u/curiousscribbler

The Latin-derived "abomination" doesn't seem like a good translation of Hebrew tow`ebah, which IIUC means "something hated" rather than "something you avoid because it's a bad omen". Curious, I found myself poking around for cognates. The Phoenician equivalent is t'bt, but I haven't been able to find anything similar in Ugaritic with my limited resources. Can anyone point me in the right direction?

My current machine:

Windows 11 25H2 Windows Feature Experience Pack 1000.26100.360.0
Leader NBC-NJ50LU-FHD-I7
Intel® Core™ i7-1065G7 CPU @ 1.30GHz (1.50 GHz)

(Sadly, the details of my 2015 laptop have been lost to time.)

Just checked a literally dusty old external hard drive and found I'd done a Windows Backup onto it, from my then Windows laptop, in 2015. It's 64Gb.

I'd like to be able to see what's in the backup file before I mess with it. I've copied the file onto my current laptop. If I double-click on it, it opens in Windows Backup, but I'm not confident about what's going to happen if I say Yes to restoring the contents. Will I be able to choose what it restores and where? Very grateful for any pointers!

I want to keep working in Libreoffice Writer, but I'd like an app which lets you collect and search all your notes on characters, worldbuilding, etc. Right now I have it all in one Writer file and it is a hell of a mess lol. If I could only cover the walls of the study with those cork noticeboards! Then I could refer to my notes at a glance. Is there a software equivalent?

I'm using Windows 11 Pro and Thunderbird 155.0, and IMAP.

All of a sudden, when I right-click on an email and delete it using the little Trash icon, it disappears for a second and then pops right back again!

I think the emails I right-click delete are being downloaded from the server again, since disconnecting from the Internet prevents them from reappearing -- until I reconnect.

I can delete emails by dragging them to the Trash, thankfully -- it's only the right-click method that isn't working.

I'm trying to think of mythological examples of sisters fighting each other, and I'm coming up blank! Even close female friends would fit the bill. (In myth, sisters tend to be helpers, but there must be some exceptions!)

Edit: All I've come up with so far is Inanna vs Ereshkigal in The Descent of Inanna (not much of a fight really lol), and Ishtar vs Ṣaltu (a sort of clone of Ishtar created by Ea).

Thank you all for your answers to my earlier question about "broken arrows"! I'm reading up on Cold War nuclear testing. I have a cynical bent of mind, and I'm always looking for the real motive behind war -- which is generally money.

The ancients went to war for profit: land, loot, slaves. I wondered what they would make of firebombing cities. That led me to wonder who might have profited from the use of nuclear weapons against Japan; and how the profit motive might have been involved in the subsequent testing of nuclear weapons by the US.

(Obviously the other nuclear powers also engaged in testing; I'm just far more familiar with the US program, at this stage.)

Somewhere I read that the sun's Oort cloud overlaps with Proxima Centauri's Oort cloud. I was wondering if there's also an overlap with other nearby stars. Looking at the table of nearby stars in Wikipedia, I guess the only other possibility would be Bernard's Star. How can I find out the size of Bernard's Star's Oort cloud? (Or Proxima's Oort cloud, for that matter.) Is it just the size of each star's Hill Sphere?

I watched the 2011 documentary Nuclear Savage, about the US deliberately nuking the Marshall Islands so they could study the effects of radiation on humans, with terrible results. The documentary also mentioned the soldiers used as guinea pigs during tests in the US, and the civilians affected by fallout from the tests.

The intentional nuking of the Marshall Islands was characterised by the US as an accident, and in fact the explosion was accidentally far larger than planned. This made me think about the numerous "broken arrow" incidents in the US and around the world in which nuclear bombs were accidentally dropped from US planes, or were involved in plane crashes. To me, it seems miraculous that the US (or anyone else!) never inadvertently nuked itself.

What I'm trying to get a grip on is just how much control the US had over its nuclear weapons during the Cold War. How much of what happened was the result of a careless, gung-ho attitude which treated the Marshall Islanders and even US soldiers and US citizens as expendable? How much was the result of restraint, ethics, and safety protocols? How much was dumb luck?

Sometime in the last week or so, I came across something which amazed me: a functional gene which was "hidden" inside another gene, and could be transcribed (or translated?) via a frame shift of a single nucleotide. The thing is, I don't know where I read or heard it, and I can't find it again! Does anyone know what I'm talking about?

If "life" is "a chemical system capable of evolution through natural selection", then is it possible that some "chemical systems" are better at evolving than others? (Forgive me, this is a half-formed thought!)

I remember as a teen realising who the USS Grissom was named after and being touched. But where did the Mutara Nebula get its name?

Got an unusual use case here...

I've been given the job of refitting my company's encrypted shared folders on their private cloud -- which were created using a custom encfs/OpenSSL-based piece of software developed many years back -- to use quantum-safe keys.

The encfs system used an AES256 symmetric key for all the files in the folder, which was encrypted using the RSA cert of each user which had access to the folder, and all the resulting encrypted key blocks were stored in a config file so each user could decrypt their own copy of the key -- effectively treating the AES256 key as a shared secret.  So far, so old-school.  The question becomes how to replace the RSA encryption certs with quantum-safe ones.

And the big complicating factor is interoperability...  since not every user's certs are going to roll over at the same time time, we need to preserve the existing RSA users' access while allowing new/replacement ML-KEM users to be introduced.

So we're looking at needing a hybrid scheme, capable of supporting an arbitrary number of users, and which needs to maintain the existing underlying AES key.

Now, if I understand correctly, it's considered a bad idea to use ML-KEM to encapsulate an existing shared secret -- to the extent where OpenSSL (which the existing app was built around) provides no direct means of doing so.  So if I can't feed the existing AES-256 key into a fresh encapsulation...  do I need to generate a *second* shared secret for the ML-KEM user, store its encapsulation, and then the user's code must use the second shared secret to encrypt/decrypt the stored first AES-256 key?

Or do I need to create a new shared secret for each user, use a KDF to derive a common key... and presumably replace that key every time we add or remove a user from the shared folder?

Also, is there any sensible way to move from such an arrangement to a purely ML-KEM based system down the line, once the RSA keys have all been replaced?  It will still need to support an arbitrary, varying number of users with access to the shared folder.

Migrating entirely away from their existing software base is not their preferred option at the moment, but if there's an open-source product which provides a simpler quantum-safe end-to-end encryption solution I'm entirely open to hearing about it!

Obviously, there is an extremely good reason it wouldn't work - but I have no idea what it is!

Sometimes when I'm nodding off, I feel a series of tiny explosions happening, in my face, or even inside my face. It's a bit hard to describe. I associate it with falling asleep by accident, or trying (and failing) to stay awake.

It's not a hypnic jerk (for me that's more like a martial arts kick!), and I don't hear anything, so it's not Exploding Head Syndrome.

Any thoughts?

Sometimes when I'm nodding off, I feel a series of tiny explosions happening, in my face, or even inside my face. It's a bit hard to describe. I associate it with falling asleep by accident, or trying (and failing) to stay awake.

It's not a hypnic jerk (for me that's more like a martial arts kick!), and I don't hear anything, so it's not Exploding Head Syndrome.

Any thoughts?

I'm thinking about how the cargo's genetic material would degrade over time. Am I more likely to arrive with viable, healthy organisms if I freeze them at the start, or if I give them an appropriate environment and let them live and reproduce during the trip?

In WWII, mass bombing of civilians became a routine part of war, culminating in the use of the atomic bomb. Was there a particular moment in history when it came into use, or was it gradual?

Edit: Thank you so much to the commenters who address my question! I've learned a lot.

Quick wave to the stragglers posting answers other people have already posted 😆

I caught bits of this black and white movie on TV and I've been hunting it ever since. It isn't Millions Like Us, The Gentle Sex, or Mrs Miniver. What the heck is it?