proggy

I can’t find the source, but I think this practice was mentioned in the recent Fulton County, Georgia indictment of former president Trump and his associates. It was also employed extensively by the now-disgraced General Petraeus to facilitate his extramarital affair [1]. It’s a pretty popular tactic used by people who aren’t very wise to the fact that their cleverness does not equate to actual privacy.

[1] https://www.cnet.com/news/privacy/petraeus-reportedly-used-d...

One of the shuttle missions that resulted in loss of crew was caused by operating the vehicle outside of the rated temperature envelope (for the SSB O-rings). If that requirement was honored, the failure rate could have been halved.

The other loss of crew was caused by a genuine oversight in the design of the system, in that the orbiter was always susceptible to strikes from insulating foam falling from the external tank.

Unlike Titan, neither one of these failures were due to the inevitable cyclic wear of the primary pressure vessel. They were both devils hiding in the details, neither one the result of reckless hubris.

OceanGate full on admitted that its carbon fiber hull, a major red flag component at the center of its design, was highly experimental and did not know exactly when it would fail. They foolishly thought that strain gauges would detect issues well in advance of failure, while completely ignoring how immediately and catastrophically composite structures are known to fail. They recklessly sold tickets to fund their experimental craft, inviting people aboard who were definitely not made fully aware of just how flawed the design was up front. These were not all members of the Explorers Club — a former head writer for the Simpsons went on a dive, for goodness’ sake.

So to return back to your point, I’d rather take a shuttle after a few dozen flights than get inside a Titan II after a few dozen dives.

It’s a relief to see that the Marine Technology Society saw this coming 6 years ago, and did what they could to encourage OceanGate to do the right thing. There are inherent, known risks with deep sea exploration and firms need to be held to a minimum standard of safety out of a basic respect for human life. Being a scrappy startup isn’t a valid excuse for cutting corners when it comes to engineering and qualification of a pressure vessel and its essential components.

I really hope that the foresight of the MTS is recognized amongst the general public, and the DSV space doesn’t suffer a setback in perception and/or funding. At present, it does seem like the general sentiment is that this specific submersible was built to an incredibly poor standard when compared to, say, the famed Alvin or Deepsea Challenger. I hope that sentiment holds.

It is simply unbelievable that the company was even able to get to the point of diving to such depths with humans aboard. If they had encountered a program-destroying but non-catastrophic failure earlier on, it is possible we wouldn't be looking at one of the many horrific outcomes that this incident will likely resolve to.

Looking at the accounts reported to date, the OceanGate engineering culture was basically non-existent. Their test program was extremely lightweight to say the least, and the results that came back from what little hull testing they did do were ignored, resulting in the dismissal of an internal whistleblower [1]. We also learned that there were flammable materials within the pressure vessel, no practical contingency plan to speak of, no emergency beacon fitted, the list goes on. The whole thing was just cobbled together, not fully thought out or vetted, and yet the intent was to journey to one of the most unforgiving environments imaginable.

But getting back to the account of the reversed motor above -- it is one of the purest examples I can now think of where life imitates art. Piloting a stolen (but seaworthy) deep-sea submersible to the wreckage of the Titanic -- that was only able to make right-hand turns due to a "sub club" anti-theft device -- was a major plot point in the pilot episode of the TV series "Pinky and the Brain". Narf.

[1] https://newrepublic.com/post/173802/missing-titanic-sub-face...

Anchor Hocking is still around. For now. But if this pattern of private equity destroying trusted brands continues, one can only imagine how difficult it will be as a consumer to purchase well-made household commodities. I do not want to navigate a world where the provenance of every product is unknown, its white-label manufacturing origins hidden behind an alphabet soup name like MALACASA, KOMUEE, or M MCIRCO (all actual names of oven safe glassware products for sale today).

I don’t have an answer to your question. But I had quite a bit of trouble finding a affordable, drop-in replacement Raspberry Pi for a recent project, so I went looking for alternatives. There are a number of companies that make comparable single board computers and sell them at the $35 price point, for example LibreComputer. The board I received was very nicely put together and worked well for my purposes. The only practical difference between the clone and the genuine Pi was the lack of a Pi-branded GPIO library.

“First rule in government spending: why build one when you can have two at twice the price?”

- S.R. Hadden, Contact

As I recall, the average electric leaf blower emits around 70 dB, while the average gas blower puts out 80-90 dB (although some advertise themselves as quieter, I am dubious but have not verified by running these tests myself). The electric leaf blowers are noticeably quieter, and what noise they do make is much more concentrated on a smaller set of frequencies than a gas blower, which is kind of all over the spectrum when it gets going.

The primary challenge with office tower conversions are the floor plates. Most are big, sprawling rectangles with yawning amounts of interior space intended for cubicles, interior offices/conference rooms, and other windowless uses. Natural light is only available at the perimeter and therefore comes at a premium. The vast majority of proposed apartment conversions call for putting the living area along the curtain wall of windows and push the bedrooms into windowless areas within the core, which is problematic. Removing natural light from sleeping areas messes with circadian rhythm, reduces egress options, and reduces ventilation options as well. In my humble opinion we should not normalize the idea that access to natural light and ventilation in a bedroom should come at a premium in residential construction at least. If you’ve ever been on a cruise ship and seen/stayed in an interior state room, it’s pretty much that but a place intended for permanent residency.

It’s uncommon worldwide, but the majority of Japanese companies pay for employees’ regular daily commuting expenses in full [1]. Typically this is in the form of a commuter ticket that is good for journeys anywhere on the route between your home and work. Pretty handy if you want to break up your journey midway to run some errands or stop off at a cafe or restaurant.

Granted, this is something of a holdover from Japanese society in the late 20th century where lifetime employment was the norm, and nowadays this practice is becoming slightly less common. For instance, a specialist working for a Japanese company (like myself, a few years back), should expect to pay for their own transportation costs. Frankly, it was worth bearing the cost myself, though, as I did not need to reciprocate loyalty to the company in the same way my coworkers did by spending long hours at the office and participating in mandatory-ish social gatherings that lasted late into the night.

[1] https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2014/10/14/business/how-em...

Implementation matters. The automatic braking on my compact SUV has falsely triggered hundreds of times over the course of 3 years, usually when transitioning from a moderately-pitched-down driveway into a roadway. The result of this scenario is the car coming to a dead stop with its front end halfway into a traffic lane, putting me and my passengers at greater risk of a collision from oncoming traffic approaching from the left hand side. It’s happened so often I’ve made a habit of disabling it whenever I exit certain commonly used driveways know to trigger the behavior.

I have similar thoughts. Surface parking lots are often targets for infill development of residential / commercial structures, which if built intelligently can increase density and therefore walkability / bikeability. I’d imagine adding solar panel canopies to surface parking lots increases their value significantly, reinforcing the car-centric land use pattern and making it more difficult to replace them. It is far more energy efficient to walk short distances in a dense urban grid than it is to drive long distances between buildings that are separated by oceans of parking lots.

All that said, this is still a good solution for the land use pattern we have today. When it comes to environmentalism I’m of the view that perfect can often be the enemy of good.

I like this creator’s style. The videos are calm, relaxed, and quite funny in an understated sort of way. The lack of audio narration or piece to camera cutaways makes you feel like you’re there in their shoes, which is awesome.

As for the ferry experience itself, however — three days of zero human interaction with low ceilings, cramped quarters, stripped-down decor, prepackaged food, and an observation deck with no seating and no shade? Absolute misery in my book. Like a low security prison on the water. I guess if you’re all by yourself you could get some reading done.

While I agree that access to medically assisted suicide is a human right, I also think the author is making a salient point about economic injustice. Generally speaking, those with generational wealth and connections fare better in life than those who start at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. Being poor leads to worse outcomes—when you spend all your time working to survive, there isn’t much time for doctor’s appointments (even with universal heath care), daily exercise, or a health-conscious diet. It’s an incendiary headline to be sure, but the point still stands: when medically-assisted suicide is made readily available, those who are the least loved by a society are most likely to opt out of living in it.

Technology Connections is a true gem of a channel.

Concerns about cost per flight aside, how would one go about locating spaceports near enough to urban centers for this concept to be viable? If a fully fueled airliner crashes in an urban area, it’s devastating. Now consider a fully fueled rocket — would the crash be an order of of magnitude worse?

Perhaps I still have the “rockets are inherently dangerous, mitigate bad outcomes by isolating them” mentality. Maybe designs will get the the point where the likelihood of a bad outcome is so remote that it would make sense to locate a spaceport in the same way one locates an airport. Or maybe the spaceport could be way out there and just connected to the urban center with high speed ground transportation. Either way, if spaceports become commercially viable, it’s an interesting thing to consider from an urban planning perspective.

And, like clockwork, just a few weeks after this article’s publication in mid-2020, a floppy diskette of SimRefinery was found and the game was provided to Ars Technica for further discussion [1].

[1] https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/06/a-lost-maxis-sim-game...

I think the missing one is Tuck and Roll’s Drive Em Buggies (Disney California Adventure)

Also, It’s Tough To Be A Bug was cloned, so I guess you can count it twice. It’s still playing at Animal Kingdom (1998), and opened with Disney California Adventure in 2001 (closed 2019).

The amount of detail in this map is absolutely incredible. Pretty much every conceivable rail service is present. I especially like the route planning feature. It’s no Hyperdia [1], that thing is a monster, but it’s super duper cool for local trips. As someone who’s messed around with Tokyo transit apps as half-baked personal projects, color me impressed!

[1] https://www.hyperdia.com/

The major downside is total inundation of all of the valleys filled in by the reservoir. The 20th century is littered with dams whose headwaters have completely destroyed unique natural environments, eg Hetch Hetchy [1]. They are technically “easy” to build if only speaking to their constructibility, but dams are incredibly charged from an environmental perspective.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hetch_Hetchy

You’re not alone. Even the car insurance companies predicted that lower traffic volume would result in fewer incidents and therefore fewer claims overall, to the point of refunding premiums in 2020.

Now, I could get in to how state insurance commissioners found that the companies didn’t refund customers enough…[1] But that’s a bit besides the point — there was a marked decline in monetary claims volume during the height of lockdown. Incidents may have been more severe, but overall volume was definitely lower according to the commissioner’s study in the state of California.

I guess if you just focus on fatalities, it still adds up, but it is still quite a surprising statistic given the circumstances.

[1] https://www.insurance.ca.gov/0400-news/0100-press-releases/2...

Not to mention that if the charger is on-premise, there is no longer a personnel need to drive gas-depleted cars to an offsite refueling station. That may add up to significant labor savings.

While I understand the purpose of neutrality when administering health care — surgeons must operate on wounded saints and murderers alike — I believe the author fails to make an important distinction. There are choices that have an impact on individuals (or relatively small groups of people), and choices that exponentially affect public health.

The one-two punch of choosing to abstain from vaccination and going about daily life unmasked is a terribly irresponsible combination, one that has the potential to kill innocent bystanders by proxy. Perhaps it’s most comparable to driving under the influence or arson, even though the worst case casualty counts of those are still only in the hundreds, while a “Typhoid Mary or Mark” could bring about the demise of untold numbers of vulnerable folks over the full course of time.

So yes, if you forgo vaccination and get sick it’s your own fault (consequence of a personal decision), but it also means that you bear some responsibility for every person you have now caused to be infected down the line. Perhaps it isn’t right to judge people for self-inflicted wounds, but I believe it is quite appropriate to judge people for the fire they’ve perpetuated. So while it’s simpler for physicians to just treat everyone and not get bogged down in who caused what — my goodness, how the rest of us should judge and scorn those who made choices that risk the well being of us all.

So, let’s set aside the commercial applications and just focus on general aviation for a second. Avgas, which fuels over 160,000 small planes in the US alone, contains lead [1]. Even if electric flight is only practical in the general aviation sector, it would remove one of the last remaining sources of lead pollution in our environment. A pretty big win all on its own.

[1] https://www.faa.gov/about/initiatives/avgas/

As someone who’s spent time between California and Japan recently (2019-2020), I honestly think the differences between a Daiso in the US (Los Angeles) and a Daiso in Japan (central Tokyo) are very slight. I bought a lot of little gifts for people from Daiso when I was in Japan, and I’ve found that most of what I bought is also available in the stateside stores. Most of the everyday goods (household, serving ware, tools, cleaning, toys, stationery, etc.) are identical, with only the food and beverage section differing significantly. For instance, in Japan there is a limited stock of local brands by the register (somewhat marked up vs. the local combini). In California, it’s a very select handful of true imports, but most of it are brands who are producing a local US variant that Daiso doesn’t have to ship through customs. And interestingly, they stock some specialty Hawaiian drinks like POG that you can’t find easily in either California or Japan.

All of the features mentioned (background blurring, live text, etc.) are “gee whiz” stuff. Yes, it would be possible to implement those features for x86_64 processors, but this article feels more like a writer trying to jump in early and predict the inevitable future when real, substantial features in future versions of OS X will be Apple silicon-only in a few years.

The loose industry term for this is “plot armor” [1]. There is no explicitly stated reason for the hero(es) being nigh invincible (be it person, spaceship, car, etc.). The only reason why the character survives is that it has a reason to continue existing for sake of the plot.

So yes, I suppose you can rationalize in your head that most ships are made out of super strong materials in science fiction, but unless that’s clearly laid out, you may just be rationalizing writer’s convenience.

[1] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PlotArmor

I only have experience with one particular model during a long-term relocation, but I found that combination washer-dryer unit to be incredibly slow and small. It made sense for a small apartment, but given the choice I’ll take a full size washer and full size dryer anyway. I guess it’s only puzzling to me why small apartments rely on laundromats instead of adding combo units so day to day washing can be done without leaving home.

I disagree. While I concede that, if there is credible information that an adversary is developing AI weapons that need to be counterbalanced to reach some sort of Nash equilibrium, simply putting time and effort into the development of any adversarial technology will turn up the temperature in the space, so to speak. More work in this area means more capability, more complexity, more risk of misuse, and a heightened risk of the possibility of additional actors. Look no further than the theory of deterrence, and how it shifted from a tolerable short term strategy during the Cold War (one with few actors), to a high risk strategy as the trove of technology was enlarged, the likelihood of it spreading increased, and the number of active and potential actors increased dramatically also.

In my view AI weapons development demands a judicious, steady, paced, and thoroughly informed approach to keep the whole space from burning up —- figuratively and literally.

It is absolutely real [1][2], and was quite the scandal at the time. If the reporting is to be believed, PepsiCo paid about $1 million for the branding strategy. All to arrive at a blob that looks like a fat person with a red shirt and blue pants separating from each other at the waistline [3]. So yes, it is a bit unreal.

[1] https://adage.com/article/agency-news/breathtaking-word-purp...

[2] https://www.fastcompany.com/1160304/pepsi-logo-design-brief-...

[3] https://www.cannotunsee.net/post/730928004/pepsi