Absolutely! I'd read LotR many times before I first read it aloud as a bedtime story season and was abashed to find how much I'd been skipping over, mostly parenthetical details of geography and world-building, while hastening in pursuit of the plot, like the holder of a big box of bonbons gorging target than savouring.

Exactly - it's somewhat akin to listening to an album in one sitting vs the songs on shuffle mixed with others; but even moreso.

It wasn't until I had an audiobook version that I "sat through" all the poetry and tree-descriptions, and it was worth it.

Both Voyagers left the ecliptic plane with their final gravitational slingshots (Voyager 1 went north, Voyager 2 went south so only the Canberra radio dishes can communicate with it) so even when Earth is further from them than the sun there's 35 degrees of separation.

Searching for the tech angle... "the police had used a helicopter with a heat-seeking camera, and could see that some of the waste was indeed starting to decompose." - a less exciting but cheaper and more informative option could have been donning overalls and rubber boots and taking a spade and a probe thermometer across it

They'll add a footnote explaining that the term "flight" should be understood as a non-refundable ticket in a transport lottery. Similarly to how most sales of entertainment now are providing you with a revokable license to access it, rather than a reusable copy in your possession.

This is your receipt for your husband. And this is my receipt for your receipt.

We're all in this together, kid.

But unless you have a way of slowing down again you'll never see anything of your destination, just the briefest of flares of light as you sail past. And if you do have a way that involves anything like physics that we recognise, you've brought along a huge rest mass that then got accelerated to near light speed. Probably your civilization needs to be approaching Kardashev Level 2 to pull this off.

The article notes that this data would reveal abortions or miscarriages, and that in some states this information is used as input for criminal prosecution.

Additionally, using implicit hormone levels to adjust the ads that people with menstruations see is uniquely predatory and manipulative. It also serves to "out" trans men when this data can be tied to a profile of someone who as chosen a non-female gender on other online platforms.

Advertising by itself is directly harmful. Its secondary effects on the world are catastrophic. Adding a new layer of "this person is PMSing, let's give them makeup ads because they're feeling insecure" is just evil.

And it starts with the all-too-familiar "Chesterton's Fence" arrogance of the domain expert who sees something done wrong and presumes that this is due to the ignorance or laziness of the doers, only to learn that there are sensible decisions made by sensible people behind it.

Thank you for giving me the phrase "Chesterton's Fence".

Long needed.

If you like the phrase, you should read https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/ to get the full context on what it means.

The only reason that the subsurface rock is cooler than magma is being able to conduct heat through to a cooler surface. When that surface becomes exterminatingly hot and remains so for a while the subsurface will be heating up too. Since the sun is estimated to remain a red giant for about one Gy it will become hotter than the surface.

Perhaps I'd become effortlessly fluent in Aramaic if I had to read enough articles in it, but absent some substantial benefit I'd prefer to keep with standard English.

You would, but it would take a while. Reading slightly different letter forms is more of a matter of hours.