It’s either a typo, or a lot or sass for a PopSci article.
“Look at this huge, unparalleled rise in carbon levels millions of years ago, it’s so huge… Psych! We do that every five years! Buckle in, buckaroo, things are about to get bad!”
Wait… Y’all are talking about X-Wing: Rogue Squadron and Star Wars Episode 1: Battle for Naboo, right?
I owned those windows ports!
They worked great back in the day - I had such a blast with them that I begged my parents to get me a shitty Logitech joystick! If you want to check them out, it looks like Rogue Squadron is only $10 on Steam; and Battle for Naboo seems to be abandonware, but it seems to be hosted on a lot of “better spread than dead” game sites.
That makes a lot of sense, actually. I also saw “fully electric” and immediately thought of electric/hybrid/ICE cars, and my brain went straight to “hold up, did I miss the fully functional diesel-powered humanoid robot?”
You’re fine - I grew up in a rural state, and I thought they were super rare until I lived in a city where the public transit system gave them as change.
I feel like I would use it voluntarily if it put the sponsors in the “add a destination” menu. I tend to use Google maps for longer trips, and I try to add any stops on the way to my route so I don’t miss them - if I hit “add destination” and it offered, for example, Citgo stations, 7-11s, and Dunkin Donuts on my route, then I would probably get gas and snacks at sponsored locations almost every time.
As it is, though… Well, just having a Dunks on the way to the laundromat doesn’t make me want to stop in and buy a coffee. Driving by ten of them “randomly” on my way to another state isn’t going to make me any more likely to stop at one.
it’s like building stuff with Legos.
I got Minecraft when it was still in beta, for exactly that reason. I was in college, I had some free time, and I liked messing around with the demo - it reminded me of all of the fun I had playing with Legos as a kid. I think it cost me maybe $15?
Now, a decade later, I still play it fairly often, and given all of the content that’s come out since then, it might be the most worthwhile $15 I’ve ever spent.
Looking at the lines on the inside, maybe duct tape? If it gets hot, it tends to leave adhesive behind; and cleaning that up with the wrong solvent can strip the finish off of your floors.
It’s pretty easy to break water down, but it’s also super easy to make it - just burn anything organic.
Usually you can’t see the water being formed, but there’s actually a really common example: car exhausts on a cold day. If you notice a bit of water dripping out of the tailpipe of the car in front of you at a red light, that’s actually the moisture in the exhaust fumes condensing on the cold tailpipe.
That’s… Actually probably exactly how Star Trek would handle modern Earth. Part of the prime directive is that any species that gets contacted by the Federation has to achieve a certain level of technological and societal advancement first, and we’re close, but I’m pretty sure we’d get put on the “check back in a century” list.
So, if they’re nice aliens and they just watch us for a while and leave, maybe our first contact just got waitlisted?
They also usually use some weasel words like “up to.” That way, if it doesn’t last the full 72 hours (which it won’t), they can claim that they stated “72 hours MAXIMUM” rather than just “72 hours.” It’s basically shifts the statement from “lasts three days” to “definitely won’t last four days.”