helterskelter

Kids these days want CD's, ipods and the original apple headphones. They call it "retro".

USB3 has/had some color labeling standards, but I only remember seeing it with type A.

Looks interesting, I'll give this a listen and a read. :)

OT, but if we made kids learning math use log tables and slide rules for all their calculations I expect that they would engage their brains more and actually think about what they were doing, ie: form a strategy to solve a problem before they started calculating. Also I think that they would get a better "feel" for working numbers in general. I have no evidence, but I suspect that by abstracting away a lot of the "gruntwork" of calculating, we've really hampered people's development in math.

Unfortunately this adds quite a bit of overhead and would make everything take a lot more time. It might be worth it though.

Takes a few seconds for audio to start.

This is what I've been looking for! I've wanted to learn CW for years now but had nobody to talk to and the idea of going on public airwaves without any CW experience except practice drills didn't do a whole lot to motivate me.

> I also tend to read multiple books at the same time. Sometimes it happens that I get so into a book that I put the rest on pause because the story is grabbing all my attention, but in general I like to have a few books that I read in parallel. Having only a single option can become boring. I generally mix fiction and non-fiction to have a broader choice.

This is actually one of the best ways to reinforce knowledge, if that's what you're reading for. Especially if you are reading about different, but related, topics. The idea is that you do a little bit of forgetting between reading sessions of a book and then have to force some recall of where you were at when you pick up the book a few days later, which reinforces the memory of what you've read.

WRT reading multiple books on different but related topics, you're giving yourself more material to build a working mental model of something, so if you're trying to teach yourself calculus, you'll probably learn it much better when you're reading it along with, say, a book on the history of rocketry, and/or a book on astronomy. The topics reinforce and integrate nicely with one another because of the big overlap with the mental models used -- learning something in rocketry or astronomy gives you a place to tie in something you learn from calculus, for instance. They're also different enough to give your mind a break so you have to practice some recall of what you've already gone over when you pick up your calculus book again.

Also from personal experience, rotating through a few books helps to keep you reading constantly. When I used to focus on a single book I'd put off reading if I was in an especially dry spot. Being able to pick up another book allows me to avoid the dry section for a while, while also preventing me from doing something less worthwhile like look at my phone.

I believe it was Optum.

Great now we all need to wear mylar blankets under our ghillie suits now.

Story time for NC's. I had a doctor that lived near me working at a medical clinic that got bought up by PE. He signed the new contract with them and kept working for a while, but decided he needed to move for one reason or another. After he quits, PE informs him of the NC in the new contract he signed, and that he wouldn't be able to practice medicine for N years (I think it was something like 5). He ended up hanging himself, and in response, the clinic's staff quit en masse and basically dared the PE company to try and enforce the clause. PE backed down because suing all the doctors individually would have cost too much and it would have been awful PR for the practice. They ended up selling the clinic before the year was out.

I hate dealing with USAA, and probably should have had a life insurance policy before I even tried. Their phone trees are designed to misdirect you, the agents do not help at all (let me transfer you...[half hour hold time]...Sorry wrong department, let me transfer you), you can't get any real information from anyone. I had to start taking down phone session ID's from the reps and asking for customer advocates to get anywhere at all. Terrible experience.

I still have their awful jingle stuck in my head played over hours of holding on the phone, I'll probably turn into a Manchurian candidate if I ever hear it again.

> A desire to try to avoid having visible markers in text around the transitions is partly why the Unicode spec around bidi text is so complicated.

Yeah but at least we can read ancient boustrophedon-style texts in plaintext, the way they were meant to be read, free of 21st century anachronisms like indication of directionality.

Unfortunately, we're still waiting for Unicode to cover Rongorongo, which has lines of alternating orientation for two readers sitting opposite one another to take turns reading it line by line.

Just a heads up, "I want to push back on" is an idiom Claude frequently uses.

It is depressing though, writing feels like it's in part becoming a game of outpacing the latest LLM's idiosyncrasies so we can signal authenticity, which perversely, is achieved through using an LLM enough so that you can become familiar with its flavor of communication.

Depends on how you use the flashcards. You can use them to memorize definitions and equalities, and you can also use them as quiz questions which excercise your reason and not simply your memory. For example, you make a flashcard for each excercise question in your textbook. Once you identify what you're struggling with, make more flashcards of that same problem type to avoid remembering the solutions. This will take you from a shaky understanding to much firmer ground pretty quickly.

Honestly just making the flashcards and elaborating on/modifying problems you're struggling with will take you a very long way.

Practicing your retrieval is actually one of the best ways to retain knowledge of something. Flashcard programs like Anki are really great because it identifies where you need more work and drills you on your weak points -- it feels awkward working constantly on your weak points, but you get quantifiably better results with the flashcard method it uses.

Some people criticize flashcards as optimizing for rote memorization and deemphasizing understanding, but you'll never achieve understanding or mastery in general without a solid platform of knowledge to work from.

You used to look at the sun or stars to make an estimate, then we had sundials. For larger time scales, there are tons of archaelogical sites around the world which tracked the solstice, equinox, etc and there's evidence that a few cultures even tracked the full period of the moon's orbit (18.6y).

~250BCE, there was a comedy by Plautus which had in it a poem lamenting the proliferation of sundials, which may or may not have been a parody of some of the attitudes at the time:

    The gods confound the man who first found out
    How to distinguish hours! Confound him, too,
    Who in this place set up a sundial,
    To cut and hack my days so wretchedly
    Into small portions! When I was a boy,
    My belly was my sundial -- one surer,
    Truer, and more exact than any of them.
    This dial told me when 'twas proper time
    To go to dinner, when I had aught to eat;
    But nowadays, why even when I have,
    I can't fall to unless the sun gives leave.
    The town's so full of these confounded dials
    The greatest part of the inhabitants,
    Shrunk up with hunger, crawl along the street.

> They've done studies, you know. Sixty percent of the time, it works every time.

Huh? You talking about Iran?

(.../s)

All I remember is that it had some to do with Bill Clinton sleeping with underage girls and Bill Gates with a nasty case of VD.

There was a study from a few years ago that associated almost all increase in traffic deaths in the past decade or so with in car displays. Almost all deaths were pedestrians being struck at or after twilight. The thinking is that infotainment systems are making drivers take their eyes off the road to adjust anything in their vehicles, and also ruining their nightvision. Not sure how they were able to separate this from smartphones.

I'm fine with idiots blowing their own hands off, I just worry about wildfires.

Probably the lack of water. I don't know why they need to continually pump it instead of doing a closed loop and cooling it through a few miles of pipe underground which is practically free, after you install the plumbing. Sure evaporative cooling is good, but certainly there are workable alternatives.

I'm not sure if this is what they're talking about, but I've heard it said more than once that a lot of Utah politicians have conflicts of interest with respect to allowing more water to flow into the lake (ties to agriculture, etc). The situation has probably changed somewhat now that parts of the city have shelter in place orders because of toxic clouds, but people have been talking about it for decades now.

Yep, build up your interior knowledge graph, each connection reinforces the nodes it joins.

Yep, it's mostly used in for navigation, especially as a backup in case GPS fails (in the case of a lightning strike on a sailboat, for instance, probably all your electronics are toast). The military still uses it with slide rules/log tables, in case of jamming, etc. It kind of "disappeared" sometime after WWII, and there aren't many new books on it, but you'll see it come up in computer graphics and animation quite a bit, and I'm pretty sure it's used extensively in surveying still.

This reminds me of WorldCom. One employee said they knew something was up when the company was posting huge profits but the CEO was sending out emails with progressively more extreme electricity saving measures.

It's beautiful, but I wouldn't want to be down there in a major quake.

Honestly I've been thinking about putting some standing stones in my yard to act as solar clock and calendar, maybe doing a lunar calendar as well...

I don't that's against code (yet).

Edit window is 10m now.

Sorry, author's name was Van Brummelen, not Van Bremmelen.