Re: The best place to drink is the emptiest bar in the...

One of my biggest culture shocks in moving from Ireland to the Netherlands is around the usage of bars as social spaces.

At home I thought of bars primarily as a place to meet new people. I'd head down about once a week alone, with just my newspaper and a free afternoon, and generally end up chatting with someone about the news until we headed out for dinner together.

Even if I went out with friends I'd always expect to mix with another group or pick up someone who had been alone, then end the night partying further at the house of some strangers.

When I arrived in the NL I had assumed this was a universal thing, but quickly found myself being told off by strangers when I tried starting conversations, as they were "just out for a quiet drink."

This was very alien to me, though I quickly became accustomed to it and no longer go to bars except for drinks with colleagues after work, or when I'm in another city and visit the Irish pub for a sense of the old days that never quite materialises.

After a while I wondered if it was simply that I was getting older, but I recently visited home for the first time since before Covid. I went for a walk while visiting my mother and decided to stop for a quick Guinness while reading my book. I wasn't on the second page when a passing woman stopped to ask me what I was reading. I explained it was in Dutch and we had a whole conversation about her brother working in Amsterdam. I couldn't believe it! These experiences continued for the entire week.

I guess to bring it back to the article, the best bar in town is very culture dependant and can change drastically depending on what you're hoping to get from your visit there.

AlecSchueler, 3 hours ago

Площадь Тверской заставы, 2017. Только-только сделали трамвайное кольцо у Белорусского вокзала. #exomnitram

Re: Physicists discover a new switch for superconducti...

Apparently one of the things that happens when a material transitions into a superconducting state is it stretches (by an infinitesimal amount) in the conducting direction. This stretching is not like usual stretching where there’s a change in the actual structure of the material. Rather, it is the bonds between each atom that stretch - pulling them into a slightly different state, one that happens to let electrons flow completely freely (ie superconducting). This “infinitesimal stretching” is usually caused by magnetic alignment, which is induced by super cold temperatures.

But there are a few odd materials, like iron selenide, that don’t seem to show any kind of magnetic alignment despite being able to become superconducting. That’s where the absolute geniuses behind this paper come in. They took a thread of iron selenide and stuck it to a strip of titanium, then physically stretched the titanium. This induced that “infinitesimal stretching” in the iron selenide sample. By examining the sample with X-rays while artificially inducing the stretch, they could detect the mechanism that would usually be the cause of the stretch. Essentially it is sort of like manually spinning the wheels on a car and watching the engine cycle, in order to understand how vehicles work.

Very clever stuff, and it seems like a real advance in understanding superconductivity. The article doesn’t really go into it, but this does suggest there might be a third axis (“super precise tension”), alongside the usual two of “super low temperature” and “super high pressure”, that we can search along to find new superconductors.

fwlr, 1 day ago

Ну прям уж «любое» декантировать не стала бы, но вот после бочки - вполне. Аналогия про форточку - шикарна

Дружинники на проспекте Славы, начало 1980-х.