So, from what I understand, living things maintain (or at least prior to the industrial revolution did maintain) a predictable ratio of C-14 to C-12. I'm not super familiar with the mechanics of this, I imagine it's a case of the amount of C-14 lost matching the rate it was replaced via respiration.
Once the organism dies, it stops controlling that ratio and we can measure the decay using a sample of the material.
It's not that it breaks down differently (in fact, we rely on it being consistent), it's how much it has broken down. Carbon-14 has a half-life of 5700 +/- 30 years (per Wikipedia), so if you see 1/2 the expected amount of carbon-14 then something would be around 5700 years old, with 1/4 the expected amount you'd predict 11400 years old, etc.
This relies on the amount of carbon-14 originally being predictable. This worked well in the past for living things (which from what I understand tended to maintain a consistent ratio of C-14 to C-12) or objects made from their organic material, but stopped being true around the industrial revolution when we started pumping the atmosphere full of carbon.
We use other isotopes, or other techniques in general, for very recent objects, or for things more than 50-60 thousand years old.
More casual way of saying asexual. Sounds a bit less clinical than the full term.
This series is basically the reason I started reading books. Really great stories, favourite is definitely Mossflower.
Jacques also made an effort to write for the blind and visually impaired -- not just in the sense of having accessible versions of the books available but also in their content. His writing involves a lot of emphasis on sounds and scents and taste, so someone blind from birth could still imagine themselves at a Redwall feast.
I think that overall just made the writing better for everyone.
I tend to agree. They say it's specifically for the game preservation stuff, and maybe that's true. Most companies would create a separate non-profit with its own funding separate for such a thing (not that all those are necessarily great either). I like what GOG does in general and I think it's important they're there, but I don't have any intention of donating to a for-profit business based on the claims that they'll only do game preservation work with the funds.
I'm not spending an era reading through all the terms & conditions, but at a quick glance I can't see anything in the legalese about what they can/can't use GOG Patrons funding for, so it seems like it's just paying the company monthly for a few extra perks and hoping they'll use that cash for something positive.
"It is important, when killing a nun, to ensure that you bring an army of sufficient size. For Sister Thorn of the Sweet Mercy convent Lano Tacsis brought two hundred men."
Good book if you want something a bit like Harry Potter but aimed at a more mature audience and not funding the stripping away of human rights.
Pierre Poilievre, leader of the conservative party and our version of a Trump wannabe.
Last time I bought audiobooks I got them from Downpour which included DRM-free downloads as either MP3 or M4B files, in addition to listening through the website or app. I believe Libro.fm may also offer this. Most of my ebooks are through Kobo and are DRM free as well.
Does depend in some cases on the publisher.
Crypt of the Necrodancer.
Really fun roguelike game where you and enemies have to move to the beat of that floor's song. I think part of the reason I still play it a lot is that it's amenable to very short sessions. I've played enough that runs go fast and I either clear or die within 10 minutes.
Over 1200 hours now almost a decade after release, and a huge chunk of that is probably sessions of under 30 mins in length.
The Founders Trilogy (book 1: Foundryside) by Robert Jackson Bennett uses a system of magic called Scriving wherein objects have written upon them instructions that sort of convince the objects that the laws of physics work in different ways. Over long ages engineers found ways to build engines for scriving that had commonly used instructions and essentially allowed more advanced technologies by creating "programming languages" of a sort, if you will, that work in proximity to the engines. So you get this very advanced society with technology built over this magic system, and a main character whose MacGuffin allows for messing with others' scriving as your setting.
I quite enjoyed the trilogy, and they seem to fit the kind of vibe you're looking for. Over the course of the books they dive a lot into both the way the magic functions and the history behind how it came to be as it is.
After Jones Soda did the six-pack of Thanksgiving dinner themed sodas (including Turkey & Gravy), this kind of thing just doesn't surprise me any more. I guess it's meant as more of a novelty thing than something people would actually use in seriousness.
Japanese to English is pretty tricky, in part because it's more standard in Japanese to fully omit words instead of using a pronoun when something is known from context. A response to "What are you doing with that book?" in English might be "I'm going to return it," but in Japanese you'd just say "Return" (返す。). So a machine translator would probably have to be very good at context to guess right a lot of the time.