I remember 30-ish years ago being in elementary school, when computers in the classroom were still kind of a new idea and we were first being trusted with access to the Internet. They brought one of the computer teachers into our classroom to teach us how to use them since not everyone had a home PC, let alone an Internet connection at the time.

One of the first things they taught us was about search engines. They mentioned the big five or six search engines at the time, which, if I recall, included yahoo, ask Jeeves, Alta Vista, lycos, hotbot, and I feel like there was one more. The school computer’s homepage was set to “yahooligans” which was sort of a kid-friendly yahoo homepage. They may have gone over some of the pros and cons of those different sites, but I don’t really remember what they were.

This was also right around the time that Google was brand-new and rapidly rising in the ranks. They mentioned Google, and I’m pretty sure what they said about it was that it was new, and it had the most search results.

And as a bunch of ~10 year olds, that was pretty much all we needed to hear, we might have given yahoo or ask Jeeves a try if we couldn’t find what we were looking for on Google, but Google was always our first try.

It had an advantage of having a kind of funny, and easy-to-remember name, which yahoo also had. I feel like around that age we also learned about “a googol” being a very large number (1 followed by 100 zeros) so we had that word association of it being very big in our minds.

So for at least one classroom in my elementary school in Pennsylvania, that’s pretty much how it got its hooks in us.

From a broader perspective, Google had a very clean and simple interface. It loaded fast, there wasn’t a lot to distract you, it had that “I’m feeling lucky” button that gave it just enough light-hearted whimsy that it felt friendly and welcoming without feeling like too much of a novelty website. It was basically just a logo, a search bar, a couple buttons, and then some legalese and such at the bottom of the page. Even if you’d never used the Internet before then, if you managed to find your way to www.google.com you could probably figure out how to do a search from there. By comparison, if you went to, for example, Yahoo, you’d be greeted with a ton of other stuff on the homepage.

And, for a long time it was actually a really good search engine. It had a ton of results, and usually managed to put something relevant on the front page. It didn’t have obnoxious flashing ads or anything, and occasionally the “sponsored results” (ads) were even relevant and might have been exactly what you were searching for anyway.

They also had some good buzz about them as a company (and you can certainly argue about how much of that was deserved.) They had the “don’t be evil” thing going for them. You’d hear about the cool perks they had in their offices for their employees. Google seemed to be sort of the good guys of the internet for a while.

And they started branching out from search, and a lot of their other services were also pretty damn solid. There’s a reason that everyone and their mother uses Gmail - it’s free and it works as well or better than any other email provider you had at the time. I remember when I set up my Gmail account 20-ish years ago, my main email account was through Verizon since that was the internet provider my parents had. I feel like I had a lot of problems logging into that account and their website was always a little wonky and difficult to navigate. And at some point I think Verizon actually stopped offering email service and my parents had to migrate to something else anyway (and of course Gmail was the obvious choice)

And then they were big enough that they were an obvious choice to be the default search when that started to be something that was baked into web browsers. And then they even came out with their own browser that, at the time, seemed so much better than whatever else you were probably using at the time. Chrome is kind of a memory hog these days (or was the last time I used it) but I remember when it first came out it felt a lot snappier to me than Firefox or internet explorer did at the time. And again, it really simplified the interface, getting rid of some extraneous toolbars and such that no one really used anyway (and, at the time, websites getting you to install their toolbar or browser extension or whatever was sort of like how today they beg for you to get their app. If you looked at some random person’s browser there was a good chance they had 2 or 3 random extra toolbars installed that were probably full of spyware or outright viruses)

And of course, they have android, the only real competitor to iOS. With all of their stuff baked into it by default, further cementing a lot of people into the Google ecosystem.

I feel like you’re severely underestimating how much and how many ways dogs can be useful dogs can be useful in hunting.

Sure, they can give chase as persistence hunters, like you said

But they’re also useful for tracking, let’s say you shoot a deer, and unfortunately it’s not a clean kill, and it runs off into the woods. You might spend hours, even days trying to find that deer, following tracks and blood trails that may stop in places and be impossible for a human to pick back up, but a scent hound can follow that trail, saving a lot of time and energy .

Or of course just sniffing out an animal in the first place.

They can be retrievers, if you shoot a duck over the water, you now need to find a way to retrieve it from the pond. If you don’t have a boat, that basically leaves swimming out there, and if the weather is cold, that puts you at risk of hypothermia. Many retriever breeds are much better suited to cold water than we are and could swim out to retrieve them with no problem. Or if you shoot something in dense brush they may be better able to retrieve it than you would without having to bushwhack your way to where it went down.

Breeds like beagles are incredibly effective for small game, they can flush them out of hiding spots for their human to shoot, or to tree game

And dogs can be used to great effect driving deer, flushing them and chasing them towards the hunters. This was actually so effective that some places have laws on the books that you can’t use dogs to hunt deer because back in the days when commercial hunting was more of a thing, it drove some deer populations to near extinction.

For some dangerous game like boar and feral swine, their role might be more to catch and hold the animal for the hunter to dispatch safely.

And that’s not to mention the value they can have for herding and guarding livestock, especially if you’re otherwise trying to go it alone or with only a small group of people, because you’re likely going to have other tasks to see to besides just constantly watching over them. To some extent, donkeys can fill a livestock guardian role, but if you need to round up a flock of sheep, they’re not going to be much help with that.

In any of those cases, they’re not necessarily generating value on their own, but they can significantly improve how productive you can be with minimal effort on your part.

As for barking, that’s a mixed bag. Yes, if you’re trying to avoid detection, it can be a detriment. But in other cases it can be a deterrent, making intruders and predators wary of intruding into your territory knowing that there’s a dog around, and it can give you an alert when there is an intruder.

And in some cases and environments, they can be useful as small draft animals, dogs can pull small carts and of course sleds.

Not every dog can fill every role of course (although some can certainly fill multiple roles) and they may not make sense for every scenario, but I think they’re worth a lot more consideration than you’re giving them.

First of all, your ideas about an eagle and wolf are pretty far-fetched

Unless you’re raising it from a puppy, at best what you’re realistically gonna find with a wolf is one (or more realistically a pack) that tolerates your presence and doesn’t actively view you as a threat or prey and sort of provides passive security by chasing things out of what it views as its own territory. The amount of time, effort, and resources (giving it food and such) to get much beyond that just isn’t going to be feasible in any kind of apocalypse scenario. If food gets scarce, you, your pets, and your livestock are absolutely going to be on its menu, and it’s probably not gonna be communicating with your dogs in any meaningful way beyond “I’m in heat, wanna fuck?”

Nor is an eagle going to be acting as a scout. You can probably watch its behavior for signs of threats that you didn’t notice, and maybe it will see you and your home as a source of safety and come back to you and refuse to leave if it sees a threat, but it’s not really gonna go out on patrol and actively warn you about what’s out there. They can be useful for hunting, but pretty much anyone who actually does any sort of falconry will tell you that every time they let their bird go, they’re really just hoping that it actually comes back and doesn’t just fuck off and they get to watch as all that time and effort they spent training it fly off into the sunset.

Dogs- absolutely, there’s good reason that we’ve been keeping dogs around since time immemorial.

Malinois is a solid breed, smart, strong, motivated, reasonably healthy and free of major health issues compared to a lot of breeds (like German shepherds,) smaller than some similar breeds so a bit easier to feed, and very trainable if you have the time and know-how. I have one myself, she’s a rare lazy malinois (which still makes her smarter and more energetic than most other dogs you’ve probably ever met) and she’s definitely got very strong herding, guardian, and protection instincts, they can also be serviceable tracking/detection dogs (police and such use them extensively for that,) my girl has even shown some rudimentary pointing instincts, and for not being a breed known for having a soft mouth (quite the opposite) she can be remarkably gentle and has carried some delicate objects around with her without breaking them, so she could do retrieving work as well.

So a pretty solid pick for a do-it-all breed if you can only pick one.

Ideally you probably would have multiple dogs to fill different roles, there’s a reason we have bred so many different types of dogs- livestock guardians, herding dogs, sight hounds, scent hounds, retrievers, etc. they all excel at different things.

And ideally you’d want enough to have stable breeding pools without too much inbreeding. This would be a lot to manage, especially if you’re also trying to train them to be useful, a large pack of untrained dogs is more of a liability than anything.

Your relationship with them is also going to be different than with a normal family pet, most of them aren’t going to be coming inside to sleep in bed with you at night, they’re going to be outside working, and in apocalypse scenario, probably turned loose to forage for themselves since you can’t just go to Walmart for a bag of kibble, and they’re probably going to be bonding more strongly with the other dogs than with you.

Cats are useful for pest control. Again, this isn’t gonna be your spoiled housecat who sleeps on your keyboard all day, this is gonna be more of an outdoor barn cat that probably wants little to nothing to do with you most of the time, but it’s gonna keep rodents and such in check.

Chickens, turkeys, etc. are a solid homesteading option, eggs, meat, feathers you could probably use for pillows, mattresses, insulation in clothing and quilts, possibly for arrow fletching if you have or can make a bow and arrows.

Goats and/or sheep for meat, milk, and wool, smaller and easier to care for than cows, and in many cases will do just fine foraging for food.

Probably worth throwing a couple donkeys in as well. They make decent livestock guardians and can be put to work as pack or draft animals if needed.

Rabbits are also a solid, fairly low-effort meat animal and of course have nice fur.

Beyond that, I can’t think of many other animals that would be particularly useful, desirable, or realistic to keep in a survival situation.

Pumpkin does have some flavor, and it’s a pretty nice one IMO, sort of sweet and earthy

But it’s pretty mild, it doesn’t bring a whole lot to the party compared to a lot of things you might add it to like coffee. It would probably come through a little more in something more mild like oatmeal.

In most grocery stores (at least in the US) carry cans of pumpkin puree (not to be confused with pumpkin pie filling which is usually right next to it on the shelf which has added sugar and spices) if you want to get a sense of what just straight pumpkin tastes like, or mix it into something else (it’s an ok source of fiber and some vitamins, and like I said, it’s tasty, just kind of mild)

FYI Pumpkin spice is pumpkin pie spice.

Most “pumpkin spice” flavored things contain 0 pumpkin. And pumpkin doesn’t exactly have a particularly strong flavor on its own. The flavor people tend to associate with pumpkin are the spices you typically add to pumpkin pie.

And it’s basically just a blend of cinnamon, nutmeg, clove, ginger, and sometimes allspice.

Just kind of flipping that script a little, I work in 911 dispatch, and we get a lot of calls from Spanish speakers.

Sometimes we’re lucky enough to have a Spanish speaking dispatcher on duty, so if they’re not on another call, I can transfer them over, and almost without fail the conversation goes like this

Me (English): 911, where is your emergency?

Caller (broken English): uh… Speak Spanish?

Me (broken Spanglish): ok, let me get you a Spanish speaker, un momento Transfers caller

Spanish Dispatcher (in Spanish): 911 where is your emergency?

Caller: Ok

Spanish Dispatcher: repeats in Spanish

Caller: uh… Speak Spanish?

Spanish Dispatcher (in Spanish): Yes sir (or ma’am,) I’m speaking to you in Spanish, where is your emergency?

Caller: oh! continues in Spanish

I registered Republican to vote in their primaries

It’s gonna be a cold day in hell before I vote for one in the generals

But I’m hopeful that I can try to head off the worst of the crazies in the primaries before it gets to the general

Depending on how we’re defining “seen” I’m betting it’s some guy running a hot dog cart or sweeping up trash or something in a busy intersection like Times Square or Shibuya Crossing

Sure, if you’re a performer like Taylor Swift who’s filling giant stadiums or what-have you, you might see 100k people a night.

But you’ll probably see at least that many people passing by if your job is to stand around in Times Square all day too.

And Taylor probably doesn’t have a gig every night, while the dude with a hot dog cart might actually be out there 8 hours a day, 5 days a week.

And on his days off, there’s a decent chance he’s probably gonna be out and about seeing faces too. He doesn’t have a private shopper to go do his grocery shopping and bring it to his mansion on a few acres of land in some rich neighborhood, he lives somewhere in or near NYC, probably commutes on the subway, seeing untold hundreds of more faces, and honestly probably sees about 100 faces anytime he walks out his front door and walks to the corner store to grab a snack.

You are right, I admit that I’m Americans so I’m used to thinking in football fields and bananas as my units, so grams don’t inherently mean much to my brain. Not sure if Google steered me wrong with the weight of mosquitoes or if I missed a metric prefix or didn’t move a decimal point somewhere. Don’t have time to go back and fix my math right now but I did throw a little disclaimer in my comment. I’ll try to fix that later.

Just kind of thinking this through

EDIT: my math is wrong. I think I didn’t move a decimal point or missed a metric prefix somewhere, don’t have time to go through and correct myself right now, but go ahead and double check that.

A typical beer is around 5%, so about 25x higher than the concentration in your blood if you’re at .2

A Google search tells me a mosquito drinks about .001 to .01 milliliters of blood per meal, let’s just go with the higher number. Just gonna assume the density of blood is close enough to water which is a nice 1:1 conversion, so that’s about .01g of blood.

A mosquito weighs somewhere in the neighborhood of 2-3grams

So after eating, a mosquito has drank about 1/200 to 1/300 of it’s body weight in blood.

Gonna mix units now, sorry science people.

1 pint weighs around 1lb. If you weigh about 200lbs, and have one beer, you’ve drank about that same ratio of beer to your body weight in terms of just how much liquid youve drank.

But again, the concentration of alcohol in a beer is much higher than the concentration in your blood.

So 1 mosquito bite is roughly the same in terms of volume to one beer, but in terms of alcohol content, it would be more like 1/25th of a beer.

So if a mosquito really gorged itself and drank 25x the normal amount of blood at once, it might start feeling a tiny buzz, but that might just be the fact that it’s a mosquito (because they buzz, get it?)

So that’s sort of drinking a whole case of beer but only one of them actually had alcohol.

If you’re a hardcore alcoholic you might be able to double that BAC to about .4%, which is about where most people would be unconscious and possibly have some significant medical complications.

But that would still only get the mosquito to about 2 beers worth of alcohol if they drank way more than they normally would in one meal.

This is all assuming mosquitoes process alcohol similarly to us, things don’t always scale up and down so nicely and mosquitoes are of course different animals than humans, so that could throw things off quite a bit.

You can’t really do it to yourself, but I’ve had really good luck ending other people’s hiccups by offering them $5 if they hiccup again

I’ve read what you’ve linked and plenty of other info about NG911, and like I’ve said multiple times I’m looking forward to the new capabilities it’s going to give us.

I still don’t see how any of it helps with the sorts of things I end up needing to look around on Google maps for.

I am very willing to be proven wrong about that. All you need to do is point out what specific parts of NG911 you think will help, and this conversation will end and I’ll admit I was wrong and you were right and you’re not doing that. Instead you’re just being a miserable asshole while I’m trying to have a conversation with you and understand what you’re trying to say.

So excuse me for matching your energy. I kind of relish the opportunity to be honest, I spend 12 hours a day at work talking to assholes like you who won’t listen to me when I’m trying to tell them how to not fucking die, and needing to be polite and professional to them. It’s pretty damn cathartic to call you out for being a dickhead and I’m not going to apologize for that.

I like my job, I like talking about it so that people understand how it works and how to access the help they need. I can only assume that you hate what you do and that’s why you’re acting this way. Sure, you make more money than me. I don’t give a fuck, my needs are met, I’m happy, and you clearly aren’t. Find a job you want to tell people about and help them understand what it is you do.

So much for

we know what we’re doing because we fucking read.

Guess you don’t actually know what the fuck you’re doing.

And not a damn part of that has anything that would keep me from having to look around on Google maps or something similar trying to match up a vague description of a location that my caller may not even be at to something that I can enter into our system.

For someone so hung up on reading, you’re really fucking bad at comprehend what the issue is that I’m describing.

Sure, I may getter more accurate location info, maybe even good enough to tell what side of the street my caller is on now, but I’m still going to need to figure out what side of the road they were on when an incident actually happened to figure out jurisdiction, because they may have turned around, pulled over 2 blocks away, turned I to a parking lot across the street, or waited 6 hours and went home before calling.

So one way or another I’m going to need to look for landmarks on a map or something like Google street view that my caller will recognize and get them to describe where they were in relation to those landmarks.

And sure they’ll be able send me pictures or video call me to show me where they’re talking about. If it’s live video that combined with location data while they’re still on-scene that would certainly be great, but otherwise I’m still gonna have to be hunting around on a map trying to figure out which of the 6 Sunoco gas stations in town they sent me a picture of.

And they can text me, which is something we’ve had in my county for a while. Great for people who aren’t able to talk for one reason or another, but not exactly a dramatic upgrade over asking the same questions and getting the same answers verbally

PSAP registries, better interoperability with other PSAPs, etc. is nice, but totally besides the issue here. Both sides of the border could be departments we dispatch for and I just need to know which one to send

And better address lists, ALI info, phone records and such are nice, but if they’re not at their home address, they don’t know the name of the business they’re calling about, and all they can give me is that it happened “in the park with a statue that looks like a dick” or “that vacant lot where Bob’s Deli used to be” (Bob’s Deli, as it turns out, burned down in 1983) none of that is particularly helpful.

Again, there are really good use cases for NG911, and I’M not denying that. Every day I find some circumstance where I’d love to have those promised capabilities that are allegedly just around the corner for us.

But none of them solve this problem.

And you’ve been sold on the idea that ng911 is some sort of magical pill that’s going to give every dispatcher $10,000, a pony, and a blowjob while the calls practically handle themselves, and that’s just not the case.

So get your head out of your fucking ass.

You’re a fucking corporation stooge who’s huffing your own farts.

There’s a lot of places where ng911 is going to be very helpful, this isn’t one of them and if you had any actual confidence that it would be helpful I this situation you’d be singing it’s fucking praises explaining how.

Those are the vibes you’re giving now. How about you actually try to explain how NG911 is gonna help with those scenarios I gave, because I don’t see any way the technologies involved that I’ve been told about are going to save me from having to manually look around on Google maps (or similar kind of service) to figure out where I need to enter a call.

Sure, I suppose they’ll be able to send me a picture or a video, instead of trying to describe it to me, but I’m still going to need to match that up to the real world somehow.

And sure, maybe our location data will be a bit better, but if they’re driving 5 minutes before pulling over to call, that location data won’t tell me what side of the road they were on when the accident actually happened.

I really don’t see how NG911 is going to help when all my callers can tell me sometimes is something like that they’re near some trees, a big rock, and a brick wall. That’s not exactly something I can punch into my CAD. Or when it’s a 3rd party caller for their grandmother in a different town who needs help, but all they can give me is that it’s a big yellow house about 2 blocks from the elementary school with a statue of a cow on the front lawn.

There’s a lot of cool things that NG911 can help with, some of it is already implemented in my county, but they’re largely not the things I use Google maps for.

I work in 911 dispatch, we’re not really supposed to log into our personal accounts on the work computers, there have been a couple incidents (not specifically in the 911 center but other parts of our county government) where people have gotten viruses and such from opening links in their personal emails on county computers.

A lot of us in dispatch make pretty heavy use of Google maps. When a caller doesn’t know where they are and we’re not getting a good location from their cellphone, we can sometimes see a lot of details on Google maps that we can’t see on the maps on our dispatch software.

There have been a couple times a caller has described a house to me and a general area that it was in but not the exact address, but I was able to get that address from looking around on satellite view and street view.

Sometimes we can see businesses and other places on it that aren’t in our system or come up as something slightly different, like maybe everyone calls a school “the Smith School,” but the actual name of it, and how it’s listed in our system is the “John Q Smith Preparatory Academy” so if I search in our system for “Smith School” I won’t find it, but if I look on Google maps I might see that pop up.

There’s cases where like if the call is on the border between 2 towns and I need know which department to dispatch, I can look on maps for little landmarks that probably wouldn’t be listed in any map software so that I can ask something like “are you on the same side of the road as the house with a big statue on the front lawn, or are you across the street from that house?”

Point is, it’s a very valuable tool for my job in situations that can actually be life-and-death sometimes, and since I can’t log in to it at work, I worry about getting shut out from features I use or even out of the service entirely.

There are 3 naturally occuring types of carbon, called isotopes, ¹²C, ¹³C, and ¹⁴C. These are all basically the same except for the number of neutrons in the nucleus of the atom. Living things can use all 3 types to build sugars and proteins and all those other organic molecules needed for life. Animals get it from the food they eat, plants get it from the air. These 3 isotopes all exist in nature in a pretty consistent ratio

¹⁴C, however, is unstable (radioactive) and over time decays into more stable elements.

But it also is constantly getting replenished from cosmic rays interacting with other gases in the atmosphere to in the atmosphere, so as long as something is alive the ratio of carbon 14 in that plant or animal to the other types of carbon stays pretty consistent.

But once it dies, it’s not taking any new carbon in, so what was there when it died is all it’s ever going to have until it decomposes away entirely or gets eaten by scavengers or whatever. The ¹²C and ¹³C are basically going to stay put, while the ¹⁴C slowly decays.

So to date something you just need to look at the ratio of the different types of carbon and you can figure out how old it is.

Let’s say ¹⁴C has a half life (the time it takes for half of it to decay) of 1 year (its actually something like 5 or 6 thousand years but this makes the math easy with smaller, easier to digest numbers)

And let’s say the ratio is 1:1, ¹²C+¹³C to ¹⁴C (again, it’s more like 1% carbon 14 IRL)

So after a year, half of the ¹⁴C will be gone, and the ratio will be 2:1

After another year half of that remaining ¹⁴C will be gone and it’ll be a 4:1 ratio, another year and it’s 8:1, etc.

This of course has limitations. After a long enough time basically all of the carbon 14 will be gone and you can’t really date things that way anymore. I think the limit is something like 50,000 years.

It’s also only really useful for plants, animals, and stuff made from them (leather, textiles, the straw in mud brick buildings, food, etc.)

So not really useful for dating rocks from a few billion years ago like we would need to date remnants of Theia.

There’s also a few things that can cause more ¹⁴C to form than normal, humans caused one with our nuclear testing, there was another event around the 8th century that we’ve discovered from measuring the carbon 14 in tree rings from that time that we think may have been caused by a supernova sending more cosmic rays our way than usual. So those events also need to be accounted for.

But there’s other similar techniques using elements with longer half lives that we can use to date older or inorganic materials.

For example uranium-lead dating. When the mineral Zircon forms, it tends to include uranium but exclude lead. But over time uranium decays into lead, so if you have a sample of zircon, you can measure how much lead is in it and figure out how long ago it must have formed because that lead must have once been uranium that has decayed at a steady pace over the centuries.

So we can use methods like that to determine when certain rocks formed.

We know pretty well what the earth and moon are made of (X% silica, Y% Iron, Z% aluminum, etc. with certain amounts of different isotopes) so if we were to find some deposit of minerals that deviates a lot from what you’d find elsewhere on earth or the moon, it’s pretty safe to say that that material might have originated elsewhere, like on theia.

I’m not really a jewelry-wearer, and certainly not an expensive jewelry wearer

That said, I think it’s kind of fun. If I were the kind of person to wear jewelry, I might consider this. I’m a pretty hands-on, DIYer type of guy, I find myself fucking around with hose clamps pretty often, and hell, I might even say I have a bit of affection for them, I’ve solved a lot of problems with them.

That price seems steep to me, but I feel that way about most jewelry. I don’t know what material it’s made out of or how big it is, maybe that’s a fair price for how much silver or whatever is in it, maybe it’s horribly inflated.