jcynix

Aged but still true:

Tom Scott: Why Electronic Voting Is Still A Bad Idea https://youtu.be/LkH2r-sNjQs

From the original article:

"The extensive training required to achieve domain-specific expertise modifies the brain. Changes in brain structure have been found in domains including music, athletics, and navigation. Training also alters brain activity."

Definitely not Kodachrome. The process to use at home was Kodak's Ektachrome. Still much more work than the much simpler b&w processing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ektachrome

As described in Edward Tenners classic book "Why Things Bite Back. Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences", 1996 (oldie but goldie)

Oh, yes, geoengineering, because nothing can go wrong …

Please read the classic book by Edward Tenner: Why Things Bite Back. Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences, 1996 (oldie but goldie and must read for people who think technical solutions have no unintended (and irrevocable) consequences Mike eucalyptus trees in California, or the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cane_toad in Australia, among others.

I've seen people (non IT) do similar things (i.e. develop small applications) with Excel.

I created my bibliographic database with HyperCard. And I still miss it. HyperCard's attractiveness was the easy UI creation. FileMaker wasn't bad, but a bit more limited UI wise. And sqlite, while a phantastic DB misses the easy UI.

Hmm, that gives me an idea: dithering (of generally "mogrifying") my images might make them less palatable for those pesky AIs roaming my web server …

How about Cormac McCarthy?

StreetComplete is cool, fun and useful, yes. And there is its companion app StreetMeasure which makes it easy to add measurements like the width of a narrow street, for example.

Fascinating! Now I need to check if there are "dog resitant" examples, because our juvenile Border Collie surely will shred most materials rather fast …

I can sympathise with you, but how could a "quantum" effect" doesn't make this easier?

Maybe "Turing machine" is too abstract or simplistic as a concept? Both for real computers and brains?

I can see that a computer is on some level just a lot of sand (silica and metal) but put together in a really complex way, it "suddenly" can add and compare numbers … if we observe the complexity levels from sand to computer and try to see the analogy when comparing cells / neurons to a structure of billions of them somehow interconnected on both a physical and chemical level, evolved during millions of years, I have no problem to accept that brains are still too complex to explain for us.

Quantum field effects? You don't need these, IMHO, if you look at how highly parallel things seem to work in brains.

Marvin Minsky's theory of a "Society of Mind" describes a (highly) distributed model of the mind. Which BTW, always reminds me of the first Shrek movie, where the donkey jumps up and down, shouting "Take me! Take me!" to Shrek. That's similar to what I observe when I'm undecided but two instances of "sub-processes" (or agents as Minsky calls them) of my mind try to get attention.

Daniel Dennett similarly gives a distributed model of consciousness. Where many parallel "processes" are at work, competing and "observing" each other. And this parallelism is happening with a much, much higher degree than any of our computers parallelism.

> Currently reading a web novel called The Years of Apocalypse.

Thanks for mentioning it. I'm now at Chapter 7 of it and it seems to be a well written story. Still need to arrive at the "time loop" moment ...

> Your coffee mug isn't naturally brown and warm: it is a cloud of atoms made of 99.9999% empty space, with no color, no texture, and no intrinsic smell.

A tiger too is "just a cloud of atoms" but nevertheless I wouldn't like to share a room with it. The article sounds a bit like a variant of Solipsism.

Hmm, the review makes me rather curious. While in the movies "Groundhog Day" and "12:01 P.M." the protagonists awake at the same place and time each day.

How do these book explain that the protagonist(s) can relocate to different places? Even if it would give a rationale for that glitch in the loop, it would be strange if you'd check into a hotel and appear to be there the next morning without the check-in?

Various apps for (primarily) photographers offer views of the sun's (and moon's) path, even with live view through the camera.

For example https://www.sunsurveyor.com/ or https://www.photopills.com/ best among others

But both i.e. and e.g. might be more easily understood by non-native speakers of English (IMHO ;-)

> But I find it a little extreme to say "it's faster to build your own than to install an existing alternative".

Installing an existing alternative might be easy ... once you found the one which best (i.e. mostly) matches your requirements. The time consuming task IMO is the time needed to find and then choose between half a dozen (or so) alternatives which all might do the job ... until you installed them, tested them, and found that they are insufficient for the job you expect them to do.

Not just deer, but a number of insects will thank you for your generosity. And you will have to learn when and how to fight them in order to get a decent harvest.

NAC taken before consuming alcohol has a positive effect apparently, but taken afterwards it's detrimental as mentioned here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acetylcysteine

You'll find a detailed description oft potential effects and uses here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acetylcysteine (aka NAC)

> Didn't git pioneer this sub-command style?

No, various other tools used it before git, e.g. openssl.

Try Peter Cawdron's book "The Anatomy of Courage" which is a sci-fi retelling of a ww1 report.

Here's a revview: https://www.zeppjamiesonfiction.com/a-remarque-able-read-a-r...

Nice, and I like the idea that the past is fixed, but ... is there a way to define the point of rollover to the next day? My "days" sometimes end at 0:50 for example and not at 23:59. So I might summarize the day a bit after midnight.

ImageMagick is a wonderful command line tool, IMO. You could use it to extract various information, e.g. the 5 most used colors of an image, as in

    convert $IMG -colors 5 -depth 8 -format "%c" histogram:info: | sort -nr

If needed you can easily remove colored borders first (trim subcommand with fuzz option) or sample only xy% from the image's center, or where the main subject might be.

My first thought: a rather strange copy of the en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pillsbury_Doughboy

Google's Android robot has a much better design, IMHO. And I remember the Amazon box version of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danbo_(character) and Arielle Nadel's photo stories "365 Days of Danbo" with it. Can't imagine that with the Apple Dough boy..

And the eye's periphery, while it isn't sharp, is highly sensitive to movement. Which is "obvious" if you ponder the question where dangerous things appear first. Thus things dangling from the rear mirror in a car are a bad thing, they need (subconscious) attention.

The cone cells in the eye's center are color sensitive, but need a lot of light, while the rod cells at the edges are highly sensitive to motion, even in low light. And that might be one of the reasons why flicker is strenuous for the eyes. Funny side effect is that looking at stars in the night sky seems to work better when you look slightly besides a star, I guess that's because then the low light parts take over.

Ah, yes, After Dark, with the "Lunatic Fringe" module, which was fun (and was a time sink ;-0). And what I would like to see again is the "Stained Glass" module which produced phantastic visual effects when tuned a bit.

Wikipedia lists them by country, and with pictures, for example

French: [Boîte à livres](https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bo%C3%AEte_%C3%A0_livres?wprov...)

German: [Öffentlicher Bücherschrank](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96ffentlicher_B%C3%BCchers...)

and many more countries. They all need a caretaker, or else they degenerate into rubbish.

In France I stumbled upon one during a holiday trip, it was located in an old phone booth. Hmm, I must have a picture somewhere in my photo collection, …

We heat up unskimmed milk, add oatmeal, let them soak for at least 10 minutes. Then serve them and pour a little bit of cold milk over the cooked oatmeal. Plain, or add some fresh fruit, nuts, berries to taste.