I have a Kenmore 80 Series washer and dryer set. There’s a knob on the control panels to turn the buzzer off. It runs until it’s finished. There is no lid lock, the washer is top-loading. The drum brake is a bit loud these days, should probably look into that. And it’s probably about time to clean out the dryer’s vent, the dull men’s club will enjoy that.

Pledged a frat.

GNU is the sound a man makes when you force his epiglottis open with a socket wrench.

As the name of open source projects go, Lemmy isn’t the biggest dumpster fire I’ve come across. It’s clear how to pronounce it, at least.

Go ahead and give that a try.

That British guy, Jack “That guy who fought World War 2 with a claymore and bagpipes” Churchill, was also an early pioneer of surfing.

There’s a LOT of e. coli up your ass.

Put more delicately, you are a great big multicellular eukaryote, each of your cells has (or had, in the case of red blood cells) an inner chamber called the nucleus, and you’re full of mitochondria and other organelles. Your body is covered and filled with other organisms, many of them simple, tiny little single cell prokaryotes which make a living helping their gigantic, complicated host function. Like all the bacteria in your intestines that help you digest food. Their cells outnumber yours by a wide margin.

So, here’s a lesson from the flight physiology chapter of the private pilot syllabus:

Your vision is a lot worse than you think it is. You probably conceptualize your eye as similar to a digital camera, there’s a lens that focuses light on a sensor made up of an array of light sensitive cells, and that the edge of that array is as densely packed as the center. This is the case for a camera, but not for your eye.

Each of your eyes has over 30 million photoreceptors called rods and cones.

Rod cells come in one variety and are only really good for detecting presence or absence of light. They work well, or can work well, in very dim light, and they form the basis of your night vision. This is why in very dim conditions you might experience your vision in black and white.

Cone cells are less sensitive to light requiring relatively bright light to function, and come in three varieties that respond the strongest to low, middle and high wavelengths of light, what we know as red, green and blue. By comparing the relative intensities of these wavelengths, we can derive color vision. They don’t work well in low light conditions.

The sensor array in the back of your eye that contains these photosensitive cells, called the retina, is sparsely populated toward the edges and doesn’t have very good resolution. Try reading this sentence looking at it through the corner of your eye. It gets denser and denser, and the ratio of cones to rods increases, until you reach a tiny pit in the very center called the fovea.

This is difficult to put into words but unless you’ve been blind since birth you’ll understand what I mean: You use your whole retina to “see.” You use your fovea to “look.” The detailed center of your vision, the spot where you are “looking” is drawn from the fovea through the center of the lens out into the world. When you are looking at something, you are pointing your fovea(s) at it.

There are no rod cells in your fovea, only cones. So you have very high resolution color day vision, but next to no night vision, with your fovea.

This is why things like dim stars in the night sky can be more easily seen with your peripheral vision than your central vision. Your central vision does not have the cells to see well in the dark. It’s not in the anatomy.

We teach this to pilots because distant lights the pilot is using to navigate by, avoiding collisions with obstacles or other aircraft, might be dim enough that the night adjusted eye can’t actually see it with the center vision but can with peripheral vision.

The same chapter teaches about the “hole” through which the optic nerve passes and how that blind spot is capable of hiding something like another airplane from you, which is why you look around and don’t just stare out the windshield. It’s not often a problem because most of the time one eye can see into the other’s blind spot, but it’s useful to know that about your vision.

Each cell will detect some light, undergo a chemical process that fires an adjacent neuron, and then take a very brief moment to reset to be ready to do it again. Each cell is doing this independently, so your eyes don’t have a “frame rate” the way a camera does, but a flickering light begins to look continuous to humans at a rate of about 18 cycles per second and no flicker can be detected somewhere around 40.

Your occipital lobe takes in this choppy inconsistent resolution broken up mess of visual information passed to it via your optic nerves, does some RTX DLSS 4k HDR10 shit to it and outputs the continuous and smooth color 3D picture you consciousness experiences as “vision.”

AND THEN ON TOP OF THAT your brain does optical everything recognition. You can look at millions of different objects - the letters of the alphabet, tools, toys, people, individual people’s faces, leaves, flowers, creatures, stars, planets, moons, your own hands, and recognize what they are with astonishing speed and accuracy.

It’s what scientists call the hellawhack shiznit that happens inside your brizzle.

As an American, I’ll take the Mojave over the Outback any day.

I was picturing Phalanx CWIS. doesn’t take much mampower to run one of those.

1840s, actually. The patent was granted to a Scottish man named Alexander Bain.

First thing’s first, the telegraph. An electric circuit which can be energized or not energized at the push of a button called a telegraph key. At the other end is a solenoid which is spring loaded up, and an electromagnet on the circuit pulls down when the line is energized. Originally this was supposed to cut into paper tape to “print” the morse code message, but telegraphers quickly learned how to hear the letters in the clicks, a good telegrapher just…hears words. So they did away with the tape.

Morse code telegraphs require a single circuit to transmit an on/off keying message, the following aparatus uses five:

If I understand this right, the message would be written on non-conductive paper with conductive ink, and then wound around a cylinder that featured a whole bunch of insulated conductive pins, each kind of forming a “pixel.” A mechanical probe would check each one of those pins in turn, each pin in a row, and then shifting to the next row at the end. if it was conductive it meant there was ink there so click. So it would perform a raster scan. At the other end was paper that was coated with an electrosensitive material that would darken with the application of current, so at each pixel if the conductive ink on the original completed a circuit, current would be applied at that pixel on the copy, producing a low quality probably unusable copy. It was difficult to get them truly in sync plus it would have been hilariously low resolution. But it did somewhat function.

Paint me a picture of what you think that looks like. Here’s my painting: Everybody marches on their capitals, everyone gets gunned down with 30mm cannonfire, the Americans are gunned down holding pistols and rifles everyone else is gunned down holding pitchforks and torches.

Oh I’m all for building safety standards. I’m not willing to deal with legislation that requires adherence to proprietary standards created by for-profit companies that cost hundreds if not thousands of dollars a copy because graft.

and your work can pass inspection

And we get into the red tape that makes it functionally impossible. Fuck everything about it.

I figure it’s not a factor of my age, it’s a factor of the house’s age.

You see some old houses they say something like “This house was built in 1840 by Mister Plutis Astercock for his family” and they mean he knocked some trees over, sawed it into boards and nailed it together with his own hands. Just…right there in town. Down the street from the post office. Try that now and they’ll broadcast your evisceration on PBS. I’m a trained carpenter god dammit there are five families living in houses I built. No, now the only place you’re allowed to build your own house with your own hands is out in the cousinfucks.

I’m in year two of planning to replace the windows, this month it’s been a dying relative and an upcoming dental surgery that’s put it off.

My previous cat Harry had shockingly good English comprehension skills. As I was walking out to the car to go get some fried chicken, Harry was milling around near the front door. Fried chicken was his favorite food. I said to him, “Harry, I’m gonna go get some chicken. If you’re here when I get back I’ll give you some.” He sat his fluffy ass down on the spot and when I got back there he sat.

Another day he was on the far side of the yard. I stuck my head out the door and said “Harry, come here.” And he stood up and started ambling in my direction. I said “Come here quicker.” And he broke into a trot.

I remain unconvinced.

melonade.

I’m looking forward to Matt Groenig’s new show.