Phones can easily be oriented either way, unlike most laptop and workstation screens.
Majority of views certainly come from people whose eyes are horizontally next to each other and therefore whose field of view has a greater extent in the horizontal rather than vertical direction.
Admittedly I don't understand where the vertical recording fad comes from. Personally I take pictures and photos that are almost exclusively horizontal except in rare cases like taking a picture of a very tall building.
I assume that the vertical recording fad primarily comes from:
1. the people doing the recording being too lazy to rotate their phones, and/or the people doing the recording catering to the lowest common denominator of expecting viewers to be too lazy to rotate their phones;
2. so many "influencer" and related videos these days consisting solely of the narrator's face being right in front of the camera, which makes for vertical being the optimal orientation, due to the human face being taller than it is wide (hence the term "portrait orientation"!).
I also hate it, and I also still shoot almost all my photos and videos in horizontal / landscape orientation. I guess that makes me old.
Well, I used to want to do photos/videos in landscape mode. Until I learnt the hard way that orientation detection is not very reliable on (at least the older) iPhones. Had my share of "come on, turn 90 degrees you useless thing" moments, until I gave up completely on wanting to reorient my phone. Since then, it has stayed in portray mode forever.
I can't easily re-orient my phone when I'm laying (my main use circumstance) because then I have to hold it above my stomach awkwardly. Gets worse when it's charging. Can't put it because I'm fat enough for screen to "dive" and become obstructed. Vertical mode has no such issue.
When I'm sitting, holding vertical feels natural, holding horizontal feels awkward again. I can put my hand on a lap and basically rest in vertical. High risk of dropping it in horizontal (and while rotating). Same for walking.
I don't really see how you can do it "easily" apart from purely geometric considerations. I can rotate my PC display more easily cause it's arm-mounted (which is one of the PC life changers).
where the vertical recording fad comes from
Most popular content today is "person focus". People are vertical.
When you're taking a self-portrait it's easier to hold a phone vertically one-handed, your self image fits the screen better, and your followers are going to view it in portrait mode on TikTok anyway.
When you go yo take a selfie of something other than your face, you just keep the habit.
For social media, vertical pictures and videos is preferred. Instagram adds some borders around your media if it's in landscape mode, same with TikTok, so the idea is to use vertical recording to not have added black bars around your media.
The US has extended the protection of the law to the law-abiding Irish, Italians, Germans, Russians, Jews, East Asians, Indians, and Latinos freeing them up to flourish and build human capital. By contrast, the same state has not only failed to do so for the Black community, but its agents have engaged in extrajudicial killings of the community's members with impunity since they lost their legal "protection" as someone else's private property.
Community under assault will redirect its private efforts to security which then undermines cultural and economic development and slows down formation of human capital. That's because security needs are fundamental and trump cultural and economic development [1].
Regarding Indian Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims, I disagree they are indistinguishable for outsiders. Typically, anybody who cares can tell by the name, place where they live, or even just the job they do.
> Regarding Indian Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims, I disagree they are indistinguishable for outsiders. Typically, anybody who cares can tell by the name, place where they live, or even just the job they do.
It is only recently that some white Brits may have started clueing on to this. While these trends were emerging, this was definitely not the case.
And even now, it very often is not the case. To give an example, plenty of Brits from Pakistani muslim backgrounds have names and surnames that <1% of white Brits could place as being of that background. This isn't rare at all, unlike e.g. Arab names that indeed most can tell apart.
It's most significant, though, that you even say "Brits from Pakistani muslim backgrounds". No one says "French from Algerian muslim backgrounds". A French person with an Algerian background can only be a descendant of one of the million or so ethnic French who colonized Algeria, and is in no case a Muslim. The UK is far ahead of the continent in terms of integration, and the US is light years ahead of that.
Well, the may have understood the concept of "running out of stuff" and yet not realize it naturally belongs with numbers (of which they would have known other examples like one and two). I can imagine ancient folks putting the notion of "running out of stuff" with ideas such as "hungry", "empty", "dead" etc. Formation of the more abstract concept of zero-the-number is certainly a few cognitive experiences further down a line.
The perspective of modern computer science (with its zero-based indexing etc) or modern algebra (with its need for neutral element for addition) certainly makes it clear that zero is just another integer. However, without those perspectives I doubt it is so obvious.
For example, people normally count things by starting from one, so, at least following this usual procedure, counting to zero is technically speaking impossible. Also, we can't distinguish between zero apples and zero oranges, but we can tell two apples and two oranges apart.
In fact, even with the perspective of modern algebra zero remains special. For example, it is the only element of a field without a multiplicative inverse.
I'd be surprised if zero didn't take any extra effort to discover. It's clearly different than other integers.
The OP said "There's more time between the last Stegosaurus and the first T-Rex" which computes to 145-72 = 73 and "then (sic) there is between the last T-Rex and us right now." which computes to 66-0=66. Note that 7 million years is about 10% of the timescales involved, so perhaps not something to be dismissed as "scientific error".
Haha. This is the most secure part. When you start compiling, rust will happily download random "crates" and include them in your program, because "dependencies".
Technical detail: Having crossed all meridians is generally not considered the proper criterion for circumnavigation since this is trivially done near the poles. The definition I have come across include a loop that partitions Earth's surface into two parts of comparable area.
Any two non-zero areas are comparable, but I don't think 1:10000000 will satisfy the definition. It is necessary to establish an acceptable ratio. 1:6 or something like that?
Looks good to me as a rough back-of-the-envelope calculation to get the orders of magnitude right (the speed will go down as the object is climbing out of Sun's gravity well).
However, you're still missing a guesstimate for alien lifespan. Do you have reasons to believe they live shorter than 33552 Earth years?
Also, is 38 km/s really the top speed for hypothetical interstellar ship?
I imagine aliens that live on average 870 Earth years (~10x average lifespan of a female Japanese) and travel at 9,000 km/s. They can easily make Sun-Proxima Centauri trip six times in a lifetime.
It seems to me that "the universe" is not an appropriate term for our close planetary neighborhood.
There is a difference between an interstellar object passing within 85 times the distance to the Moon (so closer than Mars at closest approach to Earth) and say a supernova thousands or millions of light years away (and hence thousands or millions of years ago).
I don't know where the universe begins, but I'd say Low Earth Orbit and the Moon don't qualify while Proxima Centauri does. For reference:
Distance from ground to space: ~100 km
Distance from California to Australia: ~12,000 km
Distance to the Moon: ~400,000 km
Distance to 'Oumuamua's closest approach: ~33,000,000 km
Distance to Mars at closest approach: ~55,000,000 km
Distance to the Sun: ~150,000,000 km
Distance to Neptune: ~4,500,000,000 km
Current distance to 'Oumuamua ~5,000,000,000 km
Distance to Sedna: ~13,000,000,000 km
Distance to Proxima Centauri: ~40,000,000,000,000 km
There are still plenty of other possibile curiosities than interstellar rocks in closer proximity than Proxima Centauri. Each would require highly specialized instruments.
Not sure what the window of opportunity was for O6a, but it's doubtful that it would have been possible to prepare a mission in that timeframe. It follows that such "spaceships" would need to be prepared ahead of time and maintained indefinitely for an event which may not occur again for centuries ...
Aliens might not actually be land-based creatures like us. Those who evolved on planets entirely covered by liquid (water or otherwise) might even find the idea of "land" fairly strange.
(It's actually quite interesting to ponder the stages of discovery that liquid-based intelligent aliens might go through. First they might discover air (and land if available) and only after that space as another outer layer. I suppose that adds extra thrill we didn't have. Supposing of course that conditions there allow gas and liquid to exist as separate phases. Planets above criticality would probably be weirder still? Would any bottom rocks under the supercritical fluid still count as land - as opposed to "sea floor"?)
It's hard to evolve technology in water or even a moist environment. Even using fire or metallurgy is already difficult, let alone anything to do with electricity.
Majority of views certainly come from people whose eyes are horizontally next to each other and therefore whose field of view has a greater extent in the horizontal rather than vertical direction.
Admittedly I don't understand where the vertical recording fad comes from. Personally I take pictures and photos that are almost exclusively horizontal except in rare cases like taking a picture of a very tall building.