KineticLensman

5 ms·

31.
by KineticLensman 7mo ago
> As I understand it, a big part of produced clothing just goes straight to waste to begin with. My niece runs a business that relies on the way we discard clothes. She buys clothes from suppliers in India who source them from the bales
32.
by KineticLensman 7mo ago
Yes. Kryten had definitely been at the pies
33.
by KineticLensman 7mo ago
In the UK, if a homeowner (customer) pays a company to clear domestic rubbish, and the company illegally fly-tips it, it's the homeowner who gets chased. The law requires them to check that the company is legit.
34.
by KineticLensman 7mo ago
In Vivaldi, point insertion seems to be x-offset to the left or right of the mouse click.
35.
by KineticLensman 7mo ago
When I discovered that you can daisy chain cable ties, I felt that I’d found a new law of DIY physics
36.
by KineticLensman 7mo ago
See 'genetic programming' for techniques that are sort of based on this idea. Typical approach is to have a problem representation (gene analogues) that can be used to create a population of different individual solutions. Test th
37.
by KineticLensman 7mo ago
> despite air being the same everywhere. The air may be the same everywhere, but roads and safety laws aren't.
38.
by KineticLensman 7mo ago
So he was a Robber Ducky?
39.
by KineticLensman 7mo ago
E.g. with phrases such as "Let us go and respire the air" (which I am now keen to use in an actual conversation)
40.
by KineticLensman 7mo ago
For another work inspired by The Tempest, Forbidden Planet! Caliban == Monster From the Id, if you squint hard enough
41.
by KineticLensman 8mo ago
Actually, the bottom layer from which God created the cosmos was originally Computer Science. Where else do you think all the chaos came from?
42.
by KineticLensman 8mo ago
Cue obligatory reference to the programmer archaeologists in Vernor Vinge's novel A Deepness in the Sky . Their job, on starships, is to safely bodge the multiple strata of software that have accreted since Mankind left Earth, centuri
43.
by KineticLensman 8mo ago
> Once again, it was the English who provided the spur. I'm continuing with this initiative by proposing a new variant on Haggis: "Shepheard's Haggis". It's basically a Shepheard's pie - which is essentially
44.
by KineticLensman 8mo ago
I don't have specific links to this but it's more general reading of tech / military history over the years. I'd love to see a definitive study of the tech tree behind steam engines, but I do know that making bullets&#x2
45.
by KineticLensman 8mo ago
> they invented a steam engine[0] The Aeolipile was not a functional steam engine - it was essentially an unpressurised two-spouted kettle that span on an axle. It had no way of maintaining enough pressure (no valves) to do useful work a
46.
by KineticLensman 8mo ago
> Every episode of the show conforms to a formula where he gets suspicious of one of the other characters in the show and we spend the episode wasting time while it's finally determined that the suspect of the week is actually innoc
47.
by KineticLensman 8mo ago
I do like poetry, but if we are looking at a crescent moon, in our night, it means that the bulk of farside is facing toward the sun, and will therefore be brighter than nearside
48.
by KineticLensman 8mo ago
> the fully illuminated “dark side” Personally, I don't find the phrase 'fully illuminated “dark side”' to be a convincing alternative to the physically more accurate term 'far side'. Of course NASA has only just
49.
by KineticLensman 8mo ago
It’s far side, not dark side. The moon doesn’t have a dark side anymore than the earth does
50.
by KineticLensman 9mo ago
Exactly. In fact, when Gandalf catches up with Aragorn/Legolas/Gimli in 'The White Rider' chapter, he explicitly tells them that Sauron has committed a major strategic blunder: attacking too early, as soon as he thought
51.
by KineticLensman 9mo ago
> "couldn't they just fly to Mount Doom and drop the ring?" If the allies were counterfactually sensible enough to fly the ring to Mordor, Sauron could have been counterfactually sensible enough to station an Orc/Trol
52.
by KineticLensman 9mo ago
Also Pippin and Merry, who are basically annoying teenagers in the films, even if they do some useful things.
53.
by KineticLensman 9mo ago
> Tolkein of course denied this .... and the timing wasn't right Just to expand on this, substantial portions of LOTR were written well before the atomic bomb became public knowledge, e.g. Tolkien had written first drafts of Book 4
54.
by KineticLensman 9mo ago
Tolkien’s orc dialogue in TLOTR is actually very humanised in some ways – the orcs moan about their bosses, complain about rival teams, are concerned about completing their tasks, being punished for failure, etc, etc. When they aren’t fight
55.
by KineticLensman 9mo ago
But they are still all at sea
56.
by KineticLensman 9mo ago
It was strategically important in WW1 because the British could communicate with the colonies with very chance little chance of messages being intercepted. The Germans, in contrast, didn't have access to their own transatlantic channel
57.
by KineticLensman 9mo ago
Frankenstein. Superb science fiction, very readable even though written 200 years ago. And Wuthering Heights, which strangely like Frankenstein, has a complex narrative structure and an unhinged, obsessive central character
58.
by KineticLensman 9mo ago
Where I am the sunset is already three minutes later than its earliest time but it will be another two weeks until the sunrises start getting earlier
59.
by KineticLensman 9mo ago
Some time in the early 1990s I worked with a Macintosh of some variety that had a massively heavy CRT display. It was a real bummer when we were asked to do offsite customer demos, but luckily my back and knees were young enough to carry it
60.
by KineticLensman 9mo ago
Well Christopher Tolkien was 'silenced' by the fact of his dying at the age of 95. The article in my opinion unnecessarily links JRR Tolkien's views on the monstrosity of cars with the much later conspiracy theory that car-fr

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