@esnyder@mastodon.social avatar

esnyder

@esnyder@mastodon.social

Many interests, little time. Unschooling parent. Long-term interest in bicycles; built a bamboo diamond frame bike years ago, learning TIG welding now to mess around more again. I would like to talk with more thoughtful and empathetic people with whom I don't agree. Periodically I am very sad. Wrassle computers for money.

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MLE_online, to random
@MLE_online@social.afront.org avatar

The homemade dog bones I made for my bike lock sometimes fit really perfectly

esnyder,
@esnyder@mastodon.social avatar

@MLE_online sorry, my google-fu is weak here: what are they for? To make it harder to put a leverage bar through to break the lock?

meganL, to random
@meganL@mas.to avatar

Community participation:

What are your favorite non-monopoly places to shop online? Bonus if they're actually also really cool businesses?

Help folks discover non-Amazon, non-Walmart stores!

Ones I use include:

American Science & Surplus: https://sciplus.com/

Stonemountain & Daughter https://stonemountainfabric.com/

Davis Food Co-op (not mail order, but you can still do "curbside" pick-up) https://davisfood.coop/

esnyder,
@esnyder@mastodon.social avatar

@meganL I have no idea what the company politics are like (google tells me they are privately held, with ~3K employees), but I am grateful for the existence of https://www.mcmaster.com/ It's an interesting case where I don't even know how I would look for most of the things I want to find on it via amazon or whatever.

MLE_online, to random
@MLE_online@social.afront.org avatar

Busy day in ceramics class. First things first, I got my big assignment piece back and I am very pleased

esnyder,
@esnyder@mastodon.social avatar

@MLE_online oooh, by Salton Sea clay do you mean "dug it up out of the Salton Sea"? I've always wanted to try working with wild clay; would love to hear more about it!

sundogplanets, to random
@sundogplanets@mastodon.social avatar

Wow, I missed this... apparently a couple weeks ago a piece of (probably) the ISS crashed through someone's house in Florida?! And then they asked @planet4589 for help via twitter because they couldn't get NASA to respond to them?!! WOW.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/apr/02/space-trash-florida-home

Space law is going to be very "interesting" in the next couple years as exponentially increasing re-entries cause more damage/casualties on the ground...

esnyder,
@esnyder@mastodon.social avatar

@sundogplanets @Simonas huh, I hadn't heard of it either. Having just looked it up, it does look promising for the homeowner: section C article II says "A launching State shall be absolutely liable to pay compensation for damage caused by its space object on the surface of the Earth or to aircraft in flight."

And article V addresses liability for jointly launched objects.

esnyder,
@esnyder@mastodon.social avatar

@barrygoldman1 @sundogplanets @Simonas good question!

elduvelle, to programming
@elduvelle@neuromatch.social avatar

in question:
This should be easy, but I can’t find a straightforward solution anywhere. How can one ask the user to select one **or more ** directories using a graphical interface?

There is “tkFileDialog.askdirectory()” in the Tkinter module but it only allows to select one directory. Any implementations of that function that allow for directory multiselection?
(Yes, I could do a loop and call the same function multiple times but I wouldn’t call that straightforward)

esnyder,
@esnyder@mastodon.social avatar

@elduvelle @diazona pygtk directory chooser does this (see the notes about Gtk.FileChooserAction.SELECT_FOLDER and Gtk.FileChooser.set_select_multiple()) https://python-gtk-3-tutorial.readthedocs.io/en/latest/dialogs.html#filechooserdialog

esnyder,
@esnyder@mastodon.social avatar

@elduvelle @diazona https://gist.github.com/esnyder/83f9d1675ac79982710193f3fe4fd23a

esnyder, to Silver
@esnyder@mastodon.social avatar

I haven't posted any of my eldest kid's work in awhile, but I'm really taken with their latest creation. Adorable little isopods as earrings or pendant! https://www.idletalons.com/shop/roly-poly-necklace-or-earrings

Cropped picture of a persons ear from the side so you can see the silver pill bug stud earing they are wearing. The pillbug is half curled up so it looks like it is walking on or hugging the person's ear lobe.

seachanger, to random
@seachanger@alaskan.social avatar

tfw you are on the M/V Kennicott ⛴️

esnyder,
@esnyder@mastodon.social avatar

@seachanger this ferry journey thread is so lovely; thank you for it!

💙

skinnylatte, to Typography
@skinnylatte@hachyderm.io avatar

I have been in a typography class for 3 months. It's more intense than I thought it would be (I thought it was going to be 'how to pick typefaces' but it's 'how to design typefaces).

I stuck with it because I am interested in learning something I don't know anything about. Today I got my grade: C+.

My perfectionist self says, 'why C+?'

My kinder, compassionate self (who is thrilled that I got to do something I never thought I would), says, "yay! you designed a typeface!!"

esnyder,
@esnyder@mastodon.social avatar

@skinnylatte I've always been curious about type design; that sounds awesome.

Any chance you'll share some samples of your design?

impactology, to random
@impactology@mastodon.social avatar

If algorithms are simply series of instructions for problem solving, are there any non-mathy ways of designing them

Any book on perfecting the craft of designing algorithms in day to day life without using math, stats or programming but just everyday language?

esnyder,
@esnyder@mastodon.social avatar

@impactology that's a really interesting question; I think there's a lot of subtlety in the definition of algorithm. When we talk about "instructions for problem solving" in normal contexts it usually means something like general strategies to use when attempting to figure out how to solve a problem.

But in the algorithm definition context it actually means something more like "instructions that embody a solution to a problem."

esnyder,
@esnyder@mastodon.social avatar

@impactology I'm struggling to think of contexts where this approach makes sense outside of math'y or computer'y ones.

Maybe stuff about making jigs and fixtures in woodworking?

enobacon, to random
@enobacon@urbanists.social avatar

out here sweeping under-protected bike lanes because PBOT doesn't have a solution for the problem they designed @bikeloudpdx

tow-behind bike sweeper collecting some sticks and debris, clearing a crosswalk ramp, stretch of bike lane on the other side of the street

esnyder,
@esnyder@mastodon.social avatar

@enobacon this looks pretty cool!

(I don't know if you're affiliated with the manufacturer or not, but I went to try to learn more and it appears that their website is fubar.)

seachanger, to random
@seachanger@alaskan.social avatar

icymi I’d like to establish a new church, The 10,000 Year Church of Love and Space. Book-based religions have real staying power, so it makes sense to create one with the goal of maintaining a 10,000 year old technologically advanced civilization so that we can learn to explore space and actually eventually see what’s out there. Obviously to last this long we will have to reorient around healing and sustaining the miracle of our life-giving planet Earth, so that’s the central theme of our church

esnyder,
@esnyder@mastodon.social avatar

@AlaskaWx @seachanger I've found UU intriguing at various times because I've heard similar sentiments from others, but as an atheist I always got tripped up by it's Christian baggage.

esnyder, to random
@esnyder@mastodon.social avatar

gvwilson, (edited ) to random
@gvwilson@mastodon.social avatar

The Carpentries run two-day workshops to teach basic programming skills to people who've never touchd the command line, never used version control, and never written a 'for' loop. Who's running the workshops to teach programmers similarly basic concepts about the human sciences and the humanities so that, if nothing else, they'll understand why managers, teachers, and therapists can't "just" be replaced with AI? If we don't teach them, it's not their fault they don't know. 1/2

esnyder,
@esnyder@mastodon.social avatar

@gvwilson the problem is more meta than that though, right? As adults we've all had the experience of learning about a subject that we didn't know anything about before. If none of those experiences prompted the "AI can replace all these jobs" folks to think "huh, stuff I don't know much about is usually more complicated than I initially think" then why would we expect this experience to be any different?

MLE_online, to random
@MLE_online@social.afront.org avatar

Doing this again

esnyder,
@esnyder@mastodon.social avatar

@MLE_online it's so cool to see your notes/pictures/videos from this process, but I'm also kinda scared to try natto 😅

esnyder, to woodworking
@esnyder@mastodon.social avatar

The last time I was messing with the chainsaw mill, cutting timbers for the woodshed/mini-barn, I also managed to mill out a ~1" madrone board, along with some thicker slabs. We finally have a place we want some shelving in the family room, so sanding and getting ready to finish it now...

Same board + slab, now looking at the board 3/4 edge on, so you can see the live edge a little better.

sundogplanets, to random
@sundogplanets@mastodon.social avatar

I just looked up Voyager 1's current position for a talk and saw something wild: https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/status/

The distance between Earth and Voyager 1 is actually decreasing right now (even though the distance between Voyager 1 and the Sun is increasing). A website bug?

Nope! Earth moves really fast around the Sun. Right now we're moving faster toward Voyager 1 than it's flying away from us

Earth orbits at 30 km/s around the Sun, Voyager is going "only" 17 km/s. I love orbital dynamics!

esnyder,
@esnyder@mastodon.social avatar

@sundogplanets that's fascinating, and brings up so many more questions for me! 😂

How did we choose the direction to send Voyager off in? How far out of the plane of earths orbit around the sun is it?

I take it that the plane of earths orbit around the sun is stable relative to the rest of universe, on human timescales at least, or where constellations are in the sky would change year over year? Why? Are other planetary orbits similarly stable?

The 🌌, so interesting!

lzg, to random
@lzg@mastodon.social avatar

deleted_by_author

    •
    esnyder,
    @esnyder@mastodon.social avatar

    @lzg 😂

    clive, to random
    @clive@saturation.social avatar

    DOOM now plays on a robot lawnmower: https://www.husqvarna.com/uk/learn-and-discover/news-and-media/welcome-to-register-for-doom/

    (via @boingboingbot)

    esnyder,
    @esnyder@mastodon.social avatar

    @clive @boingboingbot I feel like we have passed the point where porting doom to run on new hardware is the cool thing, and reached the point where the cool thing is to write software to let weird hardware play doom.

    impactology, to random
    @impactology@mastodon.social avatar

    Is there a tool to group together by dragging and dropping sentences in a hierarchy?

    Like a way to catalogue and map arguments in and out of categories, sub-categories

    (not as a mind map or graph though)

    esnyder,
    @esnyder@mastodon.social avatar

    @impactology related, when I was spending more time arguing with people online I really wanted a version of https://web.hypothes.is/ that had affordances for mapping out the argument in a text; identifying premises, structure of argument, identifying the unsupported conclusions, etc..

    impactology, to random
    @impactology@mastodon.social avatar

    Nothing builds your conviction in yourself more than when you build something by yourself that works and is both useful and original.

    So I'm going to focus more on learning to build now. Have curated enough.

    That no matter what anyone says or does to you or feels about you, nothing will change the fact that you have the ability to make something out of nothing, which is both useful and original all by yourself. No one can take that away from you. No one.

    esnyder,
    @esnyder@mastodon.social avatar

    @impactology I too love making things, 10 out of 10, would recommend.

    But also, as someone who has struggled to deal with shame around not finishing things, I think it's worth interrogating the need to complete everything.

    I have come to really value being able to spend time interested in a process or skill, playing with it, enjoying it, whether or not produce something.

    It's nuanced; I still dislike wanting to produce a specific thing, working towards it, and flaking out.

    brainwane, to movies
    @brainwane@social.coop avatar

    https://tubitv.com/movies/595077/rivers-and-tides

    The 2001 documentary "Rivers and Tides" on Andy Goldsworthy's art process and work is free to view, in the US, on Tubi.

    Slow, reflective, fluid. Moments that stuck with me when I first saw it decades ago, and then freshly struck me when I rewatched it this year. Musings on failure, artistic practice, and flows.

    esnyder,
    @esnyder@mastodon.social avatar

    @brainwane one of my favorite artists! Thanks for the tip, haven't seen it in years.

    glightly, to random
    @glightly@mastodon.social avatar

    Someone suggesting the best reason for free education is so that USians can know the value of democracy. Education should be free. But thinking that ignorance is the only reason fascism is rising is mistaken.

    One of the big mistakes I made in my life was thinking that if only people could be educated to things, they'd make ethical choices. This is not necessarily true.

    Check out the degrees among many of the people leading fascism in this country. It's not lack of education.

    esnyder,
    @esnyder@mastodon.social avatar

    @violetmadder @glightly @stationkeeper I find calls for "quality" education as a means to combat (fascism/climate denialism/homophobia etc.) problematic because these are not (primarily) failures of logic, but failures of empathy, compassion and morals.

    And in my experience 99% of such calls do not see that the way we currently and historically have wielded education has embodied and perpetuated the same failures of empathy, compassion and morals.

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