Skua

While they probably shouldn’t actually put it on the article themselves, they can submit it to Wikimedia Commons or even just post it somewhere public under a creative commons licence

This must never be changed

I assume not, but primarily because I would expect the actual scientists and/or Oxford to make a bigger deal out of that if they had achieved it

The actual paper is beyond my level of physics knowledge, but Oxford uni published an article about it themselves which looks far better to me. No clickbait headline and it explains the significance of the achievement far better

https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2025-02-06-first-distributed-quantum-algorithm-brings-quantum-supercomputers-closer

First distributed quantum algorithm brings quantum supercomputers closer

I do not know the actual answer to this, but I can definitely see a potential causal link between “shitty to no QA” and battery fires

What I’m taking from this is that if we had invented Western musical notation in 2016 we would undoubtably have used 🅱for everything

As I understand it, yes. The b rotundum and b quadratum. I actually have no idea where the natural sign comes from though, now that I think about it

I really dislike that German system, but for those that want an explanation:

Traditional European music theory evolved towards using sets of seven notes out of twelve in an octave. We eventually labelled those notes A through to G. Originally A was the lowest note available in common notation and we built our instruments accordingly (see the lowest and highest note on most pianos even today), but we then take a particular liking to the scale that starts on C using this system.

Even though this worked really well most of the time, in each seven note scale there was one standard combination that was pretty harsh (the diminished chord, such as the B chord in C major). To get around this, people just kind of accepted that B could be in two different places - the usual position if that sounded better, the flattened one (one twelfth of the octave lower) if that worked better. The system of sharps and flats wasn’t standard yet - nor was the modern staff system at all, for that matter - and it was only really this note that it mattered for most of the time, so the solution was to write the letter B in two different ways depending on which one you meant. There was a round B and a square B.

And then Germany gets really good at making printing presses. This is very useful for spreading copies of musical notation, but it does present a problem: your press probably doesn’t have two ways to write the letter B. So what do you do instead? Use another letter for one of them. H is the eighth letter, and it even looks kinda like the square B anyway, so that becomes the standard practice.

One fun quirk of this is that it permitted Johann Sebastian Bach to write his last name in musical form, which he went on to do in a whole bunch of his compositions

I think you’ve misunderstood me a bit. English is the official language of Nigeria. One of the reasons it’s the official language was that it was seen as neutral within Nigeria because it wasn’t any group’s first language. Or it was at the time, anyway. That was an entire human lifetime ago now, so it’s quite possible that things have changed a bit since then.

I don’t think this image accounts for second languages (otherwise Hindi would be twice as big), and as I understand it the reason that English is the official languae of Nigeria even as an independent country is so as not to give anyone’s first language priority over any other

Each column represents the total military spend of the world’s countries in that year. Each column is further broken into what separate parts spent that year, the categories for those parts being America, Russia/USSR, China, NATO except America, and the rest of the world.

So to pick some examples out, we can see Soviet expenditure (the bright red section of each column) crash enormously when the country fell apart in 1991. Post-Soviet Russia hardly spent anything by comparison, so the red section of each column got really small all of a sudden. This combined with the reduction in American expenditure (the pale blue section) in the 90s resulted in a low total spend for the world (the total height of each stack), even though the spending of every other country outside of those two stayed fairly constant (the pink for China, dark blue for non-USA NATO, and grey for everyone else).

I chose Amazon and a bag design as the example specifically because it’s a real story (although not a rucksack, I misremembered that part)

Potential revenue isn’t, but intellectual property is. At least in most current legal systems, it is

I don’t think that that’s necessarily true. Let’s say someone designs a rucksack because they find the existing options on the market uncomfortable. They produce them on a small scale and they get fairly popular. Then Amazon sees it, copies it, mass produces it for less than the original designer could, and makes sure that any time someone searches for a rucksack on Amazon their version appears first in the list. I think it’s reasonable to say that the original designer lost something there

That doesn’t mean copyright can’t be or isn’t abused, of course

“Firefox Power User Keeps 7,400+ Browser Tabs Open for 2 Years”

Somehow, not an Onion article

yes, if I could do maths

strings are in base two, got it