← Feed

Posts

• View post

  I've seen industry giants publish studies in academic conference proceedings which reach conclusions the complete opposite of what their own data show. In one prominent example, Google simply binned their data such that nearly all the entropy was smoothed away. I've seen the direction of entire industries, nations, cultures, and the world steered wherever industry wants, supported by academic trust washing. I've seen leading academics cynically sign on as lying industry stooges. We s...

• View post

  @coloradosun@mstdn.social When I spoke with a local electrician about installing home solar in SE Colorado, he told me I would not be compensated for any surplus power I returned to the grid. Having lived in WA, I was surprised to hear this. Can anyone point me at a reliable source of information on this topic?

• View post

  @christineburns@mastodon.green This happened to the second Beowulf cluster ever built. Somehow, someone who had access to the machine room at Goddard Spaceflight Center where the cluster was located managed to discreetly remove half the RAM from all ~100 nodes in one night. That was ~32 years ago.

• View post

  One elevator town on the westernmost edge of cultivated land east of the Rockies.

• View post

  A sign that hasn't had a purpose for half a century.

• View post

  Courthouse stairs.

• View post

  ... with increasing frequency. It feels like Meidas has figured out the formula for scratching whatever itches in the MAGA mind. Sure, more than half of the comments on those sites are still hateful, unhinged, and detached from reality, but more and more now repost or reference Meidas content as rebuttals. No idea if this effect is real, or if the fact/fantasy distinction has really opened a single Nazi's eyes, but thought it was worth mentioning. /end

• View post

  ... in the 1970s, the worst thing a white person could be was a "ni**er lover." It could get you killed. Adults and teens alike casually demanded genocide for the entire middle east and Africa. Mexican kids called themselves Spanish out of shame. My TX university in the 1980s, was almost entirely white. Classmates referred to all Blacks as apes. The casual calls for genocide continued, but these kids were now voting adults. In DC, which was only ~20% white at the... /2

• View post

  Here's the Wikipedia entry for the "New" US embassy in Moscow, constructed between 1979 and 2000. Possible connections to current events in Washington DC are for the reader to imagine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embassy_of_the_United_States,_Moscow#New_building

• View post

  Just encountered the word "apolaustically". The OED says it occurs less than once per 100,000,000 words in modern written english. It has two definitions: A. adj. Concerned with or wholly devoted to seeking enjoyment; self-indulgent. B. collect. sb. A suggested synonym for ÆSTHETICS; the science of the pleasurable.

• View post

  In light of recent events which seem likely to have revealed considerable detail regarding US intelligence sources and methods, I went looking for information about the devastating November 1940 Luftwaffe raid on Coventry. Several sources have claimed Churchill chose not to evacuate Coventry before the raid because he feared doing so might reveal the existence of Ultra - the Bletchley Park codebreaking effort. Recent scholarship suggests these accounts are apocryphal. https://winstonchurchill...

• View post

  By default, all Wikipedia pages now open with a site menu that consumes the left ~20% of the page width, and an editing menu that consumes the right ~20%. Why? I can't imagine I'm alone in only wanting to see either of those menus, maybe, 1% of the time.

• View post

  Bought this back at the start of the GW Bush administration.

• View post

  @sk76 A while back I tooted about being stuck in a small town near Rovaniemi one night in the early 80s when hitching in Lapland. Not sure if I mentioned how the high school kids would load up on food from these carts and "drag main" in their parents' old Volvos and Saabs. Made me laugh to see how similar small town life in Lapland and the American midwest were/are.

• View post

  @ChanceyFleet I'm not sure I've ever intentionally used an emoji. Some software automatically replaces emoticons with emojis, and I know I've been bit by that when moving fast. But intentionally? I don't think so. THIS, OTOH, I am here for :BreakDancingWombatWearingChapsAndClownShoes