Psychlist

I use 3-4 browsers and because WFH + VM's for coding some incidental sandboxing.

Maybe my expectations are biased by subscribing to Nebula? And for those who do, Medlife Crisis just posted a fun video on the placebo effect featuring great (fake) sponsor callouts.

Much better than perfect pitch, otherwise known as the ability to know that something is out of tune, by how much, and struggle to ignore that. A violinist friend managed to train herself to shift pitch to match the rest of the orchestra but I suspect part of the reason she turned to the dark side (jazz) was the latter's ability to adapt to her sense of correct pitch.

Not least because the argument about "what note is this" and "what note do you think you're singing" starts basically day one of singing lessons. Trying to learn any practical music when you can hear the difference between close frequencies mean you're effectively learning colours from a group who insist that blue and green are the same colour.

One of my party tricks used to be saying the song and artist from the first 5 seconds of a track. These days with samplers and synthesisers that's almost impossible. I still get tripped when I hear some samples, like "that's the bass guitar from {song x} WTF" in the middle of some otherwise pleasant song.

I've seen code that does "fast" searches of a tree in a dumb way come out O(n^10) or worse (at some point you just stop counting), and the solution was not to search most of the tree at all. Find the relevant node and follow links from that.

Meanwhile in my day job performance really doesn't matter. We need a cloud system for the distributed high bandwidth side, but the smallest instances we can buy with the necessary bandwidth have so much CPU and RAM that even quite bad memory leaks take days to bring an instance down. Admittedly this is C++ with a sensible design (if I do say so myself) so ... good design and architecture means you don't have to optimise.

What we're really waiting for is second hand EVs in real numbers, or the political decision that small, electric cars are the only ones allowed on most streets. That would dramatically cut the death rates from both pollution and vehicular homicide.

Tesla tried it. There was no point Tesla building more swap stations because so few people paid the premium to get a swappable battery. It turns out that people who won't buy an electric car unless they can swap the battery will find some other reason not to buy an electric car if that reason is removed.

I'm not saying you should do this. And Rohloff strongly suggest you don't do this I'm just saying that you can do this.

For an hour or more the recumbent wins just for comfort, and unfaired records it wins on air resistance (that's why the UCI banned them, it let povo scum beat gentlemen athletes). But then the UCI doesn't have faired records... it's only the IHPVA et al that make that distinction.

Interestingly the PBP etc records (we don't have records, this isn't a race!) are all uprights AFAIK. But that's xenophobia rather than technical skill from what I know. And the Round Australia record is an upright, largely because no-one on a recumbent has been inclined to attempt it. RAAM is held by a bent (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_Across_America#Records).

You could build that bike out of steel tubing and it would be rideable, as I said, but insofar as it's broken it's broken at the missing down tube.

Slingshot, for example, had no down tube just a wire and that was a bit notorious for being squirrely in the steering.

You could definitely build a bike like that that was quite rigid, it would just be heavy or expensive or both. A decent carbon layup, for example, might bring it back to the chain forces going through the seatstays being the main issue. But that's something you'd want to analyse a lot before building it. And I think you'd end up wanting a much bigger head tube lug than shown.

I didn't collect photos of the real experiments, those were mostly "grab a scrap bike, hack it about, (try to) ride it, bin it and try again. But if you wander the mozbike site there's a few of those. https://moz.geek.nz/mozbike/see/misc/2001/index.html has the "MBB FWD recumbent" that's just a cheap chair welded to a BMX frame :)

People used oxen, donkeys, llama etc way more than horses. And the Chinese invented wheelbarrows and used them extensively rather than using draft animals. They often use bicycles much the same way as wheelbarrows now, and rich people often find that amusing (possibly because a KMart bike is a toy, a Chinese bike is a workhorse).

Typically a safety bike will get through 3-5 chains before needing to replace the rear cog, and many more before replacing the chainring(s). But Pinion gearboxes in the bottom bracket often run small chainrings that are similar in size to the rear cog, and I suspect they need to replace both rather than just the rear one.

The limit for athletes is normally cardiovascular, commonly oxygen - VO2max the the measurement there. For less fit people it can be the cardio side, their heart just isn't up to it so their muscles fail and they lie on the ground twitching. Oxygen-deprived people pant and gasp.

So recruiting more muscle groups really doesn't help. What does is increasing oxygen intake, and this is where recumbent bikes come in. The laid back position opens the thorax and increases effective lung capacity. As well as reducing air resistance, except that that's a very subtle thing that mostly depends on the rules governing the sport in question (fairing on bike and kayak, for example, are variously restricted or banned in most relevant sports).

You can also reverse that and exercise at high altitude... less oxygen for everyone!

At one stage Klein had a problem with the chainstays separating at the bottom bracket and a number of people rode those bikes after breaking them... almost exactly the "missing chainstay" problem above.

I've built some very weird bicycles and broken both those and conventional bicycles. I have at least some idea of what works... I'd be willing to build as many of those renders as someone was willing to pay for.

Secondly, part of the idea of Stanford and other elite schools is to create social links so that even quite serious mistakes aren't career-ending. The idea that "your first business will fail, and that's ok" is necessary because almost all new businesses do fail. Society needs that, and since the US can't have a social safety net, we need that group of rich kids with rich friends to provide at least some people who can afford those failures.

We can argue about whether the victim of the coffee-dumping was wrong to think it was a minor thing, but hopefully we can all agree that the death penalty was a bit harsh for that offense?

Then they get to Stanford and discover that the university administration is actively hostile, it's looking for reasons to get rid of imperfect students, or students that can be blamed for imperfection (anyone running a group of students that has a problem).

Access to it was either via the manufacturer website or you could configure your own server IP and it would send JSON packets via HTTP post. No verification of the server, but it was also annoying enough to configure that I thought even a thief that found it would just smash it rather than fscking with it. AFAIK no-one ever did, it only stopped working when I stopped paying for the eSIM (the new owner never took over that tracker even though I told them all about it)

The immobiliser was a whole other ball of shit. It had a keyfob, but also remote monitoring via a physical SIM. I couldn't find a DIY-able one, so I was paying ~$US50/year to some Chinese company to monitor the system and allow me to track and immobilise it via their app. That worked, as did the geographic restrictions, but it was also easy enough to remove/bypass - the new owner hated the system and rang me to yell about it before removing it. I assume they just added a bypass wire and moved on.

I put cameras onto a box truck so I had reversing etc, but I used an 8-camera wired security system with video recorder and eSIM for that. The screen was optional but I found one that only had one button (to toggle views) rather than a "command console" type that by its nature gave full control over the security system. Driving around displaying the bumper-height rear camera on the screen was quite handy, normally it's a blind spot of trucks.

Likewise the GPS tracking system, I bought a stand-alone navigation system (you need a truck-specific one that you can at the very least type height and weight into so it doesn't direct you down roads you can't fit through), and obviously a separate anti-theft tracker (well, two, because the immobiliser also had one).

And of course there was a radio/CD player in the cab, no need to wire that into the one computer to rule them all that modern mobile infotainment systems have. I mean, "computers with wheels" or whatever the transport as a service companies call their devices these days.

Doesn't that rely on you living next to someone else's thermometer that's published? My not very accurate setup gives me more than a degree just down my property line (~30m) largely because one end is next to a road and the other on lawn surrounded by trees. Albeit neither are proper meteorological stations so accuracy in that sense isn't even an option.

I publish a few readings but have never really looked into the exact accuracy of the https://www.uradmonitor.com/ sensors. My actions in response are pretty coarse so it doesn't matter a huge amount... PM10 goes over 300 and I close the doors and windows sort of thing.

I have a red LED striplight above my bed for reading paper books so I will try using that for the ebook reader and see if I notice a difference. My main issue is that interesting ebooks keep me awake longer than interesting paper books, I have a "no screens after 8pm" rule but wasn't counting the ebook reader as a screen.

It's expensive but it's doable. Or you could say that the plastic milk people have successfully externalised enough of their costs that they can charge less than a more efficient option. Somehow producer levies to cover waste disposal are uncommon and wildly unpopular (with producers).

What works more often is an explicit deposit, or a pay-for-return. I buy cleaning stuff from a local wholesaler who will pay a few dollars for each 20 litre container returned, a little more if it has a tap, and about $10 for a 200 litre drum (which I can also buy cleaned from a second hand drum dealer for $15).

But when you're talking about a 500ml dishwashing detergent bottle there's not enough value in the bottle to make it worth setting up a return and reuse system. If you get down into plastic bags it's complete nonsense, even for single-material (ie, non-food) bags at less than a cent each. In NSW we have a 10c fee per bag to discourage their use and even that is not enough to cover the cost of recovering and downcycling those bags (our downcycling scam just collapsed: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-11-17/recycle-collapse-proo...)

Look at the economics of milk bottle returns, for example. My parents pay ~10c/time to buy milk in glass bottles on top of the ~50c deposit on each bottle. People where they are do that because they intensely dislike plastic bottles and have the spare money to pay extra for milk.