retrac

San Serriffe is woke liberal nonsense cooked up by The Guardian.

It applies to most private residential and small-scale business electric use. Rationale would be getting quite political, as you might imagine. But I suppose there are several justifications that are given.

One is to offset the cost to the consumer for phasing out fossil fuels. Coal has been shut down and wind and storage and new nuclear is being built. Politically it has been presented as a matter of fairness; poor people are least able to pay for increases or to retrofit. A kind of wealth redistribution. (Though when you remember large corporately-run farms are included in the subsidy it's maybe not the most progressive form of redistribution.)

In Quebec where they have a great surplus of hydroelectric they also partly subsidize residential electricity with the profits of the surplus sale to the United States. The energy is so cheap there than resistive heating is cheaper than natural gas for home heating. Avoiding dependence on oil and gas imported from either the US or western Canada, or rather trying to lessen that dependence, is a standing issue for both Quebec and Ontario.

Consumer price of the energy. Doesn't include connection fees, but those are a minority of the cost. Includes special energy taxes. But not sales tax.

For a real example, I'm on flat rate and if I use 1000 kWh my monthly bill will be 211 CAD (effective rate 0.21 CAD / 0.13 EUR per kWh) including taxes, connection, delivery, everything, but without subsidy. The amount I pay after the subsidy is applied would be less at 165 CAD.

Here in Ontario, residentially we pay about 0.09 USD per kWh at night and 0.18 USD with demand peak pricing on weekday afternoons. Or if you have flat rate it's about 0.13 USD per kWh. This is considered very expensive by Canadian standards and it's due to our nuclear power program where about 55% of electricity is from nuclear, the rest from a mix of wind/hydro/solar/biofuel and gas. The increased price during the day is due to the need to burn a bit of gas at peak demand. The grid is otherwise nearly carbon neutral, and the long-term plan is to phase out the gas with a mix of wind, nuclear and pumped storage.

We pay less in practice than the rates given above for power, because the government also subsidizes it. But even without that I understand such rates would be relatively cheap in most European countries.

It's akin to a compiler unrolling a loop. Uses more RAM (area) but fewer cycles to execute. Hardware synthesis uses many of the same techniques as compilers use to optimize code.

It's a common pitfall for those learning hardware description languages like Verilog, when they think about them like programming languages. If you go "if (calc) res <= a * b;" If res is 32 bits wide then you have instantiated a 32 bit fast multiplier circuit dedicated just to that one operation. This is often not what was intended.

Despite how leaning on the analogy too closely can mislead in that way, the analogy between hardware and software is not a shallow one. A combinatorial circuit is akin to the pure function of functional programming. Anything that can be described as a pure function working on fixed integers or floating point or other discrete data types, can be transformed into a combinatorial circuit. And there are algorithms to do so automatically and often with reasonable efficiency.

Free software synthesis has come a long way in recent years, by the way. There's even several hobbyist projects that can take VHDL or Verilog and produce layouts using TTL chips or even discrete transistor logic with automatic circuit board layout. You can now compile your code directly to circuit board copper masks and a part list.

I, too, love the potato. I like to boil them with broth, oil, lemon juice, and garlic and spices, then lightly roast to finish.

> I read once that humans can live on a diet of potatoes and milk

Protein is not a monolith; it's nine different compounds that are needed, for humans. Meat has all of them. But most plant foods do not. A person will eventually starve from lysine deficiency if they eat nothing but wheat, rice, millet, most grains really. Even though these are rich in protein. That might be why bread and rice is so often paired with beans; beans are rich in lysine and the combination covers all the bases.

One of the proteins that the potato lacks relatively is methionine; a large active adult man needs perhaps 1 - 2 gram of methionine per day. Potatoes have about 500 mg methionine per kg. That works out to some 2 - 4 kg of potatoes a day and some 1500 - 3000 calories to go with it. (Plausible enough, if you ask me. When I was younger and worked a labour job burning lots of energy I would cook a 2 kg bag of potatoes and they'd be gone in a couple days.) It does seem nothing but boiled potatoes, salt and maybe a multi-vitamin and some fat, will keep a person going more or less indefinitely. I can't do the mostly-potato diet myself anymore though. I would get very fat.

That presumes that languages with little morphology do not have equivalent structures at work elsewhere doing the same kind of heavy lifting.

One classic finding in linguistics is that languages with lots of morphology tend to have freer word order. Latin has lots of morphology and you can move the verb or subject anywhere in the sentence and it's still grammatical. In a language like English syntax and word order and word choice take on the same role as morphology.

Inflected languages may indeed have more information encoded in each token. But the relative position of the tokens to each other also encodes information. And inflected languages appear to do this less.

Languages with richer morphology may also have smaller vocabularies. To be fair, this is a contested conjecture too. (It depends a lot on how you define a morpheme.) But the theory is that languages like Ojibwe or Sansrkit with rich derivational morphologies and grammatical inflections simply don't need a dozen words for different types of snow, or to describe thinking. A single morpheme with an almost infinite number of inflected forms can carry all the shades of meaning, where different morphemes might be used to make the same distinctions, in a less inflected language.

This is the 4th documented transplant incident with rabies in just the United States, with cases in 1979, 2004 (four deaths from one donor), 2013 and now this one.

In at least the 1979 [0] and 2004 [1] and also this recent case, it seems likely the donor died of rabies; they all had neurological symptoms which in hindsight fit the profile. But due to the rarity it wasn't diagnosed.

I can't help but wonder how many people who aren't organ donors got rabies then died and it wasn't ever correctly diagnosed; most people aren't organ donors.

[0] https://sci-hub.se/10.1056/NEJM197903153001105

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/jul/03/usa.suzannegol...

The article sort of has a point; in a healthy economy this kind of labour would be done with capital equipment. A sawmill is much more efficient than a bunch of individuals chopping wood with axes. (Safer too, probably, when talking about injuries per unit.) The inability for this work to be done efficiently with capital reflects a flaw in the economic order. (The classic: poor people don't have the stuff to do things efficiently, and so remain poor.)

But this article has a certain feeling of contempt for hicks doing something as backwards as burning wood for warmth. Maybe it sticks out to me because I'm in Canada, where a significant % of all households (of all social classes) rely on wood. Because wood happens to be the cheapest source of heat. The fact that we burn wood is not a sign of industrial decay or primitiveness. It's a sign of there being a lot of trees and logging around these parts.

But at the same time, yes, it is associated with poverty. Wood smoke is unhealthy. And wood heat one of the highest rates of injury or fire in terms of home heating. Some people resort to it out of desperation, particularly junk wood and garbage that shouldn't even be burned. But not necessarily so. Back to the point of the article: is there quantified evidence that use of wood for heat is increasing in America among the poor? Or is this based on the author's impressions?

Perhaps because I'm a layperson and haven't studied the topic enough, but I find there to be an almost incomprehensible gap with the emotions and psychology of classical antiquity.

Most of us learned in school that the ancient Greeks had no single word for our concept of love: they distinguished eros, philia, agape, xenia, etc, and did so in ways that don't directly map to our modern feelings.

It's not just love. All of their emotional and mental vocabulary was aligned to a different internal axis. From my interpretation, there was no word or concept that cleanly equates with our concept of either mind, or emotion.

What we call the mind correlates to what the Greeks called logos, pathos, pneumos, psyche, phrene, nous, thymos, eros. These concepts map to our concepts like will, desire, mind, soul, reason, consciousness, emotion. But they don't map in a straightforward way.

There was a generally rich emotional vocabulary for what could be called non-corporeal passions. Phren could be translated as brain, heart, mind, soul, thought, reason. It's where heavy sad thoughts sit, underneath your heart. It's also where you form your rational intentions. Thymos is somewhere between a thought and an emotion. It's related to blood pounding in the head and ragged breathing. But it's not a bodily sensation. At least not primarily. It's the feeling of surging towards the finish line in a close race, but for the soul. Thymos is a wet emotion, by the way. Cold and wet. As in the classical elements of water and air, which are what breath is made of, which is related to the mind and soul.

There's a world model that informs the emotions, even which parts of the body they are associated with, and why, and that model is now quite alien, which makes the emotions also rather alien.

The Visi-On API provides a handle-based memory manager. Handles are a kind of managed pointer that allow memory blocks to be moved around even though the hardware does not have virtual memory. So long as the program always follows the rules on acquiring and releasing the handle before using the underlying pointer, it enables a kind of poor man's virtual memory. The first version of Mac OS and Windows 3.x worked in a similar way. I'm guessing that the designers of Visi-On thought of this, and the other abstractions the API provides, as a kind of virtualization.

Processes on modern operating systems are a type of virtual machine. On Linux or Windows, processes are provided with the illusion of infinite memory. And there is the illusion of infinite parallel threads of execution, bounded only by storage. That is a kind of virtualization, just not full machine virtualization.

At the machine level the boundary between machine instructions and system calls and API becomes blurry. If you don't have a floating point unit, the instructions trap and a routine in the kernel can perform the same thing. Instruction sets are APIs. Many operating systems present their system calls as if they were special machine instructions.

This kind of phrasing is less common today, where "virtual machine" is usually equivalent to "full machine virtualization", but you'll encounter this broader sense in earlier literature.

Very impressive hack. Looking at this I now think I may have overpaid for my Palm Pilot back in the day!

For the Pixter Color in 2003 I found a price of $80 US at release. The specs aren't directly comparable (less RAM and I bet less battery life too). But still! That's less than half the cost of a black-and-white Palm m105 around the same time.

I wonder how cheap PDAs might have been if mass market forces had been applied to them. Handheld computers didn't really get the cost reduce it like a mass market kid's toy treatment until the smartphone era.

I recently skimmed a grammar of Faroese [0]. Not much has been written about the language in English; only a couple books, and an English-Faroese dictionary was only first published in the 1980s. It's spoken by about 50,000 people in the Faroe Islands, which are between Iceland and Scotland. The isles were settled by Viking-era Norse about a thousand years ago and then largely forgotten by the rest of the world. But they kept speaking their version of Old Norse and it became its own language.

It's obscured by the writing system somewhat. The spelling system is derived from Old Norse and is very conservative. It's not at all indicative of how it's really pronounced. The written form is somewhat mutually intelligible with Icelandic, but the spoken language is not.

Underneath those æ and ð is a language that is oddly similar to English, like convergent evolution. It has undergone an extensive vowel shift (but in a different pattern). And also like English, it has also undergone extensive affrication (turned into ch/j) of the stop consonants and reduction of final stops and intervocalic stops. It has the same kind of stress - vowel reduction interaction that English has which just heightens the uncanny effect.

I came away with the impression that it is English's closest sibling language, aside from Dutch:

broðir "broh-wer" (brother), heyggjur "hoy-cher" (hill/height), brúgv "brukf" (bridge), sjógvar/sjós "shekvar/shos" (sea), skyggj "skooch" (sky/cloud), djópur "cho-pur" (deep), veðirinn "ve-vir-uhn" (weather). Rough pronunciations given between quotes; all examples are cognate with English!

There's an extended story reading by a native speaker here [1] if you want an example of what it sounds like. No idea what they're saying but it sounds pretty.

[0] https://annas-archive.org/md5/4d2ce4cd5e828bbfc7b29b3d03349b...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSXu2fuJOTQ

Write something. My usual suggestions (although I am biased) would be an operating system or a compiler. Or both! When I was in school those were typical course projects in a CS program. (The program I took was more to the circuit and electronic side of it, and my final year project was to design a CPU in VHDL.)

A compiler will exercise most of the fundamentals, and in ways you're probably not too familiar with, if you primarily just do a bit of scripting or numerical computation. Areas like parsing - how do you deal with reading in arbitrarily nested recursive structures? And the abstract -- how should you structure the representation of a program internally, perhaps as a tree? And the concrete -- what opcodes does your processor accept?

Here in Canada, nothing. Thanks to the retroactive copyright extension which increased the copyright period to 70 years, nothing will enter the public domain in Canada until 2042.

Bandwidth and storage.

The Viking landers (1975) were very sophisticated with robotic arms and mass spectrometers, adorable little anemometers, digital colour cameras, the whole deal, with 5 megabytes of digital tape storage.

The downlink rate was 16 kbps when related by the matched orbiter; otherwise direct communication was at 250 bps.

The digital cameras were pushing the absolute limit of technology at the time. The digitizer produced a 16 kbps bitstream that fed the uncompressed image directly to the transmitter taking four minutes to send an image. It could also be stored on tape for later transmission, but it used much of the tape to do so.

If it had included a microphone and ADC, it would have been technically possible to record a few minutes of audio and then spend hours transferring it back to Earth. But the kind of constant monitoring now done really depends on the more than 1 Mbit/s of bandwidth now available thanks to half a dozen Martian orbiters, and all the fancy processors and gigabytes of storage the landers and rovers now have.

LLVM includes an equivalent to binutils, with a macro assembler, linker, objdump with disassembler, library tools, handling formats like ELF and raw binary etc.

LLVM-MOS includes all of that. It is the same process as using LLVM to cross-assemble targeting an embedded ARM board. Same GNU assembler syntax just with 6502 opcodes. This incidentally makes LLVM-MOS one of the best available 6502 assembly development environments, if you like Unix-style cross-assemblers.

Presumably it would be straightforward to port the GB code generation to the Intel 8080 / Z80. There have been a few attempts for LLVM for those CPUs over the years. But none which panned out, I think?

> (and ally?)

Oh right. The rest of the world. It exists. USA is only 6% of global land area.

Oft forgot in these conspiracies.

It would require not just cooperation and secrecy in the United States government/military over 75 years, but that every nation-state in the world including those with comparable ability in space and etc. is in on the conspiracy. Japan, India, China, the old Soviet Union...

Or do the aliens only visit the contiguous 48 states?

This is so conjectural as to be more in the realm of science fiction but here goes. There's little to no hard evidence that there's anything particular to the human brain that makes our way of thinking unique to humans. No doubt we are indeed evolved to be highly intelligent social animals. But how specialized is our brain to our particular kind of thinking?

What if what evolved was not primarily biological, but cultural evolution? What if our kind of language, and our kind of thinking, are the product of many stacked layers of ideas and cultural practices. And not much more? If so, then perhaps it is contagious. And if that can't be ruled out, maybe we should think long and hard before we try to talk to the whales. Lest we risk turning that classic The Onion piece into something real: "Scientists successfully teach gorilla that it will die some day -- Tulane University researchers say Quigley is now able to experience the crippling fear of impending death previously only accessible to humans."

It's open in the sense that anyone can use it. Without restriction. And there's no way to be banned from it. Since anyone can just drop off an anonymous letter in the post. You don't have to enter a service agreement. Just dump you satchel of letters with stamps on them, in the nearest mail box.

It's not just practically open. It's legally open; at least here in Canada, the federal postal service has a legal obligation, arising from the constitutional right to free speech, to carry any mail that has legal content, regardless of how Canada Post or its employees might feel about it. They're obligated to take those commercial service agreements regardless of content. (This has been a point of contention sometimes with graphic anti-abortion flyers delivered as ad-mail.)

The main means to deal with someone abusing the postal system is the criminal law and court orders.

Sorry you're right I was mistaking this with the civil service that was offered as an alternative to military conscription.

I must completely misunderstand the purpose of the German system of conscription. I thought the point was to train the reserve populace in relevant skills to defence and public functioning, not just to extract labour.

All my silly pet projects which are otherwise quite useless, were nonetheless very useful as didactic exercises.

www.gov.mb.ca www.gov.nb.ca www.gov.pe.ca www.gov.ns.ca www.gov.ab.ca www.gov.bc.ca www.gov.on.ca www.gov.nf.ca www.gov.yt.ca www.gov.nt.ca www.gov.nu.ca

Some redirect. Sask. and Que. break the pattern, but both have various government sites under .gov.sk.ca and .gouv.qc.ca (comme de juste).

There's an interesting property to thermal storage, as a consequence of simple geometry. Consider a cube. volume = n³ and surface area = 6*n². Surface area increases more slowly than volume. The ratio of surface to volume decreases with more size. Thus: a sufficiently large thermal reservoir becomes self-insulating with its own mass.

A single iron atom can be a magnetic domain. So a surface coated with single-atom domains, spaced a few atoms apart. I would posit that's close to the 2D limit because of physics. They can't be directly next to each other or it's impossible to read or write them.

So very roughly, about 1 bit per square nanometre. Which unless I'm dropping an order of magnitude (very possible) is about 10 petabits per square centimetre, and with about 300 square centimetres for a 3.5" platter that's 3 exabits or so per side of platter.

Whether it will ever be possible to actually read or magnetize domains that small without interfering with the neighbouring domains is the question and no one knows. There have been several breakthroughs, like perpendicular recording, that have brought us much closer to the theoretical limit above, than anyone would have thought.

Heating a ferromagnetic material lowers it coercivity -- the heat softens it and makes it less magnetically "springy". And if heated enough it fully loses its magnetization.

So, to write, zap the area with a laser to heat it up. The coercivity is lowered. This lets a weaker magnetic field work to magnetize the area. This allows packing more densely, as the weak field will not affect the neighbouring cooler and higher coercivity regions.

(I think.)

This is not the first time lasers have been used to write to magnetic media. Magneto-optical discs (e.g. Sony's MiniDisc) were erased using laser heat. (MO discs also were read with laser, the ferromagnetic material used had different optical properties depending on magnetization.)

No, you're right. The attack on the Death Star sequence, in Star Wars (1977), is one of the very first use of 3D computer graphics in film.

The tie-fighters and Death Star were drawn as wire-frame. And it was all wire-frame until about '81 - '82. Textured rendering was driven by rapid performance gains with parallel and vector processors. I can't think of any use of textured surfaces until the early 1980s, outside of some experimental things like "A Computer Animated Hand" (1972).

The Genesis effect in Star Trek II (1982) was considered mind-blowing at the time. Most people in the audience would have never seen anything like it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tq_sSxDE32c They used a Cray X-MP supercomputer. A very expensive one minute of film.

What we would recognize as the early 3D graphics scifi style emerges in the early-mid 80s. For example, The Last Starfighter (1984): https://youtu.be/bkDzkjQodzs?t=32