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hcrisp

Re:How often do you think about the 1893 World's Fair? on Wednesday September 23, 2026 @09:18AM (#49815657)
On a related note, I visited the St Louis Art Museum which is on the site of the 1904 World's Fair. Then it contained many ornate buildings made of plaster: https://encyclopediavirginia.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/...

The art museum is in a remodeled building that sits on the top of the same hill overlooking the pond. What it looks like now: https://nohomejustroam.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/St-Lou...

Those world's fairs were something else.

Re:Anthropic's Model Naming, Extrapolated on Wednesday June 10, 2026 @04:28PM (#48482198)
I asked an AI bot to do this just this morning and it also suggested:

    - Epic
    - Tale
    - Saga
    - Chronicle
    - Legend
    - Logos
Re:C++: The Documentary on Friday June 05, 2026 @08:45AM (#48411654)
I read it recently. I liked a few of the chapters especially how policy classes fix some issues with OO design. I do recommend asking an AI chatbot to summarize each chapter and say what the modern equivalent is since some of the idioms have improved. I think one whole section was obsoleted through the use of std::variant and std::visit.
Re:Ti-84 Evo on Saturday May 02, 2026 @08:59AM (#47986038)
My TI-85 story involves the fact that it only had 2D plotting (though I think newer models such as the TI-89 had 3D).

I had a 3D calculus class so I wrote a program in it to plot a 3D isometric mesh of a surface using the 2D rendering library. It was slow but got the job done. I used it to help pass a test or two.

I also experimented with drawing random surfaces and objects like a tire. They looked pretty cool for a calculator screen.

The math lab at the college had a cable which you could use to take data off or put it on so you could in theory have exchanged programs with others but this was before the internet so I didn't.

I still have mine and enjoy the sliding the cover off - a trip down memory lane.

Later I rewrote the program in QBasic on a PC for fun and it was lightning fast!

You built your wife?! This robotics stuff has gone too far. Next you will be telling me that you threw your cow over the fence some hay!
Re:Robert Redford Has Died on Tuesday September 16, 2025 @03:09PM (#45266528)
Not as long but similarly lost at sea, crossing the Atlantic in a life raft: "Adrift: Seventy-six Days Lost at Sea" by Steven Callahan.
Re:The McPhee method for writing deeply reported nonfiction on Tuesday August 26, 2025 @10:49AM (#45027352)
McPhee was recommended as someone whose writing "makes boring things interesting". I did enjoy The Curve of Binding Energy (nuclear science) and to some extent Coming out of the Country (Alaska). Both of those featured interesting vignettes and colorful characters which propelled along the narrative.

However, I then turned to his magnum opus on geology, Annals of the Former World. That was a long slog which, although I enjoyed moments of it, now I wonder if my time wouldn't have been better spent reading something more interesting.

Also: "Roughly 85% [of a data center's energy use] is data collection from sites like TikTok and Instagram, and cryptocurrency." What a waste!
As I recall, Apollo 11 was off by 4 miles downrange, which was considered good but not precise. More work on the guidance / navigation system allowed for a precision landing in Apollo 12 (to touch down near a Surveyor probe).
Re:DOGE has 'god mode' access to government data on Thursday February 20, 2025 @08:01AM (#43114149)
The government itself self-reports $149B in "improper payments"

https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/doge-musk-government-was...

Remarkably preserved for having had the keel crushed by ice. Seems the icy waters kept the wood from decaying. Looks pristine.

Jimmy Chin is the director. He just discovered some remains of Andrew Irvine from the 1924 Everest expedition. Seems he's been having a good year.

I asked mine, and he said the wisdom teeth can crowd teeth if the jaw size is too small causing buckling (a cosmetic issue). More seriously, it can interfere with nerves in your jaw (again because of size constraints) causing numbness / paralysis, etc. Likely the decision to remove them comes down to your genetic / jaw structure and whether they have fully come in yet or not.

https://www.webmd.com/oral-health/wisdom-teeth-removal-neces...

I prefer this video of A* pathfinding on a real map (Chicago and Rome):

https://youtu.be/CgW0HPHqFE8?si=9aw_eHy3IedXY1Ro

Re:A chemist explains the chemistry behind decaf coffee on Thursday July 25, 2024 @05:02PM (#41073348)
I couldn't find any citations that mention molybdenum as a way to increase metabolism of caffeine. However, I found one reference [0] that mentions, "Consumption of broccoli and brassica vegetables in general and absorption of large quantities of vitamin C increase caffeine clearance".

EDIT: It would seem that the vitamin C paper [1] concludes the opposite of what [0] states. "These results indicate that the elimination of caffeine in the elderly is not affected significantly by the concentrations of vitamin C achieved during this study."

    [0] https://www.coffeeandscience.org/health/coffee-and-caffeine/caffeine-and-metabolism
    [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7064899/
Re:Should the Hawthorn Be Saved? on Thursday July 04, 2024 @07:31PM (#40878852)
I have a Hawthorn. My brother-in-law, who is a landscaper, came over to show me how to prune what we thought was a flowering crab. However, on closer inspection, he exclaimed, "Wait, this a Hawthorn bush!"

It has gotten larger over time, and harder to mow around due to the thorns (spine-like protrusions which resemble small branch growths more than true thorns).

It does have one redeeming quality. Every year in early spring, for a brief but dazzling moment, it appears covered in thousands of small, white, lace-like flowers.

Cause storms do?
You can buy a cheap dongle to plug your headphones into the USB-C port. It works fine, but now you have the problem of keeping track of the dongle when they kids unplug it.
Cool, but I couldn't tell if it reached the point of spaghettification [0].

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghettification

Re:Ollama releases OpenAI API compatibility on Friday February 09, 2024 @08:20AM (#39314554)
I tried running Deepseek 33b using llama.cpp with 16k context and it kept injecting unrelated text. What is your setup so it works for you? Do you have some special CLI flags or prompt format?
Re:The Mad Scientist's Club (book series) on Tuesday January 16, 2024 @12:11PM (#39015771)
I loved these so much that I created my own Mad Scientist's Club with my neighbor friends which held meetings in our (very hot) shed loft during the summer.

I just finished reading some of them to my pre-teen girls, and they enjoyed them quite a bit despite the fact that very few girl characters are part of the plot. A few quotes made us chuckle ("Shut up and stop rocking the boat!" was one). We even figured out which boy was the narrator, even though he never mentions his name.

I guess it speaks to their universal appeal to kids of curious minds who like hearing of scrappy, madcap adventures attempted by smart but hair-brained individuals of their age. The books always gave me the sense of unbridled freedom to invent, explore, and maybe pull one over your knucklehead neighbor or unsuspecting parents.

Image on Vulcan's homepage says 90% was flown before first launch. Or is that just marketing?

https://www.flickr.com/photos/ulalaunch/32854051607/in/album...

This was a satisfying article emphasizing the engineering ingenuity to build Apollo. I read the book awhile ago and remember a scene not mentioned in the article about when North American went to go make their formal pitch to NASA for the Apollo command module. When the arrived in the room they realized their slide projector had the wrong adapter for the outlet. Panicked they looked for a solution to no avail until someone had the idea to just cut the cord and stick the bare leads into the wall. Problem solved; and they won the contract. Fun book.

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