I very much doubt that the .io TLD will vanish, too many big companies use it. Seen as non-country TLDs are allowed, I suspect that as soon as the country code goes away an existing registrar will buy it and .io domains will carry on.

I know it's trite to say "calm down Satan", but, calm down Satan. You've captured the spirit of a Fae deal really well.

Well yes, humpback whales reach sexual maturity by around 10 years of age (some much before then it seems). A marine biologist is still practically in it's larval form at that point.

(Yes, yes, I know that wasn't what you meant, but I couldn't help myself)

You've taken an apex predator, evolved for the stresses of the tooth and claw natural world, fulfilled their every need and whim, and now all they have left is choir practice and occasional surprise attacks on unwary feet.

I've seen that image many times before, but not really stopped to think about the details.

• 'Tongue bones' disturbs me. Doubly so when they seem to be shown curving around the inside of the skull. Are they actually bones, or more akin to tendons?

• A woodpeckers tongue appears to be bifurcated at the back. I suppose that makes sense if it curves upwards rather than down the throat, but still; nature is weird.

• 1000G is a lot of force. Even if the brain is padded by the tongue (it's like they're almost licking their own brains), the bulk of the brain is still getting bounced around. I wonder if we can learn anything about mitigating TBIs from them?

That'll be Ophiocordyceps unilateralis. It invades the ant's brain and causes it to leave it's nest and go somewhere better for the fungus then wait to die as the fungus errupts from its head.

If we're talking about nightmare mind control horrors, we shouldn't forget our old friend toxiplasmosis gondii, which infects rodents, then alters their behaviour so they're not afraid of cats, in particular. This leads to the rodent getting eaten so the parasite can infect the cat, which is the only place it can reproduce, before spreading from the cat faeces back into the rodent population. It can also infect humans where there is evidence that it affects behavior too, particularly making males more careless of rules.

Sleep well.

NaevaTheRat? You're not really a rat are you? You're a Drop Bear. This is exactly the sort of thing a Drop Bear would post to entice more ~~victims~~ people to come to Australia.

Seriously though it's a country I'd love to visit one day.

It's not about the $8000, it's about defeating the unionization effort and sending a warning to the other employees.

I suspect he'd didn't have as much to lose by throwing away his 40s as you would. He doesn't sound like the most rational of sorts, so probably didn't have the 'stability and the means" for a good life you mention.

All odd numbers are prime: 1 is prime, 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is experimental error, 11 is prime, and so on, I don't have funding to check all of them, but it suggests an avenue of productive further work.

Once you can get a good reference for one unit ypu can start to use it to determine the others. None of these are going to be perfectly accurate, but they should be good enough for day-to-day use.

I'd start with time. We're going to make a sundial. To do this you need to make a drawing compass and some flat ground with plenty of sun. Find a v-shaped stick, or lash a couple together so you can scribe circles in the ground. Start by making one circle around a well marked centre point, then using the same compass, draw another circle centred on the edge of the first. Draw two more circles where the second crosses the first, and two more where those cross it. You should now have a central circle with the perimeter divided into six segments (this is the same technique for drawing a hexagon inside a circle). Put another stick upright in the centre and you have a sundial with 2 hour segments. You can bisect the lines between each of the points to get 1 hour segments, and if it's big enough, busect again to get 30 minute segments. We'll get shorter time measurements later.

The next unit to find is the meter. A one meter pendulum completes a swing from one side to the other every second. In order to minimise the effect of air resistance, find a heavy, but not too large rock and tie it to the end of a rope. Measure out approximately out meter of rope (measured from the centre of the rock) and tie it to a solid branch. Next is the tedious bit. Set it swinging as the sundial hits one of it's marks and count the number of swings until the sundial hits the next mark. You should get 3600 per hour. If you get too many, lengthen the rope and try again, if you get too few, shorten it. Once you have the right number you have both your meter measure and your one second.

You can get a metric tonne, and thereafter a kilogram, by building a balance weigh beam, and a cube shaped container that is exactly one metre on a side. Attach the container to obe side of the beam, and a second container exactly the same distance away from the pivot on the other side. Add rocks to the second container until it balances with the empty first containor. Now fill the first with cold water. Add more weight to the second until it balances again. The additional weight should be exactly one metric tonne. By careful geometry you could reduce tge size of your first container to make this easier, but keeping it big and then dividing the result minimises measurement errors.

Temperature is harder to measure, but you can build a thermometer with any liquid that changes density with temperature. Even water works, although adding alcohol helps I believe. So, while you're finding the meter, get some fruit and let it ferment. Use the resulting liquid in your thermometer. If you don't have a glass tube, and can't make one, use an opaque one, and float a light reed or similar on the liquid, with the end sticking out of the top. Calibrate it with boiling water for 100c, and, assuming a reasonable climate, wrap it against your body for a goid long while to get 37c. If you have accesd to ice, letting it just melt gives you 0c. Dividing the marks you get like this would involve some careful geometric construction, but should yield a usable thermometer. Converting that to Kelvin, as the SI unit, involves adding 273.16.

The ampere and candela are probably of less use in this situation, and are going to be tricky to measure. By assuming gravity is 9.81m/s^2 and using the kilogram you can derive the Newton. From that you have the Joule, and one Joule per second is one Watt. Assuming you build a generator, you can derive the Ampere from it's older definition relating to the force, in Newtons, between two parallel wires. From there the volt can be derived.

Beyond that, I think you should just hope for rescue!

Thanks for a thought provoking question.

You really shouldn't have something kike SSHD open to the world, that's just an unnecessary atrack surface. Instead, run a VPN on the server (or even one for a network if you have several servers on one subnet), connect to that then ssh to your server. The advantage is that a well setup VPN simply won't respond to an invalid connection, and to an attacker, looks just like the firewall dropping the packet. Wireguard is good for this, and easy to configure. OpenVPN is pretty solid too.