A-well-a don’t you know about the bird?
Well, everybody knows that the bird is a word
Nice tie-in to another stutter song, tcrosse! Well played!
Interesting study out of MIT:
“Covid-19 patients who recovered from the disease still have robust immunity from the coronavirus eight months after infection, according to a new study. The result is an encouraging sign that the authors interpret to mean immunity to the virus probably lasts for many years.”
My state has been trending very nicely since mid-January. We are know around 50% of our population who have been vaccinated or survived exposure. I notice a few other states; Illinois, Florida, Michigan, trending back up case-wise despite also being at 50% or more “herd” immunity. Florida’s uptick is fairly minor but Illinois and Michigan show disturbing trends.
Whether birds talk or not, we incorporate them into our culture. Nevermore…bird is a word. I developed a revulsion for poetry as a result of being pushed into Junior Literary Critic mode in English classes, but some shards of poetry remained in my brain from the time before Junior Literary Critic.
Those shards of poetry would be Robert Frost’s “miles to go,” Poe’s “Raven,” and some lines from Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner- which is about killing an albatross. Of the 3 poems from which I remember some lines, two deal with birds.
Song lyrics replaced the poetry void for me. Bird is a word……
Much appreciate Neo’s five minutes of edit mode. Time and again.
Thanks for the link, Zaphod. I had forgotten all about Taki.
Back in the 1980s there was a mass migration from Gary, Indiana to the Twin Cities. Things changed.
@tcrosse:
Taki canned reader comments a while back too. Can’t imagine why hehe.
I hadn’t known they came from Gary specifically and when. Thx for data point. Somalis are icing on the cake. Still, if Civilization collapses the Hmong will make short work of everyone else, Apocalypse Now style. So there’s that.
This will bring a tear to the eye of anyone who was doing engineering math back in the Eighties.
They make other old favorites too. Something for everyone.
Oh, I hated those things. Never did figure out how to use most of the functions properly. 🙂 Well, I guess I didn’t really “hate” them, but I was definitely intimidated by them.
As for the ravens and the “Nevermore” stuff, I suspect they just do that as a sort of vaudeville act to pick up pennies. I’m sure they save their good material for more… discriminating audiences. 🙂
Zaphod and Phillip,
I was fairly adroit with a slide rule in my High School days. We were also very thoroughly drilled in interpolation, extrapolation and logarithms so we could approximate to a necessary degree of accuracy without the aid of “electronic brains.” I continue to use those approximation skills nearly daily. It’s a handy thing to know.
Calculator prices finally dropped enough that our AP Chem teacher felt comfortable requiring calculators for tests by my senior year, but we were allowed to share because the price tag was still out of reach for many of us. Part of the fun when sharing with a classmate was to make sure the lcd screen spelled something humorous when handing it, upside down, to a classmate.
Rufus T. Firefly Part of the fun when sharing with a classmate was to make sure the lcd screen spelled something humorous when handing it, upside down, to a classmate.
Ah yes, the good old “7734.” There are probably more, but that’s all I knew. Knew it before the calculator days, from dial phones.
I never learned how to use a slide rule at all. That’s a gap I’ll always regret.
The slide rule was handy for doing approximations and what-ifs, as long as you didn’t forget where your decimal place was. Also, the slide rule case hanging from the belt was a badge of tech nerd-hood, along with the pocket-protector.
My first paying academic job was as a grad student TA, and I spent about 1/4 or 1/3 of my time teaching the undergrads how to use their calculators. “I just don’t know why I can’t solve this problem.” OK, let’s start at the beginning. The physics is fine, but your calculator skills need work. Since I was already hooked on RPN calcs. I had to grit my teeth through the Texas Instruments models.
If anyone is still interested in RPN calcs. and hasn’t already found this calculator for Windows and Linux, there is this: http://www.tordivel.no/xcalc/
And you can enjoy reading how much this programmer hated programming for Windoze.
Not a good look for Tesla or self driving vehicles.
Once the fire was out, investigators found the body of one man in the passenger seat and the body of another man in the back seat.
Authorities say no one was in the driver’s seat of the car.
I watch daily the Crows cousin of the Raven rule the roost. They work in concert to bully larger birds. Personally watched them one day pick on Bold Eagle and ran him/her off nest.
Mean little devils.
Not a good look for Tesla or self driving vehicles.
They dropped off passengers. One man stayed in the back seat. Another – in the driver’s seat – started the car and then climbed into the passenger seat. It’s supposed to have an autopilot ‘driver-assist’ feature. It’s not clear from the reports whether it has full self-driving technology. If it does, the technology doesn’t work or these guys didn’t know how to set it up. They were on the road for only a few minutes before it careers off the road, hits a tree, and bursts into flame in a way that hardly ever happens outside the car chases in 1970s cop shows. The only ameliorating factor is that these were oldish guys, not young men with many productive years ahead of them. There are times when mens’ deficit of risk-aversion causes terrible trouble; quite unusual when the men in question are retirement age.
I have an old H-P 11-C that I break out now and then for auld lang syne, to pop a few numbers on and off the stack.
Yeah, ravens are mimics just like mynahs, parrots, and some other birds.
There’s a meme-joke out there involving teaching all the wild crows in a woods to shout “RUN!!!”
😀
}}} I was fairly adroit with a slide rule
Ahhh, but did you ever get a circular slide rule?
THOSE were the cat’s meow!
I recall seeing LED calculators, but then there was the first LCD calculator — THAT was cool, because with the early ones, the transition was sort of slow, so the numbers seemed to “melt” into each other, kind of like a “morph” effect. LCDs were a major improvement, as they were lower powered so, unlike an LED, they could be “always on” and not drain the eph out of the batteries.
Both were in the 100 buck range in the early 70s (the LED Watch in “Live and Let Die“! It was like 1000 bucks! 😛 ), this with Gold @ 32 bucks an oz and minwage @ $1.25, iirc.
By HS (mid 70s), there were the programmable HPs, with the HP 55 and then the HP 65. I had one classmate who had a 55. How many know of, much less remember, Reverse Polish Notation? The 55/65, iirc, were on the order of 500, 600 bucks. I also got an LED watch with more capabilities than the Bond watch from Seiko (remember them?) for about 100 bucks. I also had a friend with a cheaper non-RPN calculator… It had a **PI** key!! OOooooooooohhh!!! 😀
As with all things made essentially of carefully dirtied sand, the price dropped precipitously. By the early 80s, there were calculators for about 10-30 bucks, and somewhere around that time you could find an LED watch in a cereal box as a giveaway.
But I still have three slide rules. The plastic one I bought, the nice metal one my then-GF’s dad gave me, and a circular Pickett that I picked up somewhere.
I am ready for the collapse of Civ, if nothing else.
😀
Ah yes, the good old “7734.” There are probably more, but that’s all I knew.
“Leet”
Re: The Tesla Crash:
Clearly, a Darwin Award winning situation, but, unfortunately, from their ages, they likely already reproduced.
My favorite stutter song is still “My Generation”. Because Daltrey’s rhythm is truly that of someone who stutters. Like when it gets caught in your throat and nothing close to coherent comes out of your mouth.
Art Deco,
The Tesla does have full self-driving technology but Tesla will not advertise it as such for obvious reasons (see news reports on the horrific accident you commented on for an example).
They themselves state it is not ready for everyday use yet, but Elon says it will be by the end of the year (I think he has been saying it is one or two years away for at least a decade). However, based on tracking of their own vehicles (Tesla’s record A BUNCH of data and one has to be connected to Tesla’s servers in order to keep under warranty, so it’s a near 100% sample size).
Here’s what Tesla stated about the data last October:
“In the 3rd quarter, we registered one accident for every 4.59 million miles driven in which drivers had Autopilot engaged. For those driving without Autopilot but with our active safety features, we registered one accident for every 2.42 million miles driven. For those driving without Autopilot and without our active safety features, we registered one accident for every 1.79 million miles driven. By comparison, NHTSA’s most recent data shows that in the United States there is an automobile crash every 479,000 miles.”
So, yes, computers misinterpret their surroundings, but so do humans. The Tesla folks say their computers (and cameras and sensors…) are safer than the average human behind the wheel.
The most dangerous part of a car is the nut that holds the wheel.
Regarding “self driving” and electric cars there are two things I never hear discussed, but they are so obvious the folks shoulder deep in these technologies must be focusing on them.
First, I won’t go into robotics and AI vs. human intelligence except to state computers are often very good at things that are difficult for humans and very bad at things that are easy for humans. Humans have to go to years of medical school and residency to develop a database of conditions, symptoms and pathologies in order to be good predictors when presented with a patient so we down select our best and brightest for the job of physician. That’s actually a piece of cake for a computer. Input all known aches, pains, symptoms and past history of a patient, compare it to a database and spit out a list of likely illnesses ranked by probability and/or additional questions to ask. But walk on a crowded street and find a subway station and descend the stairs to the platform and get on the correct train? Really, really tricky stuff for a machine.
What would really help self driving cars is if they knew what all the other traffic was doing. Driving isn’t so hard for computers these days, but reacting to the randomness and unpredictability of traffic is. It’s for this reason that I think our first, widespread use of self driving cars will be when a city (my money is on Tokyo) requires all vehicles within a certain radius of the city center to be connected to a network so that all cars know what all other cars (and maybe bicycles and humans from cellphone pings) are doing. This is also were real fuel savings and pollution reduction come in.
If I get in my car and tell it my destination is my office, 22.8 miles away the city server knows where I am going and what is in front of me or will be in front of me for the entire journey. It knows who else is on the road and where they are going. It also knows the timing of lights at all the intersections. Rather than going 70mph sometimes and 3mph other times it would be better if all us commuters were going 30mph most all the time. A faster trip overall, better fuel economy, better on brake pad wear, far fewer accidents. And it can choose the most effective routes based on everything else that is happening.
Second,
Trailerable batteries. Gas stations that also have battery packs on aerodynamic trailers (such trailers already exist). So, for my typical commute to and from work my electric car has the range to handle it. But, for my family vacation to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho I arrange for a rental from a battery-trailer company. Drive with no trailer to close the the car’s ultimate range. Exit the highway and attach a trailer and connect it to the car in about the time it takes to refuel a 15 gallon gas tank. Drive until that battery pack is nearly used and exit at the next rental facility and repeat the process until I’m in the “Famous Potato” state.
Or maybe having self driving lanes designated for only self driving vehicles … at least till ALL the kinks are ironed out.
On another note. Has anyone seen anywhere what the “end game” is for the vaccine? I mean do the powers that dictate want absolutely NO cases or is there in the writings something like 1 case per something?
Yawrate:
A lot of people have said that’s a stutter song. I actually think it’s a stammer song. Long ago I was taught that the distinction between the two terms was that stuttering involved repeating the phoneme and stammering involved blockage and a pause in the ability to say it. Looking it up just now, it appears that the distinction has now disappeared and they are both called stuttering, at least in the US.
I went to school with someone who stammered, in the old-fashioned sense of his speech stopping sometimes when he tried to get a sound out, and it was very distinct from anything I’d ever heard described as stuttering at the time.
At any rate, I guess it’s all moot now.
Rufus, interesting and logical idea for that self-driving car city. Isn’t something like this part of the “smart city” concept being bandied about somewhere? I didn’t really look into it much, just a concept being floated. I can see why you’d bet on Tokyo, but isn’t that a big wad to bite off, even for the Japanese? Tokyo-Yokohama is said to be gigantic. Maybe a mid-size city in Japan or China could be more likely as the test pad.
I’d like to open another topic: journaling. Two or three years ago, I journalled a whole year of my life (approximately). I’m not generally a journaller, but since it grew organically out of a major event in my social life, I kept it up to see if I could chronicle what I was doing with my life.
When 2020 started up, I felt I had resolved to continue this, since it seemed useful. But then I got a bit behind after the new year and then, well… 2020, you know? Things and ideas and impressions started to happen so terribly fast and my emotions were all over the place – sometimes it would have taken me all evening just to record each day. Whenever I got to catch my breath mentally, I was so far behind that there no longer seemed to be any point in even pretending to catch up; and then the next abomination would rear its head, of course. Eventually I decided that the closest approximation I would or could ever have for a chronicle of my life that year would be a crude data dump of my texts, e-mails and YouTube history.
This attitude has been ongoing in 2021 with two exceptions. I keep two separate, focused journals now. One is from September 1, 2020 to current, a log of all liturgical events at the parish in which I’ve been involved in that time (which, surprisingly, has not been quite all of them, since the funerals have been mostly restricted to family only due to You-Know-What – in fact, even as I write this, I just got a notification of another such funeral coming up). I wanted to keep track of take-home lessons from each service, personal post-mortems, things like that. All necessary since our church services involve a huge number of details and nuances pertinent to the Orthodox spiritual life. (Sept. 1 is the start of our ecclesiastical year, btw.)
The other one I have going over the last few weeks is a gardening journal, which is not as voluminous as the other, but in which I intend to make notes about what/when for plantings, maybe little remarks about what I’m using for soil mixes, things like that. I don’t know that I want to get into heavily regimented details such as building a whole watering schedule for every planter box. Given my rather obsessive nature when it comes to recordkeeping, I could see myself doing that if I really wanted to, but I really have to keep a lid on that tendency.
My comment, then, is that I’m coming to consider this sort of focused journaling as a potential alternative to the more typical journal which spans one’s entire life, at least in theory. Have any of you tried this approach?
Officer Sicknick died of natural causes, two strokes. No allergic reaction to any irritants at the riot. RIP.
My sense is that no one can say at this point what the “end game” is for the various FDA-approved COVID-19 vaccines. I don’t think even the folks at the CDC know for certain. However, they have tried to clean up and simplify the COVID-19 section of their website, the latest feature being a “What’s New and Updated” landing page with info. about the vaccines, starting with today’s date and working backward. The specific topics addressed are a mixed bag (I doubt that you are interested, for example, in “Considerations for Casinos and Gaming Operations”), but this is the best resource I know of for the time being.
Now the goal post will move to … the two strokes were brought on by the insurrection that murdered Officer Sicknick.
jack @3:06pm,
It’s my assumption (and I think I’ve even read this suggested as a near term goal of some municipalities) that Interstate highways will fairly soon have the bulk of their right lanes taken over by unmanned, self driving tractor trailers. I believe the UK already reserves a lane (the left, naturally) for tractor trailers (except when autos have to cross it to enter and exit a highway) and the maximum speed limit is about 45mph. It would be a lot like freight trains, except no tracks and the vehicles are separated by a bit of space, rather than linked together.
My guess is we’ll first start seeing this for long haul trucks. Maybe something is going from Iowa City to Sacramento. There’s a depot near an entrance to I-80 in Iowa City and the self driving truck is loaded there, where it enters the highway. It exits about 1,000 miles later to refuel at a facility just off the highway, then re-enters until it gets to the depot in Sacramento, also just off of I-80. All the self driving trucks on I-80 are connected to a system that knows what they are all carrying, where they are all headed; tire pressure, all the ODBII codes…
Interstate driving is a lot more predictable than city driving. Fewer vehicles per mile, no intersections, everyone headed in the same direction. And freight has a cost factor. Not having to pay for a driver, or ensure he rests and doesn’t drive 2/3 of a day is enough economic incentive to push this forward. That’s why I think it will be the first, large scale adoption of unmanned vehicles.
All that makes good sense.
Now the song for today dedicated to Hunter Biden.
Wait for it … wait for it
“I didn’t have the common decency
To lay off my brother’s wife”
[O]n Thursday, the mother of Breonna Taylor, a black woman killed by police during a raid in March 2020, charged that the movement in her city of Louisville, Kentucky, is nothing more than a scam.
“I have never personally dealt with BLM Louisville, and personally have found them to be fraud,” Tamika Palmer wrote on Facebook.
—
Khan-Cullors said last week that the organization is not a “charity,” and that people in the community with financial needs should pressure the government for reparations for slavery.
Not a charity. (giggle)
—
I haven’t done this yet, but all major corps. have an “Investor Relations” web page and shareholders can send letters or email to the board of directors. Why on earth would these corps. be sending major dollars to BLM?
TommyJay,
Shareholders need to ask that very question at the next shareholders’ meeting. “There are so many worthwhile charities doing great work in this nation. Can you tell us why you chose BLM to receive the largest donation from this corporation and can you tell us what mechanisms you have in place to track how that donation is spent?”
Stepped into a gas station today. What was playing on the muzak? Bay City Rollers. Consonant AND vowel stutter:
“I-I-I-I got a date. I-I-I-I just can’t wait.”
“Sa-Sa-Sa-Saturday ni-ight. Sa-Sa-Sa-Saturday ni-ight.”
@TommyJay:
I went off to read that guys site expecting a *proper* epic rant about Windows and all I got was a vague sense that he was somewhat disenchanted with programming for the platform. I feel let down!
This one is pretty good. I have it on my iPhone. Available for a bunch of platforms.
IIRC first half of Eighth Grade was log and trig tables and then the word came down that a new era had dawned and we’d better show up for second half of the year with a Casio fx-80 or else.
Pretty sure much of the real world still does a lot of important work with tables, nomograms, and specialised slide rule tools — eg. HVAC reckoning.
Apparently pilots still have to study and know the E6B circular slide rule as a backup and common-sense-get-a-feeling-for-what’s-right check for flight planning software.
Zaphod,
Sorry if I mislead. If you’ve got a calculator app you like, stop there. I never looked beyond Bernt the Norwegian’s little app XCALC. The 2.9X versions are tiny with a little help file that works fine for the more arcane capabilities.
I’ve used logarithms many times, but from a table? And a Pickett slide rule too. Those are childhood memories.
@TommyJay:
Can’t help it if I like a good programming rant, now, can I? 🙂
Probably less of a thing now in the Age of Woke and Hurt Feelings but back in the day some of the stuff one would come across in code comments could be hilarious and scathing.
Also have some faint memory of steam tables from first or second year engineering. Can live without those too!
Come to think of it, I’m pretty sure the nasty little book of log and trig tables also had tables of random numbers in the back.
And I’ve just had another nasty flashback from first year university: pdf and other stats tables again in a horrid little book.
Some things have changed for the better.
The story will probably move on to ‘Officer Sicknick died because the in – surrec – tion – istas were loud and unpleasant, and smelly, and said mean things, causing his murder stroke.’ I blame Trump.
How long have they known?
Circular slide rules are the bomb, used to keep one in the glove box to calculate fuel mileage.
Tesla crashes have resulted in conflagrations more than once. One of them, I think it was in the Netherlands a while ago, also resulted in an electrocution for one of the firefighters. This hazard doesn’t get as much analysis and coverage as it ought to. I guess eventually they will probably figure out some kind of safety measure that triggers with G-shock to open the circuits.
Just pulled out my old HP-15C, expecting the 25 year old button batteries to be leaking goo. It still worked, while flashing a battery level warning. Batteries clean. Nice.
@Aggie:
I believe the problem is inherent to Lithium Ion battery technology. Good ones are pretty damn safe these days given that they have a bunch of in-built safety features. But the nature of traffic accidents is that everything gets smashed up and then all bets are off.
There are all kinds of restrictions on shipping these things as air freight in laptops, etc. Must be some kind of certification process to facilitate this right out of the factory, but it’s not possible to ship by air any kind of second-hand item with a Li-Ion battery.
The Corvallis Era Real Thing you own is trending up in the market.
Apparently they did a made-in-China re-issue for enthusiasts about 10 years ago but there were some quality problems — HP not being HP ever since that awful Fiorina creature pillaged and strip-mined the company.
I take a dim view of the Tesla autopilot, based on a less than extensive knowledge of their systems. This website surprised me slightly. More mayhem than I expected.
I remember the 2018 crash in Mountain View that killed an Apple software engineer. At the time, Tesla claimed that the system was giving visual and audible warnings prior to the crash. Yes, but Tesla didn’t say when the alarms occurred. If it was 0.8 sec. before the crash, so what.
The NTSB report was harsh towards both the deceased and Tesla, and they claimed there were no usable warnings. They established that the Apple engineer was playing a game on his iPhone at the time. I’m forcing myself to avoid a snarky comment on the driver’s priorities.
Zaphod,
Wow. My slip case is in good shape, but the metal bezel around the calculator display has a medium sized dent in it. Depreciate by $250? Ha!
}}} It’s for this reason that I think our first, widespread use of self driving cars will be when a city (my money is on Tokyo) requires all vehicles within a certain radius of the city center to be connected to a network so that all cars know what all other cars (and maybe bicycles and humans from cellphone pings) are doing. This is also were real fuel savings and pollution reduction come in.
Rufus, the mistake you make here is a common one. VERY common. ALL TOO common.
You assume some centralized control scheme is needed, which really isn’t the case. NO car cares one whit about what some other car 10mi away is doing or wants to do. It cares about what the cars within, oh, 500 yards want to do.
THIS can be done with a fully decentralized system where each car broadcasts about 10 pieces of data — where it is, what direction it’s going, how fast it’s going there, and it’s desired end location (that’s at least 8 numbers, FWIW).
That’s about all any other car needs to know. That and some rules for negotiating, and most cars wouldn’t even need to stop at intersections, they could adjust speeds and following distances so that they danced through while just missing each other (yes, this would be unnerving to watch as an occupant).
Mind you, if too many cars wanted to go into too small an area, there would then be some stopages, etc., but this would also be alleviated by having cars “passing through” take alternate, longer (but faster) routes around the issue zone, reducing traffic in the congestion arena — think everyone wanting to get to a football game at a major league stadium.
Then you just have to have some handling for breakdown issues and bob’s your uncle.
AIR TRAFFIC CONTOL should have done this DECADES ago. Obviously, you still want some tracking, for airspace reasons, but for the most part, the planes themselves can and should avoid collisions without reference to a central command system.
}}} A faster trip overall, better fuel economy, better on brake pad wear, far fewer accidents. And it can choose the most effective routes based on everything else that is happening.
As to this, again, decentralized works better. I use WAZE to pick my routes, it has predictability built into it, knowing traffic patterns and having reports of immediate conditions along the different routes. I also have been known to change on the fly as some incident occurs to change the conditions I encounter during the trip (and yes, this is nontrivial) — having the driver computer use this kind of info for routing and re-routing would be the ideal system.
^^ Yup. It’s also much more resilient + obviates bunch of scaling issues.
As OBH suggests some of the Emergent Behaviour will at first be counterintuitive and weird.
Here are my slide rule stories.
(1) In the spring of 1971, when I left college for the summer, all the science-engineering students wore slide rules dangling from their belts. (Yes, I learned to use one in HS). In the fall of 1971, when I got back to campus, all the SE’s were packing calculators (a Texas Instruments model IIRC, but it doesn’t really matter; I’m sure there were various brands).
(2) I learned RPN first, and still have a devil of a time doing it the “right” way.
(for the non-geeks following along, that’s Reverse Polish Notation, and it’s not an ethnic joke). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_Polish_notation
(3) When I was re-reading Heinlein’s fifties novels about space travel later on in the seventies*, it always amused me that the astrogators would haul out their slide rules to do on-the-fly calculations or anticipated maneuvers (landing on the moon, for example), even when they had a computer on-board, which were described as lumbering behemoths.
Even the Dean’s imagination failed him on the degree of miniaturization that was achieved relatively quickly.
*I certainly didn’t know any better while in grade school, having never seen a computer or a calculator, other than the mechanical one my Dad used for his bookkeeping.
Which was pretty cool, actually; I used to have it, but it got lost in some move or other.
Likewise my souvenir block of magnetic core.
}}} If you wish to make a man like you, it is said you should ask a favor of him rather than do a favor for him. If you ask a favor that is within his power, he will like you for asking because you thereby honor his power. This is why a man likes his wife a little better when she asks him to open a jar of pickles, and a little less when she offers to sew a button on his shirt. The request honors his strength, the offer dishonors his skill.
What a load of fourth-wave feminist horseshit.
“The Terrible Tyranny of Equine Feces” is more like it.
No, did not read any more of it, as that alone pisses me off, it’s so wrongheaded.
A stupid, clueless feminist idiot wrote this, who has no comprehension of how relationships ACTUALLY work.
}}} Even the Dean’s imagination failed him on the degree of miniaturization that was achieved relatively quickly.
Well, Heinlein’s brilliance was more about seeing second-order and third-order effects, than pure prognostication.
He foresaw the issues with Nuclear Power (Blowups Happen), Mutually Assured Destruction (Solution Unsatisfactory) and even foresaw interstates (The Roads Must Roll). In each case, his technology itself was wrong, but his prediction of the EFFECTS it had on society were spot-on.
As to seeing miniaturization, well, that wasn’t really obvious until the Space Program, as well as the Nuclear Race** kicked it into high gear, as well as the development of the Transistor, which did not exist in reality until 1947, and really wasn’t significant until MOSFETs in 1959. All of RAH’s real “Science”-y fiction had already been written by then. From the 60s onward, about the only one that was sciency was The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress. The others were talking heads variants on Heinlein Individuals. Entertaining, but not the groundbreaking science he’d done before.
They pretty much had to wait for William Gibson to break open the next sub-genre, Cyberpunk.
=====
**The desire to improve electronics was strongly driven by the need to miniaturize guided missile components.
And that, Children, is why you don’t get busted in iffy hot tub photos in your younger days and why you don’t adopt your children via some dubious loophole. You might pass Go and you might not go to Jail, but you sure as hell won’t Collect Two Million Dollars.
OBH quoted, “This is why a man likes his wife a little better when she asks him to open a jar of pickles, and a little less when she offers to sew a button on his shirt. The request honors his strength, the offer dishonors his skill.”
Then, OBH wrote, “What a load of fourth-wave feminist horseshit.”
I try for a joke-a-day, but I saw that and thought:
Well here is todays video starring Fable the Raven, who actually knows a lot of words and often mimics the falconer. Fable is one of the stars of the site and is quite bonded to the falconer, shaking her tail feathers (happy excited) in this episode.
A-well-a don’t you know about the bird?
Well, everybody knows that the bird is a word
Nice tie-in to another stutter song, tcrosse! Well played!
Interesting study out of MIT:
“Covid-19 patients who recovered from the disease still have robust immunity from the coronavirus eight months after infection, according to a new study. The result is an encouraging sign that the authors interpret to mean immunity to the virus probably lasts for many years.”
https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/01/06/1015822/covid-19-immunity-likely-lasts-for-years/
My state has been trending very nicely since mid-January. We are know around 50% of our population who have been vaccinated or survived exposure. I notice a few other states; Illinois, Florida, Michigan, trending back up case-wise despite also being at 50% or more “herd” immunity. Florida’s uptick is fairly minor but Illinois and Michigan show disturbing trends.
Whether birds talk or not, we incorporate them into our culture. Nevermore…bird is a word. I developed a revulsion for poetry as a result of being pushed into Junior Literary Critic mode in English classes, but some shards of poetry remained in my brain from the time before Junior Literary Critic.
Those shards of poetry would be Robert Frost’s “miles to go,” Poe’s “Raven,” and some lines from Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner- which is about killing an albatross. Of the 3 poems from which I remember some lines, two deal with birds.
Song lyrics replaced the poetry void for me. Bird is a word……
Much appreciate Neo’s five minutes of edit mode. Time and again.
Minnesota Nice:
https://www.takimag.com/article/minnesota-gats/
Errr…
Thanks for the link, Zaphod. I had forgotten all about Taki.
Back in the 1980s there was a mass migration from Gary, Indiana to the Twin Cities. Things changed.
@tcrosse:
Taki canned reader comments a while back too. Can’t imagine why hehe.
I hadn’t known they came from Gary specifically and when. Thx for data point. Somalis are icing on the cake. Still, if Civilization collapses the Hmong will make short work of everyone else, Apocalypse Now style. So there’s that.
Attention Calculator Aficionados:
https://www.swissmicros.com/product/dm41x
This will bring a tear to the eye of anyone who was doing engineering math back in the Eighties.
They make other old favorites too. Something for everyone.
Oh, I hated those things. Never did figure out how to use most of the functions properly. 🙂 Well, I guess I didn’t really “hate” them, but I was definitely intimidated by them.
As for the ravens and the “Nevermore” stuff, I suspect they just do that as a sort of vaudeville act to pick up pennies. I’m sure they save their good material for more… discriminating audiences. 🙂
Zaphod and Phillip,
I was fairly adroit with a slide rule in my High School days. We were also very thoroughly drilled in interpolation, extrapolation and logarithms so we could approximate to a necessary degree of accuracy without the aid of “electronic brains.” I continue to use those approximation skills nearly daily. It’s a handy thing to know.
Calculator prices finally dropped enough that our AP Chem teacher felt comfortable requiring calculators for tests by my senior year, but we were allowed to share because the price tag was still out of reach for many of us. Part of the fun when sharing with a classmate was to make sure the lcd screen spelled something humorous when handing it, upside down, to a classmate.
Rufus T. Firefly
Part of the fun when sharing with a classmate was to make sure the lcd screen spelled something humorous when handing it, upside down, to a classmate.
Ah yes, the good old “7734.” There are probably more, but that’s all I knew. Knew it before the calculator days, from dial phones.
I never learned how to use a slide rule at all. That’s a gap I’ll always regret.
The slide rule was handy for doing approximations and what-ifs, as long as you didn’t forget where your decimal place was. Also, the slide rule case hanging from the belt was a badge of tech nerd-hood, along with the pocket-protector.
My first paying academic job was as a grad student TA, and I spent about 1/4 or 1/3 of my time teaching the undergrads how to use their calculators. “I just don’t know why I can’t solve this problem.” OK, let’s start at the beginning. The physics is fine, but your calculator skills need work. Since I was already hooked on RPN calcs. I had to grit my teeth through the Texas Instruments models.
If anyone is still interested in RPN calcs. and hasn’t already found this calculator for Windows and Linux, there is this:
http://www.tordivel.no/xcalc/
And you can enjoy reading how much this programmer hated programming for Windoze.
Not a good look for Tesla or self driving vehicles.
https://abc13.com/tesla-crash-battery-fire-driverless-2-killed-in/10528089/
I watch daily the Crows cousin of the Raven rule the roost. They work in concert to bully larger birds. Personally watched them one day pick on Bold Eagle and ran him/her off nest.
Mean little devils.
Not a good look for Tesla or self driving vehicles.
They dropped off passengers. One man stayed in the back seat. Another – in the driver’s seat – started the car and then climbed into the passenger seat. It’s supposed to have an autopilot ‘driver-assist’ feature. It’s not clear from the reports whether it has full self-driving technology. If it does, the technology doesn’t work or these guys didn’t know how to set it up. They were on the road for only a few minutes before it careers off the road, hits a tree, and bursts into flame in a way that hardly ever happens outside the car chases in 1970s cop shows. The only ameliorating factor is that these were oldish guys, not young men with many productive years ahead of them. There are times when mens’ deficit of risk-aversion causes terrible trouble; quite unusual when the men in question are retirement age.
I have an old H-P 11-C that I break out now and then for auld lang syne, to pop a few numbers on and off the stack.
Yeah, ravens are mimics just like mynahs, parrots, and some other birds.
There’s a meme-joke out there involving teaching all the wild crows in a woods to shout “RUN!!!”
😀
}}} I was fairly adroit with a slide rule
Ahhh, but did you ever get a circular slide rule?
THOSE were the cat’s meow!
I recall seeing LED calculators, but then there was the first LCD calculator — THAT was cool, because with the early ones, the transition was sort of slow, so the numbers seemed to “melt” into each other, kind of like a “morph” effect. LCDs were a major improvement, as they were lower powered so, unlike an LED, they could be “always on” and not drain the eph out of the batteries.
Both were in the 100 buck range in the early 70s (the LED Watch in “Live and Let Die“! It was like 1000 bucks! 😛 ), this with Gold @ 32 bucks an oz and minwage @ $1.25, iirc.
By HS (mid 70s), there were the programmable HPs, with the HP 55 and then the HP 65. I had one classmate who had a 55. How many know of, much less remember, Reverse Polish Notation? The 55/65, iirc, were on the order of 500, 600 bucks. I also got an LED watch with more capabilities than the Bond watch from Seiko (remember them?) for about 100 bucks. I also had a friend with a cheaper non-RPN calculator… It had a **PI** key!! OOooooooooohhh!!! 😀
As with all things made essentially of carefully dirtied sand, the price dropped precipitously. By the early 80s, there were calculators for about 10-30 bucks, and somewhere around that time you could find an LED watch in a cereal box as a giveaway.
But I still have three slide rules. The plastic one I bought, the nice metal one my then-GF’s dad gave me, and a circular Pickett that I picked up somewhere.
I am ready for the collapse of Civ, if nothing else.
😀
Ah yes, the good old “7734.” There are probably more, but that’s all I knew.
“Leet”
Re: The Tesla Crash:
Clearly, a Darwin Award winning situation, but, unfortunately, from their ages, they likely already reproduced.
My favorite stutter song is still “My Generation”. Because Daltrey’s rhythm is truly that of someone who stutters. Like when it gets caught in your throat and nothing close to coherent comes out of your mouth.
Art Deco,
The Tesla does have full self-driving technology but Tesla will not advertise it as such for obvious reasons (see news reports on the horrific accident you commented on for an example).
They themselves state it is not ready for everyday use yet, but Elon says it will be by the end of the year (I think he has been saying it is one or two years away for at least a decade). However, based on tracking of their own vehicles (Tesla’s record A BUNCH of data and one has to be connected to Tesla’s servers in order to keep under warranty, so it’s a near 100% sample size).
Here’s what Tesla stated about the data last October:
So, yes, computers misinterpret their surroundings, but so do humans. The Tesla folks say their computers (and cameras and sensors…) are safer than the average human behind the wheel.
The most dangerous part of a car is the nut that holds the wheel.
Regarding “self driving” and electric cars there are two things I never hear discussed, but they are so obvious the folks shoulder deep in these technologies must be focusing on them.
First, I won’t go into robotics and AI vs. human intelligence except to state computers are often very good at things that are difficult for humans and very bad at things that are easy for humans. Humans have to go to years of medical school and residency to develop a database of conditions, symptoms and pathologies in order to be good predictors when presented with a patient so we down select our best and brightest for the job of physician. That’s actually a piece of cake for a computer. Input all known aches, pains, symptoms and past history of a patient, compare it to a database and spit out a list of likely illnesses ranked by probability and/or additional questions to ask. But walk on a crowded street and find a subway station and descend the stairs to the platform and get on the correct train? Really, really tricky stuff for a machine.
What would really help self driving cars is if they knew what all the other traffic was doing. Driving isn’t so hard for computers these days, but reacting to the randomness and unpredictability of traffic is. It’s for this reason that I think our first, widespread use of self driving cars will be when a city (my money is on Tokyo) requires all vehicles within a certain radius of the city center to be connected to a network so that all cars know what all other cars (and maybe bicycles and humans from cellphone pings) are doing. This is also were real fuel savings and pollution reduction come in.
If I get in my car and tell it my destination is my office, 22.8 miles away the city server knows where I am going and what is in front of me or will be in front of me for the entire journey. It knows who else is on the road and where they are going. It also knows the timing of lights at all the intersections. Rather than going 70mph sometimes and 3mph other times it would be better if all us commuters were going 30mph most all the time. A faster trip overall, better fuel economy, better on brake pad wear, far fewer accidents. And it can choose the most effective routes based on everything else that is happening.
Second,
Trailerable batteries. Gas stations that also have battery packs on aerodynamic trailers (such trailers already exist). So, for my typical commute to and from work my electric car has the range to handle it. But, for my family vacation to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho I arrange for a rental from a battery-trailer company. Drive with no trailer to close the the car’s ultimate range. Exit the highway and attach a trailer and connect it to the car in about the time it takes to refuel a 15 gallon gas tank. Drive until that battery pack is nearly used and exit at the next rental facility and repeat the process until I’m in the “Famous Potato” state.
Or maybe having self driving lanes designated for only self driving vehicles … at least till ALL the kinks are ironed out.
On another note. Has anyone seen anywhere what the “end game” is for the vaccine? I mean do the powers that dictate want absolutely NO cases or is there in the writings something like 1 case per something?
Yawrate:
A lot of people have said that’s a stutter song. I actually think it’s a stammer song. Long ago I was taught that the distinction between the two terms was that stuttering involved repeating the phoneme and stammering involved blockage and a pause in the ability to say it. Looking it up just now, it appears that the distinction has now disappeared and they are both called stuttering, at least in the US.
I went to school with someone who stammered, in the old-fashioned sense of his speech stopping sometimes when he tried to get a sound out, and it was very distinct from anything I’d ever heard described as stuttering at the time.
At any rate, I guess it’s all moot now.
Rufus, interesting and logical idea for that self-driving car city. Isn’t something like this part of the “smart city” concept being bandied about somewhere? I didn’t really look into it much, just a concept being floated. I can see why you’d bet on Tokyo, but isn’t that a big wad to bite off, even for the Japanese? Tokyo-Yokohama is said to be gigantic. Maybe a mid-size city in Japan or China could be more likely as the test pad.
I’d like to open another topic: journaling. Two or three years ago, I journalled a whole year of my life (approximately). I’m not generally a journaller, but since it grew organically out of a major event in my social life, I kept it up to see if I could chronicle what I was doing with my life.
When 2020 started up, I felt I had resolved to continue this, since it seemed useful. But then I got a bit behind after the new year and then, well… 2020, you know? Things and ideas and impressions started to happen so terribly fast and my emotions were all over the place – sometimes it would have taken me all evening just to record each day. Whenever I got to catch my breath mentally, I was so far behind that there no longer seemed to be any point in even pretending to catch up; and then the next abomination would rear its head, of course. Eventually I decided that the closest approximation I would or could ever have for a chronicle of my life that year would be a crude data dump of my texts, e-mails and YouTube history.
This attitude has been ongoing in 2021 with two exceptions. I keep two separate, focused journals now. One is from September 1, 2020 to current, a log of all liturgical events at the parish in which I’ve been involved in that time (which, surprisingly, has not been quite all of them, since the funerals have been mostly restricted to family only due to You-Know-What – in fact, even as I write this, I just got a notification of another such funeral coming up). I wanted to keep track of take-home lessons from each service, personal post-mortems, things like that. All necessary since our church services involve a huge number of details and nuances pertinent to the Orthodox spiritual life. (Sept. 1 is the start of our ecclesiastical year, btw.)
The other one I have going over the last few weeks is a gardening journal, which is not as voluminous as the other, but in which I intend to make notes about what/when for plantings, maybe little remarks about what I’m using for soil mixes, things like that. I don’t know that I want to get into heavily regimented details such as building a whole watering schedule for every planter box. Given my rather obsessive nature when it comes to recordkeeping, I could see myself doing that if I really wanted to, but I really have to keep a lid on that tendency.
My comment, then, is that I’m coming to consider this sort of focused journaling as a potential alternative to the more typical journal which spans one’s entire life, at least in theory. Have any of you tried this approach?
Officer Sicknick died of natural causes, two strokes. No allergic reaction to any irritants at the riot. RIP.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/capitol-police-brian-sicknick-natural-causes-stroke
For SHIREHOME:
My sense is that no one can say at this point what the “end game” is for the various FDA-approved COVID-19 vaccines. I don’t think even the folks at the CDC know for certain. However, they have tried to clean up and simplify the COVID-19 section of their website, the latest feature being a “What’s New and Updated” landing page with info. about the vaccines, starting with today’s date and working backward. The specific topics addressed are a mixed bag (I doubt that you are interested, for example, in “Considerations for Casinos and Gaming Operations”), but this is the best resource I know of for the time being.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/whats-new-all.html
Good luck!
@Kate
Now the goal post will move to … the two strokes were brought on by the insurrection that murdered Officer Sicknick.
jack @3:06pm,
It’s my assumption (and I think I’ve even read this suggested as a near term goal of some municipalities) that Interstate highways will fairly soon have the bulk of their right lanes taken over by unmanned, self driving tractor trailers. I believe the UK already reserves a lane (the left, naturally) for tractor trailers (except when autos have to cross it to enter and exit a highway) and the maximum speed limit is about 45mph. It would be a lot like freight trains, except no tracks and the vehicles are separated by a bit of space, rather than linked together.
My guess is we’ll first start seeing this for long haul trucks. Maybe something is going from Iowa City to Sacramento. There’s a depot near an entrance to I-80 in Iowa City and the self driving truck is loaded there, where it enters the highway. It exits about 1,000 miles later to refuel at a facility just off the highway, then re-enters until it gets to the depot in Sacramento, also just off of I-80. All the self driving trucks on I-80 are connected to a system that knows what they are all carrying, where they are all headed; tire pressure, all the ODBII codes…
Interstate driving is a lot more predictable than city driving. Fewer vehicles per mile, no intersections, everyone headed in the same direction. And freight has a cost factor. Not having to pay for a driver, or ensure he rests and doesn’t drive 2/3 of a day is enough economic incentive to push this forward. That’s why I think it will be the first, large scale adoption of unmanned vehicles.
All that makes good sense.
Now the song for today dedicated to Hunter Biden.
Wait for it … wait for it
“I didn’t have the common decency
To lay off my brother’s wife”
Robert Cray … Across the line
https://youtu.be/1V7nplxTIJs
Señor Wences with a British accent?
Michael Brown, Breonna Taylor Families Ask BLM Where Money Went
Ha ha snicker ha!
Not a charity. (giggle)
—
I haven’t done this yet, but all major corps. have an “Investor Relations” web page and shareholders can send letters or email to the board of directors. Why on earth would these corps. be sending major dollars to BLM?
TommyJay,
Shareholders need to ask that very question at the next shareholders’ meeting. “There are so many worthwhile charities doing great work in this nation. Can you tell us why you chose BLM to receive the largest donation from this corporation and can you tell us what mechanisms you have in place to track how that donation is spent?”
Stepped into a gas station today. What was playing on the muzak? Bay City Rollers. Consonant AND vowel stutter:
“I-I-I-I got a date. I-I-I-I just can’t wait.”
“Sa-Sa-Sa-Saturday ni-ight. Sa-Sa-Sa-Saturday ni-ight.”
@TommyJay:
I went off to read that guys site expecting a *proper* epic rant about Windows and all I got was a vague sense that he was somewhat disenchanted with programming for the platform. I feel let down!
This one is pretty good. I have it on my iPhone. Available for a bunch of platforms.
https://thomasokken.com/free42/
IIRC first half of Eighth Grade was log and trig tables and then the word came down that a new era had dawned and we’d better show up for second half of the year with a Casio fx-80 or else.
Pretty sure much of the real world still does a lot of important work with tables, nomograms, and specialised slide rule tools — eg. HVAC reckoning.
Apparently pilots still have to study and know the E6B circular slide rule as a backup and common-sense-get-a-feeling-for-what’s-right check for flight planning software.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E6B
Zaphod,
Sorry if I mislead. If you’ve got a calculator app you like, stop there. I never looked beyond Bernt the Norwegian’s little app XCALC. The 2.9X versions are tiny with a little help file that works fine for the more arcane capabilities.
I’ve used logarithms many times, but from a table? And a Pickett slide rule too. Those are childhood memories.
@TommyJay:
Can’t help it if I like a good programming rant, now, can I? 🙂
Probably less of a thing now in the Age of Woke and Hurt Feelings but back in the day some of the stuff one would come across in code comments could be hilarious and scathing.
Also have some faint memory of steam tables from first or second year engineering. Can live without those too!
Come to think of it, I’m pretty sure the nasty little book of log and trig tables also had tables of random numbers in the back.
And I’ve just had another nasty flashback from first year university: pdf and other stats tables again in a horrid little book.
Some things have changed for the better.
The story will probably move on to ‘Officer Sicknick died because the in – surrec – tion – istas were loud and unpleasant, and smelly, and said mean things, causing his murder stroke.’ I blame Trump.
How long have they known?
Circular slide rules are the bomb, used to keep one in the glove box to calculate fuel mileage.
Tesla crashes have resulted in conflagrations more than once. One of them, I think it was in the Netherlands a while ago, also resulted in an electrocution for one of the firefighters. This hazard doesn’t get as much analysis and coverage as it ought to. I guess eventually they will probably figure out some kind of safety measure that triggers with G-shock to open the circuits.
Just pulled out my old HP-15C, expecting the 25 year old button batteries to be leaking goo. It still worked, while flashing a battery level warning. Batteries clean. Nice.
@Aggie:
I believe the problem is inherent to Lithium Ion battery technology. Good ones are pretty damn safe these days given that they have a bunch of in-built safety features. But the nature of traffic accidents is that everything gets smashed up and then all bets are off.
There are all kinds of restrictions on shipping these things as air freight in laptops, etc. Must be some kind of certification process to facilitate this right out of the factory, but it’s not possible to ship by air any kind of second-hand item with a Li-Ion battery.
This is a pretty good article:
https://orthosphere.wordpress.com/2021/04/19/under-the-terrible-tyranny-of-pity/
Link wording sufficient to indicate whether or not will be of interest.
@TommyJay:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Vintage-1985-HP-15C-Programmable-Scientific-Calculator-with-Slip-Case-Rare-VHTF/293493461796?hash=item445592d324:g:D~AAAOSwfbhbq5cM
The Corvallis Era Real Thing you own is trending up in the market.
Apparently they did a made-in-China re-issue for enthusiasts about 10 years ago but there were some quality problems — HP not being HP ever since that awful Fiorina creature pillaged and strip-mined the company.
I take a dim view of the Tesla autopilot, based on a less than extensive knowledge of their systems. This website surprised me slightly. More mayhem than I expected.
I remember the 2018 crash in Mountain View that killed an Apple software engineer. At the time, Tesla claimed that the system was giving visual and audible warnings prior to the crash. Yes, but Tesla didn’t say when the alarms occurred. If it was 0.8 sec. before the crash, so what.
The NTSB report was harsh towards both the deceased and Tesla, and they claimed there were no usable warnings. They established that the Apple engineer was playing a game on his iPhone at the time. I’m forcing myself to avoid a snarky comment on the driver’s priorities.
Zaphod,
Wow. My slip case is in good shape, but the metal bezel around the calculator display has a medium sized dent in it. Depreciate by $250? Ha!
}}} It’s for this reason that I think our first, widespread use of self driving cars will be when a city (my money is on Tokyo) requires all vehicles within a certain radius of the city center to be connected to a network so that all cars know what all other cars (and maybe bicycles and humans from cellphone pings) are doing. This is also were real fuel savings and pollution reduction come in.
Rufus, the mistake you make here is a common one. VERY common. ALL TOO common.
You assume some centralized control scheme is needed, which really isn’t the case. NO car cares one whit about what some other car 10mi away is doing or wants to do. It cares about what the cars within, oh, 500 yards want to do.
THIS can be done with a fully decentralized system where each car broadcasts about 10 pieces of data — where it is, what direction it’s going, how fast it’s going there, and it’s desired end location (that’s at least 8 numbers, FWIW).
That’s about all any other car needs to know. That and some rules for negotiating, and most cars wouldn’t even need to stop at intersections, they could adjust speeds and following distances so that they danced through while just missing each other (yes, this would be unnerving to watch as an occupant).
Mind you, if too many cars wanted to go into too small an area, there would then be some stopages, etc., but this would also be alleviated by having cars “passing through” take alternate, longer (but faster) routes around the issue zone, reducing traffic in the congestion arena — think everyone wanting to get to a football game at a major league stadium.
Then you just have to have some handling for breakdown issues and bob’s your uncle.
AIR TRAFFIC CONTOL should have done this DECADES ago. Obviously, you still want some tracking, for airspace reasons, but for the most part, the planes themselves can and should avoid collisions without reference to a central command system.
}}} A faster trip overall, better fuel economy, better on brake pad wear, far fewer accidents. And it can choose the most effective routes based on everything else that is happening.
As to this, again, decentralized works better. I use WAZE to pick my routes, it has predictability built into it, knowing traffic patterns and having reports of immediate conditions along the different routes. I also have been known to change on the fly as some incident occurs to change the conditions I encounter during the trip (and yes, this is nontrivial) — having the driver computer use this kind of info for routing and re-routing would be the ideal system.
^^ Yup. It’s also much more resilient + obviates bunch of scaling issues.
As OBH suggests some of the Emergent Behaviour will at first be counterintuitive and weird.
Here are my slide rule stories.
(1) In the spring of 1971, when I left college for the summer, all the science-engineering students wore slide rules dangling from their belts. (Yes, I learned to use one in HS). In the fall of 1971, when I got back to campus, all the SE’s were packing calculators (a Texas Instruments model IIRC, but it doesn’t really matter; I’m sure there were various brands).
(2) I learned RPN first, and still have a devil of a time doing it the “right” way.
(for the non-geeks following along, that’s Reverse Polish Notation, and it’s not an ethnic joke).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_Polish_notation
(3) When I was re-reading Heinlein’s fifties novels about space travel later on in the seventies*, it always amused me that the astrogators would haul out their slide rules to do on-the-fly calculations or anticipated maneuvers (landing on the moon, for example), even when they had a computer on-board, which were described as lumbering behemoths.
Even the Dean’s imagination failed him on the degree of miniaturization that was achieved relatively quickly.
Random search result:
https://gtechmini.wordpress.com/multimodal-essays/miniaturization-in-computers/
*I certainly didn’t know any better while in grade school, having never seen a computer or a calculator, other than the mechanical one my Dad used for his bookkeeping.
Which was pretty cool, actually; I used to have it, but it got lost in some move or other.
Likewise my souvenir block of magnetic core.
}}} If you wish to make a man like you, it is said you should ask a favor of him rather than do a favor for him. If you ask a favor that is within his power, he will like you for asking because you thereby honor his power. This is why a man likes his wife a little better when she asks him to open a jar of pickles, and a little less when she offers to sew a button on his shirt. The request honors his strength, the offer dishonors his skill.
What a load of fourth-wave feminist horseshit.
“The Terrible Tyranny of Equine Feces” is more like it.
No, did not read any more of it, as that alone pisses me off, it’s so wrongheaded.
A stupid, clueless feminist idiot wrote this, who has no comprehension of how relationships ACTUALLY work.
}}} Even the Dean’s imagination failed him on the degree of miniaturization that was achieved relatively quickly.
Well, Heinlein’s brilliance was more about seeing second-order and third-order effects, than pure prognostication.
He foresaw the issues with Nuclear Power (Blowups Happen), Mutually Assured Destruction (Solution Unsatisfactory) and even foresaw interstates (The Roads Must Roll). In each case, his technology itself was wrong, but his prediction of the EFFECTS it had on society were spot-on.
As to seeing miniaturization, well, that wasn’t really obvious until the Space Program, as well as the Nuclear Race** kicked it into high gear, as well as the development of the Transistor, which did not exist in reality until 1947, and really wasn’t significant until MOSFETs in 1959. All of RAH’s real “Science”-y fiction had already been written by then. From the 60s onward, about the only one that was sciency was The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress. The others were talking heads variants on Heinlein Individuals. Entertaining, but not the groundbreaking science he’d done before.
They pretty much had to wait for William Gibson to break open the next sub-genre, Cyberpunk.
=====
**The desire to improve electronics was strongly driven by the need to miniaturize guided missile components.
She just took a payoff in plain sight.
https://dailycaller.com/2021/04/19/amy-coney-barrett-2-million-book-advance/
And that, Children, is why you don’t get busted in iffy hot tub photos in your younger days and why you don’t adopt your children via some dubious loophole. You might pass Go and you might not go to Jail, but you sure as hell won’t Collect Two Million Dollars.
OBH quoted, “This is why a man likes his wife a little better when she asks him to open a jar of pickles, and a little less when she offers to sew a button on his shirt. The request honors his strength, the offer dishonors his skill.”
Then, OBH wrote, “What a load of fourth-wave feminist horseshit.”
I try for a joke-a-day, but I saw that and thought:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4eLSeKkpw0
Well here is todays video starring Fable the Raven, who actually knows a lot of words and often mimics the falconer. Fable is one of the stars of the site and is quite bonded to the falconer, shaking her tail feathers (happy excited) in this episode.
https://youtu.be/trfww03dYBo