the House until Northern Democrats passed the Civil Rights Act, leading to a Democratic collapse in the South. Republicans like Nixon adopted a new strategy of appealing to white grievances to win over Southerners, and the South has been Republican ever since.

    This story is partly true. Desegregation really did drive white Southerners away from Democratic nominees for President in the era from roughly 1948 to 1972, especially in the Deep South. Comparing presidential elections just before and after the Civil Rights Act passed makes this abundantly clear. So why did Democrats lose the House in 1994, not 1964?

    The truth is that Congressional Democrats held because of their divisions, not in spite of them. A united party is a weakness, not a strength.

    7 votes
  9. Have mass migrations ever happened for positive reasons instead of because hardship or lack of opportunity in their home countries?

    Just as a preface, I am not making this post because I oppose immigration or want to turn away imigrants, much less those who can't live safely in their home countries, I just notice immigration...

    Just as a preface, I am not making this post because I oppose immigration or want to turn away imigrants, much less those who can't live safely in their home countries, I just notice immigration and misery seem to be intimately related, and it honestly makes me wonder if a world without misery is also a world without immigration, at least in the form of mass migrations of a specific people group or type of person. I also recognize that more immigration and cultural diversity does have a wide variety of benefits, regardless of it's causes or motives, and that leaving your home for some faraway country looking for some high-end job not present where you live is definitely not the fault or problem of the person migrating.

    I've been thinking about immigration recently and it kind of astounds me just how much of immigration happens because of misery, Colonialism or oppression. Here's a pretty broad and varied list of mass immigration phenomena and (as I understand them) their causes:

    • The USA has a southern border crisis (to some extent because Republicans like to exaggerate it to justify their xenophobia and so on) because Mexico and Latin America as a whole are much poorer than the USA (something the USA itself shares a good deal of blame for) and thus want to come to the USA, with illegal immigrants often doing so by any means necessary.

    • Europe (and Turkey kinda) has an Arab migrant crisis because of the (mostly) failed Arab Spring and Syrian Civil War destabilizing the region or plunging it into war, forcing million to flee to Europe, which is in large part responsible for this crisis seing as (West) Europeans colonized the whole region and set much of the stage for conflicts.

    • A large share of white people from a variety of different ethnic groups in the USA were fleeing oppression or misery in Europe (and the ones that were not came here to colonize and oppress the natives):

      • Quakers fleeing to the USA due to British persecution

      • Irish-Americans coming to the USA in largest amounts following the Potato Famine

      • The height of German-American migration to the USA followed the 1848 revolution's failure to make a more liberal and united Germany

      • Meanwhile, Black Americans, after being forcibly migrated out of the African continent to be enslaved, fled the US South in the millions starting around the 1920s as this was the nadir of race relations and the heights of the Jim Crow age. White flight to the suburbs (another large migration) was one of the main northern responses to this influx of black people.

    • In early 20th century Brazil, the government encouraged immigration from European countries and Japan to them in large part due to a need for cheap labor still unmet a few decades after the end of slavery and as a way to make the country more white. Many of the European migrants were poor workers looking to make a better life for themselves.

    • Zionism arguably owes it's existence and success to centuries of anti-Semitism in Europe and it's culmination in the Holocaust, alongside a sympathetic British Empire and UN being able to simply lease most of the Levant that they had colonized to a new Jewish state. This is layered on top of the fact that the reason Jewish people even left the Levant in the first place was oppression by several different foreign empires for centuries since antiquity. The modern state of Israel also owes the largest share of it's Jews from neighboring middle-eastern countries which also expelled them due to their own anti-Semitism.

    • In the middle of the 20th century in Brazil, millions of Brazilian northeasterners migrated to the Southeast in search of economic opportunity they lacked (and to some extent still do) at home, as well as fleeing drought in more rural zones. Notably, in the 2010s we have seen many of these people return to the Northeast following Lula massively helping the Northeast develop over his first presidency in the 2000s. For a personal anecdote, both of my mother's parents did this, and brought my mother to where I live in São Paulo, and then they also went back to the northeast in the mid 2010s.

    • Virtually the entirety of the Global South and also Eastern Europe suffers from Brain Drain, where their most educated people leave in search of better opportunity and higher incomes in developed countries and the multinationals they possess. Much of the USA's legal immigration and economic power in spite of it's numerous flaws is owed to this.

    • Somewhat similarly, most Western European countries have one or more large communities of people who originate from a country they had colonized as an empire. (The USA also owes much of their Filipino American community to owning them despite it not being the same colonialism as practiced by the British on the USA or by Spain.)

    Looking at this fairly long list of examples, I have to wonder if there are mass migrations that happened because of more positive reasons or if any of these already existing mass migrations can be explained by more positive reasons?

    25 votes
  10. Comment on What are your top three video game soundtracks? in ~games

    Kuromantis
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    The top 2 are easily OMORI and Undertale (plus AU Deltarune). My personal favorite tracks from each OST are Sinking for OMORI and Undertale for Undertale. OMORI is so good because it's really good...

    The top 2 are easily OMORI and Undertale (plus AU Deltarune). My personal favorite tracks from each OST are Sinking for OMORI and Undertale for Undertale. OMORI is so good because it's really good at conveying the emotions of the characters or their memories and setting the mood for the player across a very wide variety of moods (This is also from the same soundtrack). Undertale is so good for similar reasons although more in the context of bringing their lore and the story to life.

    Third is harder for me, among the games I'm familiar with, I'd say Minecraft, VVVVVV, Sonic Generations and Pizza Tower are all contenders and, honestly, nearly all of them are good for the same reasons. I think if I have to pick one of these, it'll be Pizza Tower, because it's also accompanied by really good sound effect design in the game.

    5 votes
  11. Comment on How Denmark destroyed Greenland: Brief history of Denmark's colonialism in Greenland in ~humanities.history

    Kuromantis
    (edited )
    Link
    A video talking about the history of Greenland, starting from the medieval era. I found it particularly interesting because I had loosely heard of Greenland having the world's highest suicide rate...

    A video talking about the history of Greenland, starting from the medieval era. I found it particularly interesting because I had loosely heard of Greenland having the world's highest suicide rate but this video very neatly explains how it's basically a consequence of Danish colonialism, similar to the conditions found in Native Reservations in pretty much every new world country from Canada to the US to Brazil to Argentina.

    5 votes