dmckeon

Came across this explainer site the other day: Short, Self Contained, Correct (Compilable), Example http://sscce.org/

There was a post office in New Mexico that had collected over 100 misspellings of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pojoaque,_New_Mexico

In the HTML version: s/21:26:39/21:36:39/ to agree with the PDF & spoken text.

The English prevailed then, but the New Englanders also prevailed in the wake of the American Civil War, when the public school education model was introduced by people from Massachusetts, and textbooks tended to reflect a Northern view of American history, presenting an unbroken sequence from the Mayflower to the Emancipation Proclamation, eliding many things that did not fit their preferred narrative, such as Jamestown in Virginia, France in Quebec and the Maritimes, the Dutch in New York, Catholics in Maryland, St. Augustine, anything to do with New Spain, etc.

If you travel to places where you might want people searching for you from the air to notice you amid many square miles of search area, a signal mirror is remarkably effective. https://adventure.howstuffworks.com/survival/gear/use-signal...

Trapping an entire sounder of feral hogs is apparently a better choice than trying to shoot a few of them, as any hogs not killed will repopulate quickly: https://www.uaex.edu/publications/pdf/MP534.pdf

Tell: “in search of easy pray”

spellchecking != proof reading.

Was expecting something fully automated: generate a 3-d plot of the game board, download to a controller that acts like a 3-d printer, with dozers as the “print” heads. Well, Cat’s 100th anniversary is a few years away - we can hope.

> There is a ton of offshore oil in Southern California

There was a lot of offshore drilling before 1969, before blow-out protectors were required, until one big spill at the cusp of the environmental movement turned most of the California coast against oil drilling, and anything like it offshore, even, ironically, off-shore wind farms - for now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1969_Santa_Barbara_oil_spill#M...

Here is a place (San Agustín sump) that takes 3 weeks to get to from the cave entrance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sistema_Huautla

Save this as a bookmark/shortcut/tool

  javascript:(function(){var%20newSS,%20styles='*%20{%20background:%20white%20!%20important;%20color:%20black%20!
  important%20}%20:link,%20:link%20*%20{%20color:%20#0000EE%20!important%20}%20:visited,%20:visited%20*%20{%20
  color:%20#551A8B%20!important%20}';%20if(document.createStyleSheet)%20{%20document.createStyleSheet
  (%22javascript:'%22+styles+%22'%22);%20}%20else%20{%20newSS=document.createElement('link');
  %20newSS.rel='stylesheet';%20newSS.href='data:text/css,'+escape(styles);%20
  document.getElementsByTagName(%22head%22)[0].appendChild(newSS);%20}%20})();

> If I organize my life in such a way that I get lots of long, consecutive, uninterrupted time-chunks, I can write ...

> many high-value art thefts in the past ten to fifteen years has been the potential for stolen works to be used as collateral linked to drug deals.

This is alluded to, twice, but not explained. Is this a form of money laundering, or a deal at a distance - contraband is delivered in country A, artwork in country B? I don’t see how “collateral” plays a part, unless one party “loans” drugs in exchange for artwork, and the second party pays off the loan and recovers the artwork after selling the drugs onward.

A claim with well over 1000 exceptions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_positions_filled_by_pr...

Hope the default settings are better than the MyShake app for iOS, which IIRC helpfully defaulted to notifying one of all quakes near 0 latitude, 0 longitude. It would be nice to have a settable low threshold so one could become familiar with the notifications at 2.5..3.5 Richter, and then set to a higher threshold.

In the USA, 10-year census records since 1790 and immigration records are great resources. The LDS church has done a lot of work microfilming many church and government records that remain available, and has had volunteers transcribing and indexing them. For the British Isles, property records are a good resource - if the people being researched owned or bequeathed property. Research-sharing sites such as ancestry.com can help connect Nth cousins who may be looking for the same remote ancestors.

> Why there are only right footprints and no left footprints?

Walking around the edge of a lake, with the lake to the walker’s right, and softer/wetter ground under the right feet?

There is a "Close Similar Tabs" extension for Firefox https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/close-similar...

Personally, I usually prune a window with many open tabs, usually created after a search for a solution or workaround for a bug, down to the initial search(es) and any useful results, then bookmark any remaining tabs into a folder, in the hope that a future search for the same topic might provoke an auto-suggestion, and in the usually vain hope that I might someday curate all the folders for related topics into a coherent hierarchy.

So Isidore, encyclopedist and patron saint of the internet, is also the inventor of special characters? How appropriate.

Indeed. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24371703 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24396780

tl;dr: digital pregnancy test only uses digital tech to scan a standard paper test, and display the result, at 4x the price.

The pattern of using eponyms instead of descriptives is also recognized in medicine: https://scopeblog.stanford.edu/2020/01/30/eponym-debate-the-...

    “It is easy to build something complicated;
    it’s hard to build it so that it’s simple.”
    Father of the Sidewinder:
    Dr. William B. McLean

Good thought for modern software.

A greater risk than flames crossing firebreaks is firebrands or cinders - flaming bits of bark, small branch, clumps of pine needles - being carried aloft by heat and falling past the firebreak into combustible dry grass or other fuel, or onto a wooden deck next to wooden siding of a house, or in a rain gutter full of pine needles and twigs next to a composition shingle roof edge.

Big Basin has burned before, and was “doomed” in 1904: https://mobile.twitter.com/DustinMulvaney/status/12977663634...

Only 10% of the cells in a human body are human, but that 90% is only 2-3% of human body weight. https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/nih-human-micr...

tl;dr: Private is easier/cheaper.

Almost any set of policies and procedures can be gamed by a motivated set of participants, and the more information that is exposed by a moderation process, the easier it becomes to game the process, and the harder/more expensive it becomes to support a moderated environment, whether by volunteers or paid staff.

Public activity logs, detailed policies, and detailed procedures would be an amazing expression of transparency that would then immediately become a complicated house of cards requiring constant maintenance, defense, and review. For volunteers that is either a huge time-suck or a high threshold. For paid staff, the same, plus expensive, plus a target for law-suits.

A system that was used in some counties in California a few years ago used a paper ballot that was marked by the voter, and then fed by the voter into an optical scanner (made by Eagle, IIRC) which either successfully scanned the ballot, xor returned it to the voter in cases like: extraneous marks, votes for too many candidates in a multi-seat poll (like 4 candidates marked for 3 city council seats among 11 candidates) and similar. The voter could exchange their improperly marked ballot for a fresh blank ballot and start over. The net effect was that all ballots scanned by the voter needed no further inspection - an effect that is sadly lost in vote-by-mail.

A favorite quote seen in the introduction of a cookbook in the 1970s or so, which unfortunately I have never been able to later attribute: “The world needs more cooks, not more cookbooks.” I think this can also apply to some programming environments.

Run genny to cool freezer, refrigerator, UPS batteries, and all rechargeable devices. Stop genny overnight, or when all is cooled or recharged. Repeat as needed.

The less expensive generators may run at a constant speed, regardless of wattage load, so there may be no concept of “idling”. Thermal mass as jugs of water, or bags of water ice (if available) is a win.