Archiving my Twitter, Facebook and other social network activity
Apparently opium affects parrots the way caffeine affects humans, and hyperactive parrots in India are trashing the poppy fields trying to get their fix.
@Satsuma replies:
cant decide if this is more or less funny than the high on opium wallabies making crop circles on Australian poppy farms
Wow!
I think wallabies and crop circles win! 😂
Every time I see “Android Pie” written out, it looks wrong. My brain wants it to be “Android Pi.”
According to “Reading in the Brain,” we assemble words in alphabetic writing systems by grouping sets of 3 letters in each 5 (IIRC). To read the word BRAIN, we assemble BRA, RAI, AIN, BRI, RAN, RIN etc., and map to which words best match those triplets. That’s why it’s so easy to mix up BRAIN and BRIAN – they’re not just the same letters in almost the same order, they’re almost the same triplets.
I imagine that’s also why I consistently misread “NSW” as “NSFW” instead of “New South Wales.”
@OldBrushNewPaper @Satsuma Is this like the final punch card full of closing parentheses I heard about from old LISP programmers who wanted to make sure everything was closed?
Found a place called “Moana Sushi” on Yelp. My mind immediately started in on this:
“I’ve been staring at the menu in the window
Long as I can remember,
Never knowing what to try….”
@FiXato Sometimes I wonder how Chekhov manages to stay positive.
TFW you start writing a change to the program logic, then realize that because of the way you’d written it in the first place, you don’t actually need to rewrite any code, just run a single SQL update.
@brion replies: DELETE FROM `bugs` WHERE severity > 0
IF ONLY!!!!!
Also trying to figure out what checkions are… Maybe they’re a particle produced when a warp field mode collapse triggers an exploding gradient?
@janellecshane What? No creme de cacao? 😂
@quantumcowboy Yeah. Living in California, I’ve often wondered the same thing about low-flow faucets and shower heads: at some point the flow becomes *so* low that people have to spend more time using them just to rinse off the soap.
I’m sure someone’s done the math to optimize water use in real-world scenarios, but judging by a lot of restroom sinks, I don’t think the market has taken it into account.
The promise of LED outdoor lighting: We can produce the same amount of light for much less energy and maintenance! And maybe aim more of it downward for better efficiency!
The reality: For just a little bit more money, we can make night look like day!
Good to hear that LineageOS is almost ready to jump to version 16, based on Android Pie.
But I’m disappointed they’re halting official builds of 14 (Nougat) when there are so many devices that can’t run 15.
I’ve got a Samsung Galaxy S4 that’s still working just fine with LineageOS. My 8YO uses it for games, a Pebble Watch & sometimes photos. Now it’ll once again join the ranks of unsupported old hardware.
I mean, it’ll still run, but I like security updates…
I remember in college doing a comparison of the narrative structure to Frankenstein, which also has several levels of narration from the creature telling his story to Victor who tells it to some guy on a polar expedition who tells it to the reader.
It’s been a while since I read it, but IIRC it adds authenticity. The explorer seems to be meticulously honest, so you trust him, but Frankenstein is raving – yet he feels such revulsion toward his creation that the emotional complexity of the creature’s story is that much more believable, because if Victor were lying, he’d make the creature sound worse. And the explorer still isn’t sure whether to believe the story until he meets the creature himself at the end.
Hmm, this looks interesting:
“The City in the Middle of the Night” by Charlie Jane Anders, set on a tidally-locked planet where humans can only live in the narrow band of twilight between permanent, boiling day on one side, and permanent, freezing night on the other, and they have to find totally different ways to conceptualize time in their…well, we can’t really say “daily” lives, can we?
#books #scifi
Who decided so many restaurants have to be as echo-y as possible?
I don’t need it to be quiet, but it would be nice to actually be able to hold a conversation with the to-go cashier about how they lost my order.
Yeah, it’s been a fun evening…
At least losing the order wasn’t their fault. It’s a chain restaurant & the central order line didn’t submit the order to them. But just trying to establish that, and re-order, with a restaurant full of families here for an elementary school fundraiser, and everything echoing off the smooth walls, floor and ceiling to the point where I could barely make out my own words, never mind the cashier’s…
@dantebrevity links to Why Restaurants Are So Loud Now (Boing Boing), which quotes How Restaurants Got So Loud (The Atlantic).
Thanks…I’d suspected a lot of that (cheaper construction, and encouraging people to finish up sooner and leave), but hadn’t really thought about the impact of open kitchens or the noise encouraging people to drink more.
But the part that comes down to visual aesthetics makes me think of the plants in Jurassic Park, chosen for appearance regardless of whether they’re good for the actual dinosaurs.
I may want to check out that search-by-noise-level app…
Fascinating as the Year 200 setting has been up to this point, the naivete & overconfidence has been maddening.
You *know* the enemy has vastly superior technology & knows way more about physics than you do. You don’t send your entire fleet to intercept one ship that you’ve decided is harmless based on the fact that *your tech* couldn’t be destructive enough based on *your* knowledge of physics.
Awakened hibernators seem to be more…paranoid? Cautious? Perceptive?
I guess the idea is that those who grew up in this era figure humanity has already faced the Great Ravine, we can face *anything*, while those who lived earlier don’t have that overconfidence.
Or maybe the Imprinted tech is out there, the polarity fixed, and in wider use than anyone thought.
But it’s still been frustrating pages & pages of “when will the big dummies figure it out?”
I don’t know why “Your package has been delivered, here’s a photo of it sitting in front of your door” is creepier than “Your package has been delivered.”
I mean, a stranger was going to show up at your home either way, and they haven’t actually walked inside in either case.
But the picture still seems weird.
I understand the reasons for not including full-text search on Mastodon. But it makes it really hard to do your own research before reacting to something you see when there’s no way to zoom out to see the wider context.
@hafnia @OldBrushNewPaper I used to run a comic book fan site back in the day, and I did a lot of scans that I cleaned up (making backgrounds transparent, fixing paper grain & replacing dots with solid colors, etc) to go with the character profiles I was writing.
I still see those scans pop up all over the place. I figure I didn’t own the art to begin with, so I find it amusing.
My photos, however…those I feel a lot more possessive about.
@denikombucha @Are0h Though I have to admit, I feel a lot more comfortable about Minecraft being owned by someone else now. It was really weird to find myself looking at info about the original dev & thinking, “Wow, I’m so glad Microsoft bought this.”