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BXLE_1-1-BitIs1

752 karma · joined December 7, 2018

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BXLE_1-1-BitIs1··on We're unlocking the biggest mysteries of the clitoris
The erectile penis and clitoris cells both develop from the same embryonic tissues. I suspect that the itch from these organs incentivises the owners into reproductive behaviors.
BXLE_1-1-BitIs1··on Air Canada's woeful security at cargo warehouse
Air Canada's woeful security at cargo warehouse at time of Toronto's airport gold heist detailed in court.

The bad guys were fiddling the database under other employees' credentials on shared computers.

BXLE_1-1-BitIs1··on Antiqua–Fraktur dispute
My high school English teacher chose Baskerville for the yearbook. This was back in the days when letterpress was still hanging on. Offset was mostly for short print runs. Both processes produced very fine resolution.

I remember when 300 dpi was a Xerox selling point while IBM was stuck at 240 for high speed printing. Now my cheap Brother does 600.

Serif fonts look better with higher dpi. Garamond tolerates lower dpi than modern serif fonts with finer features and curvatures.

I have a soft spot for Optima which is (was?) Xerox' official font, which coincidentally worked well on its printers.

BXLE_1-1-BitIs1··on Midlife Vascular Risk Burden and Dementia-Free Survival Years
You can do everything right and get taken out by an accident. So far I've dodged a loose trailer that came off next to me going the opposite direction, a rock dislodged by a marmot from the cliff above, two drunk drivers drifting towards me, a city bus turning towards me on an icy road, a few other left turning drivers who didn't see me in a crosswalk (I now carry a high intensity pulsing flashlight for crossing at intersections) and two near misses when a gust upset my glider.
BXLE_1-1-BitIs1··on Show HN: Teach your kids perfect pitch
A440 is higher than earlier tunings. Baroque is often A415 and A392 can be used for French harpsichord music.

Equal temper results in each key being so many semitones above or below C Major.

Other temperaments have a distribution of pure and dissonant intervals giving different colors to each key. Certain keys would not be useful or notes would have to be adjusted to make a key sound right.

BXLE_1-1-BitIs1··on How Alberta Eradicated Rats
Lots of rodents in Alberta. The neighbourhood cats keep the mice and hantavirus down. Aircraft are often infested with mice. We need more bullsnakes.
BXLE_1-1-BitIs1··on Goodbye Visa and Mastercard: 130M Europeans switching to sovereign payment
Trump sanctions against ICC members and at least one human rights rapporteur has effectively debanked these people and made it very difficult for them to travel.

Protecting Rule of International Law against Rule of Trump Ukazi has become necessary.

BXLE_1-1-BitIs1··on Hindenburg’s Smoking Room
Back in the 50's tonsillectomies were a regular rite of passage for kids, especially in colder places where kids spent more time indoors exposed to smoke. A couple years after moving from Maiibu to Toronto, I had the surgery.
BXLE_1-1-BitIs1··on Inventing Cyrillic (2024)
So far not mentioned are a few Hebpew letters incorporated into Cyrillic (sh, ts, ch) somebody handier with Unicode can post them
BXLE_1-1-BitIs1··on Colorado grandma keeps getting pulled over due to database error
File a small claims court action for each traffic stop demanding the maximum SCC amount. You can claim against the PD, who can join Focus or other provider as defendant.

Don't forget to ask the officer(s) making the stop for their badge number and name letting them know that you may need to subpoena them.

BXLE_1-1-BitIs1··on ASML became the chokepoint for cutting-edge chips
Xerox in my time there skewed compensation to the salespeople while turning a blind eye to the software developers who made the sale possible.
BXLE_1-1-BitIs1··on Škoda DuoBell: A bicycle bell that penetrates noise-cancelling headphones
There's been the odd idiot wearing headphones mowed down on train tracks. The trains air horn didn't get the message through.

The Air Zound is wonderful. You can get pedestrians' attention with light toots. I reserve the full blast for developing danger or people who didn't get the message from the toots.

Survival depends on being heard in a car with closed windows with possible loud radio or squabbling kids.

BXLE_1-1-BitIs1··on Cyberattack on vehicle breathalyzer company leaves drivers stranded in the US
Here in Canada a Family Protection clause is common in insurance policies which covers you and your family in the case of hit and run, uninsured or under insured up to your liability limit.
BXLE_1-1-BitIs1··on My application programmer instincts failed when debugging assembler
Assembler programs are written for different environments: Ordinary applications, Accessing OS facilities the compiler language can't access, extending the OS, Device control, enhancing boot process...
BXLE_1-1-BitIs1··on My application programmer instincts failed when debugging assembler
As an ancient mainframe Assembler programmer, I first learned Assembler from studying the code generated by the compiler. There are traps in compiler languages calling user written Assembler routines. The first one I encountered was a routine that could return to different addresses in the calling program. That worked as long as the address was in the same routine, but if the return address was farther up the calling chain (eg. A > B > C < A). A would crash running B's registers.

The application programmers ended up with a dump and had no idea on how to diagnose the problem. I once walked up to a programmer puzzled by a dump and solved it in about three minutes (practice helps) putting out of joint the nose of the senior programmer who was being consulted.

The compiler library handled this situation just fine, but the guru who wrote the Assembler program insisted that programmers had to be more careful.

I wrote another routine to intercept the calls and use the subroutine library when needed.

BXLE_1-1-BitIs1··on Helsinki just went a full year without a single traffic death
Not yet discussed is that European countries have standards mandating lower hoods that are not as hazardous to pedestrians in a collision.

Getting hit by a pickup or high profile SUV is much more likely to kill you than a compact.

Adding bull bars to the front virtually guarantees a fatal head injury to a child.

BXLE_1-1-BitIs1··on IBM Mainframe Business Jumps 67%
While many IBM products are beautifully designed, IBM also has a long tradition of dreadful implementations. JES3 and COLT (Canadian On-line Teller) come to mind.

IBM had a tradition of not allowing customers to fall down. JES3 took down a bank in Buffalo. Fortunately for the guilty a major snowstorm had shutdown the city for several days. IBM sent in SEs on snowmobiles.

COLT was even worse as it could throw a mainframe into an interrupt cascade. You had to press System Reset, then IPL and pick up the pieces of transactions. It took me a few months to identify where a register got mangled over an interrupt. This was pseudo reentrant code which I came to utterly despise.

I characterized the code as the result of student intern self abuse.

I spent several months flogging that dead horse until I changed jobs. There were later opportunities at other banks that saw COLT on my résumé that I refused.

In the current millennium, IBM has been serially fomenting payroll disasters with Phoenix as it's known in Canada (I don't know what it's called in Australia).

BXLE_1-1-BitIs1··on From Nevada to Kansas by Glider
You need to keep your nose on the grindstone for years to progress to glider cross country flying. Then you end up as an instructor and have to finagle time in your own glider. There's a bunch of time upgrading and updating flight instruments. You need a viable glider club to have enough people to get you in the air between working on club aircraft, equipment and airfield issues.

These guys had a big oxygen tank.

It's nice to see they were using an Air Glide S and managed to make their goal against the odd 56kt headwind.

BXLE_1-1-BitIs1··on Canada slashes 100% tariffs on Chinese EVs to 6%
A separated Alberta would become a de facto Puerto Rico in thrall to the US without any votes.
BXLE_1-1-BitIs1··on Canada slashes 100% tariffs on Chinese EVs to 6%
The Forever Canadia https://www.forever-canadian.ca/ petition collected over 400,000 signatures from Alberta electors.

Then Danielle moved the goalposts to make it easier for the Independence folks:

Signature collection period: January 3 to May 2, 2026 Number of signatures required for a successful petition: 177,732 (10% of the total number votes cast in the 2023 Provincial General Election).

BXLE_1-1-BitIs1··on Why Arab states are silent about Iran's unrest
Arabic speakers are not necessarily Arabs. Indigenous populations became Arabic speakers during the spread of Islam.

We saw the same in Latin America with Spanish and Catholicism.

BXLE_1-1-BitIs1··on Drones that recharge directly on transmission lines
This will open a giant can of worms. Hobbyists, bad actors and military will be taking advantage.
BXLE_1-1-BitIs1··on Dental hygiene key to predicting mortality, Japanese researchers find
Once bacteria set up house deep inside a tooth, they are sheltered from the immune system while dispatching bacteria into the blood system. I've had infected tooth removed and found myself feeling a whole bunch better after.

Infection can spread to adjacent teeth or sneak in alongside a loose filling or underneath a crown.

A wobbly tooth is likely infected and you might want to get it out to protect adjacent teeth.

I had a root canal in my 20s that failed 10 years later and was replaced by a bridge that had to be replaced every decade or so until a tooth supporting the bridge failed; so I ended up with two implants.

Implant technology is really good today. You will ultimately save money and misery by going straight to an implant if a root canal or bridge is suggested. You will still need to floss to prevent gum loss.

BXLE_1-1-BitIs1··on MH370 vanished in 2014.New search aims to find answers families desperately want
The locked cockpit door has been implicated in a number of pilot suicides: German Wings, Egypt Air, MH370 and possibly others.

Then there's Helios that crashed near Athens. The pressurisation failed and the cockpit oxygen cylinder had been left closed. The preflight check of the crew oxygen mask flow had not been done. By the time a cabin crew member with portable oxygen figured out how to get through the door, the fuel was about to run out.

BXLE_1-1-BitIs1··on Nabokov's guide to foreigners learning Russian
Nabokov writes so beautifully in English.

Not mentioned is that Russian is well populated with loan words from other European languages (especially technology terms) , but about the only Slavic loan word in European languages I know of is "robot" (work) - samizdat being a more recent arrival.

BXLE_1-1-BitIs1··on Prosecuted for threatening spoofed emails – cops failed to check headers
During Petzold’s preliminary hearing on Oct. 1, 2023, the Crown called RCMP [supposed] digital forensic expert Const. Wilson Yee to explain his analysis of the email on Marguerite’s laptop.

Petzold's defence lawyer Ian McKay then had a chance to cross-examine.

He asked Yee about the email “headers” — metadata contained in the digital file that is not typically seen by the end user unless they specifically go looking for it.

The email headers read, in part: "Received: From Emkei.CZ".

That website, based in the Czech Republic, describes itself as a "free online fake mailer” and allows users to send emails that can appear to come from any sender.

BXLE_1-1-BitIs1··on JetBlue flight averts mid-air collision with US Air Force jet
The US could issue a notice of an Alert Area where military operations are in progress AND could coordinate with Dutch airspace authorities.

US AWACS has the capability to identify civilian aircraft and route military traffic well clear of civil traffic.

BXLE_1-1-BitIs1··on Google confirms Android attacks; no fix for most Samsung users
I choose not to install any banking app and do my banking in incognito mode so that any malefactor who somehow gets into my device can't see where I bank.

Of course that leaves security in the hands of the browser.

BXLE_1-1-BitIs1··on NTSB Preliminary Report – UPS Boeing MD-11F Crash [pdf]
Gyroscopic precession took the left engine to the right. In AA 191 the right engine departing to the right did not affect the center engine. Sadly the engine failure procedure at the time mandated slowing down to V2 which was below the stall speed with slats retracted. There's now revised procedure and hydraulic fuses.

I expect all remaining aircraft will be getting new rear pylon lugs with shortened inspection intervals - provided the replacement cost is below the value of continued usage.

BXLE_1-1-BitIs1··on Raccoons are showing early signs of domestication
They have a lot in common with housecats, except that they are more clever. Decades ago we heard a crunch crunch sound from the rear mudroom. We looked and saw a raccoon reaching in and eating dry cat out of a box with the cat looking on enviously.

Camping I heard a crunching sound, looked out from the tent to see a racoon helping itself to granola in the back of the car. Lock your doors.

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