From the paper,

Launching a dart via an atlatl ‘normally’ requires that force is applied by hand to the short arm of a lever, moving the dart at the long arm of the lever […] a downward launch of an atlatl dart may partially hinder or entirely deactivate the biomechanics required for the atlatl to work optimally. […] [Additionally] the atlatl dart’s light weight may result in it more easily rotating in mid-air such that it is no longer perpendicular to the ground.

My guess is that the dart falls out of the launcher fast enough to miss some of the push from the launcher.

No one is saying mountains aren’t real - that’s an example to show the absurdity of denying facts. The person referenced is a “creationist”, and probably doesn’t reference one specific person. The biggest thing with creationists is denying evolution.

Nice! Thanks!

When I researched this previously I concluded that there are two very good options for regular backups: Borg and Restic. These are especially efficient at backing up a diff of what has changed since the last backup. So you get snapshots of your filesystem state at each backup point without using a huge amount of space. You can mount any snapshot as a virtual directory. After the initial backup, incremental backups take a minute or two.

I use Borg, and I back up to cloud storage on Borgbase. I use Vorta as a GUI for Borg. I have Vorta start automatically when I start my window manager, and I have it set up for daily backups. I set up the same thing on my kid’s computer.

I back up my home directory. I have some excluded directories like ~/.cache, and Steam’s data directory. I use Baobab to find large directories that I don’t want backed up.

I use the “exclude caches” option in the Borg “create archive” settings. That automatically excludes Rust target/ directories because they follow the Cache Directory Tagging Specification. Not all programming languages’ tooling follows that spec so I also use directory name pattern excludes. For example I have an exclude pattern for .*/node_modules/.*

I use NixOS, and I keep my system config in a git repo so I don’t need backups for anything outside my home directory.

According to the theory of quantum immortality, everyone gets their own main-character timeline.

Only tangentially related, but if you choose to ignore the portal you can come back later to get Gale. I was in a role-playing mood on my first playthrough. When I encountered a strange portal, and was given only the choices of ignoring it or sticking my hand in I thought, “How about no.”