Sapere Aude
Month: March 2017
abundance everywhere
a team of planetary scientists have come together to propose a new meaning for the term “planet”. Based on their geophysical definition, the term would apply to over 100 bodies in the Solar System, including the Moon itself.
It is estimated that there may be 200 dwarf planets in the Kuiper belt of the outer Solar System and possibly more than 10K in the region beyond
Watch 36 years of Microsoft PC operating systems for consumers flash before your eyes, plus more than a couple dick drawings, in this experiment to challenge the limits of sequential Windows installation. Beginning with MS DOS 3.10—which he notes wasn’t even available as a retail product before version 5, you had to buy a whole computer to get your hands on it—he uses VirtualBox to install every Windows operating system from there on up. This involves copying the disks onto the root of the C drive one by one.
now i really want a fire pit!
Even though it’s spring, it’s still chilly outside at night and a human skull ‘log’ might be just what the witch doctor ordered to keep you warm. It’s definitely a conversation piece, I’ll give it that. The human skull ‘log’ is for gas or liquid propane pits only.
On March 5, 1973, 30 people headed out to a farm in Ossineke, Michigan, to witness an unusual event: the burial of an estimated 30K frozen, family-size mushroom pizzas. The mood was somber, and a little cheesy. The Governor of Michigan gave a brief homily “on courage in the face of tragedy,” before bulldozers began shoving pizzas into an 6m hole.
Wow, quite the story
The group of conspirators was so close with Francis that they all nicknames, according to the indictment. The team called Fat Leonard Lion King, L.K. or Boss. “Defendants referred to themselves collectively … by terms such as ‘the Cool Kids,’ ‘the Band of Brothers,’ ‘the Brotherhood,’ ‘the Wolfpack,’ the ‘familia’ and ‘the Lion King’s Harem,’” the indictment added. For a few years, the Lion King’s Harem tore up the Pacific like a group of rowdy teenagers. The 7th Fleet’s Judge Advocate General sent an ethics message to the 7th’s leadership warning them to remember that taking gifts, especially gifts from contractors, was a no-no. The Cool Kids forwarded the message to the Lion King so he knew to keep their relationship a secret. “The next day,” the indictment stated. “During the [command ship] USS Blue Ridge’s port visit to Hong Kong, [the Cool Kids] and others dined and drank at Francis’s expense at the Petrus Restaurant in Hong Kong at a cost to Francis of $20435.”
Here’s how quickly populism can be automated:
- Trump or Bannon picks an issue: the narrower and more inflammatory the better. Make the vote a yes or no.
- Trump asks his supporters to tell him what they want.
- His supporters download the app to their smartphones and vote.
- A little programming and marketing magic radically improves the number of Trump supporters using the app and reduces spammers/non-supporters attempting to skew the vote down to a trickle.
- Millions of Trump supporters download the app and vote.
- Once the decision is in, the app makes it easy to call or spam message to the user’s Congressional representatives. Millions of calls roll in.
- A bill that codifies that issue is fast tracked in Congress. Massive pressure via the app and the White House gets it passed quickly.
- Connecting action and results quickly generates buzz. Repeat. This time with 10 m downloads.
- The app evolves. The pressure from the network increases. It consumes the Republican party.
there are a set of reasons why people want voice to be the new thing. One more that I didn’t mention is that, now that Mobile is no longer the hyper-growth sector, the tech industry is casting around looking for the Next Big Thing. I suspect that voice is certainly a big thing, but we’ll have to wait a bit longer for the next platform shift.
The researchers believe this tight spacing could eventually yield magnetic storage that is 1000x denser than today’s hard disk drives and solid state memory chips.
Even more can be packed in if you use a historical name which—like Late Antiquity or Early Industrial Revolution—implies that our centuries are mostly important for their relation to some even more important neighboring era. If this is the Prepandemic Age, then 2100+ are going to be very bad centuries; if this is the Late Pandemic Age, they’re going to be great centuries. The Early Unification. The Late National Era. The Late Surface Era. The Interimperium. The Truce. The Early Digital Ages. The Late Digital Ages. Comparative labels with a strong judgment—positive labels, negative labels—can also imply enormous amounts about what comes after the 21st century. Are we the Dark Digital Age? Or the Golden Digital Age? Are we the Dark Interracial Age? The Golden Interracial Age? Entire future histories spin out in the imagination from each one.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 