jhallenworld

The problem is self interest and legalized bribery:

"The coal industry has been shrinking in West Virginia for decades. But Manchin himself made nearly $500,000 last year from investments in the state's coal sector. He also raised $400,000 in campaign contributions from fossil fuel companies in the third quarter of this year, as he questioned the need for the CEPP. Manchin is the top recipient in Congress of donations from the oil and gas industry."

On top of this, I think we have a huge problem with the Senate. The representation is terribly skewed, giving far too much weight to rural people. We need to break up the big states or something.

On belts: don't bother with the cheap ones on Amazon (30 belts for $5). Trust me, they are terrible. They are not uniform thickness so you end up with terrible wow.

I had good luck here:

https://www.ceitron.com/

https://www.ceitron.com/passive/belt.html

(Look up the store in Dayton, it even looks like a classic mom and pop electronics store).

One more hint: if you have a belt that slips off a pulley, most likely reason is that the pulley axes are not parallel with each other, and probably nothing to do with tension.

If you want to save money, go for Marantz PMD430 or one of the mono ones if that's OK for you:

https://www.fullcompass.com/common/files/2039-PMDRecordersDa...

I recently bought a PMD221 as a high-end data cassette recorder/player. I was having trouble transferring zx-spectrum games onto cassette using a cheap recorder, but PMD221 works great.

You can make your own "scrying mirror"..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIxNGvv-bfs

I did a four-level radix tree for the Unicode character class and case conversion support in JOE (Joe's Own Editor, so that you can edit Unicode on non-Unicode systems): index sizes of 7 bits, 5, 5 and 4 plus ASCII has a fast-path table.

The main difference is that it computes the tables at startup from the sorted Unicode intervals. So the construction code has to be fast. The same code is also used for user character classes in regular expressions.

Anyway, it builds them in two passes. First pass it de-duplicates nodes, but only the previously constructed node is a candidate for de-duplication. This keeps the memory usage low during construction. De-duplicated nodes can still be modified during this construction, so they may be re-duplicated (there is a reference counter to determine when this happens).

Second pass (after all data is loaded, no more changes allowed), it globally de-duplicates the leaf nodes using a hash table. Many of the leaf nodes are duplicates (and not just the all zero ones).

Hah, well what was the rate of progress on breeding faster horses vs. internal combustion in the late 19th century? I don't imagine that the progress rate was very high for horses..

Study this:

https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...

Ignoring storage: it makes no sense now to build anything but wind and solar. Only the marginal cost of gas is cheaper (meaning existing plants, not new ones).

Including storage: conventional is still cheaper, but not by much (within a factor of 2): $81 for PV+storage vs. $44 for gas combined cycle.

We should put more resources into storage now, fusion can wait.

So this old problem is all about the ambiguities that arise when squishing a two dimensional structure- a tree into a one dimensional space- a line of FORTRAN (and all subsequent programming languages).

But there are better options, and they are showing up, in of all things, calculators. Modern calculators allow equations to be entered in typesetting notation. For example, you enter a fraction bar key, then it allows you to enter the numerator, hit arrow key, then enter denominator. The fraction bar grows to accommodate the arguments. For complex expressions, this method requires fewer keystrokes than FORTRAN because it saves on parenthesis. It's also much easier to read. (It's interesting to think about the resulting one-dimensional representation- the sequence of keystrokes: Bar <numerator> Down <denominator> Right).

Programming languages should make use of this. There are many operators, so your editor could allow you to draw some kind of visual representation of a tree right in the code. Operator precedence as a thing is then gone, and the visual representation makes the equation completely unambiguous. We can argue about the visual representation- it could be a tree with branches, boxes within boxes, vertical and horizontal bars..

Not really true at IBM- I mean of course you got to take vacation. Also, you couldn't carry over vacation time, so often half the office was out last two or three weeks of December to use it up.

Also on vacation time: you can negotiate for more. I knew someone who negotiated for a 4 day work-week, but that was a special case (along the lines of "I don't need to work anymore, so if you really want me it's going to be for 4 days a week only").

Young me went to a solar exhibition at Brookhaven National Labs around 1978 or so. They had an electric car (maybe the Electrovette?), photo electric panels and outside someone showing how to make a forced air solar heater. It was an insulated box with a glass or plexiglass window to allow light in. Inside was an array of cut up soda cans, all painted black. A port for air inlet and a port for outlet and voila.

[I'm pretty sure this was in BNL's old graphite research reactor building, which was open for tourists. I've since learned that this was an air-cooled reactor like the one in the famous UK Windscale accident, and that it has now been completely disassembled.]

Solar was big then- I remember a talk about it at the local library also. People were making parabolic solar hot-dog cookers.

I've been finding value in Facebook Marketplace recently. It's kind of a step up from craigslist- basically people on it are more willing to ship things to you and Facebook acts as a financial middleman. Facebook has been enforcing quality standards on the sellers- at least they will not pay the seller until a tracking number has been provided for shipped items. For buyers, the prices tends to be better than on eBay.

Anyway, they could give eBay some real competition and could be a future revenue source if it keeps expanding.

NK Labs., Cambridge MA, ONSITE, Full-Time.

https://www.nklabs.com/careers

We are hiring Electronic, Firmware and FPGA engineers.

NK Labs is a product/prototype design firm. But we are also working on Muon Catalyzed Fusion (we are working on an ARPA-E funded experiment):

https://arpa-e.energy.gov/technologies/projects/conditions-h...

Work actually is flexible, but need to be local enough to come to the lab when necessary.

>But it lacked almost all attributes of a real database system

Did it support ISAM files?

If BASIC had ISAM support from the beginning, maybe it would be as widely used as COBOL..

Also Kenya: it's all about Lagos vs. Nairobi.

For Vietnam there is the risk of the authoritarian single party rule. It works as long as the decisions are wise, but nothing can be done if they are not. I kind of think this is what's happening in China now.

I can attest that the people there are very hard working, I think most US citizens have no idea. At least this is true for people who are lucky enough to end up as professionals at the many factories that are there. Of course there are still many poor.

One interesting theory I heard about the entire Latin world (explaining why it tends to be poor) is that the old Spanish empire was deliberately modeled to be an extension of aristocratic Roman empire. The problem that this causes is too much power in the hands of aristocrats, with not enough space left for risk-taking entrepreneurs. To the degree that this is true (I'm not sure..), longstanding contact with the US may moderate it in Mexico in particular. Here is a video about it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efz4Aket2ao

It's not from lack of trying:

https://pnhp.org/a-brief-history-universal-health-care-effor...

Why can't we read comments on other platforms like Roku? Always I see a video on my TV and then wonder what the comments are, so have to find the video on my phone or computer.

I've been playing with classic BASICs recently, especially dialects for pocket calculators. Here are some random thoughts from this exercise:

"PRINT USING" is terrible (vs. C's formatted strings).

"INPUT A" is not versatile enough. I should be able to prompt with the current value of A, so user can hit enter to keep the current value. None allow you to print the current value of A (INPUT STR$(A)+">",A does not work anywhere). Some dialects allow you to retain A: TRS-80 BASICs do it. MS-BASIC sets A to zero if user just hits Enter.

Pocket computer BASIC allows you to enter an expression as a response to INPUT, such as A+1.

Modern calculators allow you to enter equations in textbook format. I kind of think modern BASICs should support this- no reason to be stuck in the early 60s teletype world.

Pocket computer BASIC allows you to bind programs to keys (or at least entry points to keys: you can have a key jump to a line with a key-label).

Pocket computer BASIC allows you to read the last entered value (AREAD command in Sharp).

Here is a benchmark which shows why these things can be important, at least in the realm of pocket computers and calculators:

https://github.com/jhallen/calculator/wiki

Has anyone ported ucLinux to the QL? Shouldn't be that hard.. here it is on a minimal system:

https://www.bigmessowires.com/68-katy/

This Ivermectin study has all the same problems you mentioned:

https://www.scholarsresearchlibrary.com/articles/effects-of-...

But then I don't know why you would pick one bad study over another to make your decisions, so I say talk about it. I bring this up specifically because of fears about vaccines and sterility.

Can you not plug the flat with one of these? Does the foam prevent it from working?

https://www.amazon.com/ITW-GLOBAL-BRANDS-1034-HANDLE/dp/B00P...

They should have used diethylene glycol, like the Austrians:

https://www.thewinestalker.net/2015/04/austria.html

I wonder which tastes better?

NK Labs | https://www.nklabs.com/careers | Full-time | ONSITE | Cambridge, MA

EE, Firmware, FPGA

We are hiring electrical engineers and embedded software / FPGA engineers. We are mostly ONSITE, but nearby remote may be possible.

NK Labs is a product development engineering firm in Cambridge, MA. As product design consultants, we bring our clients' ideas to life and solve their toughest technical challenges. Our team of electrical, mechanical, and software engineers have a diverse range of skills and experiences across many technical fields, including consumer electronics, scientific instrumentation, aircraft subsystems, and robotics.

True, but there was a time when FORTRAN was the most portable language, which meant that it certainly did get use beyond math. I've seen compilers and assemblers distributed as FORTRAN source.

Airbnb is available in Kabul, had no idea..

https://www.airbnb.com/s/Kabul--Afghanistan/homes?tab_id=hom...

Google reviews also interesting, nice restaurant in Kandahar..

https://www.google.com/maps/place/AFGHAN+SHINWARI+RESTAURANT...

It's not a lab until you lower the Bridgeport milling machine into the basement. Also, you may need three phase, but you will definitely need 240V for the multi-process welder.

https://www.homemodelenginemachinist.com/threads/getting-the...

The war is a failure of imagination. You are paying millions of people to work on the War on Terror. It's nice that they're all employed, that the rich get richer etc., but can we not think of anything better to do with our time?

I'm worried about vibration. Maybe they should have two masses operating in opposite directions at once to balance out the vibrations. Maybe they will license my idea..

"I have no doubt that I am very stupid; but I must confess that I am unable to follow you. For example, how did you deduce that this man was intellectual?" For answer Holmes clapped the hat upon his head. It came right over the forehead and settled upon the bridge of his nose. "It is a question of cubic capacity," said he; "a man with so large a brain must have something in it."