Bags

Maybe they have indeed been dead for several minutes and it’s a sign they need to be brought back to life

I leave for Paris tomorrow and while I’ve been planning the trip I had the strangest urge to smoke a cigarette at a streetside cafe sipping some coffee… and I have never smoked in my life. Feels like a real deep cultural meme has gripped me.

I don’t usually pay attention to usernames, but I just laughed out loud when I checked their post history. Very rarely do I see a truly shit take on here, but most of the recent posts I remember being real stinkers are all from this same user.

Also the recent obsession with age is very strange.

I’m currently reading a book (A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge) where 2 voyages get stranded at the same faraway star system, one is a totalitarian autocracy and the other is a free trading culture. The totalitarian regime gets the upper hand, takes over via manipulation and sabotage, and tries to stifle and outlaw all money and trade. They end up spying on the underground black market trade that pops up and manipulates people into trading and doing work for the regimes benefit without their knowledge… If not money, then goods and services, or any other analog for such. Certain people will always try to accumulate “wealth”, whatever that wealth may be, it doesn’t necessarily have to be legal tender.

The book feels extremely relevant to current events, as the autocratic regime employs a ubiquitous police state and uses an even less ethical analog for AI to control it all. It was published in 1999.

Still doin’ their thing, they released a new album last year! They went on a small new-album tour and that’s when I was able to catch their show.

I found the source of the quote on the bookmark, and it was a quote by Plato out of Phaedrus so it definitely is real lol. It’s somewhat different on the bookmark, but depending on what translation you look at the quote will probably be slightly different anyway. It’s sections 274e to 275b

But when he came to writing, Theuth said, “This branch of learning, O King, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories, for I have discovered an elixir of both memory and wisdom.” The king replied, “Oh most ingenious Theuth, one man is able to invent these skills, but a different person is capable of judging their benefit or harm to those who will use them. And you, as the father of writing, on account of your positive attitude, are now saying that it does the opposite of what it is able to do. This subject will engender forgetfulness in the souls of those who learn it, for they will not make use of memory. Because of their faith in writing, they will be reminded externally by means of unfamiliar marks, and not from within themselves by means of themselves. So, you have discovered an elixir not of memory but of reminding. You will provide the students with a semblance of wisdom, not true wisdom. For having heard a great deal without any teaching they will seem to be extremely knowledgeable, when for the most part they are ignorant, and are difficult people to be with because they have attained a seeming wisdom without being wise.”

I have my font set to Atkinson Hyperlegible, so the lowercase L has a little tail to differentiate it from the capital i, which has its serifs… but in the quote block, the font isn’t enforced for some reason so I had to copy/paste it into this textbox to even see what letter that was.

Interesting stuff that I would have never noticed or thought about otherwise…

I have a bookmark made by the band Sleepytime Gorilla Museum that was sneakily tucked into my merch haul last time I saw them live, and it has a quote on it that I will need to wait until I get home to properly remember, and I also want to do more diligence to figure out if it is an actual quote. At the top it says “A WARNING ABOUT READING”, and the quote says something like:

Beware the written language, man was never destined to record their every thought. How will we continue to remember ourselves when we are now able to cast our essence into this new medium, to remove the memories from ourselves so that we are wrought into perpetual forgetfulness?
-Allegedly some ancient guy from the dawn of books

Give the book Ra by Qntm a read
The synopsis is strikingly similar… It’s not lazy writing, I really enjoyed that book.

Frozen Nutty Buddy wafer bars were my dad’s favorite growing up… Unfortunately the cheap chocolate that coats them loses the tenuous temper it once had and becomes a liquid sludge at exactly 1 degree below room temperature so it melts all over the place and makes an absolute mess.

My brother and I got good at eating them straight out of the plastic wrapper without touching them.

Yeah but not to sea level pressure. Cruising above 10,000ft, planes are required to maintain an internal pressure equal to that of 8000ft or less, and it’s likely almost always close to that 8000ft, because that takes the least energy.

See “Need for pressurization”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabin_pressurization

The difference in apparent altitude is why your ears pop when ascending or descending.

Maybe this is my unpopular opinion, but Dr. Pepper out of a can on a plane at cruising altitude (~8000ft elevation equivalent) tastes way better to me than anywhere on the ground. I call it my magic sky juice. Dr. Pepper is really the only soda I enjoy, anyway.

I am unsure if there are any other changes made to the cans of soda they serve on planes, like a different carbonation pressure, etc. that might make a difference instead of just the altitude.

There’s a bar near me that has a very large reverse mermaid painted on the front, and just yesterday I met a woman with a reverse mermaid tattooed on her arm…

Maybe you just aren’t looking hard enough!

My grandfather was a draftsman for one of the big military contractors back in the day. He’s got some of his old work framed, it’s really amazing what the human hand used to accomplish with only a straightedge and a compass… As an engineer who uses a lot of Solidworks, sometimes I romanticize and yearn to blow everything up and return to the artful days of hand-drafting as the standard.

My first job out of college was re-making tools to manufacture small electromechanical assemblies for repairing old military aircraft. (Said tools had been thrown away by some previous now-fired director who thought “We haven’t used these tools in 15 years, surely we don’t need them anymore…”, but when the military calls up and asks for part XYZ for a B52 that you’ve manufactured for the last 65 years, you don’t say no, even if you haven’t made the part in 2 decades). I had an entire room full of B, C, and D-sized hand-drafted drawings to pull specs and dimensions from, and each one was so beautiful in its own way. Getting to spend a whole day digging through drawings was always a nice little quiet retreat from the rest of the chaotic world.

I’m not in IT, but I was trying to get a coworker to send me a file they were supposed to have generated. I sent them a PDF and I wanted them to update it with current procedures (they were the area supervisor) and type it out in a word doc so it could be edited and rev controlled.

They never got back to me, 2 weeks passed. It was a 2 page document, so I emailed them to ask if they had finished. They responded that oh yeah they had finished a while ago, and I could find the completed document attached.

They sent me back the original PDF I sent them. After a confused follow up email, they again sent me back the original PDF.

I went over to their desk, which I had never been to before, usually I interface with them out on the assembly line. I was like “Hey what’s up, could you send me the .Doc file you created?”

Their response? “I forget what I named it so I can’t find it.”

I am even more confused. After some general troubleshooting I ask them to open their documents folder, which they did not know how to do. It didn’t matter because it was empty. They then close out of Outlook, which had been fullscreened the whole interaction.

Their desktop was the most densely packed jumble of hundreds of files I have ever seen. Not snapped to grid.

Turns out every document they ever interact with gets saved to their desktop permanently, and to find things they use Windows search. This explains why I kept getting back the original PDF, they searched for the name of what the file was supposed to be, and they just grabbed the first result without looking and slapped it in the email.

I ended up finding the document by showing them how to open a finder window, navigate to their desktop, and sorting by “last modified”, then asking them what day they remember finishing the document. It was named New Document.doc.

It ended up being so bad I had to completely re-do it myself anyway.

It depends on which theorist you talk to. Some say seconds to minutes, others say days to weeks, the nutcases say thousands to millions of years.

And at the end of the day, the electrical properties of these elements probably aren’t that interesting or useful, and almost certainly won’t be like, semiconductors or anything fun. Just dumb, heavy, really fucking radioactive wire lol.

The “island of stability” actually encompasses many of the superheavy elements that we have already produced. The “stability” part comes from “magic numbers” of neutrons in the isotopes that are theorized to have some kind of stabilizing effect on the nuclear shells.

The difficulty is that we can theorize the number of neutrons we need to stabilize a certain number of protons, but finding atoms with the right number of protons and neutrons to smash together to hopefully create that total number is… difficult. Sometimes those particular isotopes with the proton/neutron quantities required either just plain don’t exist, or are themselves a wholly synthetic isotope with its own set of problems like being insanely slow or difficult to produce, having a crazy short half-life, incompatibility with various acceleration methods, etc.

The elements at the very end of the periodic table are somewhat tenuous as we know “elements” to be, as there has only ever been very VERY small amounts of this material produced, and the isotopes of those materials that ARE produced split apart almost immediately with insanely small half-lives, so it’s not like there’s any amount of it just kicking around in a jar somewhere in some lab.

There’s a ton of interesting reading on the theoretical island of stability in superheavy elements, where a special number of neutrons added to the isotope can possibly make these superheavy elements stable for a macroscopic amount of time so they could actually be studied and handled instead of instantly exploding apart and only being detected through their decay products.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_of_stability

I think there are elements with experiments designed to produce them up to around atomic number 125 or 127. Currently the highest confirmed, named, and somewhat categorized is 118. There’s info out there about the theoretical elements. Here’s the page for element 119. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ununennium. Purely theoretically, you could just keep adding rows to the periodic table, and it will keep going, but most of those materials will never actually exist or never could exist. It’s kind of like theoretical vs applied math.

My recent ex girlfriend would take certain things we were about to do together (traveling, going to the spa, going to a particular restaurant close to my house, spending the day at a museum, etc.) and would just automatically assume that I had already done that same thing with some unspoken past ex of mine, and get preemptively sad, upset, and self-conscious that she wasn’t “the first”… What? Life isn’t all about firsts, why even get upset about that? So what if I’ve already done something before with someone else, I am still going to enjoy it with YOU right NOW. Maybe a lot of people do compare past experiences to current ones, but I don’t find that very fulfilling, so I just don’t. It’s a lot easier to just live day to day.

If you use Android, check out “Distraction-free Instagram”. It’s an app that lets you disable various parts of the app like your home feed, stories, etc.

I really wanted to stop scrolling on Instagram, but I also really wanted to keep posting my photography, as the interactions I sometimes get on my posts are fun and I enjoy sharing my craft. I also have some friends who ONLY interact via instagram messaging.

I downloaded the app, and disabled everything except messaging, and it’s been great. It’s definitely made me happier overall.

But that’s none of those genres…

I would like their stuff so much more if the nu-metal parts went away.

I am unsure what makes something “Swing”, but I absolutely adore The Roar of '74 by Buddy Rich. I discovered it via my dumb rule of “See vinyl record with car on it, buy vinyl record with car on it”