placesalt

I got an attaboy when I used sounds and flying text in my first summer office job. It was cool.

16 lines of go, with comments & whitespace

I think there a link that can be drawn between the type of contract you describe, and feudal-era serfdom. Serfs at the time were effectively prevented from owning property - land. In this case, people are being prevented from owning property - cars. In both cases the exclusion was enabled by the laws at the time. In the case of feudalism, the land reform laws brought an end to the state of affairs. And, they were responsible for a very large increase in common prosperity.

What you say is correct - the laws as they stand do allow for this behavior by BMW, and the company is correct when they say that (buyers? renters?) don't own the gadget in question.

It's also true that a discussion around preventing this sort of behavior with new laws is probably warranted.

I haven't thought about Hinterland Who's Who in a long time.

Nice selection, too. Nature's engineer.

It's worth mentioning what, at least in my mind, is a peer to the NFB: the Heritage Minutes. Sort of like The More You Know, they were (are?) usually shown in-between children's TV shows.

There's no irony or shame in their presentation, they are upfront about their motive to educate. Despite that, they were very popular and widely quoted.

Some ones that stuck in my mind:

https://www.historicacanada.ca/productions/minutes/jacques-c...

https://www.historicacanada.ca/productions/minutes/inukshuk

https://www.historicacanada.ca/productions/minutes/agnes-mac...

https://www.historicacanada.ca/productions/minutes/john-mccr...

https://www.historicacanada.ca/productions/minutes/sitting-b...

https://www.historicacanada.ca/productions/minutes/halifax-e...

https://www.historicacanada.ca/productions/minutes

> I've tested both π and g, and while they both work well, g results in far fewer disk full errors. I've heard c works even better, though I haven't tried it yet.

Good to know. FWIW i should also be avoided. It's tempting to use, since most programs use it as a counter, so it /should/ standardize the logfilesizes. But in practice it's very tricky to get a definitive disk space requirement with it.

The song 'Move Along', by Tommy Makem and Liam Clancy, about Gypsies / Irish Travellers, is very affecting:

https://youtu.be/vV7suDUeXSc?t=286

A couple things I haven’t seen mentioned:

- a keychain sized measuring tape I got as conference swag years ago

- a geologists’ hand lens. I’m not a geologist but it is useful on rare occasions when you need to see really small things. Though to be honest the phone camera magnification mode probably obsoletes it.

There are plans to send people back to the moon.

I hope someone had the acerbic wit to label the tape 'tape'

> mute

moot?

The plant doesn’t cost $53B, it’s being funded in part by the $53B Chips Act.

Headline in The Grauniad is wrong.

As a counterpoint, as Troy Lee Hudson said at a JPL lecture, 1 is infinitely more than zero[0].

[0] https://youtu.be/kqTR0mrIIEc?t=2676

(The entire lecture and Q&A in that video is quite good).

Confined farts and tea,

A grand place to be!

On board HMS Majesty

For nukes a tour or' sea

What kind of men are we?

Who fly 'bove the floor?

Hardy! and Strong!

and Work all day long!

and Sing a sweet song

when we come back to thee.

If you see a car with those plates in 'the south' (ie where 90+% of the country's population lives), you can presume that a car has physically travelled thousands of kilometres across a vast, nearly unpopulated wilderness to get to where you are. People who live in remote areas seem like hardy people; seeing that someone drove that far proves that they're a hardy person.*

*Of course, the effect is greatly reduced if you see a tourist sample plate that someone bought, with all zeros. That just means the person's been there. Far more impressive if the car's been there.

(beautiful writing, as others have said!)

> the same depressing crumbling economy of coastal towns all over the UK

I'm surprised to hear that coastal towns in the UK are doing poorly. In North America, it's generally the coastal areas that are more prosperous.

Was it overbuilding during the era of British sea power? Or a great sucking-up of wealth by London?

It makes me wonder if, long term, seaside areas would make good places to buy property. Surely, on the whole, they have more natural beauty than inland areas.

What do 'CAC' and 'LTV' stand for?

Ecology?

I did the same sort of thing with a broken iPod hard drive. If it was squeezed, it would work; the fix was to put a folded business card in-between the exterior back plate and the drive. That would squeeze it enough that it'd work. Never heated up enough to start a fire, either, so it was safe!

The basic premise I got from Mike Duncan's podcast was that: when Rome ran out of dangerous external enemies to fight (ie Carthage), people in Rome found internal enemies to fight.

That was fine for a few centuries, until external enemies re-emerged, and then it really fell apart.

"We kill people based on metadata"

- General Hayden

More to the point, any government could be run by criminals in the future.

At some point say 'ooh, is someone making popcorn?', then leave, make popcorn, and come back and share.

> 90% of jobs aren't people's "passions" and have no chance at becoming some big world changing venture. Lots of employers like to delude themselves that their company is some big important, cutting-edge enterprise that's making a real impact in the world.

They're not completely to blame; the hordes of people who claim their 'passion' is analyzing widget sales or what have you share some of it. Going along with what are essentially lies about motivations to fit in with the perceived trends of the crowd is understandable (people want to get and keep jobs), but still immoral. And, n=1, but in my experience, it isn't actually necessary.

IOW, it is what it is, and it's not what it's not, and it may be what it was - it even may have been what it will be - but it won't be what it can't be, though even then it may have been what it isn't. So it goes.

UPS is capitalized in the BBC story title (and everywhere else), it should be capitalized in the HN title, methinks.

Coincidentally, the most recent episode of the BBC podcast 'Discovery', part of their 'Life Scientific' series, is an extended interview with Geim:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/w3ct5j21

> Debate is for the observers, not the participants, to learn about all sides of an argument at the same time.

There are different types of debating, which may cloud the question; debating once or twice a year on a single prepared topic may be less informative for participants. Debating dozens of times a year on an active team is an entirely different experience. I would not be surprised at all if debate team participation has significant overlap with the rhetoric taught to students in ancient times.

Debating is an object lesson for the participants in how one can find (or should at least be able to find, if you're a good debater) arguments in favour of either side of any given issue.

Debating, especially impromptu debating, teaches quick thinking. It also teaches an ability to empathize with people on any side of an argument - you know, from experience after debating, that one can make good arguments in favour of an arbitrary side of a topic. You regularly work through points of view that you may not personally hold.

It's been said that math is learned at the end of a pencil - you learn it by working through it. Debating is the same - you learn empathy and understanding with points of view other than your own by working through them yourself.

Edit: all of this is from my experience in parliamentary debating eons ago. Things may have changed, if - as the article suggests - people can win without arguing the actual question they were given.

You can use the green part of the spectrum for LiDAR. It’s what they use for bathymetric LiDAR.

"Because it measures in the infrared, it even works in the /dark/"

No, because it's an active rather than passive light sensor, it works in the dark.

Edit: also, the fact that you can see a green dot heavily implies the sensor is operating in the green wavelengths, not in the infrared, but that's secondary.