One thing I’ve learned from reading accounts of Flock camera thefts is that you shouldn’t do more than one per outing. This sounds like a group arranged to do them all at once which also works.
Stinky cheeses have largely disappeared from the zeitgeist, but were used to be much more common (see, for example, the Pepe Le Pew cartoon from the 40s where his would-be paramour locks herself in a Limburger cheese factory gaining a stench that puts the amorous skunk in flight).
I’ve encountered feeds that do this and I tend to not keep those subscriptions long. That said, some feeds often have content that doesn’t present well in my feed reader and I’ll end up clicking to view the web presentation
What I miss is that back when Safari had RSS built in was I used to just open all the new articles in tabs from an RSS list in my bookmark bar. This is the experience I really would like to recover, being able to just get a set of tabs that represent new posts at sites that I want to follow. Maybe I’ll vibe code this for myself now that I’ve given in and turned to the dark side with Claude.
It seems like it’s become a bit more common for companies to pay part or all of the COBRA premiums for a period after a separation, at least that’s been the case in my last two job losses (one company paid the company part of the premium for six months, the other paid the whole premium for three).
A big part of the joy of model railroading is the building of such things, at least for some people.¹ It’s less about the product than the process. That’s a big part of why things like kitbashing and scratch building are popular. Finding a way to construct something out of nothing.
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1. Yes, there are people who are more into the operations side of things, but I think for most model railroaders it’s as much about the building as the running.
I don’t seem to be charged for Scam Shield on my account. I’ve had one unknown number call and not leave a message over the last month, which is a far cry from the 20–40 spam calls per day some people report.
Although Apple did undo the touchbar (although I think they gave up on it too soon—I actually liked it once they restored the esc key. I can never remember what all the F-keys are supposed to do and getting an app-specific set of graphical choices made more sense to me.
For that matter, a kit drummer is essentially playing (up to) four instruments at once since each limb could be doing something unique (granted for many (most?) drummers, they’re just using the high-hat pedal as a footrest, beating quarter or half notes on the bass drum and their hands will be focused on a single instrument, but a truly talented drummer might have four unique rhythms going at once). Add in the fact that some drummers sing backup and it can be quite impressive.
I had the pleasure of working with an amazing organist in my time at Holy Name Cathedral (he’s apparently since become semi-retired, just doing occasional fill-in work). Watching him do a Messiaen organ piece as a postlude after Mass it was like seeing video of Keith Moon on the drums. Limbs moving in a seemingly chaotic manner and yet music came out the other end (on top of crazy multi-manual keyboarding and pedalwork, he was also frequently changing the stops on the organ as he played).
For that matter, the first 5 stacked fifths gives you the standard pentatonic scale. Extending by a fifth on either end and you get the most common accidentals in Western music (if your first seven give C major you’ll get F# and B♭). I think (but I’m not sure) that some of the non-Western microtonal scales extend the tonality by not ignoring the Pythagorean comma when you’ve done the 12th fifth, but by continuing to stack fifths for more harmonies.
In the 00s, I sang in the Holy Name Cathedral choir and we did a lot of 20th/21st century choral works with harmonies that strayed very far from the classical tonal vocabulary to the point where when I was doing my own composition work, I realized that I didn’t hear dissonance any more.
One could make the argument that the only numbers that actually “exist” are the natural numbers, but the question ultimately is can you model any real number in the physical universe. Modeling ½ is simply a question of picking a unit to be 1 and finding its midpoint (or for that matter, declaring two apples to be “1” and thus a single apple would be “½”, although it’s a bit of a challenge to use apples to model (2-√3)/5
Except that you’re assuming that 1 must necessarily correspond to that minimum distance. Keeping that situation, we can just say that 1 corresponds to two inches and then realize 1/2 as that number.
Classical geometry (a la Euclid) allows for constructing a lot of numbers. We get natural numbers pretty cheaply, negative integers through adding in a concept of directionality (zero is a bit of an imaginative leap which is why it was absent from Western mathematics for so long). Constructing arbitrary ratios is possible through similar triangles and square roots through right triangles, but some basic algebraic numbers like cube roots cannot be constructed with a ruler and straight edge (which raises the question of whether, in a quantized universe, whether irrational cube roots actually exist). Of course there’s no guarantee that the quantization is going to be uniform and we also have the ɣ factor of special relativity (1/sqrt(1-v²/c²)) which gives us a non-Euclidean space to complicate things, but it’s not clear that if you can find a value for 1 that allows you to get a measurement for every irrational number.
I’ve had this paper downloaded for about a decade and haven’t gotten around to reading it, but thinking about it, especially if space and time are quantized (an undetermined question last I checked and almost certainly still so), there would exist numbers in ℝ that cannot be expressed as physical quantities, even with an infinite universe. It’s possible that even the algebraic numbers include numbers that are non-physical (although it might be a larger subset of numbers than the constructible numbers depending on the structure of space-time’s quantization).
This is one of those things that I learned about in my youth when I was a bit obsessed with model railroading (although that obsession only extended as far as dreaming and not actual building). I remember reading an article about Shays in one of the 70s model railroading magazines and I think had instructions for kitbashing one from existing model railroad parts.
A musician friend used to actually do recording with garageband on an iPad. I use mine for sheet music a lot and even sprang for the external foot pedal for page turns. There was one rehearsal where I didn’t have a chance to scan everything in advance and was playing from printed music for one song and I kept stepping on the pedal to turn the page and nothing happened.
I’ve not done it, but it seems it could be a good alternative to a laptop for digital synth stuff.
I learned the correct pronunciation when someone laughed at me at a TeX conference in the 80s when I made a reference to the You-ler fonts. In my single semester of high school German I was either never taught or ignored the teacher when the pronunciation of eu was given (or perhaps I just never connected it with Euler).
Just as a pedantic aside, people often use Venn diagram when they mean Euler diagram. A Venn diagram always has the overlapping circles and use shading or labeling describe the set relation. Euler diagrams let the circles describe the relation so two non intersecting sets in a Venn diagram might share the left circle green, the right blue and leave the intersection blank or grey. An Euler diagram will have two disjoint circles.
On the gadget front, I really love the paperlike screen protector for the iPad. This combined with the Apple Pencil made a huge difference in the usability of my iPad for writing/drawing. I still prefer to write on paper, but it’s really great for things like my writing group where we generally meet over zoom & I can give the author a marked up manuscript (with multicolor notes).
I’m also opposed to getting too precious about writing tools. So many people have drawers full of fancy notebooks with something on the first few pages and the rest empty. Get something and use it. Don’t matter if it’s a dollar-store spiral notebook or a fancy Leuchturm 1917 notebook, just as long as you use it. Same with the writing utensil. Pencil? Ballpoint pen? Whatever. I find these days I prefer to write using a cheap mechanical pencil (the kind they sell in bags of 20 at the supermarket), but I’ll use whatever.
I used to be really precious about these things. I only used college-ruled 9½×6 150-page spiral bound notebooks and wrote in 0.4mm fine-point felt tip pen. Did all my first drafts by hand. It ended up being an excuse to not finish stuff. I do most of my first drafts typing now, because it lets me get s⸻ done (although I still take notes by hand because that helps me remember what I took notes on better).
I don’t buy the cursive thing, mostly because I write slower in cursive than in print (although I have a handful of ligatures and abbreviations I use to speed up some things).
On an Apple ][, you couldn’t necessarily assume your BASIC code was going to start from the same location, thanks to the LOMEM command. I remember one of the things I wrote back in the day was a relocatable Assembly loader that would allow a bit of assembly code to be loaded to an arbitrary address in available memory and all the internal addresses (for, e.g., JSR or JMP or even some LD* commands, as I recall) would be rewritten to the correct location. I don’t really want to go back to writing code for 8-bit computers, but the challenges were certainly fun.
Indeed, even though I’ve never done this, when I saw a REM statement at the head of the file with random characters in it, I immediately assumed it was a bit of in-line assembly.
When I had Comcast internet, I could get on those, but it required a network profile to actually connect to the internet. That said, I wouldn’t put it past TV makers and Comcast to collude on using this to allow backdoor network exfiltration.
There was an interesting recent 99% invisible episode about the creation of videos for Karaoke in the 90s, which talked about videos created on very low budgets for songs with tight constraints. Even adjusting for inflation, their budgets would be well below a million dollars by today’s standards (and some costs would likely be lower thanks to digital video removing the cost of purchasing and processing film stock and making editing cheaper).