mherdeg

40 ms·

301.
by mherdeg 6y ago
Yeah I learned a whole bunch about this from https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/real-johnny-appl... (via Fark, and summarizing a book) recently: * Johnny Appleseed planted from seed instead of grafting trees i
302.
by mherdeg 6y ago
Yeah I really like going back through 20th century science fiction and seeing echoes of contemporary topics or history in the varying and wild guesses we got back in the day. IIRC Heinlein's 1940 "The Roads Must Roll" for exa
303.
by mherdeg 6y ago
I've had really good interactions with ETrade phone support (working with them on employee stock plan related requests). It has been absolutely refreshingly good customer service -- they know their product so well and know exactly how
304.
by mherdeg 6y ago
Paul Offit had some ideas about this in a recent interview: https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/936937 > [Eric Topol]: Moreover, there are a lot of things that we still don't understand. Like, for example, &q
305.
by mherdeg 6y ago
Here's some more coverage: https://www.cpr.org/2020/09/24/boulder-county-issues-ban-on-... Here's the text of the order: https://www.bouldercounty.org/families/disease/covi
306.
by mherdeg 6y ago
One of my favorites is (spoiler alert) Incandescence, which presents the utterly novel concept of an alien civilization whose faculties, environment, and thought processes are totally un-human. The characters in this story very gradually di
307.
by mherdeg 6y ago
So in general I'm OK with using someone's words to illustrate a different point than they were originally making. But when I do this I prefer to explicitly state the original context and explain how I am reusing their work -- I tr
308.
by mherdeg 6y ago
As a rule of thumb, I try not to quote from media unless I have seen the whole book/story/article/movie myself and am sure I understand the quotation in context. Part of that comes from the kind of frustration Hillel Wayne vo
309.
by mherdeg 6y ago
This is great storytelling, thanks. Maybe worth a letter to 2600 magazine?
310.
by mherdeg 6y ago
The article quotes someone who believes this is the right thing to do and explains their perspective. This isn't the only view (nor the one endorsed by the physicians I know) but it's worth understanding in order to understand the
311.
by mherdeg 6y ago
This is great. My Pixel 3 XL has broken Bluetooth/wifi connectivity (even after a factory reset, "Bluetooth keeps stopping"). And it only connects via USB-C for headphone or charging some of the time in a specific orientation
312.
by mherdeg 6y ago
With the demise of FatWallet Finance (which I read daily) I haven't really had a good source for the kind of content that used to live there. The Bogleheads forums live in kind of a parallel universe, with sometimes very similar conten
313.
by mherdeg 6y ago
Hard to believe this was nearly a quarter century ago. T he references are getting dated: > "How do you scare a Bellhead?" he begins. "First, show them something like RealAudio or IPhone. Then tell them that right now perf
314.
by mherdeg 6y ago
Does owning one of those trucks get you in trouble? I still miss the Wikipedia article "List of Guantanamo Bay captives accused of possessing Casio watches" (I think republished at http://wikialpha.org/wiki/Li
315.
by mherdeg 6y ago
Facebook's famously tight-knit and tight-lipped engineering organization has become increasingly leaky in the past couple of years, as posts and data make it to the press with surprising regularity. What changed? Is it morale? Or somet
316.
by mherdeg 6y ago
Making a checklist is hard work! My first and second drafts of process documents are always way too long. It's easy to be verbose. It's hard to be concise. It's very hard to be concise and to accurately convey the whole pro
317.
by mherdeg 6y ago
The ultimate troll entry for me on Snopes is: > So how did this claim arise? In a 1993 PC Professional article, columnist Lisa Holst wrote about the ubiquitous lists of “facts” that were circulating via e-mail and how readily they were a
318.
by mherdeg 6y ago
Considering how much of Internet culture is currently being formed on reddit it's amazing how opaque the site is to history. The archival is low-quality and missing a lot. I sometimes browse by /r/all/gilded, which gives
319.
by mherdeg 6y ago
My pet peeve is when news organizations write about a court case (whether civil, like a lawsuit, or criminal) and forget to include (1) the court name and docket number so you can look up the status and filings yourself; (2) a copy of the l
320.
by mherdeg 7y ago
Cool. Did you trade on it?
321.
by mherdeg 7y ago
OK, but what if an Amazon algorithm has actually learned that people who search for "shirt without stripes" are more likely to buy more things if the first image they see is a picture of a striped shirt?
322.
by mherdeg 7y ago
I was more or less convinced by the discussion in mid-February at https://virologydownunder.com/past-time-to-tell-the-public-i... and https://virologydownunder.com/so-you-think-youve-about-to-be... that the
323.
by mherdeg 7y ago
Still don't think I have ever connected to LambdaMOO, although I spent some time on ifMUD which is in the same neighborhood. Reading these docs now, if I understand right, in between LTAND and LTAND2 was the Mr Bungle/Dr. Jest inc
324.
by mherdeg 7y ago
A surprising amount of my enjoyment of DCSS comes from seeing it as a dialogue with NetHack -- for the first few months I played, I kept thinking 'ohh, yes, that mechanic is obviously a rejection of the baroque [intrinsics|identificati
325.
by mherdeg 7y ago
Kind of missing some historical context here: * Has MIT ever suspended a semester before? * Have they ever run a shortened or extra class year? I seem to remember something unusual happened during WW2?
326.
by mherdeg 7y ago
This is just an observation that doesn't contribute meaningfully to discussion, but ... Twenty years ago this web site would 100% have looked like an April Fool's joke. Don't know what to make of that. Maybe it's that al
327.
by mherdeg 7y ago
Interesting, our hot water heater is "tankless" and it hadn't occurred to me until this thread that this makes emergency prep a little more complicated.
328.
by mherdeg 7y ago
As a layperson it feels to me like research in the "megadose on vitamins to prevent illness" area is kind of tainted by the legacy of Linus Pauling, who was no doubt a genius in his fields and whose published literature advocated
329.
by mherdeg 7y ago
Jeez, you stock 14 gallons of water per person in your house? Where do you keep it? Do you periodically re-freshen it or what?
330.
by mherdeg 7y ago
There was a pretty popular recent post on reddit's /r/unethicallifeprotips about this recently. It's beginning to become common knowledge that paying for a mail-order mattress is often optional. By choosing not to reques

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