FRIEND: They should have these all the time if the month doesn't have an R... or, wait, if it does?
ME: They're all farmed now so it doesn't really matter, but for wild oysters you generally don't want to eat them in the summer. They get pulpy because they're basically full of oyster cum.
OTHER FRIEND: Haha and how does that taste?
ME: Compared to human cum you barely notice it.
BARTENDER I DIDN'T REALIZE WAS STANDING RIGHT THERE: 😳
In 1990, some people drove dust buster shaped vehicles, and everyone just pretended it was normal.
In 2024, many people pilot overpowered enormous monstrosities to haul a cargo of exactly one toddler and a gallon sized thermos of heavily creamed and sugared coffee, and everyone just pretends it's normal.
I drove to #KansasCity today to enjoy some of the nice #Spring Weather. I was walking around & some young folks from #amnestyinternational asked me if I wanted to donate & support. I asked them "Is Agnes Callamard still running the place?" One of them said, "Yeah I think so" so I replied "No thanks. Glory to #Ukraine" & walked away. #TrueStory #AgnesCallamardMustResign
The M5 south of the river has those audible lane markings. In fact, it was the state Main Roads Department’s original test site for that invention. The first version was a ribbed metal strip, laid under the roadside lane marker and then painted white. When your tire hit the strip it made a long droning BAARRP to wake up a drifting driver. Worked great (damn near shit myself the first time I hit one) but cost a ton. The final version, which now gets used everywhere, not just on the edge markers but even on the dashed lane dividers, is just paint. They paint the white line then impress a herringbone pattern into I guess the gooey mixture of paint and ground up rubber, leaving a pattern of little bricks the size of your fingertip. Still makes a good BAARRP, but the whole thing is laid out by one machine.
This morning as I take the exit for work I get the interrupted tone as I cross the dotted lane markers. This got me thinking, the inventor probably took inspiration from aircraft cockpit alarms. This regular pattern of dots, stamped out by a wheel in the wet paint-goop makes a good loud alarm tone, kinda like that one iPhone alarm sound that you select when you really can’t sleep in. But what if it /wasn’t/ regular? Could you encode music in it? Speech?
This is my thing. My whole job is product prototyping. I’m thinking about this idea all the way from the exit until I get to the lab. I have a robot chassis or three, I have plenty of spare gps receivers. Magnetic drill. Line following sensors. What if I took the regular pattern of dots and removed some, to generate a pulse-code-modulated wave form, like how PC games in the 90s would try to squeeze recognizable audio out of the shitty square wave beeper on your computer, back before “sound cards” were a thing? I run off a couple of meters of fake lane marker on the belt printer, and while that prints I cobble together some software. Yeah, it doesn’t bloody work. Takes a week or so of print-a-road-marker-overnight, and then fuck-it-up-in-the-morning until I get a line follower, a line /eater/ if you will, that can subtractively encode a WAV file into the lane marker.
I work late, past sunset. On the way home I pull into the emergency stopping bay a klik before my exit. I lift the Eater Of Lines out of the truck and stash it in the long grass. It’s set to activate at 3am, follow and selectively eat a few hundred meters of line, then go off into the weeds again. At the speed limit in that area your tires cover around thirty meters of road each second.
Next morning I get on the freeway heading south, but take the very next exit and then loop around and get back on, heading home. It actually takes an effort of will to deliberately run off the road at 100km/hr. BAARRP BAARP BAA–TERRAIN TERRAIN TERRAIN PULL UP PULL UP PULL UP–RRP BAARRP BAARRP. Fuck me, it works!
Le-savais-tu ?
A chaque fois que tu fais tourner la photo de Margaret Hamilton devant sa pile de code, la science devient moins sexiste et tu obtiens automatiquement ton statut d'homme-féministe. 🥰 #fact#trueStory
(Non : arrêtez de vous vautrer dans la facilité avec vos 3 femmes scientifiques qui servent de caution à votre inaction, ça commence à se voir)
Kochani, z ważnych różnic między filmami a tak zwanym prawdziwym życiem. Kiedy w filmie upada torba z zakupami, to po słonecznej ulicy toczą się soczyste pomarańcze. Kiedy torba z zakupami upada w tak zwanym prawdziwym życiu, to tłucze się w niej słoik z kiszoną rzodkwią, a wy wkurwieni jak nie wiem co, w deszczu nad kałużą, usiłujecie z tej rzodkwi i szkła ratować bułki.
Way back in the 1990s, I worked as a file clerk for #MIT's legal department. While filing patents for inventions, I noticed the file folder for #PonsAndFleischmann's #coldfusion experiments was empty. When I asked someone about it, they told me the #USGovernment came and #confiscated them. Pons and Fleichmann's experiments did not pan out (or so we were told), but the fact that the government can just grab potentially game-changing inventions was a bit unnerving (and then I found out about #NikolaTesla...).
Revisiting the cold case of cold fusion
by Curtis P. Berlinguette, et al.
Published: 27 May 2019
Abstract:
The 1989 claim of ‘cold fusion’ was publicly heralded as the future of clean energy generation. However, subsequent failures to reproduce the effect heightened scepticism of this claim in the academic community, and effectively led to the disqualification of the subject from further study. Motivated by the possibility that such judgement might have been premature, we embarked on a multi-institution programme to re-evaluate cold fusion to a high standard of scientific rigour. Here we describe our efforts, which have yet to yield any evidence of such an effect. Nonetheless, a by-product of our investigations has been to provide new insights into highly hydrided metals and low-energy nuclear reactions, and we contend that there remains much interesting science to be done in this underexplored parameter space.
As if simply flying and swimming are not impressive enough, #ducks are also rumoured to be experts in #software#development and are worshipped by software #developers for inventing duck typing.
True story. I tried to humour an old tech colleague/friend with a joke I read online (you have seen it by now too). He crushed me with this deadpan response. He killed me:
Me: I was going to tell you a joke about UDP, but you probably wouldn't get it. 😆
Techy workmate: It's funnier that way. 😑
I thought the joke was pretty good at the time. But I've never told it since. 🤣