ternus

The BBC Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell miniseries is excellent. One of those times (others might include the original LOTR films and early Game of Thrones) where a genre adaptation wildly exceeded my expectations.

This is still a concern in 2025. If your aircraft systems break, or if you don't want to be identified, there are surprisingly few ways of identifying you nonetheless.

It surprises many people to learn that we do not have full radar coverage of the continental United States, much less the oceans. Outside of the ADIZ (Air Defense Identification Zone), military bases, large airports, etc., planes are more or less tracked voluntarily by systems like ADS-B.

From the excellent Computers Are Bad newsletter, https://computer.rip/2023-02-14-something-up-there-pt-I.html :

""" It is a common misconception that the FAA, NORAD, or someone has complete information on aircraft in the skies. In reality, this is far from true. Primary radar is inherently limited in range and sensitivity, and the JSS is a compromise aimed mostly at providing safety of commercial air routes and surveillance off the coasts. Air traffic control and air defense radar is blind to small aircraft in many areas and even large aircraft in some portions of the US and Canada, and that's without any consideration of low-radar-profile or "stealth" technology. With limited exceptions such as the Air Defense Identification Zones off the coasts and the Washington DC region, neither NORAD nor the FAA expect to be able to identify aircraft in the air. Aircraft operating under visual flight rules routinely do so without filing any type of flight plan, and air traffic controllers outside of airport approach areas ignore these radar contacts unless asked to do otherwise.

There are incidents and accidents, hints and allegations, that suggest that this concern is not merely theoretical. In late 2017, air traffic controllers tracked an object on radar in northern California and southern Oregon. Multiple commercial air crews, asked to keep an eye out, saw the object and described it as, well, an airplane. It was flying at a speed and altitude consistent with a jetliner and made no strange maneuvers. It was really all very ordinary except that no one had any idea who or what it was. The inability to identify this airplane spooked air traffic controllers who engaged the military. Eventually fighter jets were dispatched from Portland, but by the time they were in the air controllers had lost radar contact with the object. The fighter pilots made an effort to locate the object, but unsurprisingly considering the limited range of the target acquisition radar onboard fighters, they were unsuccessful. One interpretation of this event is that everyone involved was either crazy or mistaken. Perhaps it had been swamp gas all along. Another interpretation is that someone flew a good sized jet aircraft into, over, and out of the United States without being identified or intercepted. Reporting around the incident suggests that the military both took it seriously and does not want to talk about it. """

I can't find the original tweet, but someone (half?) jokingly proposed a law that all benefits must be defined as continuously differentiable functions (thus making cliffs impossible).

"Yeah, I made $1M last year. Here's my SNAP check for six cents."

If you don't care about music or background play, and all you want is to eliminate ads, YouTube Premium Lite is $8/month.

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/15968883

Anecdotally, the professors I talked to in the building hated it. Non-rectilinear walls and oddly-shaped offices made it difficult to put up bookcases and desks. The windows were all custom, meaning if one broke, it was difficult to replace. And, of course, the aforementioned leaks.

I was in the Radio Society and had access to the Green Building (50) roof. The Stata Center actually looks coherent from that angle, and you can tell that was the angle the designers and approvers had been seeing it from (in model form) the whole time.

> it was French that equipped English to become the language of international communication, _a state of affairs which should be celebrated as la francophonie’s greatest achievement_.

Imagine making this claim to a proud French language partisan. You'd have to rush them to the hospital.

My primary monitor is the Samsung 57" 8Kx2K 240Hz ultrawide. That's the same amount of bandwidth, running over DisplayPort 2. It mostly works!

I visited in person several years back and was astonished - the grass really was that shade of lime green.

Don't miss Sete Cidades: the cluster of small towns inside the caldera of an extinct volcano. Gorgeous.

That phrase is Google's mission statement.

What's the go-to recommendation for smart thermostats with local control (no cloud) + Home Assistant these days? Claude suggests Ecobee + Homekit. Z-Wave seems to be another popular option. What are people using?

Good writeup. Note that they say:

> Evidence so far is scarce, so we repeat these claims with some healthy skepticism. But we should also note, external contacts and 3rd party reports are all telling us the same story: the litho tool is legit. Note we have worked with Substrate since as far back as 2022, but the technical analysis here was by team members who did not have access to that NDA information.

> Naysayers will point out a million reasons why this is improbable, difficult, etc. - and they are mostly correct.

> We're hopeful for success but skeptical given how many questions there are.

Debt ceiling is different than a shutdown. Debt ceiling negotiations are about raising the debt limit to pay for spending Congress has already appropriated. The debt ceiling failure mode is "the US defaults on its debt."

Shutdowns happen when Congress hasn't appropriated new money by passing a budget. The shutdown failure mode is "there isn't enough money to pay for existing programs."

I was astonished at the claim that pilots ejecting can lose half an inch of height due to spinal compression induced by the G-forces. Claims seem to be borne out:

https://www.forcesnews.com/news/can-ejecting-aircraft-make-p... https://www.quora.com/Do-pilots-lose-height-when-they-eject-...

The claims made on that kind of hobby tool, in that era, serve as a fantastic argument for truth-in-advertising laws. Looking at you, the perpetual ad for (plans for) time machines and force fields in the back of Boy's Life.

> If you are sleeping a healthy amount you aren't grinding enough

Unless you build a soundproof box for your rock tumbling - then you can run it 24/7.

Wow, that's awful. Have you looked into the existing powered exoskeletons? Or are those too hip/thigh focused to help?

This is a major through-line in War and Peace. Native Russian characters write to each other in (untranslated-in-the-original! Hope your translation comes with footnotes!) French, and a significant chunk of the dialogue is in French as well.

Were the bath bombs any good? Did the LLM's advice(?) make a meaningful difference? I didn't know making them was so simple.

I read this as a reference to the Fourth and Fifth Republic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Fifth_Republic

(I've read that the French are talking about a Sixth, given that they've gone through several prime ministers in the past few weeks/months and seem unable to maintain a government long enough to pass anything.)

The saving grace was that it was followed by a single hyphen, not an em-dash.

Presumably they mean the Model Y Standard. The existing model became the Model Y Premium.

Great project! If you don't feel like building your own chicken squisher, there are commercially-available automatic coop doors that you can buy on Amazon. The one I got is Tuya-based, making it easy to integrate into Home Assistant.

Five days after installing it (and thus enabling the chickens to access the outer yard) they were carried away by predators. The 8ft+ wire yard fence didn't extend far enough into the ground to prevent something from tunneling under it.

That's not his department.

Artemis II is not on the pad. It's in the VAB, and it isn't stacked yet (source: my sister's an engineer with NASA Exploration Ground Support and is one of the people in charge of assembling it).

There's a lot left to do before it's ready to launch: https://spaceflightnow.com/2025/10/17/orion-spacecraft-arriv...

Of course, compared to the decades-long SLS timeline, that's "ready to go".

Many dishwashers are supposed to be wood-screwed into the surrounding cabinets! Recently installed one for a friend and was surprised to see that instruction.

Meanwhile, with the exception of ice makers/water dispensers (1/4 PEX), fridges don't have to deal with hoses for the most part. So much easier IME.

Also: if you find ice forming in your fridge, or uneven cooling inside, it may be due to a clogged drain tube. This was the root cause of my fridge breaking: tube in the back clogged -> condensation backed up around the evaporator coils -> froze solid -> blocked circulation fan -> incorrect thermal readings, warm/frozen spots in fridge.

Totally fine to choose as the author did, but for others who might face a similar choice: repairing a thermostat in a fridge is dramatically easier than fixing almost anything in a dishwasher. I did that with my fridge - cost <$20 for the part and maybe 30 minutes of work. Your (EU) kilometrage may vary.

I suspect the power savings would be much less dramatic with a fixed thermostat.

I used to be a huge fan of Charlie Stross. He's made exactly this kind of apocalyptic prediction many times before. When devastation doesn't materialize, or the outcome far less severe than he predicted, he doesn't update on his beliefs or say "huh, guess I was wrong about that"; instead, he moves right on to the next one.

One of his favorite subjects is Brexit. I'm not a fan either, but here's his track record:

2016: When the Brexit vote happened, he predicted imminent Scottish independence, a failure of the Northern Ireland peace, and the collapse of the London financial sector (note the "fascism is here!" Cabaret reference): https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2016/06/tomorro...

2018: he's stockpiling food and medicine to prepare for the immediate consequences of Brexit's implementation: "Current warnings are that a no-deal Brexit would see trade at the port of Dover collapse on day one, cutting the UK off from the continent; supermarkets in Scotland will run out of food within a couple of days, and hospitals will run out of medicines within a couple of weeks. After two weeks we'd be running out of fuel as well... After week 1 I expect the UK to revert its state during the worst of the 1970s. I just about remember the Three Day Week, rolling power blackouts, and more clearly, the mass redundancies of 1979, when unemployment tripled in roughly 6 months. Yes, it's going to get that bad. But then the situation will continue to deteriorate. With roughly 20% of the retail sector shut down (Amazon) and probably another 50% of the retail sector suffering severe supply chain difficulties (shop buyers having difficulty sourcing imported products that are held up in the queues) food availability will rapidly become patchy. Local crops, with no prospect of reaching EU markets, will be left to rot in the fields as the agricultural sector collapses." https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2018/07/that-si...

2020: impending crisis, widespread shortages, deployment of the military, "added economic crisis, probable civil disobedience and unrest, a risk of the NHS collapsing, a possible run on Sterling, and then a constitutional crisis as one or more parts of the United Kingdom gear up for a secession campaign." https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2020/12/so-you-...

2021: yet more disaster predictions, including that Boris Johnson might declare war on France: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2021/11/an-upda...

In 2022 he once again predicted a general strike, a failed harvest, and the collapse of the UK system of government: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2022/08/the-gat...

And then... none of this happened. Brexit hasn't exactly been positive for the UK, but neither has it rendered it into Fallout: London.

The bread is the mascot of the TV channel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernd_das_Brot -- an article surprisingly full of gems such as this:

> The reason for Bernd's depression was revealed in the 85th episode of the series. In his telling: "[...] A long, long time ago I fell in love with a beautiful, slim baguette. She was so unbelievably charming and funny. But unfortunately, my affection was in vain. She only had eyes for this perfect stranger, a multigrain bread. It was so devastating. [...] My heart has been a dry clump of flour ever since."

Late at night (i.e. right now in the US), KiKA plays a "late night loop" starring Bernd.

I'm confused. According to the article, several days working results in a 90kb compressed DB. If that's the case, it can't be capturing all the text you see, including web pages - perhaps "working" here doesn't involve general web browsing? What am I missing?