The people that don’t understand the problem usually are management, and I have to spend an exhausting time each day explaining to them why the problem exists and why it takes so long to fix it. I once was honestly telling them their meetings were a big part of the delays. Which then obviously led to more meetings on “how we can better communicate so we can have less meetings and more productive time”. I wish I was joking.

Antlion itself an official wireless modmic, but it’s a staggering 150 bucks, was cheaper a could years ago… On the upside, it’s pretty much a lifetime purchase and really good quality. But it’s definitely overpriced.

If your budget is lower, you can look at lavalier mics or wire mics. Those are the kind that TV/ video guys usually wear. Lavaliers are simply tacked to the top of your shirt, while the wire mics are super thin wires that you wear under your actual headset. Both are light, have good audio quality and nur importantly are available at much wider and fairer price ranges, as they are less of a nice. Lav mics can be as cheap as ten bucks.

I have invested lots of effort and research and sadly money over the years into this specific question. And nowadays my recommendation would be: keep it simple.

That means: get a headset that is well reviewed and uses a wireless connection. Do not use Bluetooth. Bluetooth has good quality now, but no matter what perfect settings you use, you will have a noticeable delay, which is especially noticable during hectic gaming voice comms. Some headsets with a dedicated wireless receiver ( usually a small USB dongle) offer BT as an extra option, which can be great if you want to use it for listening to music or doing occasional calls while moving outside while linked to your phone.

Second tip: don’t get a combined all-in-one gaming headset. They can be good, but are always overpriced für what they offer. Marketing ftw. Instead get a good headset and get a simple separate mic. Modmic or any derivative works.

Overall, you’ll get tremendously better quality for significantly less price. The sheer amount of options for good “generic” headphones is immense. Added bonus: because the two are separate, you can swap one out when it breaks. Especially the addon microphones have a tendency to last decades, unlike the headsets themselves, which suffer more immediate wear and tear.

It was unusual in how far south it was visible in many regions of the world. It’s been roughly 50 years since the last time that happened. Obviously the subjective impact depends a lot on where you live. Some see it every year, others only will get the chance when the Sun explodes and strips away our magnetosphere entirely. Which hopefully will not become a centennial event.

A lost bat might get trapped in a dark room. While they wouldn’t be bothered too much by the dark ( like everyone else, they need at least a bit of light to see using their eyes ), they could use echo sounding to figure out the room fairly well. But they still would be unable to open the door or window to escape, so still trapped or “lost”.

My attempt at an interpretation. 😅

The always are inter operability issues on a federal level in Germany, because of the strong level of individuality of each state. That has little to do with Windows vs Linux.

Any project that has to aggregate data on a federal level is technically challenging and accompanied by a ton of political sensitiveness. The states tend to see any attempt at standardization as an attack on their state freedoms.

The efficacy of vaccines usually declines over time after administration. The immune system starts to “forget” how to fight a pathogen it doesn’t encounter. It doesn’t completely forget, but it puts the treatment data way back in the archives. So when it encounters the real deal, it can take quite a while to boot up production of antibodies. It also varies by the type of disease.

This is fine for some slow diseases ( which is why sometimes a single vaccination can suffice ), but can be risky if the disease progresses faster than the immune system can ramp up the defenses.

Administering the vaccine as soon as possible after suspected exposure to deadly or highly contagious diseases simply helps the immune system to get the necessary blueprints to get in the fight quicker.

Administering the vaccine before any exposure at regular, long intervals is done to decrease the baseline risk. Sometimes you don’t know you have been infected. Many diseases are not only transmitted by dramatic, obvious vectors. In those cases, it’s definitely better to have some old defense than none at all.

Taste is actually a valid and very important identifier used for classifying minerals during geology field work when there is no access to advanced diagnostic tools. For health reasons, it’s obviously not the primary method, but it usually follows the “scrape test”. Scraping the mineral over a known hard surface tells a whole lot about hardness, texture, color, granularity…

Do the proven old trick of simply outlining your text in contrast color. Increases readability means, and it no longer matters what background color you choose for varieties.

I’m keeping your soda bottle analogy:

In this case, a very strong eruption ejects kids of super hot gas and rock upwards, like when you open a shaken bottle. After some time, pressure will decrease, and gravity will start dragging things down again.

Unlike a regular soda bottle, heat is significant. Hot gas rises in the atmosphere against gravity. During this rise, it loses energy ( so it cools down). When it reaches a high enough temperature where the lifting momentum is overcome by gravity, it starts falling again.

As the top starts to fall while there still is more material below in the column, the column gets compressed. As the center of the column is the hottest part, it still pushes material upwards. So the colder material falling from the top is pushed outwards, widening the column a bit. It also encounters the cold air outside and starts cooling even more itself, falling ever faster in the outside “ring” of the column. It still is only “cool” compared to the rising inner column, still thousands of degrees. Also, all the light glasses will have moved further up the atmosphere and either fall slower or not at all. This is where the long term effects such as your mentioned ash fall/ rain comes from. So most of the rapidly falling material that then form pyroclastic flows are actually fairly heavy liquids/solids and heavier-than-air gasses. They only seem so light and fast inside a pyroclastic flow because if their immense temperature and contained energy.

However, sooner or later the falling material encounters the ground, a solid obstacle. As the inner column is densely filled with super hot, probably still rising fresh material, the only possible way is outwards. And with continuous pressure from above from all the falling material, the material needs to move out of the way very rapidly. This is not dissimilar from how water behaves that flows from a bottle or faucet and hits solid ground. But a pyroclastic flow is a bit more viscous, and still very hot. While moving outwards, it quickly has to push away the cool, resting atmosphere. The only way for the air is to step aside upwards. Now, as the cold air likes to stay close to the ground and was compressed, it forms a seemingly paradoxical barrier layer of cold, dense air above the pyroclastic flow, pressing down on it, even squeezing it further outwards. This together with it’s own viscosity means there’s surprisingly little turbulence between the two layers, with the hot flow continuing to rush along below the cold barrier layer instead of mixing and rising through it upwards. If this interests you, look up inversion layers: they are a normal phenomenon in regular weather as well, especially winter time, and can sometimes even last many days.

Consider that ash columns reach many km in altitude, filled with many tons of material. It doesn’t all fall slowly at the same time. It’s literally rock falling from high atmosphere to the ground, carried by heavier-than-air gasses that also want to sit below the atmosphere.

How do you think they would verify or sanction an invalid ballot? Given that voting is secret and therefore there’s logically no personal information on the ballot, this would be rather tricky - or extremely worrisome for democracy. ;) So no, it’s definitely not illegal in any somewhat democratic nation. And yes, most countries do count invalid votes separately. This can be an important indicator that something went wrong. Eg if suddenly all districts report much higher numbers of invalid ballots, something might have gone wrong in the counting process or just the ballot design might be too confusing. Definitely worth looking into, though. And if a single district shows an unusual count of invalid ballots compared to others, that also is worth looking into.

Many that intentionally vote invalid claim to do so to show their frustration with all party options. However, this hurts democracy. Even if do not love or even like any of the parties/candidates, you still should vote.

Vote for the “least of the bad”. A vote for a democratic candidate that has a boring mix of policies planned that you don’t fully support is still a lot better than anything on the other end of the spectrum, with radical extremists working to undermine society or democracy itself. By voting invalid, your missing vote ends up being “shared” by everyone, and I’m certain there’s some on the list that you really don’t want to even have the tiniest shred of your vote.

You go to vote and invalidate the ballot. Mark none or all of the boxes or write ‘fu’ on it. It’s not that hard.

This doesn’t change the issue presented by OP. Sea level is not level across the world. In fact there are much larger differences than most people expect. The Earth is not perfectly round. Earth rotation causes the equator to be affected by a centrifugal force, making it wider there ( more distance to earth core means less gravity ) than at the poles. Overall, gravity at Earth surface level varies by 0.7%, ranging from 9.76 in Peru to 9.83 in the Arctic Ocean, but it’s absolutely not linear. In addition, the Earth is full of gravity anomalies. These cause localized dips and spikes in gravity. Two of the big dogs lips lie in the Indian ocean and the Caribbean. Because water is fluid, sea level is very much affected by local gravity (as well as other factors such as air pressure, salinity, temperature…). Which is also why the moons gravity can cause tides. The permanently lower gravity on these anomalous spots mean that the average sea level here is lower than it would be on a perfect sphere. This difference can be up to two meters in sea level.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_of_Earth

That’s because Spotify shuffle by default is not a simple true randomizer as most would expect. It tries to be “smart” and mixes your playlist so similar songs play after another, while avoiding playing songs from the same artists back to back. And some more variables. In theory this is great and works well for some users and focused playlists, but can ruin playlists that cover a very wide range of genres and styles.

You can better approach true randomness by disabling the “Automix” feature in Spotify settings. Not entirely sure if you then actually get true randomness (Spotify loves being opaque), but I hope it helps with your playlist at least.

I would love if they made some enthusiast options available so we could customize our own Automix and shuffle preferences, but that will never happen…

I would agree if this decision would only affect themselves. But vaccination against infectious diseases works best if the majority is vaccinated. Then you can actually stop it from spreading. Which is important for all those that cannot be vaccinated for legitimate health reasons. Some vaccines are dangerous for specific subsets of the population. And usually it’s the same subset that would be most affected by an actual infection of the diseases we vaccinate against. Small children, pregnant people, any immunocompromised people… Vaccinating is an act of solidarity and community.

It’s interesting how different the quality of schooltime can be, and how perception of said time can differ for school kids as well. I was in a “full day” school starting from age 9 in a country where regular schools end at lunch time. Our school had the same curriculum to go through as every other, but lots more time to do it. The extra time was filled with dedicated self-learn time ( basically to do homework, but you have your classmates around to talk and help each other and can reach out to teachers if you really struggle with something) and elective extracurricular activities. It was mandatory, but you had free choice between all the offers. Teachers had to offer something, and usually offered their personal passion activities/hobbies. This led to these activities being the highlight of every kid’s week, because there was enough variety to choose from to find something you liked. Kinda like club activities in US schools, but much less codified and without competitive objectives. Some examples are photography, pottery, soap box car building, school beautification ( we literally were allowed and encouraged to graffiti/mural the school walls :D ), gardening, natural science ( basically constantly doing fun physics and chemistry experiments without boring theory), electronics etc. . This was intentionally kept separate from sports or music, which also were partially elective: you had to do sports and music, and some basics were mandatory for all, but you could opt for specializations. All this semi-forced mingling served well to prevent the formation of strong clique boundaries, without inhibiting kids from pursuing their talents and passions.

All that had huge advantages. Kids from troubled families had a much easier time of keeping up with everyone else, as help from home was hardly necessary. Lunch was provided by the school. Wasn’t stellar, wasn’t horrible. But it was available to all students for free, and that can be very important to some as well. It took me a long time, often only after visiting school friends for the first time or even after schooltime was over entirely, to realize how crazy rich or poor some of my friends’ families actually were, or what difficulties they sometimes faced at home and that there was a reason we never were invited to visit them. At school, it simply didn’t matter to us. Sure, some wore more brand clothes than others, but nobody thought of using this as a measure of personal quality. Class cohesion also was usually strong. Sure, kids still were assholes and bullies like everywhere else, but it usually got solved internally quickly, because it was harder to keep it up for full days with plenty of “forced” social time, and you ended up being more confronted with the damage and hurt you caused. And in really bad cases the proximity to school made it much easier for teachers to pick up on any developments in their students and classes and react quickly. There also were some mandatory “social skill” classes to teach everyone basic conflict solving and mediating. It was only one or two sessions per year, but I think it actually helped, even if we kids usually scoffed at it at the time. It was very clear the school philosophy was not to push through a curriculum, but to use the extra time to help explore and form personalities that later will hopefully enmesh well in society. And yes, our school had a bit more teaching personnel than other schools to fill all the time slots and extra activities, but we still had 25-35 students per class, it was not some utopian dream.

We kids loved the full day spent at school as well. No homework, and what’s better than spending the entire day with your friends? The school was far from my home, so I left the house at 6:30 and usually got back around 18:00, with about 40min of train commute plus 30min of walking (one way). Only Friday ended at lunch. Still never felt that I was lacking “me” time.

Tl;Dr : It matters a lot how the time at school is used.