• 1 Post
  • 32 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 11th, 2023

help-circle

  • I like this explanation. I don’t think we can do a lot better than this one at this point.

    I think a fun next step is “forget what’s real, I want to write a story with humans interacting with aliens that’s consistent with what we see now.” What do you have to invent to make it work? Nothing really works for me. But stuff like the dark forest is good. I can suspend disbelief enough to enjoy it.


  • I bought some $50 open back headphones a while back and they a just worlds better than anything I’d had before. Is there a step up from there that’d similarly rock my world?

    My mic is pretty similar. $100 got me an SM58 and it’s wonderful. You have to basically eat it and I can peak it if I’m loud. But it sounds so much nicer than most things. I know there’s a few steps up from there. But I don’t sing so think I’m fine.






  • When I was in highschool we toured the local EPA office. They had the most data I’ve ever seen accessible in person. Im going to guess how much.

    It was a dome with a robot arm that spun around and grabbed tapes. It was 2000 so I’m guessing 100gb per tape. But my memory on the shape of the tapes isn’t good.

    Looks like tapes were four inches tall. Let’s found up to six inches for housing and easier math. The dome was taller than me. Let’s go with 14 shelves.

    Let’s guess a six foot shelf diameter. So, like 20 feet circumference. Tapes were maybe .8 inches a pop. With space between for robot fingers and stuff, let’s guess 240 tapes per shelf.

    That comes out to about 300 terabytes. Oh. That isn’t that much these days. I mean, it’s a lot. But these days you could easily get that in spinning disks. No robot arm seek time. But with modern hardware it’d be 60 petabytes.

    I’m not sure how you’d transfer it these days. A truck, presumably. But you’d probably want to transfer a copy rather than disassemble it. That sounds slow too.









  • We can be heretics together. But you’re wrong. It was the best of the three because it commented on the universe.

    I wanted to love TFA. So much promise wasted by repetition. They had an es-storm trooper! A super emotionally damaged Vader worshipping anger Jedi. The wiggly light saber. I should have loved it. The characters were so cool. But they didn’t do anything new. Felt very design by committee.

    In TLJ the characters did new things. It didn’t all feel right to me. But it was new. I loved Luke’s story. War stories should leave their heros damaged. I loved the worthless dirtfarmer parents. Everyone can’t have special parents. Even Poe’s stupid story with pink hair general was a commentary on how ruthless rebels have to be. People die. You can’t waste resources. There was a lot wrong about TLJ but it tried.

    And ROS had one good line. That’s it.

    The actors deserved so much better. They worked hard. They loved star wars. They wanted to make something good.




  • Five minutes of googling says some folks thing stone mason. Some copy and paste response says unskilled tradesman. Other response says translation is just “learned” so maybe they could read.

    I’d never heard of this before so seeing that there is disagreement is a fun new thing for me. Especially interesting to see this “learned” response.

    I spent a few minutes looking to see if a name I trust said any of this. Ultimately I don’t have the background to evaluate it and lots of folks spend their lives about historical Jesus. I didn’t see anything from anyone I recognized but, like I said, I don’t know much about this area.