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Nightmare Email Feature

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"...just got back and didn't see your message until just now. Sorry! -- TIME THIS MESSAGE SAT HALF-FINISHED IN DRAFTS FOLDER: 3 days, 2 hours, 45 minutes."
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rudykocur
2562 days ago
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emdeesee
2561 days ago
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Also here's a typo you didn't notice before you pressed "Send".
Sherman, TX
MaryEllenCG
2561 days ago
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NOOOO
Greater Bostonia
Technicalleigh
2561 days ago
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Oh hey. 47 minutes is FAST.
Vancouver BC
Covarr
2564 days ago
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A full edit history would show all sixteen ways I rewrote each individual sentence because I was trying to figure out the best way to word it, what details to include or omit, etc. And a couple of structural rewrites.
East Helena, MT
alt_text_bot
2564 days ago
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"...just got back and didn't see your message until just now. Sorry! -- TIME THIS MESSAGE SAT HALF-FINISHED IN DRAFTS FOLDER: 3 days, 2 hours, 45 minutes."

Bird/Plane/Superman

5 Comments and 14 Shares
You can apply special translucent films to your windows to help keep birds/Superman from accidentally flying into them.
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rudykocur
2848 days ago
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sjk
2843 days ago
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I LOL'ed at "mating behavior often observed by a hidden David Attenborough".

Oh, sure, when I do with birds, I'm a naturalist, but when I do it with people, I'm a perv!
Florida
bibliogrrl
2849 days ago
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I mean if you went against an Emu, it could probably take a punch. I wouldn't recommend it, though.
Chicago!
Covarr
2850 days ago
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Charges extra for a third carry-on item: all but birds.
East Helena, MT
alt_text_bot
2851 days ago
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You can apply special translucent films to your windows to help keep birds/Superman from accidentally flying into them.

The role of logs

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You are probably familiar with logging, and log levels. In particular, the following scheme is very popular.

I have been using this scheme for pretty much every software project I had in over a decade. And it works. Which is good.

But I found that there are actually not really useful for our scenarios. In particular, we found that there are many cases where a component that logged something as a warn or error would generate a support ticket by eagle eyed admin, while it was just a valid part of the software behavior. The other side of that is that when we need to use the logs to find a problem, we never use fine grained logs, we just need it all.

This lead me to believe that we only actually need two and a half levels.

  • Informative – we are reporting so one of our support engineers or a team member can look at that and understand what the software is doing.
  • Operational – something deserves attention from the customer’s operations team.

There isn’t really anything in between those. Either this is something that we fully expect an operation team at the customer to look at, or this is something that the development and/or support engineers need to see.

But I mentioned two and a half, what is that half? Well, above operational, there is another half a level, which I like to call Pay Attention Now. This isn’t actually a log level, it is a way to attract someone’s attention to the log, or to some sort of operational alert. This is an SMS sent, or an email, etc.

But beyond the “something need attention now”, there is nothing else that is needed. The production logs are either for routine operations monitoring (in which case they should be relatively succinct and written with an eye to a reader who isn’t familiar with the internal working of RavenDB) or “what is going on here” mode, which is typically done by a team member who needs the most information possible.

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rudykocur
3164 days ago
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Sunbeam

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Sunbeam

What if all of the sun's output of visible light were bundled up into a laser-like beam that had a diameter of around 1m once it reaches Earth?

—Max Schäfer

Here's the situation Max is describing:

If you were standing in the path of the beam, you would obviously die pretty quickly. You wouldn't really die of anything, in the traditional sense. You would just stop being biology and start being physics.

When the beam of light hit the atmosphere, it would heat a pocket of air to millions of degrees[1]Fahrenheit, Celsius, Rankine, or Kelvin—it doesn't really matter. in a fraction of a second. That air would turn to plasma and start dumping its heat as a flood of x-rays in all directions. Those x-rays would heat up the air around them, which would turn to plasma itself and start emitting infrared light. It would be like a hydrogen bomb going off, only much more violent.

This radiation would vaporize everything in sight, turn the surrounding atmosphere to plasma, and start stripping away the Earth's surface.

But let's imagine you were standing on the far side of the Earth. You're still definitely not going to make it—things don't turn out well for the Earth in this scenario—but what, exactly, would you die from?

The Earth is big enough to protect people on the other side—at least for a little bit—from Max's sunbeam, and the seismic waves from the destruction would take a while to propogate through the planet. But the Earth isn't a perfect shield. Those wouldn't be what killed you.

Instead, you would die from twilight.

The sky is dark at night[citation needed] because the Sun is on the other side of the Earth.[citation needed] But the night sky isn't always completely dark. There's a glow in the sky before sunrise and after sunset because, even with the Sun hidden, some of the light is bent around the surface by the atmosphere.

If the sunbeam hit the Earth, x-rays, thermal radiation, and everything in between would flood into the atmosphere, so we need to learn a little about how different kinds of light interact with air.

Normal light interacts with the atmosphere through Rayleigh scattering. You may have heard of Rayleigh scattering as the answer to "why is the sky blue." This is sort of true, but honestly, a better answer to this question might be "because air is blue." Sure, it appears blue for a bunch of physics reasons, but everything appears the color it is for a bunch of physics reasons.[2]When you ask, "Why is the statue of liberty green?" the answer is something like, "The outside of the statue is copper, so it used to be copper-colored. Over time, a layer of copper carbonate formed (through oxidation), and copper carbonate is green." You don't say "The statue is green because of frequency-specific absorption and scattering by surface molecules."

When air heats up, the electrons are stripped away from their atoms, turning it to plasma. The ongoing flood of radiation from the beam has to pass through this plasma, so we need to know how transparent plasma is to different kinds of light. At this point, I'd like to mention the 1964 paper Opacity Calculations: Past and Future, by Harris L. Mayer, which contains the single best opening paragraph to a physics paper I've ever seen:

Initial steps for this symposium began a few billion years ago. As soon as the stars were formed, opacities became one of the basic subjects determining the structure of the physical world in which we live. And more recently with the development of nuclear weapons operating at temperatures of stellar interiors, opacities become as well one of the basic subjects determining the processes by which we may all die.

Compared to air, the plasma is relatively transparent to x-rays. The x-rays would pass through the plasma, heating it through effects called Compton scattering and pair production, but would be stopped quickly when they reached the non-plasma air outside the bubble. However, the steady flow of x-rays from the growing pocket of superhot air closer to the beam would turn a steadily-growing bubble of air to plasma. The fresh plasma at the edge of the bubble would give off infrared radiation, which would head out toward the horizon (along with the infrared already on the way), heating whatever it finds there.

This bubble of heat and light would wrap around the Earth, heating the air and land as it went. As the air heated up, the scattering and emission from the plasma would cause the effects to propogate farther and farther around the horizon. Furthermore, the atmosphere around the beam's contact point would be blasted into space, where it would reflect the light back down around the horizon.

Exactly how quickly the radiation makes it around the Earth depends on many details of atmospheric scattering, but if the Moon happened to be half-full at the time, it might not even matter.

When Max's device kicked in, the Moon would go out, since the sunlight illuminating it would be captured and funneled into a beam. Slightly after the beam made contact with the atmosphere, the quarter moon would blink out.

When the beam from Max's device hit the Earth's atmosphere, the light from the contact point would illuminate the Moon. Depending on the Moon's position and where you were on the Earth, this reflected moonlight alone could be enough to burn you to death ...

... just as the twilight wrapped around the planet, bringing on one final sunrise.[3]Here's an image which is great for annoying a few specific groups of people:

There's one thing that might prevent the Earth's total destruction. Can Max's mechanism actually track a target? If not, the Earth could be saved by its own orbital motion. If the beam was restricted to aiming at a fixed point in the sky, it would only take the Earth about three minutes to move out of the way. Everyone on the surface would still be cooked, and much of the atmosphere and surface would be lost, but the bulk of the Earth's mass would probably remain as a charred husk.

The Sun's death ray would continue out into space. Years later, if it reached another planetary system, it would be too spread out to vaporize anything outright, but it would likely be bright enough to heat up the surfaces of the planets.

Max's scenario may have doomed Earth, but if it's any consolation, we wouldn't necessarily die alone.

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rudykocur
3218 days ago
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peelman
3214 days ago
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Randall, I salute you.

I have got to make this book a higher priority on my reading list...
Seymour, Indiana
llucax
3217 days ago
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"You wouldn't really die of anything, in the traditional sense. You would just stop being biology and start being physics.".

I want to be physics when I grow up!
Berlin
jlvanderzwan
3220 days ago
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"Fahrenheit, Celsius, Rankine, or Kelvin—it doesn't really matter."

That's one of the nicest ways to hint something utterly horrible is going to happen.
reconbot
3224 days ago
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You would just stop being biology and start being physics
New York City
satadru
3223 days ago
The mathematicians might argue that you'd actually start being math at that point.
skittone
3224 days ago
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This one's really good (and funny):

"You wouldn't really die of anything, in the traditional sense. You would just stop being biology and start being physics."
satadru
3224 days ago
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Clearly the papers I read need better openings...
New York, NY
manderay
3222 days ago
I love the What Ifs so much...