at_a_remove

A few bits:

1) I think only a few of his plays are really at the level for high-schoolers, so you're not entirely wrong.

2) When I was a private tutor, I had a methodology for teaching these plays, which was a little vocabulary first for a scene, then reading it out loud. It has to be out loud. I usually had extra copies and you bet I would grab a parent and have them do a third part.

I would read in meter and with the appropriate tone, do all of facial expressions, mime any relevant action, and generally ham it up. I would typically pick the most difficult part. After each scene, we'd talk about it, the culture and history of the time, and so forth.

You are not to blame for not getting into it, it's just on the edge of high school appropriate and tends to be taught poorly.

I mean, that's well and good but I bought it because that kind of thing deserves at least some sort of compensation for the work.

Ah, the endless mysteries of git. People say, "It's so simple once you understand the base model." And yet there are these inevitable buts. And somehow, people keep arguing over how to use it, what is the Correct Way. If it were that simple, the One True methodology would be obvious, yet the disagreements continue. Then I ask dumb questions about merging and have yet to hear how the magic happens, just very circular "merging ... merges" answers.

One day I hope to have a positive and comprehensible experience involving git and perhaps even git and another programmer, but that might be too much to ask.

Lupus is kind of lousy for the punchy scientific format because it has as a nickname "The Great Imitator." (Note that the porphyrias are known as the "little imitator.") Because of this somewhat Protean nature, lupus can masquerade as quite a lot of things, leading it to be a casual element one would have to bring up and then eliminate in episode after episode. Thus, for screenwriting reasons, it needs a kind of general dismissal which would stick in the mind of viewers ...

People talk of her acting, which was fine and good, but I think her largest achievement was Fairytale Theater, Nightmare Classics (only four, but a quite good adaptation of "Carmilla" was in the lot), and so forth. She executive produced four of these series, putting together quite a lot of talent in one place. The IMDB credits for some of these episodes are amazing.

I have not one but two safes I've inherited which I ought to get opened. My thinking is that both safes would not be empty, as you can store as much emptiness as you like in a single safe.

I should figure out where to begin, do I bring the safes to the locksmiths, how are the safes disposed of, et al? It should be interesting.

This has been in my "to buy" for a while. I am decent with ffmpeg but I could always learn more.

I knew a guy who worked at Microsoft and was sending me NT 5 (later called Windows 2000) alphas to try out. Even then, the goal was to have an electric bill, a gas bill, and a "Bill" bill.

The first half of the sentence ("women in STEM") is meant to reflect on the confounding approach to the person mentioned in the second half of the sentence, a woman in STEM. First half "YAY GIRL POWER GO!," second half is that same bunch of people, presumably the Twitterati in question, being down on an opinion held by a woman in STEM who, well, the Nobel Prize is pretty good as a confirmation that you are STEMming very hard, when what they ought to be doing is, "Hey, we were just talking about women in STEM, maybe we should not reflexively criticize the very model of the person we were praising when she has an opinion which might be new or troublesome to us."

I've witnessed more than a little of this. I worked in a university, in a library (though not as a librarian), and realized that everyone at a certain level or above in administration Came From Money. While "has a house in another country" is not subtle, "father was on an Everest expedition" is. Once I began noticing this soft ceiling I could not help but see it everywhere in the university. Meritoriousness was not on the menu and it took me entirely too long to "get" that I was locked out of promotion and that it was just a way to keep me dancing like a little dog standing up for a treat.

The "bundle of tradeoffs," which is a more humane and human way of thinking, is at odds with the "cog in the machine" approach which began with interchangeable machined parts and progressed on to the human element. Being replaceable then becomes a prized characteristic. Indeed, one of the administrative staff suggested that anyone who seemed like they were too valuable to replace ought to be let go on those grounds alone. It's a recipe for a kind of predictable mediocrity.

Business loves predictable mediocrity, and we see it in various forms of intellectual property. Why sell a copy of Office for unlimited use when you can charge monthly and predict out your next few quarters? Own a movie? No, rent. And as academic institutions continue their transformation into administratively bloated credential assembly lines, we will see more business-y strategies worm their way in.

Nope. You know that erectile tissue? Well, it's not just in the penis, it's also in the nose as well. Hence the stuffy nose. It's not allergies, it's the same sort of tissue having the same response.

That "pump" in your nose you may feel just prior to a good sneeze? That's those tissues swelling with blood.

What is needed is a combination of practices: widespread adoption of <main> and <nav> tags, but also for search engines to see and respect these. How many times have you searched for some technical issue plus, say, PHP ... only to find that the PHP is really just a word in a set of "related" links, autogenerated by whatever the site is? Were that in a <nav> and that respected by the search engine ...

Until then, skip links aren't the worst idea.

I have been having thoughts, wild and incoherent, about the evolution of a given programming language. What does it take to survive and thrive? I might describe my programming career as being kind of a refugee: on the web, I moved from plain .asp to Perl, fled Perl for Python ...

At the start, a language needs the ability to evolve. I recall reading a book on Python before I adopted it, a book which was so off-putting that I ended up delaying my attempts to use Python, and it went on about Python's philosophy when it came to division. I knew that, at some point, Python would have to change away from integer division by default. And it eventually did. It was a mistake because it was non-obvious, and the language changed to fix it. Good.

Now, though, all kinds of things have crept into Python which are decidedly non-Pythonic: the walrus operator, which looks like something that escaped from a Perl dungeon; the docopt module, which has a weird trap of it being a module you must know about, but only if someone has decided to use it; the utter shambles which is the whole environment and library packaging "let entirely too many ways to do it exist;" or the community's preference for Requests while it somehow has yet to be co-opted into the standard library. I am sure I have gored someone's ox here.

Perhaps a language needs a certain window before it is finally frozen in place. Or a more stringent, forceful mandate than the Zen of Python, which I think has been Not Enough. In a way, I am reminded of the Agile Manifesto, which was well-intentioned but had no enforcement, no orthodoxy; it lacked teeth to nip at the heels of those who fail, who go astray. Originally, I had considered that the Network Effect as a way to freeze things, but it seems to only work on protocols and less so on languages.

I sometimes think our chosen vocabulary for cancer is a bit self-defeating. I am sure oncologists have a more nuanced view than mine, but there's three big components which stick out to me. First, where did the cancer start (organ is good, tissue specific is even better)? Second, what mutations were involved? Third, where has it gone from there? All three give a more complete picture than just the point of origin.

I am trying not to be reactionary but I swear, my usual response to the announcement of a new Windows feature is often "... and how do I turn that off?"

Still, sqlite ... tempting. Sometimes, if I am missing something I read months or even years ago, the right query to the sqlite files Firefox keeps can give good results.

I think you are dead on. I recall -- perhaps incorrectly -- that Gibson has been just silly amounts of incorrect on some things, but SpinRite itself, I've never heard anything but "... and then everything worked like a minor miracle." And you're correct, Gibson has a certain, uh, Wolfram-y habit of selling himself whenever possible, which doesn't help matters, but I hope people can manage to separate the personality from the product.

"We do not like annoying cousins." Yes, exactly. The, uh, confident fluency of LLM responses, which can at the same time contradict what was said earlier, reminded me exactly of that. I don't know if you've ever met one of those glib psychopaths, but they have this characteristic of non-content communication, where it feels like words are being arranged for you, like someone composing a song using words from a language they do not know. See also: "you're talking a lot, but you're not saying anything."

Part of the consideration is that I would eventually like to get into the music sharing scene (I have fought this for a very very long time) and there's considerations of which tools and which source of metadata complicating my decisions. Which is the "preferred" among which group?

Beets sounds like it should be part of the mix, but so does MusicBrainz Picard.

Why not? Because you won't know what of your strategies is outmoded by something new because that group is not publishing their strategy, which is like yours but on steroids, either.

And then everything regresses to the Dark Forest game theory.

Thank you for this. I am trying to figure out what it is I want to do with my collection.

EAC doesn't seem like it would have anything set up for an autoloader like the Nimbie, but dbpoweramp does; on the other hand, the major music-sharing groups seem to prefer EAC.

Sadly, there's nothing out there that will be relatively accurate and precise when it comes to extracting beats per minute, key, and the nebulous "energy" characteristics. I would love to have those.

I think I will also have to work to do things like pushing lyrics and artwork into the FLACs, seeing what metadata "makes it" in the re-encoding to something like a 320kbps MP3.

Sloth stool ceiling.

I suppose that means I have to learn it now. I'm about half-joking: I've deliberately sought to limit myself to tech further on in the hype cycle.

I think that it probably goes like: 0/0, 30/0, 0/25, 30/25, 0/50, 30/50, 0/75, so that one in emptying into the other fast enough to avoid overslothing, assuming 5% goes to making the sloth fatter. This allows for a minimum "neither tummy nor turd" 20% sloth floor value.

If that were increased, we would instead see a series with smaller and smaller non-zero values for fullness as we approach maximum sloth fecalness.

I have one of the classic severe photodermatoses and, well, tough luck for me, I guess. I must take some fairly annoying measures if I wish to avoid pain and disfigurement.

As to the Vitamin D angle, the more I look into it, the more I see that it is a balancing act, and you need other supplements in a particular ratio for it to be more effective.

We did a lot of, uh, unofficial versions of these as Dungeons and Dragons-obsessed tweens and teens, resulting in some slightly maniacal, if ultimately harmless, behavior. Our pitch dark bits involved sneaking out via a window and completing a circuit of the neighborhood, which escalated into taking and leaving items stashed in various places as proof, finally culminating in a "yeah, but can you do it completely naked without being spotted?" set of dares.

Our various forest pellet free-for-alls may have resulted in one of us entering the military in some kind of scouting capacity. My personal stratagem was camouflaging myself by remaining stock still in bizarre positions and orientations, resulting in my profile not being an immediately recognizably human outline from a distance, then getting the drop on someone. Others could cover large amounts of ground without much noise, and so forth.

In retrospect, we ended up getting quite good at that kind of thing, very quickly, and with age I realize that this is probably a large part of the evolutionary history of humanity: skulking, hunting and being hunted, deception, complex strategies for evasion and capture, tracking and being trackless, first against the other animals and then likely against each other. This was likely just built-in, waiting for the right prompts to develop.

I do love me some murder ballads, and not just the Nick Cave album. Murder, Misery, and Then Good Night, the endless covers of "Knoxville Girl" (Rachel Brooke does a great one), Trailer Bride and some early Neko Case ("Make Your Bed").

It's more or less an offshoot for my affection for the "downbeat lyrics, upbeat music" from the thing in the 80s UK music scene, more or less exemplified by The Smiths but taking root elsewhere, like the Canadian "Echo Beach." Something might sound cheerful, even jaunty, then you crack it open for the melancholy inside. A bit like good absinthe: a sweet start and then a bitter finish.

Having searched for and not found a reasonable cheat sheet, I made my own cheat sheet of all of the "gestures," laminated it, set it down for my mother. She still couldn't get it.

I think the gestures are just not a great way to go for the elderly, for a few reasons. First, gestures are not explicit, you have to discover them, be told about them, see them used by someone else. Second (and this one deserves subclassing) is motor control. Finger-tapping speed, for one, declines notably with age. Fine motor control, for the gestures, can also be impaired with age. Third, there's a lack of feedback when using gestures: no haptics, no titles to relay during phone calls, no "you just closed this program by swiping up!"

Oh, I see what you're getting at. Yes, the Q would be flipped. M, though, stays the same.

Sometimes I think the "anti-" prefix has done more harm than good to communicate what's going, like the choice of assigning "negative" to electrons.

Not necessarily. You could load up one black hole with electrons and the other black hole with anti-protons ... both would have negative charge, -Q ... but the latter would have a much greater mass, since anti-protons are much heavier than electrons, despite having equal charges.

"Antimatter" is really only "anti" in a few respects. First, the lepton or baryon number has the sign flipped. An electron has a positive lepton number; a positron would have a negative lepton number. The charges are also flipped, where applicable (anti-neutrons still have a charge of zero). Isospin is flipped; spin is not. Mass is not, in three ways.

First, if you converted an anti-proton into pure energy (ignoring charge conservation, et al), it is the same energy as you would get out of a proton.

Second, an anti-proton exerts the same gravitational pull as a proton. A world of anti-matter would cause you to fall toward it the same way the Earth would.

Third, a force exerted on an antiproton causes it to accelerate along the same vector as the force, so the inertia is the same as regular matter.

People have theorized, myself included, on what some kind of matter where mass was negative (let's dub it nega-matter) would look like, which is to say that a force pushing it away would contrarily draw it toward you. You can simulate it in particle life, likely, but what would happens is that all of the nega-electrons would feel electrostatic repulsion and therefore clump together, as would all of the nega-protons. These two lumps of enormous charge (we just don't get that in real life, electrostatics are dozens of orders of magnitude more powerful than gravity) would create an "attractive" field between them of nearly incalculable strength and, because they would move opposite to the vector of the force, promptly zoom away at many nines of the speed of light. In short, they would sort themselves out and fly away to distant corners of the universe with great haste.

Well, if you load up a black hole with, say, electrons, it will have an electrical field similar to a point charge -Q, just the way the mass M behaves as a point mass emitting a gravitational field (or distortion in spacetime, take your pick).

Additionally, when you get Hawking radiation into the mix, negatively-charged particles (electrons, muons, tauons ... but probably mostly electrons) would be preferentially emitted, since pair production near the horizon would preferentially eject the negative particle via electrostatic repulsion and just as preferentially recapture the positive member of the pair.

Not that you asked, but the angular momentum looks different than the other two, it actually changes the shape of the event horizon to something more oblate.