sstoneb

@sstoneb@retro.pizza

I'm a nerd.

I post a mix of #ITeachPhysics and science stuff, cartoons/videogames/etc., and cute animals. I live and teach in the greater #Boston #Massachusetts area.

My toots are searchable! I will stay in the tootfinder opt-in index for now as well: https://tootfinder.ch/

Some hashtags I like/look at: #mondog, #caturday, #ITeachPhysics, #physics, #DestinyTheGame, #Destiny2, #Nintendo, #AnimalCrossing, #Pokemon, #StarWars, #Transformers, #animation, #comics, #Disney

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

sstoneb, to random

New justification for sending me a notification just dropped.

sstoneb,

@trixter Allie suggested maybe somebody has a quota of notifs to send and they are struggling to come up with new ideas.

It reminds me of how sportsball commentators are like obligated to deliver a certain number of stats and come up with these labyrinthine statements like “this is highest scoring game played in this arena on a Thursday by a team with a left handed coach”.

sstoneb,

@trixter Ahhh, so even beyond the basic "must suck people in with fake engagement" motives, there is that too. I had no idea that would be possible!

I don't get banners or anything from facebook, just a badge on the icon, but that still might be enough for this trick.

sstoneb, to random

Spent a loooot of time during my break this week adding many new features to my about the Doppler effect. I'm not done tweaking it but it's getting close. Please take a look and give me feedback.

What's confusing? What needs work?

https://www.desmos.com/calculator/0zacncubrm

sstoneb,

@Hundstrasse Thanks! Desmos is mainly a graphing calculator which can also be used to write simple simulations. If you like math you should definitely play with it a little bit!

I tried to subdue the Mach cone with thin lines and low opacity for the shading. Mainly I wanted it to just sort of "highlight" the form you can see from the wavefronts. I might have gone TOO subtle though. :)

sstoneb,

@Hundstrasse It's helpful anyway! My audience is high school physics teachers (like me) that might want new ways of illustrating concepts for their students.

Swede1952, to ilaughed

This is interesting, it's almost as if my camera has x-ray capabilities. I took this as the turkey vulture passed on the other side of the oak tree in my backyard. You can see the out of focus outlines of the branches in the foreground. Of course, the branches weren.t that large in relation to the vulture.

sstoneb,

@Swede1952 and there's some neat optics going on here! You may already know this, but each pixel in the camera's detector receives light from all parts of the lens. So as long as most of the lens has unobstructed line of sight to a given part of the bird, a nice image can still form.

It's more like you're seeing "around" the branches than through them because the lens has an area to it, it's not just a single point.

sstoneb, to Transformers

On my book scans site, I've refreshed the writeup and viewing options for the "Super Activity Book", an extra-long book focused mainly on word and letter activities with minimal coloring stuff.

Most of the pages are new for this book, but a significant minority of them are repurposed from older books (but with new typesetting).

https://www.camphortree.net/tf/books/coloring/super-activity/

sstoneb, to Astronomy

On Dec 12, a tiny strip of the Earth will get to see Betelgeuse occulted by asteroid 319 Leona! What a cool (and scientifically fertile) event to witness. Not that I'll get to witness it myself, but still...

https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/asteroid-will-cover-betelgeuse-may-reveal-its-visible-surface/

sstoneb, to random

Please experience this 100% perfect trailer for the game, "A Castle Full of Cats":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-QTPqkomVA

This is apparently a "hidden object" game which I know I used to see a lot ads for on mobile platforms, but never really understood why they exist. Perhaps this trailer is the culmination of that chain of events.

sstoneb,

@level98 Yeah sort of, but I think in a lot of this genre--which I have not played--the objects aren't usually all the same kind of thing? So there might be like scissors, a table, a goblet, etc., all sneakily drawn into the linework of the main scene.

I mainly just like the live reenactment of the game experience with the lady in the princess dress, pointing at drawn cats in random places. :)

sstoneb, to random

Hey @trixter I see we are running v4.2.0 now and I changed my prefs to "Include public posts in search results". But it seems like maybe it's disabled at the instance level? Being an opt-in only feature I figured people wouldn't object, although I guess it probably can hit server performance to some extent. Do you plan to enable it? Am I doing something wrong / misunderstanding how it works?

sstoneb,

@trixter I'll try again another day I guess.

What I'm seeing right now makes it feel like text search isn't functioning, though, rather than simply my posts not being indexed yet. It doesn't even say like "no posts found". There's just no indication of a text search even existing.

This image is from the advanced web interface.

sstoneb,

@trixter It's working! 🎺

sstoneb, to random

New strategy being employed by captchas to rule out bots:

Checking for instinctive human behaviors such as "select all cats". Easy, and done!

sstoneb, to random

It is time for .

My first sighting of the season at Stop & Shop this afternoon.

sstoneb, to animals

Paw-on-nose naptime

sstoneb, to tearsofthekingdom

Here's a really well-shot and edited video of a hoverbike model being 3D printed, assembled, and painted. It's all in Japanese but there's not really any words anyway.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWrvJZwqZaU

sstoneb, to Gifs

I posted this under a relevant skeet on Bluesky, but they apparently don't support gifs there, so I am tooting it unprompted instead.

I made this Skeleton Dance gif last year after noticing that the original animation here loops seamlessly. It just FELT like a gif to me.

@ancient_catbus

Four skeletons hold hands and dance in a circle, then pirouette individually, before rejoining hands to continue. This comprises a few seconds of the classic animated short, "Skeleton Dance", sometimes referred to as "Spooky Scary Skeletons".

sstoneb, to random

In a recent "Craig of the Creek" episode (Bernard of the Creek, Part 2), Alexis shows up near the end wearing this set of armor which she got from the school's theater department.

It looks SO FAMILIAR to me but I can't place it, and the nerds in my discord couldn't either.

I swear this is a reference to something very specific and it feels like it's from NES box art or something like that.

Anybody got a lead?

sstoneb, to Transformers

On my book scans site, I've refreshed the treatment of "Battle For Earth". This book has been posted for a while but only as a bare html file and no commentary.

Please take a look and enjoy!

https://www.camphortree.net/tf/books/marvelhc/battle_for_earth/

sstoneb, to Transformers

I've been tinkering with part of my website, trying to modernize the page design, and just spent a few hours attempting to understand -block elements and -align. The tutorials I could find were not specific enough for me and I eventually made this jsfiddle to help me suss it out:
https://jsfiddle.net/593m1k86/

None of the options will actually vertically align the center of your inline-block element with the center of its parent!

sstoneb, to tech

Web Old-Timer Shouting at Cloud:

I read an article on
earlier today and apparently scrolled a little too far, such that a different article started. The new article hijacked the page/tab title AND the url, even including its entry in my browser history, so that when I later wanted to revisit the article I actually read... there was absolutely no trace of it.

I had to try some searches on their mainpage to relocate it.

JavaScript was a mistake. 😑

hoaxeye, (edited ) to random

The "Sailor Moon" picture is very popular. It's of course not a real, single-exposure I'll try to explain why: https://hoaxeye.com/2023/07/17/sailor-moon/

sstoneb,

@hoaxeye Another suspicious aspect--which I don't want to straight-up call "impossible"--is the orientation of the crescent Moon so close to the horizon.

The Moon's day/night line is parallel to the Earth's, so from most points on Earth's surface, a rising or setting Moon will be "lying down" to some extent, not vertical.

In principle you could get a shot of the Moon looking like this, but it would need be taken at a latitude very close to one of Earth's poles, like Iceland or closer.

sstoneb, to random

Saw this mentioned on slashdot: a bill in the Massachusetts house might make us the first state to BAN the sale of cellphone location data to data brokers (assuming it passes)! 🥇

https://www.wbur.org/news/2023/07/14/legislation-digital-privacy-phone-data-sellars

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