SpeakerToManagers

SpeakerToManagers, 1 day ago

@cstross
We moved to our current house 20 years ago in part because we are across the street from a bus stop, a 5 minute walk from a neighborhood center with a public library, a market, a bakery/coffee shop, 5 restaurants, a brewpub, assorted other shops, and 3 more bus lines. On top of which we have lots of trees around us.

SpeakerToManagers, 14 days ago

@clacksee @bookstodon
Sure, I’d like to read a starship teapot book. Sounds trippy, especially if there’s a dormouse inside.

SpeakerToManagers, 16 days ago

@cstross
And he won’t share that with other billionaires (he’s a greedy git) so there’s no point in kissing his ass, it won’t help you.

SpeakerToManagers, 16 days ago

@cstross
As I’m sure you are aware, though others may not, Godwin has turned off the Law for the duration, though nobody knows how long that will be.

SpeakerToManagers, 16 days ago

@SFRuminations
I love Hannes Bok’ illustrations. His colors, his textures, his compositions, I could go on all day.

SpeakerToManagers, 17 days ago

@cstross
I like it! Definitely the Price/Rigg interactions should Have similar chemistry their work In Theatre of Blood, one of my favorite Vincent Price movies.

SpeakerToManagers, 18 days ago

@RL_Dane @Flux
Making the tapeout and the fab masks opensource would be nice. It would give designers a head start on replicating the chip, possibly as multiple cores on an SOC. That would be fun to play with.

SpeakerToManagers, 22 days ago

@cstross
That’s assuming profit from Falcon launches and the Big Dummy (when it’s reusable) can overcome Musk’s need to throw money at Mars.

SpeakerToManagers, 22 days ago

@cstross
I don’t have much good to say about StarLink, what with Musk’s playing Cold War politics with it, and its deleterious effect on astronomical light pollution, but you’re probably right that the military will love dumping a thousand birds into orbit at once.

SpeakerToManagers, 22 days ago

@cstross @cigitalgem
Damn. Reading Dennett was what got me interested in Philosophy again, after Plato’s bullshit, Kant’s opacity, and everybody trying to ignore Leibniz.

SpeakerToManagers, 1 month ago

@cstross @annaleen
Crowley bragged of eating the shit of Mexican prostitutes. I suspect that was bullshit.

SpeakerToManagers, 1 month ago

@annaleen

1. Preordered.
2. My 1st Cordwainer Smith was “Mark Elf”; the manshonyagger stuck with me a long time. What haunts me is “No, No, Not Rogov!” I was watching Olympic Figure Skating then, and I empathized with the performer.
3. Interesting the writers who were were in Intelligence during WWII: Linebarger, John D. McDonald, Eric Russell, Alice Sheldon. And shoutout to Christopher Lee, an assassin in WWII, who said: “No, that’s not the sound a knife makes cutting the throat of a guard.”

SpeakerToManagers, 1 month ago

@cstross @LordWoolamaloo
I had a high school friend who was a white sheep of the Biddle family, late 17th C landholders in Pennsylvania who are still sitting on a pile of money and real estate. Joel wanted to be a composer, and have nothing to do with the family rentier business, and he succeeded.

SpeakerToManagers, 1 month ago

@xgranade
I’ve played with it a little. It’s … mostly less than useful. Not something I’d use.

SpeakerToManagers, 1 month ago

@xgranade
Indeed! I have a stash of Nixie tubes downstairs somewhere. They were still in use in the 70s; I had an HP millisecond timer in my lab that used them. Didn’t have a mercury delay line, but I used to make strain gages out of plastic tubing and mercury,

SpeakerToManagers, 2 months ago

@cstross
Is your Muse Terpsichore? ‘Cause she sure does make you dance around when she inspires you.

SpeakerToManagers, 2 months ago

@cstross
Original design:
https://www.antiquesnavigator.com/archive/2020/09/17/154081259303.jpg

SpeakerToManagers, 2 months ago

@cstross
“No wake word”? Hahahaha, Google Alexa calling the police by mistake, for instance. Your ring could SWAT you.

SpeakerToManagers, 2 months ago

@xgranade
It ought to be. And there’s a large slice of that should go to the FAA. It was predictable (and was predicted) that the major change in corporate culture after the merger with Northrop McDonnell-Douglas would cause serious quality problems.

SpeakerToManagers, 2 months ago

@xgranade
The cat also supports the notion that because there can be no explanatory theory of quantum physics we should all just “shut up and compute”. Of course this has left open the discourse about how quantum states “collapse” to observables to every quack theory about how everything is connected (as Mike Ford pointed out, that’s why there are so many short circuits).

SpeakerToManagers, 2 months ago

@annaleen @nytimes
Behind a paywall I’m not willing to pay for (killed my Times subscription years ago; I’m not willing to support their editorial positions, misinformation, and misleading headline).

I saw an interview with both of them recently and was impressed with their level of commitment to investigative reporting. Obviously they were surveilled when in China, and the threat of arrest or disappearance was non negligible. And horrified by how far the situation has gone.

SpeakerToManagers, 2 months ago

@wordshaper @cstross @FeralRobots
The technology for wrist mounted BP is available, it’s just going to take someone to put the development and manufacturing money into it. The idea is to use near infrared light which penetrates the skin to measure blood flow changes during the pulse and estimate pressure from that. The research on this dates back at least 45 years, I remember reading about it when I worked in a physiology lab in the 70s.

SpeakerToManagers, 2 months ago

@wordshaper @cstross @FeralRobots
Machine learning may be a solution for the calibration problem. I’m not optimistic any of the tech companies will be motivated to solve the skin tone problem, as they still haven’t built a bathroom towel dispenser or a sink faucet control that works right for non-white people.