bjowen

My parents have a cast aluminium one - it’s cracked and older than me but still makes an excellent cup. The only thing that will retire it will be induction cooking!

If you managed to crack the detection problem, you’d still likely be so saturated with solar / background neutrinos as to confound any real prospect of a signal.

Super off-topic but national differences in washing lines vs dryer use are fascinating. In an early attempt to replicate the Japanese line-drying time forecast[0], I looked around for English-language articles about clothes drying, and the predominant advice was to always use a clothes dryer, because line-drying takes too long, encourages mould and mould is deadly and to be feared. Which seemed weird as I’d never owned a dryer.

Props on sticking to your guns for so long with cloth nappies, I know some couples who couldn’t make it work and felt they’d let themselves down.

[0] https://tenki.jp/lite/indexes/cloth_dried/

Sounds like a similar tactic to blaming the Texas blackout on renewable energy. An event that irritates the general public is fertile ground for opportunists to be first to press with something from ideology rather than information.

Oh come on, this story again?

This is great news for physics PhDs and the NIF machine is cool as hell, but it’s research to keep the US’s doomsday devices up to date. This does very little to stave off the other doomsday threat before us and nothing to justify the breathless reportage that it’s getting.

Same and same - although I recall hearing it in 2019 and it felt like an outlier.

Cute. There is already a News Corp doing monopoly stuff and regulatory capture, so that doesn’t seem too far fetched.

There’s probably a PhD length answer that involves the transition from Renaissance to Baroque music, the plagues of the mid 17th century and the Little Ice Age.

Violins have always been identified as being tuned in 5ths to the best of my knowledge, but the features mentioned above helped them out-compete other stringed instruments over a century when the fashion in music favoured those features.

Some of them are - the construction favours better projection over the kind of mellow sound of a viol, the rounded bridge allows for better virtuosic playing rather than chords. Music from the late 16th to the time of Monteverdi had a tradition of florid embellishments (diminutions) which favour a more responsive instrument, like cornetto, recorder or violin. The plague of 1630 in Venice is thought to be a major factor in the decline of the cornetto, so the violin had an opportunity to fill that gap then.

There’s also a change in the theory of harmony around this time from the Guidonian hand and hexachords to a more complete chromaticism. As someone’s already pointed out, fifths make for a very convenient arrangement of tones and semitones in order to play a scale. I suspect hexachords fit more naturally (!) across strings tuned to fourths - you would have ut-re—mi on the hard, soft and natural hexachords at your fingertips. As music theory moved away from this understanding of harmony, it would have also been more suited to the violin over the similar instruments tuned to fourths and thirds.

The NIF and some other facilities (eg the Sandia Lab Z machine) are for studying fusion plasmas in order to understand their behaviour in thermonuclear weapons first, and possible application in power generation as a distant second. That’s pretty explicit, it’s a way of keeping up nuclear weapons research and maintenance without detonating actual devices and breaching test ban treaties and causing various other messes.

JET, ITER, Wendelstein and other magnetic confinement facilities on the other hand are investigating fusion as a source of grid energy.

In a much cooler reality, it is, and it’s the other Tesla.

Outsider to US religious / politics interface here but the impression from over here is that it’s the Falwell end of the evangelical movement rather than the RC church that has been driving denialism.

It’s worth pointing out that stamina changes surprisingly quickly, it can be only 3 days between a hill being impossibly daunting and just a hill.

+1 cycling. This is very contingent on the kind of area you live in (distances, hills, bike routes / lanes, general tolerance of cyclists) but it has made the difference between couch potato and relative fitness for a lot of people I know. The key for me and them is having it as your go-to transport for getting to the shops or school or the office. I think “incidental exercise” generally describes the approach.

There’s a whole class of persistent organic pollutants that probably fit that bill. Plastics manufacture can involve BPA and phthalates; things like PCBs / PBBs occur in a surprising range of places like transformers and capacitors, fire retardants and carbonless copy paper; dioxins form in a bunch of processes and are toxic in frighteningly small doses, and the latest to join the club are the PFAs, which are involved in firefighting foams ans surfactants, or the preparation of water repellent treatments and non-stick coatings. Many are implicated in cancers and endocrine disruption, and may bioaccumulate to significant levels even in people with low exposure. The book Slow Death by Rubber Duck (2011) was a pretty thorough introduction to the subject - although I imagine by now many of its references will be out of date by now.

It seems like the top of the list to me! - though it’s been emitted for longer in quantity.

It’s a high-school level laboratory experiment. Nobody’s handing them out at birthday parties[0], but mostly because hydrogen likes to go bang loudly, not because it’s corrosive or toxic or anything.

[0] unless Mark Rober is involved in some way.

Thirty thousand cases today, with about 1700 added overnight - and that is with the lockdowns.

You may still personally consider this an overreaction, but please do not invite other people to that conclusion with incorrect data.

I love this most characteristic of phrases, it’s something English lacks. That last morsel of the shared slice of cake, the semi-sip of wine left in the bottle… the remnant of politeness?

> 5. Under Swiss law, it is obligatory for a user to be notified if a third party makes a request for their private data and such data is to be used in a criminal proceeding. More information can be found here.

This is subject to carve-outs of course, but it would be interesting to see how PM seeks to achieve this.

A historian’s word for this might be inclosure. A wag’s might be the hostile corporate takeover of everyone’s private life.

Just a small caution - this is a weird place for the news to break (5:40 am in Adelaide). There’s been talk of this move for 5 months, since a report was tabled in April with this alongside other recommendations [0]. I can’t find other recent mentions of this being drafted into legislation.

The news this week is that the “Identify and Disrupt” bill has been passed to allow federal law enforcement to interfere with computer equipment in a way that deserves its own thread. [1][2] That bill was rushed through without time for members to read it [3]

[0] https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Hou...

[1] https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/download/legislation/bi...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/aug/26/tony-...

[3] https://twitter.com/helenhainesindi/status/14304595485071441...

Same. The consolidation of departments and powers into the new Department of Homeland Affairs under the current incumbency has been an ominous kind of creep towards it too. It feels inevitable that there will be support for this move from the talking-heads who are currently inciting freedumb protests, because either Terrorism or Think Of The Children.

On online identities linked to passports - the US already asks this kind of in visa / ESTA applications [0]. It’s not currently mandatory to answer, but I get the impression that’ll change.

It’s hard to believe the line that any of this is directed to reducing online bullying, if anything it makes doxxing trivial. Law enforcement already has powers by warrant to do much of what this contemplates, and the rest is not somewhere I want Peter Dutton et al to be able to see.

[0] https://www.esta-online.com/blogs/esta-social-media-question

The cast-aluminium little guys are devilish to get right, and they only make 3 shots of coffee. Once you get the knack they’re fine, and as they get bigger I find it’s much easier to get a consistent brew. Better still, get a steel one which will go in the dishwasher too!

eftpos has been quiet while doing quite a lot of innovation (eg - [0]). ATMs and any CHQ/SAV transaction still run on their rails, and there’s a lot of iceberg below what you see in terms of branding at point of sale and plastic cards.

[0] https://www.eftposaustralia.com.au/news/eftpos-has-started-c...

Even with 3DS challenges, people are persuaded out of their one-time passcodes by phishing, using an increasingly elaborate series of text-message and voice-call based deceptions. I hate the term, but search for “smishing” and there’s a bunch of material explaining the exploits.

Depending on the region, only a small fraction of payments are enrolled in the framework to do that validation / challenge anyway, it’s been expensive to adopt and a lot of card acceptors are still nervous about abandoned carts and lost revenue.

Aaaand that’s not to mention good old fashioned stolen cards, counterfeiting and at the other end, full-scale identity takeovers. Many security features are still bypassable by using the legacy system that should have been supplanted by now. It is a constantly-evolving (and frustrating) field.

Sure, but you often hear it being talked about in terms of a victimhood hierarchy or “oppression Olympics” which is a mischaracterisation that is used to stake out a position against listening to people who are being marginalised.

In my experience, it’s an effort made to listen to people whose needs aren’t being met, because whatever policy or design is being discussed either forgot them entirely or designed something inappropriately. Easiest non-political example I can think of is an office bike locker where I worked which had hanging bike racks — as people started using e-bikes, that worked out badly, because e-bikes are heavy and the people using them didn’t all have the strength to hoist them. They weren’t the majority of cyclists, but they were causing the majority the problems of bikes being left in awkward or unsafe places. Turns out some regular cyclists struggled to lift their bikes too, so we installed floor racks (and power outlets) - clutter solved and back injuries hopefully avoided.

That effort to listen is definitely misused by some people who (in my respectful opinion) thrive on attention, but I think you’d find lefties talking about the project in terms of equality and inclusion.

The dispute rate is certainly true for companies under the general umbrella of “subscription services”, usually meaning porn / webcam sites, and there are trigger points where the payment processor will switch off a facility that exceeds a certain dispute volume.

OF has been increasingly making use of step-up authentication to avoid disputes, which is the way the non-US payments industry is heading. My guess would be that if disputes are in fact the reason, it’ll be because the step-up authentication isn’t available or working for some significant slice of the market.

That said, I don’t think that’s the reason. Switching off porn altogether means the vast majority(citation needed) of OF’s content will be gone, which means this has to be a life-or-death move. MC has been placing legality/consent/age restrictions on adult content, including real-time monitoring of content / chat [0]. My guess is that this is onerous enough that it breaks OF’s business model.

[0] https://www.webshield.com/post/mastercard-introduces-revised...

Eh? No, it’s part of the EMV standard and uses the same triple-DES crypto. There have been contactless implementations with poor security, including some truly weird contactless-mag stripe devices, but they are not the current standard or widespread in most markets.

Visa and MC put Australia in the Asia-Pacific region, and the regional rules and fees have been gradually changed (2004ish onwards) to favour chip payments. There still had to be an extravagant amount of re-work for ATMs and compromises to suit some of the major players in Oz, whose quirks dictate the norms for the rest of the market.

Anti-fraud measures for inherently insecure mag stripe are really tilted in favour of the big operators who can afford a well-skilled fraud shop or a provider who’ll happily charge millions per year in licence fees. The difference in fraud-to-total-dollars-transacted between a big player vs something like a credit union can be 20x, especially if there’s a major counterfeiting campaign. And it’s generally considered a social good not to make things easy for organised crime.