The study of this is called allometry, and if you know the bone lengths of a creature you can generalize the formula to figure out when that animal will change from any one gait to another (like trot, canter, gallop, etc). This was used on Jurassic Park to figure out when the T-Rex would run (although I believe they ended up fudging it for coolness factor).
I think the last time I celebrated any holiday was buying some champagne when Kissinger died.
Also quite a few great books in the public domain. Here is a website that curates, fixes up, and publishes free copies of classic public domain literature: https://standardebooks.org/
I’d like to specifically highlight the Swill Milk Scandal also.
The New York Times reported an estimate that in one year, 8,000 infants died from swill milk. The milk from swill-fed cows, produced in dense urban areas and often priced as low as 6 cents per quart, was affordable to most of New York City’s poorest residents. Swill milk dairies were noted for their filthy conditions and overpowering stench both caused by the close confinement of hundreds (sometimes thousands) of cows in narrow stalls where, once farmers tied them, they would stay for the rest of their lives, often standing in their own manure, covered with flies and sores, and suffering from a range of virulent diseases.
Sound familiar?
The Tammany Hall politician Alderman Michael Tuomey, known as “Butcher Mike”, defended the distillers vigorously throughout the scandal—in fact, he was put in charge of the Board of Health investigation… Tuomey assumed a central role in the ensuing investigations and … shielded the dairies and turned the hearings into one-sided exercises designed to make dairy critics and established health authorities look ridiculous.
Sound familiar? However people were so enraged that eventually laws passed regardless, and then finally at the federal level.
Most people don’t know about it, but this was basically THE incident that led to the modern FDA. It keeps coming up too. Recently we’ve had the raw milk fad, but also various melamine adulteration incidents (melamine is used to fool modern protein assays, but is basically the 21st century version of swill milk). There’s also occasional “grass roots” efforts to loosen the regulation on milk labeling, ostensibly for plant based milks, but I am suspicious this is astroturfing by the dairy industry because it’s exactly what they’ve been fighting for since the Pure Food and Drug Act passed.
School dreams are very rare now, and when I have them the “cast” is all people from various adult jobs. I never knew my actual school mates as adults, so I guess my brain just can’t fill it in. If I was actually transported back to high school and saw them again it would probably feel like being surrounded by babies, so makes sense that “central casting” sends in adult stand-ins.
I’m always an adult too. What’s weird is I remember being a child. I remember my body being clumsy and awkward, I remember being confused by adult concepts, I remember being small. It never comes out in childhood dreams, I’m always my present age.
Finally getting a generator. I live in a rural area. Not having a generator was a huge hole in my setup. We also got a wood stove earlier this year for backup heat. I had longer term plans for solar but now it looks like that may be impossible since China makes all the equipment, and it’s already difficult to balance the utility with the expense.
I was forced to take 4 years of Latin and I’ve basically reverted to “Salve Magistra, Italia Peninsula Est” levels. It never clicked with me. Every week was a struggle, I was a terrible student, and I remember jack shit. At best it helped me remember the names of stuff in anatomy class, which was actually interesting. I think the way it was taught is the worst fucking way to learn a language, like most 19th century educational theory.
without any account
Did they make this easier? I have a Sage and I had to open a SQLite database file on the e-reader, then flip some flag, to bypass account sign in. But that was a few years ago.
It’s the Trolley Problem. Many people finding themselves in that problem would say, “Of course I flip the switch, one person is less than five people”.
But if you take a step back it’s reasonable to ask, “WHY did I suddenly find myself in this Trolley Problem? Trolleys don’t spring into existence fully formed like Athena springing from Zeus’ forehead. They are designed and built, piece by piece. The switch was setup by the agency of someone. People were kidnapped and tied down by force. I was placed here on purpose.”
So given that realization it’s also reasonable when told you must choose to say, “Why? You designed this system. You tied the people down. You could have done it differently and instead deliberately did THIS. I had nothing to do with it and I refuse the premise that I must participate in your fucked up game. No matter what happens the blood is on your hands and I refuse to share in your guilt.”
That’s the essential argument. There’s the realpolitik decision to do “less harm”, but you can also reject the fucked up premise.
Not me, but someone I was dating. Her family owned a Chevrolet dealership and she was always driving some kind of lightly used mid-range sedan. Two of them catastrophically failed and one of them would randomly shut off when going over slight bumps. Like going over an expansion joint on a bridge could do a full shut off, no power steering, etc. These were all sub 20k mile cars. She would just get it towed back to the lot and get another one, like a disposable product. The family laughed about ripping off customers. The whole operation was banking off soccer moms buying enormous Suburbans and boomer nostalgia for Corvette. Basically just rent seeking an ancient contract to be the dealer for a large territory. Needless to say I will never buy a Chevy.
Toxic megacolon. Sounds like a metal band.
A soil probe and sample boxes. You use the probe to take what looks like a little core sample and send it off in the box to get a soil analysis from the local university extension (for a nominal fee).
I ran into a guy from high school and it turns out he worked for Microsoft back in the Windows Mobile days. He said that changing even a single button on a submenu would take six months of meetings, and if it involved other departments they would actively sabotage any progress due to the way MS internally made departments compete, so you could basically forget it. He said they literally backdoored software so they could sidestep other departments to get features in.
I think about that a lot.
I agree with this. It’s the artists, not necessarily the “style” itself. Basically the fundamentals of visual language are what’s hard to master, just like writing beautiful poetry requires mastery of a written/spoken language. Artists that have spent the time and put enough thought and practice into creating their own unique voice will be difficult to replicate.
Some modern artists I can think off of the top of my head:
It’s an interesting article, I couldn’t help but think of how “Pirate Speak” really comes from Robert Newton’s acting in a famous Disney movie. So while it predates big tech’s debasement of culture it’s still a “top down” artifact, in a way. I guess you could say it came from a creative decision of an artist (Newton adapting his native accent) and initially caught on for good fun rather than for profit. So far less cynical than the radioactive shit getting pumped out now, if for no other reason than in the 1950s Disney hadn’t figured that shit out yet.
When I was in elementary school I entered the bathroom and some other boy was standing with his back against the wall, facing the urinals, with his pants down and his dick out. When he saw me he said, “No wait! I can make it!”
He then started to piss. He apparently was pissing as forcefully as he could, trying to “make it”. As his stream started it went all over the floor in front of him, then crept up the wall, splashing all over the pipes and the bottom of the urinal. Finally he got, at best, one drop of piss into the urinal at which point his stream retreated and he re-sprayed everything a second time.
“YEAH!” he said. “YEAH!”, in victory. Then he left.
It’s been like forty years and I still remember this. I have five memories from elementary school and this is one of them.
Not a huge fan of snakes. It’s not to phobia levels, but I get a huge adrenaline rush when I see one, even if a fraction of a second later my forebrain identifies it as harmless. I love being in nature, so it’s just something I have to deal with.
I’ve had several rattlesnake encounters and it’s at least one guaranteed nightmare every time. The dream is always the same: I’m standing somewhere at dusk, often barefoot. Under a nearby, low object I see a rattlesnake. Then I see another to the side. Then another behind me. Then I realize they are everywhere.
I really hate ticks, so I appreciate their rodent killing service. But if we never ran into each other again that would suit me fine.
Just spitballing but you’d have to align the desired shape somehow, perhaps with a singular value decomposition. Once its transform was normalized you could compare its shape, or perhaps its convex hull, with a database of banned shapes.
The problem is this is pretty easy to defeat (by adding extra sprues and spikes to the object, breaking it into two shapes, etc) and the more aggressive you get with the check the more you risk false positives.
An AI training set would involve creating a dataset of all the banned shapes, then generating tens of thousands of permutations of them however you believe people might try to trick it. Ultimately the AI would lock onto some small feature of the shape that scores it as positive, perhaps something trivial. That also leads to weird false positives. This also creates an arms race as people figure out what that feature is subvert it.
This problem is much harder in 3D than in 2D (currency). Since you can also cut, file, and glue shit that comes out of a 3D printer later I don’t think this is a solvable problem. Like most gun control measures in the USA it appears to be aesthetics.
You could also just aggressively go false positive all over the place and say “fuck the users”, with exceptions for cops. This is basically the USA’s approach to drones.
It’s annoying when the vacuum system has a small leak so, over that long road trip, the car is always slooooowly losing speed. It’s such a nightmare to diagnose, at least as a DIYer.
In Luke, when Jesus says (again) to love thy neighbor literally the next question someone poses to him is “but who is my neighbor?” Jesus responds with the tale of the Good Samaritan. In this story there is a man, a traveler from a foreign land, who was robbed and beaten and left on the roadside, suffering and ignored by passing strangers (including a priest). The Good Samaritan feeds him, fixes him up, and puts him up at an inn.
There’s two laws… two. The first is to love God, the second is to “go and do likewise” as the Good Samaritan did. I’m a godless commie and I know this shit.
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=luke+10%3A25-37&version=NIV